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The house had gone into its night noises one by one.
The television was low in the front room, not really watched now, just on. The washing machine thudded in the kitchen like it had a grievance. Pipes clicked in the walls. Somewhere beyond the bedroom window a scrambler whined up the road and was gone. Her fairy lights were the only soft thing in the room, little yellow blurs pinned round the mirror and drooping over the headboard, making the posters look unreal and her schoolbag on the chair look like somebody else’s.
Chantelle lay flat on top of the duvet in an old vest and shorts, hair still a bit damp at the roots from the shower, staring up at the lights like they might shift into a shape if she watched them long enough.
They did not.
Her jaw still felt odd.
Not sore exactly. A heaviness in it. A memory more than an ache. Every now and then she noticed herself pressing her teeth together for no reason and had to stop.
Mammy had stood in the doorway earlier with folded towels in her arms and said, not loud, not sharp, just plain, You can talk when you’re ready, Chantelle.
That had been worse in a way.
If April had roared, Chantelle could have roared back. If April had started in on shame and disgrace and what-will-people-say, Chantelle could have put her face on and done the whole thing, the eye-roll, the slammed drawer, the I don’t care of it. But there had only been that one sentence, and then the sound of Mammy going back down the hall with the towels, like there was dinner to plate and uniforms to think about and the world had not stopped because her daughter had sunk her teeth into another girl at school.
So now there was only the room and the lights and herself.
Her lip glosses were lined up on the windowsill in their usual little row, clear tubes, cloudy tubes, one with the silver writing rubbed off, one with the cracked cap, one almost empty because she’d dragged the wand round the sides till there was barely anything left. The whole thing had started over one of them. Not even the good one. Not even one she’d have mourned properly.
She could still see it in scraps if she let herself.
The toilets after lunch. Too bright. Somebody laughing. Somebody saying, Are you serious? The little slick click of plastic dropped against tile. Leah Kearns with that look on her face, not cruel enough to count as cruelty, which somehow made it worse. Just that half-smirk people did when they thought they could have a bit of you for free. Chantelle saying something back before she’d even decided what it was. Hands too close. A shove that might have stayed a shove if the room had been bigger, if the floor had not been wet by the sinks, if the other girls had not made that noise they made when something was beginning and everyone knew it.
Then heat. Immediate. Complete.
Not thought. Not choice. Just heat.
After that, only flashes. Leah’s wrist near her mouth, or maybe her hand, skin there anyway, the cheap chemical smell of body spray and school soap, the taste of lip gloss smeared somewhere in the mess of it, sweet and plasticky, and then that awful split-second thing where her body had got there before the rest of her. Pressure. A yelp. Girls screaming now for real instead of enjoying themselves. Somebody hauling one of them back.
She turned over fast and shoved her face into the pillow, then rolled onto her back again just as quickly, annoyed with herself for doing something so dramatic when nobody was there to see it.
She had not been sorry then.
That was the worst part. Or one of them.
In the corridor afterward, with teachers suddenly all authority and shoes squeaking and everybody asking questions in the wrong order, she had been blazing. Chin up. Breathing hard. Still ready. She had looked at the bite mark darkening on Leah’s hand and felt almost clean with how little she cared. Let them all be shocked. Let them all act like they’d never seen girls claw and slap and drag one another by the hair over less. Let them say feral if they wanted. At least feral did not stand there blinking while somebody took from you and laughed.
She had come home with that still in her, that hard bright thing, and then the shower had happened, and the hot water had hit the back of her neck, and suddenly she had not felt bright at all.
Now the room was thick with the smell of shampoo and fabric softener and something faintly sugary from the body mist she’d sprayed without thinking. Her mouth felt too noticeable in her own face. She kept imagining what she must have looked like. Not glamorous. Not hard. Not even mad in a way that made sense. Just all teeth.
She lifted her hand and touched her lower lip.
Nothing there. No split skin. No swelling. Only herself, intact.
Leah Kearns was not even someone who mattered like that. Not a best friend gone rotten. Not a sworn enemy. Just a girl she knew in the loose school way girls knew one another, through bathrooms and PE and the geography of lunch tables, through borrowed bobbins and borrowed chargers and borrowed bits of gossip. A girl she could picture clearly without ever once having missed her when she was absent.
That made it stranger.
Chantelle tried, for a while, to build the case again in her own head. Leah had taken the gloss. Leah had laughed. Leah had put hands on her first. All true enough, probably. True enough for a row. True enough for shouting. Maybe even true enough for a slap in the kind of place where girls sometimes slapped.
But her body had skipped straight past all that as if it knew a door she didn’t.
Downstairs, Mammy laughed once at something on the television, sharp and sudden and normal. Then silence again. Then cupboard doors.
Chantelle stared at the fairy lights till the little halos blurred.
There were things in her that arrived too fast. She knew that much. Not in words she’d say out loud, because she would never, but in the ordinary evidence of her own life. The way her chest could go hard as stone in a second. The way her whole face got hot if she felt stupid, or watched, or overlooked. The way some tiny thing could turn huge if it touched the right place. Not the obvious place either. Not the thing itself. Something tucked in behind it.
The lip gloss had not been the thing.
She knew that now and hated knowing it.
She turned her head and looked at herself in the mirror across the room. The fairy lights broke her reflection into pieces. Posters behind her. The dark shape of her own hair over the pillow. Her mouth.
Earlier, in the school toilets, she had felt big. Bigger than the room. Bigger than the other girls crowding round. Bigger than shame. Now she felt fourteen in the stupidest possible way, pinned to a bed in a room with fairy lights and a chipped mirror and makeup wipes spilling out of the bedside drawer, suddenly unsure what exactly had leapt out of her and why it had seemed to know the way.
She thought of Mammy not shouting.
That unsettled her all over again.
April had seen girls like this before. Girls all temper and flash, girls who came in from school with their faces set a certain way, girls who swore blind it was nothing and then moved round the kitchen like lit wires. Mammy had looked at her once, properly, and decided against the row. Decided to leave a door open instead.
You can talk when you’re ready.
Chantelle closed her eyes.
For a second she saw the thing again, not the hand, not even the bite really, but the instant before it, the blank white burst where she had stopped being embarrassed or angry or offended and become only movement. That frightened her a little, though she would never have used that word for it. Frightened was for children and weak girls and people crying in school offices. This was something else. A thin cold feeling under the ribs. A dislike of what she now knew she could do without thinking.
The washing machine knocked again, finished, went still.
She rolled onto her side and pulled the duvet up, though she was not cold. The fairy lights glowed softly into the darkening room. From downstairs came the muted sound of Mammy rinsing plates.
Chantelle put one hand under her cheek and kept her eyes open.
Tomorrow there would be school faces, messages, versions of the story already gone wrong in ten directions. She could survive that. She knew how. Chin up. Lip gloss on. Laugh first.
But tonight there was only the quiet little room and the strange knowledge sitting beside her in bed like something newly arrived.
Not that she’d bitten a girl.
That she had got there so fast.