The Yearbook by Holly Bourne

Author:Holly Bourne [Bourne, Holly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Usborne Publishing Ltd
Published: 2021-05-12T18:30:00+00:00

The house was disquietingly quiet when I got in. I closed the door, listened. Sent out bat signals to pick up emotional radar readings. I couldn’t sense Mum’s nervous energy. There was something not quite right though. I slipped my shoes off, careful to tuck them properly under the shoe rack. I went to check out the living-room. Empty. Fine. I walked into the kitchen and stopped in the doorway.

A smashed plate on the floor.

My heart cracked – sending fault lines throughout my body. I stared at the smithereens of the plate, like it could somehow grow a mouth and tell me what happened. Who smashed it? Why had nobody cleaned it up? Nightmare stories played themselves through my head…then I was startled by a cough upstairs, the squeaking of floorboards.

Adam. I found him in his room, his rucksack wide open, moving piles of clothes into it.

“Adam?”

“Woah, Paige. You scared me.” He flicked me a grim smile, then went to his wardrobe to remove a pile of scented, folded jumpers Mum had laundered for him. He scrunched them into a ball and stuffed them into the bottom of the bag.

“You alright?” I nodded towards his packing, my heart unable to keep up with all these developments.

“What? Yeah. I’m going to go back to uni tonight.”

“I thought you still had another week off?”

“I do.”

He removed more clothes from his wardrobe and I was too scared to ask what happened. We never talked about anything in this house. “Right.”

I watched him pack with an urgency I hadn’t seen before. He kept looking at his ticking clock. He pushed in a few T-shirts, and his going-out shirts. Then he started on electricals, crouching under his desk and yanking out numerous charging cords, wrapping them into a tangled ball, stuffing them on top. I just stood and watched, scared. Waiting for him to tell me what happened. Not wanting to know. Not wanting him to break the code and make it real.

“Adam?”

He paused. He wouldn’t look at me, but he pushed his thumbs into his eyes.

“Christ, Paige,” he said into his hands. “What even is this house? I can’t stay a second longer.”

He fell onto the bed and curled into a ball. I took one tentative step into his bedroom. I’d never seen Adam like this. He was always glowing in the spotlight. Happy to soak it all up. Not weak…not scared. He was the lucky one out of the two of us, not the broken one.

“You don’t realize how toxic it is until you get out,” he told his bedroom wall. “You get used to it. We think it’s normal, because it is to us. But then, when you leave… I went to uni and, honestly, Paige, it’s like taking my first breath of fresh air. Then I came home and it’s worse because being away from it makes me realize how bad it is. How bad he is.”

The fear I felt. He’d broken the code. We didn’t talk bad about Dad. Especially Adam.

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