Because We Are Bad, OCD and a girl lost in thought Read online

  One biology lesson a few months later, when the sun is shining brightly through the windows behind the whiteboard, and Georgia is sitting next to us drawing patterns with her protractor on her worksheet, we learn the shocking truth.

  We are a boy.

  We can’t believe we didn’t realize before.

  We find out when Mrs. Nelson says we don’t look like we are concentrating very hard and tells us to read aloud from the textbook to the class. We were two letters away from finishing a routine that had been going on since we sat down at the beginning of the lesson. We want to scream. We want to throw the book at her and tell her she has cost us half an hour of our life that we will never get back. We don’t, because anger only hurts the one who feels it. Instead, we sit up straight, smooth down the page, and read aloud carefully:

  Jan was looking at her chromosomes under a microscope in biology class, when she saw something unusual. Instead of having XX chromosomes like a normal girl, she had XY. Shocked and confused, Jan went to the doctor, who explained that due to a genetic mutation, she had been left with an XY genotype, which explains why despite being 16, Jan has never had a period.

  Although Jan had lived all her life thinking she was like other girls because she was born with a vagina, she has no ovaries. Instead, she has internal male testes. While Jan will not be able to have children, she has recently started dating Tom. Tom understands about her condition and is supportive. Medication means Jan can expect to live a relatively normal life.

  And that’s when we know. We are like Jan. It explains everything. All that time spent worrying that we didn’t get our period because what happened when we were younger damaged us and made us infertile, we were focusing on the wrong thing. We don’t even have any ovaries. It’s clear that we are a hermaphrodite. It explains why we have so much hair on our arms and legs, and why we have no boobs or bum and the body of a boy.

  We clamp down hard on our lip so the scream doesn’t escape, because no one is ever going to want to marry a boy who thinks like a girl.

  · 9 ·

  Running from Words

  After biology, Georgia and us dump our files and books at Wimborne, change into our sports kit, and head to Upper Ock.

  Upper Ock is a giant sports field on the grounds, but it’s so far away from the main buildings (you have to walk through the rose garden to get there) it feels like somewhere else altogether. Every day after school for hours the two of us run round the 400-meter track, which is painted white on the grass.

  Georgia does this because she is tipped to run for Great Britain in the 2012 Olympics. I do it because running is the antidote.

  I align my body with the start line and fill myself with breath.

  Georgia executes all sorts of warm-up drills, because her coach says you can’t train properly without doing them. She has tried to persuade me to do them with her.

  Georgia does not understand that I am not training.

  She lives in the future—hears “running” and “gold medals” in the same sentence, pictures herself jogging victory laps around stadiums and ascending podiums, probably to her favorite music. This is her goal, and she is running toward it.

  My goal is much less heroic and exists purely in the present. In fact, I’m not sure it even counts as a goal. I am not trying to achieve a personal best; I am trying to outrun my friend.

  Being less fit would actually make it easier.

  When I started running with Georgia a few months back, my pulse would roar in my temples; hotness would rise to my hairline; the cold air would coat my lungs with a bloody metallic tang. The physical discomfort alone made it pretty much impossible to focus on any lists. But the better I get at running, the less quickly I achieve my goal, because now it takes much longer to get to the level of physical pain needed to reach distraction. At first I set myself three laps an evening, and that would be enough to switch my head off.

  As I became tolerant, I upped it to six, nine, fifteen . . .

  Eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-four . . .

  Now I’m on forty-two, which is approximately ten miles. Georgia tells me I will injure myself. She does not understand that I do not care.

  One, two, three—my body tenses, I push up from my back foot and hurl myself into forward momentum along the track.

  My friend whispers: TCNDUCTOSCLSKEAYJLPRD.

  Not now, I say.

  She says: TCNDUCTOSCLSKEAYJLPRD.

  I focus hard on my lane, studying the blades of grass that stand coated in stiff white paint, making me think of a hundred thousand mini plaster-of-paris casts.

  A hundred thousand? That can’t be right. It must be more than that. Each painted line is probably 10 centimeters thick and definitely 400 meters (40,000 centimeters) long. There are eight lanes requiring a total of nine painted lines to make the track. So all I need to do is count the number of blades of grass in a 10-by-1-centimeter area of one of the lanes and multiply it by 40,000 and then multiply that by 9, and then I’ll know how many mini plaster casts there really are—

  TCNDUCTOSCLSKEAYJLPRD.

  Her voice is insisting, wheedling, difficult to unhear. It will only be deafened by a high-intensity pain in my body, so I up the pace. The cows in the neighboring field chomp disinterestedly on grass and gaze over the fence. The concept of running laps must be bizarre to a cow, mustn’t it? Cows! That’s another one, that’s easier than grass, how many cows are there in the field? One, two, three, four—must run faster, go, go, go!—five, six, seven, eight—

  TCNDUCTOSCLSKEAYJLPRD!!!

  She shrieked that one—She’s a banshee; She’s a spoiled child demanding the whole of me, tugging at my shorts as I try to run past her, and . . . oh! I’m going to give in again.

  She isn’t going to be distracted by grass or cows.

  Fine, fine, I say, and start to go through the letters with her. She’s leading the routine, shuffling letters efficiently into red and green like piles of cards, saying when things are okay, chastising when they are not and sending me to the scarlet kingdom. We’re on U—

  Did I appear noticeably UPSET in biology after reading the passage out loud? Did anyone notice and guess our secret?

  —when I try to trick her.

  In the part of my brain closest to her, I appear to be happily going through the motions of letters C, T, and O, but closer to my forehead, in the space I am sometimes able to keep her out of, I make the decision to keep going faster every thirty seconds. It’s a subtle increase, so slight She won’t notice it, hopefully, until it’s too late. I keep my breath even and press on for the next few laps.

  As I pass her, Georgia calls out, “You’re flying round!”

  My friend realizes she’s being gradually muted and lets out a shout of anguish.

  But it’s too late for her.

  She’ll pay me back later, but this is my time now. “I know!” I grin. I steel my gaze ahead and accelerate. Some sort of toxicity is seeping into the muscles in my legs. We learned—in biology—that this is lactic acid, which builds up during anaerobic respiration when you can’t get enough oxygen to the body parts that need it. It’s perceived to be a bad thing, but I use it like rocket fuel.

  The remaining letters rush out my ears, shimmying down underneath my vest top and shorts, landing in my socks before tumbling out and unraveling in ribbons behind my shoes. I imagine—and I know this is bad—my friend out of my head and onto the track in front of me, and me running her down like a car. The force of something else that can, when you think about it, really only be me, clasps my rib cage and begins squeezing the bones inward—I’ll run out of air soon, well good, do your worst and—

  The rush. The rush of this open field where I can see for miles: the other fields beyond the fence that turn into unkempt meadows, and the woods that get smaller and smaller, the winding toy gardens taken from the grounds of a princess’s dollhouse. The rush of knowing that whoever owns this field will never know it like I do, which means that in the world after time, whe
re money doesn’t matter and no one cares for territorial battles, it will all belong to me.

  Georgia appears by my side, challenging me to a lap race. I don’t know why I agree. I always lose. I suppose it’s because I know she needs the rush of beating someone like I need the rush of escaping the letters. We’re matching each other’s speed for the first 200 meters, and I anticipate the moment where she will overtake me like she always does. It doesn’t seem to come. At 300 meters I realize I’m a couple of strides ahead of her, and then there’s nothing but me against the wind, each footfall sending me bounding forward on higher and higher springs, carrying me across the finish line, swiftly followed by Georgia a few seconds later.

  She is doubled over, her hands on her knees, her badly dyed blond hair, which is now ginger, swinging like vines against the tips of the green and white blades of grass. “I couldn’t keep up with you!” she puffs.

  “I’m sorry,” I say instinctively.

  “What on earth do you have to be sorry for?” She laughs, patting me on the back.

  They should bury me here, the place where I run until my heart beats apart from all other noises, isolated like a drum removed from a score of hateful music I never wanted to play.

  · 10 ·

  Stumbling

  6:30 p.m. Canteen. We witness the disorder parade: anorexics pushing their food around with redundant forks, taking a still-full tray up to the counter when the matron looks away; socially anxious girls sitting alone at a table for thirty or looking self-conscious behind a DIY fringe; a morbidly obese girl having double doors opened for her, sweating under the buffet lights—getting upset when told she can’t have seconds.

  We sit with our friends. They are talking about Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens, their voices refracting off plates, glasses, and tables; booming surround sound. We imagine ourselves covered in egg cartons, like the bedroom of a rock star before he is a rock star, with holes cut for our nose. If the voices were muffled, would they be more bearable?

  It doesn’t help that we can’t eat—can’t look at our plate without imagining all the food it has ever had on it: a swarm of mashed potato, vinaigrette, bolognaise, gravy, and macaroni cheese. Six hundred people eat in this room three times a day. It is inconceivable that our plate has not previously been used by someone with poor personal hygiene.

  How reliable is the school dishwasher?

  How many people have sucked on this spoon?

  Had those people ever given a blowjob? If so, when, and did they brush their teeth in the morning?

  The plate teems with wet pork, beans, and saliva.

  We shake our head. It’s just a plate.

  Shiny, white, sparsely covered.

  Shiny, white, sparsely covered.

  Shiny, white, sparsely—

  No use. It is dirty, lethal, overused. Somehow we are standing up and gripping our tray. “Everything okay?” Georgia asks, her face a map of concern. We nod dumbly and run to the used tray counter. The smell of half-eaten food and used spit makes us gag. We try not to breathe, but the queue of girls handing in their trays to the women on the other side is too long, and inside we’re jumping up and down. We’ll need air soon.

  We’re at the counter with our tray. A woman is on the other side, wearing an apron and blue latex gloves, scraping food juices into the bin. Her gloves are covered in it—beetroot, chicken, ketchup, mayonnaise up her arms.

  She looks like she has just delivered a child.

  A crash. Smashing glass, clattering cutlery. Our tray is on the floor, our hands splayed like starfish. We are momentarily frozen. Silence, heads turning, then clapping; the standard boarding school response. We should laugh it off, get a mop, a dustpan and brush, anything—too late.

  We are running from the canteen, double doors swinging behind us as we head out into the night.

  We’re happy when half term rolls around. We are spending the week at home, and Ella, who has survived two and a half years without us checking that she hasn’t died in her sleep, is grinning on the doorstep when we pull up in the car with Mum.

  The three of us shuffle through to the kitchen and catch up over big mugs of sweet tea. Ella fills us in on events of the term—her main part in the upcoming school play; the new friendship group she has fallen in with; the geography teacher she doesn’t like. On the whole, then, things are going as well as they could be.

  That is, until we meet with the thought that changes everything. Uninvited and entirely dark, it arrives on the back of some very bad news. When Ella goes upstairs to learn her lines, Mum tells us her best friend Gemma has cancer, and that the doctors have said it is probably terminal.

  This is what we say out loud: “Oh, no. That’s awful. I’m so sorry, Mum. You must be really sad. . . . But Gemma is so full of life. She’s got more energy and fight in her than anyone I know. If anyone can make it, it’s her.”

  But in our head this is what is said:

  I want Gemma to die.

  This thought stops our world, makes us shake, demands we acknowledge that nothing will be the same again.

  I want Gemma to die.

  I want Gemma to die.

  “Are you okay, darling?” asks Mum. “I know, I know. It’s awful. I feel the same.”

  I want Gemma to die.

  The thought bounces from one corner of our brain to the other, like a teenage miscreant who is too old to be on a bouncy castle but who won’t get off. The thought that this is wrong is like the castle’s furious owner forced to clamber onto it to remove the adolescent, stumbling and swearing. The delinquent squeals: “Catch me if you can, old fucker, catch me if you can!”

  It would be comical if it wasn’t horrific.

  Why is this happening? I ask my friend. And why is it my thought and not our thought? How did you get off so easily?

  She replies: I don’t know.

  What can I do? I ask.

  She shrugs. I never knew you were this bad, She replies, sounding at a loss.

  More than anything, we want to ask Mum why this is happening, but we can’t. She loves Gemma. She’ll think we’re a murderer, and then she’ll remember what happened with cousin Tom. How could she live with herself, knowing her child is so evil?

  She couldn’t.

  A few days later, Gemma comes over to see Mum for a cup of tea.

  Normally we like seeing Gemma, but this is torture.

  The bad thought has been booming around our head, swelling to an indefinite magnitude. We’ve accidentally added it to certain things like pens, radiators, and trainers, so that every time we see those, the thought instantly returns. We’ve hidden all our pens and our trainers so that they won’t trigger the thought—but we can’t pull the radiators off the walls. We try to think of anything else, but it doesn’t work.

  I want her to die.

  I want her to die.

  We make an excuse and leave the room, running up the stairs two at a time to our bathroom. We curl up in a ball and rock backwards and forwards. Normally the cold tiles make us feel better, but today they don’t.

  We hear Mum asking Gemma how she’s holding up. Their voices drift up the staircase.

  Those are the voices of honest, good-hearted people. They are the voices of people who are fundamentally different from us.

  · 11 ·

  Special Needs Department

  Somewhere along the way, GCSE secondary exams rear their ugly heads, and we can’t complete them in the allocated time. The letters pop up and have to be addressed before we can even think about working out how many cakes Ahmed and Brian will have left at a bake sale if they have 243 of them and sell 23 percent within the first hour. When we do the practice papers, we get about a third of the way through by the time everyone else has finished.

  If we don’t complete the papers, we will most likely fail and have our scholarship taken away. We’ve heard about something called Extra Time. It gets given to people with learning difficulties. If you go to the Special Needs Department, you can
be assessed to see if you qualify.

  We sign up for an assessment. Two weeks later a plump woman in a baby-blue suit with short crimped brown hair comes to the department to test us. She goes through sheets of tests with us, licking her finger to turn the pages in that disgusting way of older people.

  She asks us endless questions about circles, puzzles, and patterns, recording the time we take to answer them. We answer all her questions as slowly as possible. After an hour, she disappears to a little room to assess her notes. We wait at the desk, trying to make all the lies we have told to get to this stage not be so red.

  We had to do it because we’d be letting down the school and our parents if we fail our exams.

  We had to do it because if we failed our exams, everyone would think we were stupid.

  We had to do it because the lists are the focus of our existence, and this is the only way they can be protected and we can still do our exams.

  Blue-suit woman comes back, patting our arm and smiling like she’s about to tell us we are dying from some incurable disease.

  No one else will suffer if we get Extra Time. This is a safe untruth.

  She informs us that we are “a slow processor.” We will be given the full amount of Extra Time and extra classes to help. Sympathy drips from her words like honey. She understands that we are academically very strong, but these problems will hold us back if they aren’t addressed. We smile and try to look reassured by her promises that we now have everything we need to succeed, and that it was brave of us to ask for help.