Putting Alice Back Together Read Online Free

feels like sometimes—relief.
    An energy that builds and it has to be let out somewhere.
    It’s more than relief—it’s release.
    Or it would be if it didn’t upset Bonny.
    Everything upset Bonny.
    Everything was done to appease her.
    Which was why I had been forced to wear pink.
    A sort of dusky pink, which was fashionable, my muminsisted—as if she would know. As if a size twenty, middle-aged woman with bad teeth and the beginnings of a moustache would know.
    I hated it—I hated it so much, there was no way I was going to wear it. But my threats fell on deaf ears. It was Bonny’s Special Day—and what was a bit of public humiliation to a seventeen-year-old as long as the bride was smiling?
    So I wrote reams of pages of ‘I hate Bonny’, ‘I want to kill Bonny’ and ‘I want to gouge out her eyes’ as I lay on my bed the afternoon before the wedding with the beastly pink dress hanging up in plastic on my wardrobe. I had my period and was having visions of flooding in the aisle, and to add to the joy, the hairdresser was here and, as anyone with frizzy red hair would understand, I wasn’t looking forward to that either.
    I lay down and imagined that it was me getting married and not Bonny.
    That sexy Lex only had eyes for me.
    Then I felt bad—I mean, I might hate her but she is my sister—so I moved my fantasy over to Gus instead.
    Except he was already married…
    Apparently you couldn’t wash your hair on the day of the wedding, because the spectacular style Bonny had finally chosen after several screaming trips wouldn’t stay up on newly washed hair. So she was being blow-dried while I washed my hair and then the hairdresser would dry it with a diffuser and put in loads of product and then pin it up tomorrow. We’d had a practice a couple of weeks before and it had looked suitably disgusting but,again, I’d been told to shut up and not complain because it was Bonny’s Special Day.
    So I washed my hair and I sat sulking in the kitchen as Bonny’s hair was being blow-dried, and then Eleanor’s was blow-dried too. Mum wasn’t having hers put up, so she was getting ‘done’ tomorrow, and as I moved to the stool, perhaps seeing my expression when the hairdresser took out her scissors, Mum tried to appease me. She couldn’t give a shag that I hated hairdressers and hated, hated, hated getting it trimmed—no, she just didn’t want me making a scene and upsetting Bonny.
    ‘It’s just a little trim,’ Mum warned, clucking around and trying to pour cold water on the cauldron of hate we were all sitting in before it exploded. ‘Oh, I didn’t tell you, I rang Gus and you can have an extra piano lesson,’ Mum said to my scowling face. ‘He’s working over the holiday break and he can fit you in on Monday.’
    Now, that did appease me.
    You see, Gus wasn’t like the usual, scurf-ridden, vegan tutors that Mum had found for me in the past. He was as sexy as hell, with brown dead-straight hair, no hint of dandruff and dark brown eyes that roamed over me for a little bit too long sometimes. He smelt fantastic too. Sometimes when he was leaning over me, or sitting beside while I played, I was scared to breathe because the scent of him made me want to turn around and just lick him! Like Lex, he was from Australia (they must make sexy men there—I was thinking of a gap year there to sample the delights). Gus spoke to me, instead of down to me. He spoke about real things, about his life, about me. Once when his moody bitch of a wife walked in on our lesson and reminded him that he’d gone over the hour,it came as a surprise to realise that we had. Instead of playing, for those last fifteen minutes we’d been talking and laughing and I felt a slight flurry in my stomach, because I knew that when I left there would be a row.
    He started to tell me more and more about his problems with Celeste and I lapped every word up and then wrote it in my diary each night—analysing it, going over and over it,