Free The Boy Next Door by Irene Sabatini Page B

than Chipangali.
    I told Mummy and Daddy that I was going to the public library after school to study.
    There is no one around but us and the animals.
    “I wanted to be a bloody vet,” he says. “Jeez luck, didn’t even get round to sitting my O levels; had to get away from that
     house. Education, that’s the key. The be-all and end-all.”
    He sounds a bit like Daddy.
    “What are you smiling at?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Asch, I’m sick of looking at these lazy fossils. Let’s go and get a drink.”
    In the gazebo it is very cool and we can hear the birds chittering away. The lady serving behind the counter looks at me and
     makes a face. Ian orders two Cokes and some buns and chips. We sit at a table in front, and I put my hand in my pocket to
     get a tissue out to blow my nose. The lighter makes a tinkling noise on the stones. Ian bends down to pick it up. The lighter
     is in his hands. He turns it over, sees “Rhodesian Army” on it. His face changes. Splotches of red by his cheeks, on the side
     of his head. He squeezes the lighter in his hand.
    “So, what’s this?” he says, looking at me.
    A cold weight is pressing hard on my chest.
    “Something from your dad, a souvenir?”
    Too late I realize I could lie. I could say yes.
    “No, I… I found it in the vegetable garden. The policemen came, they were looking for evidence, they said… I wanted to give
     it to you, today.”
    “Man, so you think I… that that’s what happened, that I… You’ve had it all this time, why?”
    I don’t even know why, but I start crying, tears just falling on my cheeks. I wipe them away.
    He looks at me, and then he starts drinking his Coke. He puts the lighter on the table. I can’t drink, eat; I sit there looking
     at the lighter.
    He gets up. “Let’s go,” he says.
    He leaves the lighter on the table.
    We don’t talk on the drive back.
    He drops me by the cemetery, and I walk the rest of the way home.

17.
    On the last
day of term, Bridgette throws up in the toilets. I help her clear up. She starts crying and stops.
    “My dad is going to kill me,” she says.
    After school we go to Grasshut. Every Friday we meet up there and we exchange news. She’s my best friend (Bridgette says we’re
     “mates”), and because of this, I don’t really care what the other girls say—that I’m a bookworm, a teacher’s pet, a goody-goody.
     Bridgette calls them losers, losers with a capital
L
and attention seekers.
    We sit right at the back in the dark. We share a toasted cheese sandwich; I have a Coke and she a cream soda.
    “I told him, and you should have seen how scared he got, Lins. He said he had nothing to do with it, as if I’d done the whole
     thing by myself like Mary. He doesn’t want me around anymore. Can you imagine, a grown man acting like such a coward and one
     of Daddy’s good friends, too. He gave me forty dollars. It’s something, I guess.”
    She says that she will find a way to get rid of it.
    I try to think of a baby inside Bridgette’s stomach. I try to put the biology drawings inside Bridgette. We are sitting here
     and Bridgette has a baby growing inside her. The baby has a head, eyes, ears, a mouth. The baby has arms and legs. The baby
     might have a penis.
    “You know, the one time we were here, we saw that guy, that white guy.”
    “Yes,” I say.
    “He was really looking at you.”
    I don’t say anything.
    “Do you know him? I mean, do you talk to him?”
    “No.”
    “Why do you think he did it?”
    “I… I don’t know. But he was cleared, remember?”
    “Aren’t you afraid, living next door to him?”
    “No, not really. I don’t think about it.”
    “It would give me the heebie-jeebies, for real.”
    I don’t tell Bridgette that I lie on my bed and imagine him next to me. The two of us, side by side, on my bed.

18.
    Day after day
, I keep opening my diary; the pages all flick past, empty. I try to write things, like how I started off in March, when I
     was so excited