The Perfect Girl

ZOE

When your world explodes all the pieces of it shatter and spread, and you don’t see some of them ever again, and nothing is ever like it was before.

I lost the world I had before the accident and my mum helped me to build a new one. Now that world has gone too, and I will never see my mum again, but I don’t want to lose all the other bits.

Before I left the Unit, Jason taught me one last thing. We’d just finished our final session, two days before my release, and I asked him why all of us kids were locked up like animals when what some of us had done was just a mistake, or unavoidable, because we were stupid, or young, or had other excusable reasons for what we did like a witness who lied and a judge who didn’t believe the truth when he heard it.

‘Punishment is considered an effective deterrent,’ Jason replied and he adjusted the neckline of his ‘Bowling for Soup’ T-shirt, which was a gesture he always made when he was feeling awkward.

‘That’s the theory anyway,’ he added. ‘Look, it’s an imperfect system, and we know it is, but that’s why these sessions are important, because they’re when you get a chance to unpick what happened to you and understand the reasons for it, so that we can try to find a way forward.’

‘I told the truth at my trial and they put me in jail anyway,’ I said.

‘Well, as I said, it’s imperfect, but you know kids didn’t even used to get therapeutic sessions at all, so you’re lucky in that sense.’

The clock high up on the wall told both of us that our time was up. As a way to end our last ever session, it felt like a damp squib, because he’d said this stuff to me loads of times before.

It wasn’t the final thing he taught me.

I stayed sitting because I wondered if Jason might be about to say something cheesy and nice as a goodbye, actually I kind of wanted him to, but instead he said it was time to go, and he started to walk me back to my corridor in the Unit as usual.

There were places in the Unit where the surveillance cameras couldn’t see you. Most of us avoided them, because they could be frightening places to be alone in. You learned that very quickly after you arrived.

Jason stopped in one of those places, between two sets of doors, which linked separate areas. I was waiting for him to swipe his security pass and push open the next set of doors so that we could carry on as usual, but instead he paused, and put his hand on my upper arm. There was nobody else around, because it was a time when most people were in lockdown.

‘Zoe,’ he said. ‘You’re leaving in two days, and I think you’ve got every chance of not coming back here, I really do. I’ll personally be very disappointed if you do.’

‘I won’t.’

I said it quickly because I didn’t like the way his fingers were pressing into my arm. I stepped away from him but I couldn’t move far, because the space was so small, and every muscle in my body seized up with fear.

It meant that I was frozen to the spot even when he released his so-tight grip, and he ran his fingers down the side of my arm, over the sleeve of my sweatshirt, and across my cuff until they reached my wrist. They made contact with my skin there, and I held my breath as they burrowed up an inch or two under my sleeve. The pad of his little finger rested lightly on my wrist bone and I wished my bone would dissolve away, because it was a sickening feeling.

‘You’re so beautiful, and so talented,’ he said, and his voice sounded as if his tongue had grown thick. ‘You don’t belong here.’

His hand travelled up from my wrist to my cheek then, and it moved slowly and brushed against the side of my breast on the way there. I forced my head back even further and felt my face quiver when he ran a finger across my cheek.

His breathing was loud and unsteady.

‘I’ll scream,’ I said.

‘My word against yours, Zoe. Who do you think will win?’

There was no reply I could make, because I knew the answer to that. It would be him.

He brought his head towards mine and his lips grazed my neck and then he said, ‘Your life will be like that from now on, and you need to remember it.’

He stepped away from me suddenly then, and swiped the door with his pass and held it open for me to walk through into the bright white lights of the communal area as if nothing had happened. I walked slowly because I felt as though I might stagger, and I hardly registered that Jason was saying hello to Gemma who was on duty, and asking to see his next person, because I was feeling as though I needed to gasp for every breath.

I went to my room and curled up on my bed as tightly as possible. I felt cold, and I was shaking, and the only thing that stopped me from ripping up the sheet and wrapping it around my neck was the thought that I only had two more days in that place before my mum came to get me, and then I would never see Jason again and I would be able to have another life, a Second Chance Life.

I remember pretty much every single thing that Jason told me when I was in the Unit, because I have excellent recall, but it was that final message that he delivered in that camera-less space that lodged itself most deeply in my mind.

I already knew that life was unfair, and that structures society puts in place to protect you don’t always work, but what Jason taught me there and then is that what happened to me had marked me permanently, turned me into somebody who could be pushed and pulled around, like a toy for other people to play with, somebody without a voice, and without the right to a normal life.

Unless.

Unless I’m brave enough to take control.

In the baking heat of my uncle’s shed, a perfect idea has formed in my head: I want to save Grace from Chris, and keep her with me, so I can make her into the girl that Mum wanted her to be able to be.

I look at Lucas and I try to assess whether I can make the idea work. It’ll be a challenge, I know, because he’s like a whipped dog so much of the time, and especially now. The thing I’m thinking of can’t happen without him though, so I desperately need him to be brave as well, and that’s because I need him to lie about what happened.

I whisper it to him, the idea that I’ve had, but, as I feared, when I’ve finished telling him what we need to do he says, ‘I can’t.’

‘You can.’

‘No.’

‘If you tell the truth, they’ll lock you up, Lucas, like they did me. You don’t know what it’s like in there. And then your dad will take Grace, and he’ll hurt her. And I might never see you again. Ever.’

I try to stand as tall as I can. I put my shoulders back and shake my hair down the back of my neck. I stand the way my mum stood when Chris and Lucas got back from the concert. I stand the way she stood every day during my trial, when she was strong. I stand the way I want Grace to stand when she’s older, no matter what’s happening to her.

The problem is that however strong I am, the fear in Lucas’s eyes looks as if it has run deep for a very long time, and I’m sure that it has. I also understand that right now he probably feels the same as I did just after the accident: like a trapped animal, full of panic and pain and shock about what’s just happened, but I have to make him snap out of it, and see as clearly as I do that we need to do this.

‘Do you want Grace to have a life like yours?’ I ask him. ‘Living in fear of your dad?’

He shakes his head, but he says, ‘What you’re asking me to do is wrong.’

‘It’s not wrong if it ends up being right. Think about it.’

I’m starting to feel desperate now, because if he doesn’t agree to do as I ask we’ll lose everything we have left, both of us will. I think of the script and I know he must feel the same kind of anger deep down that I do.

‘Anger can be a release,’ Jason told me once, though he was simultaneously advising me not to display it quite as much as I did then.

In desperation, I snatch one of Richard’s models from the shelf beside us and I hold it out to Lucas and say, ‘Wreck it,’ because it’s the only way I can think to tap into the rageful feelings he must have inside him, and that might be the only way I can make him agree to my plan, right here and now.

‘What? No!’

‘Come on!’ I shove it towards him, but he bats it back roughly, and in that gesture I think I can sense his anger starting to fizz, and I wonder if he has ever once let it out before. It’s enough to convince me that my tactic is a good one.

‘I’ll do it then,’ I say. ‘I’m not afraid to.’

Right in front of his face, I hold the wing of the plane and bend it slowly, the tension in it ratcheting up incrementally beneath my fingers.

The model is intricate, and lovely. It must have taken hours and days to make.

‘Don’t!’ Lucas says. He makes to snatch it out of my hands and I just give it up.

‘Break it,’ I say.

‘No!’ He’s holding it as if it’s fine porcelain, but his hands are shaking.

‘It represents your life with your dad,’ I say. ‘Break it, and you’ll be free of him. Break it for your mum. Break it, and we can do what we have to do to get justice for her and for my mum.’

‘Why are you doing this to me? I tried to warn you, didn’t I? I sent you the script.’

‘You sent it too late!’

He looks down at the plane in his hands.

I think of what Jason said to me with his hot breath buffeting my face – ‘My word against yours, Zoe. Who do you think they’ll believe?’ – and I know that if Lucas doesn’t agree to do this with me then I can’t do it on my own.

‘They’ll believe us; I know they will. This is the only way now,’ I tell him.

‘But what about the panop messages I sent you? The police will find them on your phone.’

‘They know about my past, Lucas, they won’t care if you know too. Think about it. That’s all the panop messages prove.’

The clarity I’m feeling is incredibly pure and I’m getting increasingly frustrated that he can’t feel it too. It’s like there’s mud in his brain, and he’s thinking about all the wrong things. ‘They won’t bother looking at our phones any more anyway,’ I say, ‘if we do this right.’

He says, ‘Maria didn’t deserve my dad. And nor did my mum. Nobody does.’

‘Grace doesn’t deserve him either.’

He moves the aeroplane around in his hands so that he’s holding it by its wing like I did, and then, just as I think he’s going to put it down and leave the shed and I’ll have failed in this as well as everything else, he starts to bend it. I hold my breath as the tension in the wood builds and it begins to split.

Lucas gasps, and I say, ‘Don’t give up now,’ and it’s like that comment is a sort of release for him, as if all his rage has suddenly boiled over.

He snaps off the wing of the plane, and then its tail, and I have to step backwards because he starts to bash the aeroplane against the walls of the shed until it splinters and shatters into smithereens and still he keeps on bashing it until I’m afraid that he’s going to break his hand and he’s saying, ‘I hate you. I fucking hate you,’ and we both know he’s not saying that to me, he’s saying it to his dad.

When he’s finally finished, he looks at the few shards that remain in his hand as if he’s not sure how they got there, and I say, ‘Will you do it?’ and he says, ‘OK,’ and my heart flips in relief.