Читать книгу The Pieces of You and Me - Rachel Burton, Rachel Burton - Страница 18

… The day you left for boarding school I didn’t want to let you go. We stood outside your house, your father’s car packed up with your things, my arms wrapped around your waist, your chin on the top of my head. Even at eleven you were head and shoulders taller than me.

‘Come along, Rupert, please,’ your father said. I could hear the irritation in his voice. He was always impatient when I was around. Maybe he was impatient when I wasn’t around too, but I did feel that his impatience was reserved especially for me.

You pulled away, pushing your glasses up your nose and looking at me. I remember your eyes seemed bluer than ever that afternoon.

‘I’m still here, Jessie,’ you said. ‘Whenever you need me.’ But I knew I wouldn’t see you until the Christmas holidays and when you’re eleven the distance between September and Christmas seems enormous, insurmountable, impassable.

You got into the back of the car and your father pulled away, off to your expensive new school in London. It felt like you were going forever. It felt as though it was the end. You looked out of the rear window as the car turned out of the bottom of the road and you waved briefly. I felt as though I’d never see you again.

But life carried on much as it always had, even though you weren’t there. I moved up into the Senior Building of my all-girls school and I made friends who helped me keep my mind off you, who helped to fill the gaping hole you’d left behind.

Caitlin and Gemma were the only girls like me at school – my grandmother had high ideas about my education, but I don’t think she’d thought through how hard it would be for me to fit in. Caitlin and Gemma and I were ordinary – we didn’t have trust funds or long limbs and blonde hair and our fathers weren’t ‘something in the City’.

But they always saw me for who I was rather than as ‘Rupert Tremayne’s friend’ …