The Argument (ARC) by Victoria Jenkins

Author:Victoria Jenkins [Jenkins, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838880897
Publisher: Bookouture
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

14

Fourteen

Olivia

* * *

Olivia lies in bed trying to listen out for sound. Any sound will do, just something to break the monotony of the long hours she has spent here in silence, lying alone and trying not to think too hard about what has happened and what might happen next as consequence. Her legs feel deadened, pinned to the bed, and she longs for sleep, for the break it would allow her from the relentless circling of her thoughts. It felt liberating, being up on that roof, a kind of freedom she has never experienced before. She knows that what she did was stupid, but everyone else her age seems to get away with doing stupid things. For everyone else, recklessness seems to be a rite of passage, gift-wrapped with the gloss of youth, yet for her the rules have always seemed to be different. She isn’t allowed to make mistakes or to learn from experience. She must do as they say, and not as they do.

Olivia knows the people in her year who have had sex already, as well as the ones who have taken drugs. She knows which of them go out and get drunk in parks at the weekends and which of them have been in trouble with the police. There’s a girl in the sixth form who’s rumoured to have had an affair with one of the teaching assistants, an affair apparently everyone but his girlfriend knows about. The other staff must know – the rumour mill went into meltdown with it back before Christmas – yet the teaching assistant still works at the school, with no repercussions for whatever he’d been getting up to. The same for the student, who’ll be leaving school in just a few weeks’ time. What Olivia did yesterday was nothing in comparison to what some people seem to get up to, yet she already knows that she will pay a higher price for it than any of her classmates would.

The thought of being stuck in this house and in this room any longer is enough to drive her insane. Some days, Olivia believes she might already be mad. Her thoughts are erratic and disjointed, and quite often she thinks things she isn’t sure are normal. She tries not to linger on them, but sometimes the more attempts she makes to avoid these thoughts that plague her, the harder they hit, each time darker and more distressing. She wonders what it would be like to be allowed access to the brain of another person, for just ten minutes or so, to know if the way she thinks is normal or if other people are wired differently to her. Would it be a good thing? she wonders. Knowing she’s not that unlike someone else might offer a reassurance she’s aware she is in desperate need of but finding out she’s irredeemably more different would push her even further to an invisible edge she finds herself crawling closer to by the day. Perhaps ignorance really is bliss, and yet Olivia knows this not to be the case.

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