Asking for It by Louise O'Neill

Author:Louise O'Neill
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: YA, Teen & Young Adult, Literature & Fiction
ISBN: 9781848668201
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2015-09-02T12:00:00+00:00

This year

Thursday

I am awake. And then I remember.

I am awake and I instantly wish that I was not.

(Life ruiner.)

(I have ruined their lives.)

Guilt paints itself on to my skin. I am tarred in it and feathered.

The morning is creeping under the curtains like it is hunting for me. Even the light seems different now. It is greyer, shaping itself into shadows that want to smother me.

I am thirsty. A chalky residue coats my tongue. I look around the room, at the mirror, and the desk, and the windows. I can see points and the hard edges, the bits I might cut myself open on.

There is an old-fashioned radio alarm clock on my bedside locker, a cheap plastic square my mother bought to replace my iPhone. I’m not supposed to use my iPhone. I am not supposed to keep my laptop in my room any more either.

*

8.51 a.m.

I have slept for ten hours and fifty minutes.

That is a long time. (It was not long enough.)

I wrap the oversized dressing gown around myself. I sit on the desk chair, swivelling around once, twice, three times. I used to twirl my father’s globe like this as a child, my eyes closed, putting my hand out to stop it. I insisted that wherever my finger landed told of my future husband, my future home, my future life. I was so sure then. I was sure it was that easy.

The chair comes to a standstill. I concentrate on the edges of the mirror first, at the tacky residue left behind from the torn-off Polaroids, postcards, tickets for gigs. I work my way slowly towards the centre until I see that girl. Her face is slightly rounder now, her eyes like pieces of broken blue glass glued on to a papier-mâché moon.

I pick up a hairbrush from the vanity table, my eyes watering as I try to wrench out some of the knots (when was the last time you brushed your hair, Emma?) and for a second I think I can see chunks of vomit in my hair, that I’m covered in it, so gross, like, Sean puked all over her, did you see that photo?

I jerk forward, searching.

But there’s nothing there.

*

8.57 a.m.

This is a normal time for breakfast.

I stand at the top of the stairs, looking down. If I fell . . . (Broken neck? Brain trauma?) People fall down the stairs all the time.

One. Two. Three.

I count each one until at last my feet touch the round mat at the bottom. It is new. I sit on the bottom step, curling my toes against the emerald-green fabric. My mother never did get the vomit stains out of the old one. This one is not as nice. It is cheaper, I think.

‘Ah, here, it’s as simple as this, Ned,’ from the kitchen, I hear a man’s voice saying in an inner-city Dublin growl. ‘I’m not a judgemental man, I’m not. But if this girl was in bed with the lad anyway, what was she expecting?’

‘I don’t think she was expecting to get raped, Davey,’ a nasal voice retorts.

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