The Perfect Girl

ZOE

I am fully freaking out by the time I’ve read this bit of the script. I feel sick to my core. I want to read on, I’m desperate to, because I can see that there’s another section, but I’m suddenly aware that the Family Liaison Officer is peering around the door.

‘Zoe, are you OK to come downstairs to be with the others?’ she says, but then she sees that I’m on the computer, and she moves across the room in a solid sort of way that reminds me of a Henry Hoover: round, and squat and sort of gliding, and with a fixed expression on her face.

The next thing she says is in an I’m-handling-you tone of voice. It’s the voice they use at the Unit before they get shouty.

In the Unit there was a progression of voices, and it went like this: first, I’m-handling-you-calmly voice, then don’t-mess-with-me voice, then I’m-warning-you voice, then shouty voice, and by then the key workers would have gathered in numbers and they’d go in with the restraint holds, the ones where kids who don’t have enough sense or have too much panic end up getting throttled just because they’ve kicked off.

It happened to one of the boys just before I arrived there. Everybody kept talking about it in my first few weeks.

The Family Liaison Officer’s I’m-handling-you voice is quite a good one, but it doesn’t manage to lose that holier-than-thou tone that people have when they think that they’re more sane than you.

I can’t deny that I’m online because she’s probably not stupid, but I have managed to click off the windows my mum’s email and the script were on, and even do a quick browsing history delete before she gets close enough to bother getting her reading glasses out of a top pocket and peer at the screen. I’m quick, you see, at covering my tracks. There are so many rules in the Second Chance House that you have to be.

‘What were you looking at, dear?’ she says.

‘Just YouTube.’

We’re having a different conversation with our eyes to the words that we’re speaking. Underneath a disapproving forehead that’s collapsed into wrinkle lines above her nose, hers are saying, What the hell were you looking at? and mine are saying, There would have to be a planetary collision before I tell you that.

‘Anything special on YouTube?’

‘I was looking for a recording of a special piece of music.’

‘You don’t need to stop it because I’m here.’

‘It’s a piece my mum loved. I don’t really want to share it today, if you don’t mind.’

In spite of, or maybe because of, all the lectures about not crying in public, since I was little I have been able to turn tears off, but also on, and on this day it’s even easier than usual because they’re lurking anyway, in a real way.

I snivel my way out of this one and she escorts me downstairs, saying, ‘Oh, pet, it’s not easy this, is it?’ although I know she’s not dumb and I think this is a definite attempt to get me to ‘open up’ but there’s more of a chance of me becoming Henry VIII’s seventh wife before I do that.