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A Bloody Mess

Halle Preston

Decorative Green Leaf with pink stem

The Year Six disco, unlike those before it, was more than just a chance to wear your sister’s eyeshadow and play duck-duck-goose in the dark. It was a chance to determine who was cool and who wasn’t before high school did the proper branding. Not showing up was considered uncool turning up wrong was infinitely worse. And leaving early, everyone agreed, was just a bit sad.


     And so, I had come, and so I stayed, in the unrecognisable hall whose waxed floorboards danced with colourful lights, and whose walls were stapled with stars snipped from shiny card. A DJ played last month’s party tunes to muffle the shuffles,yawns and amens still lingering from that morning’s assembly. Instead of the usual plastic trays and milk cartons, a fruity, unnatural feast of sweets and juice drinks now awaited us on the long tables of the canteen.


     The night’s theme was neon, so I had done what any eleven-year-old girl would do and slapped a whole tube of glowsticks onto my forearms. Paired with a tutu and legwarmers, I was radioactively radiant, or so Grandma had told me (without the radioactive part) as she sent me off to the car with Grandad.


     However, my off-the-shoulder t-shirt emblazoned with the word GEEK wasn’t such a hit with my fellow partygoers. My proudly displayed red flag had set off the bull. The bull wearing sticky lipgloss, a scrunchie, and a white camisole that just, like, effortlessly glowed under the UV. Why didn’t Grandma think of that? I cursed, failing to pierce the plastic seal of my synthetic orange drink as Hayley and her herd approached.


     “Nice top,” she said. The snap of her chewing gum punctuated the sentence sharply as she scrutinised me with her uncomfortably blue eyes.


     Her followers flanked her wearing less-exciting versions of the same outfit. Their dull stares couldn’t cut like Hayley’s, only act as stones to sharpen hers on. When they all walked off, I could’ve sworn their laughter harmonised.


     I lurked by the climbing apparatus, sipping my drink through a too-thin straw. Josh Matthews was chewing sweets nearby, and after verifying with a few nervous glances that I was there — neither a ghost nor a trick of the eye — he awkwardly approached. He started asking me questions like “So you like reading?” (I did) and “Weren’t you on the girl’s football team last year?” (I wasn’t). I quickly got bored of this and retreated to the bathroom to reapply my invisible lip balm.


     Camping in the end cubicle with my trainers up on the toilet seat, I heard the door bash open.


     “—looking stupid and not saying anything back. Plus, her top! People haven’t worn that stuff for at least a year, seriously.”


     Hayley and Co. either didn’t know or didn’t mind that someone was listening. Probably the latter.


     “Well, she does live with her grandparents,” one of them (judging by the apathetic mumble, it was Roisin) offered. “Old-fashioned taste?”


     I pulled a face of approval at her dig, thinking that maybe she should have been leading this whole operation, when the other one piped up.


     “Did you hear that when her parents died, there was blood all over the back garden, and they had to like, hosepipe it down afterwards? On the jet setting!”


     I rolled my eyes. Not true. Well, not entirely true — it had been the cone setting, I believe. Anyway, I was dismayed to realise that the story was still the buzz of the town despite happening nearly five years ago (I mean, talk about old-fashioned taste!) and even now people couldn’t get their facts straight.


     “Everyone’s heard that, Jasmin,” Hayley snapped.


     “Just saying, probably that’s why she’s weird. Like, if I saw all that blood, I’d fully throw up all over myself.”


     “No, she’s always been weird. Like, in nursery, she made a wasp sting me — I swear I already told you this.”


     There was a clatter at the sinks, and I figured Hayley had finished touching up her mascara, or perhaps applying bite and sting relief to the little twinkle of a scar on the back of her neck. Roisin responded.


     “I still don’t get how you can make a wasp—”


     “She just did, alright? And you know what, my mum used to speak to her mum sometimes, and she said the lot of them were right freaks. So, I don’t care if they spontaneously combusted. In fact, they probably bloody exploded themselves.”


     “Hayley!” Jasmin gasped.


     An insectile buzz emanated from the LED strips overhead.


     “I don’t think they actually—” Roisin tried to comment before the bathroom dropped into darkness.


     A shriek erupted from all three girls as they poured outside, running back toward the hall. “I told you those toilets are haunted!” screamed Jasmin.


     I waved a hand above my head to trigger the motion sensor. Even as the lights flickered back on, I rummaged in my bag for the green marker I’d been using to sign people’s shirts in the last week of school. I used it to scrawl the first thing that I thought of in big, defiant letters on the cubicle door:


     GET LOST HAYLEY THOMPSON


     Weak, but it would at least make her snort when she read it, and her annoyed snort was very ugly. As I left the stall, I started to think I should have written something stronger, like HAYLEY THOMPSON EATS SHIT or I HOPE YOU SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUST HAYLEY THOMPSON, but then I saw my face in the mirror.


     Bleeding again. I sighed, pulling a wad of paper towels from the dispenser and stuffing them into my face. 

Staring at my reflection, at the tissue getting wetter and redder, an unpleasant, sick feeling gushed out of me.


     I hadn’t thought I'd cared about Hayley. Whatever she and her friends did to me, even embarrassing me in front of the whole class, they could barely get a reaction. I had seen and felt so much that I was emotionally clingfilmed: the hurt and shame rolled right off me, a plasticky sheen obscuring everything and everyone.


     Now that film had been pierced, but not by what Hayley had said about me. Clearly she hadn’t been taught as I had not to speak ill of the dead — because you never know who’ll hear you, or what they can do.


     I flushed the bloody paper, the rush of water shushing me conspiratorially as I stepped outside. The corridor I had walked all day had become, by night, darker and twistier than a serpent’s belly. I stood, disoriented, until Josh Matthews rushed toward me with his index finger in his mouth. Flushing pink, he stopped to explain himself.


     “Cut myself on the apparatus. It’s bleeding like mad.”


     He showcased the wound, almost proudly, as I stepped closer.


     “Oh, don’t touch it, it’s uh–”


     I grabbed his finger.


     “Right... okay.”


     He didn't protest further, but seeing he was uncomfortable, I lowered my eyes. I felt the blood slick on my palm and squeezed, suddenly, almost a reflex.


     “Ow!” he yelped, leaping back with the big eyes and skinny, taut limbs of a prey animal. It dawned on me that situations like this might be why people thought me strange. But when he looked down at his finger and saw the flow had stopped, his shoulders relaxed.


     “What was that?” he asked.


     “It’s just a trick my mum taught me,” I revealed, and, as I found myself doing whenever I mentioned my parents, I forced a smile to scare the shadow of Death away. My smile was supposedly freakish (too many teeth, not enough lips, I’d overheard Hayley saying in the changing rooms), but Josh didn’t seem too disturbed by it.


     “Oh, well... thanks?”


     Still, he scuttled off to run it under the tap anyway, either not believing it was healed, or keen to scrub the girl germs from his skin.


     I didn’t mind him, I supposed, as I skirted past the other pupils, all absorbed in some game, to secure the quiet front corner, behind the speakers and beyond the splatter radius of the garish disco lights. I hadn’t noticed, though, that the door leading under the stage was wide open next to me, and so when its buzzing yellow bulb was yanked into life, the light swarmed out, startling and stinging my eyes.


     The stairs looked enticingly easy to descend, slide-smooth in the shadow, not a splinter to be seen. Even so, I’d decided I wouldn’t be going down, even before Hayley showed up.


     “What’ve you been doing down there?” she interrogated, peering downstairs. “Let me guess... hiding? Stealing?”


     A garishly red drink sloshed about in her hand. It almost looked too viscous to be juice.


     “Oh! Or maybe your mate Josh is down there too?”

I said nothing, just looked at the liquid, pictured it seeping into soil, slithering between paving stones. She could never know. None of them could. Except me.


     “Aww, but you two would be so cute together,” she told me with a vicious smile, her oversweet tone turning my stomach. “No, really.”


     Extracting no response, she huffed, hopping down the first couple of steps.


     “Sorry, but I might have to tell Miss Flaherty I caught you messing about under the stage.”


     This should have worried me. Miss Flaherty loved Hayley about as much as she disliked me. However, I remained calm even as Hayley descended further, eyes shining with mischief and malice as she passed into the light.


     “Oh my God!” she shouted when she reached the bottom, channelling her overbaked performance as the Fairy Godmother in that year’s production of Cinderella, but thankfully more distant. “It’s a right mess down here.”


     I heard a box tip, the contents clattering out. From above it was as hushed as sand spilling from a bucket. I knew if she told on me, they’d believe her. Misfortune had always been on my heels, and its friends misadventure and misdemeanour followed close behind.


     I knew she was still talking, still destroying, but I didn’t get a chance to hear the rest. Because though I hadn’t reached out, the door was closing. And though I hadn’t slid the latch across, it was locked.


     And though I was far, far away from the dangling cord which worked the bulb, the sliver of light under the door was extinguished.


     Weird, I thought, I felt, as I watched this. But not weird in the bad way that they always used it.


     If Hayley screamed, if she clawed her way back up the stairs, if she pounded against the door, or if she didn’t, I wouldn’t know. The DJ had launched into a song everyone but me seemed to love, and the sound of the singalong drowned everything out. When I bumped into Roisin and Jasmin on my way back toward the canteen, I could hardly make out what they were saying.


     “Have you seen Hayley?” one asked.


     “We’ve lost her,” the other added.


     I noticed Roisin’s watery eyes, darting around bug-like, and the ragged edge of Jasmin’s fingernails as she tucked her hair behind both ears. Without her between them, they were just two kids my age; for that moment, that was all I was to them too.


     “Sorry, I’ve not.”


     “What’s up with your face?” Jasmin asked with a frown. I reached up to touch my chin, and my fingers came away dripping crimson. Not waiting for an answer, the two of them pushed past me to resume their search.


     This time, I let the blood flow freely. I stuck my hand in my bag and fished around for coins. Twenty pence, two tens, a five...


     Enough for a fairy cake, I reckoned, licking my top lip clean.

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