The Suicide Club Read Online Free Page A

an athletic frame. I’m not muscly, but I’m not skinny either. I have brown hair that’s a little bit wavy and which I grow quite long on top but quite short on the back and sides. My friend Matthew says that my hair looks a bit like a bicycle helmet, a cruel criticism, but one I accept with both grace and dignity. People tell me that my face is ‘cute’ or ‘mischievous’ but really it looks like it doesn’t quite fit on my skull, but in a not-bad way, I guess. It’s my big eyes that make people think I’m cute but sometimes they get too big, like when I’m surprised, and then I just look like a spaz. All in all I’m pretty happy with the way I look, which is an oddity for teenagers.
    I could hear my parents downstairs but I didn’t want to see them. They must have heard about what Craig Bartlett-Taylor had done by now and I really didn’t have the energy to speak to them about it – my parents have this uncanny knack of bringing my true feelings up and it freaks me out a bit. On my CD player I started playing my Damien Rice album, which I love. It’s a bit depressing but it’s perfect for times of reflection.
    My parents split up when I was thirteen. It was THE most terrible thing that could have happened. In the months leading up to it they would scream at each other late at night. They thought I was asleep, but I wasn’t. Sometimes I would get up early on a Saturday morning and hear them downstairs, already going at it hammer and tongs.
    â€˜You never even fucking loved me,’ she would scream, her voice all warbly. It is such a shocking thing to hear your own mother using the F word.
    Then my dad would say something calmly which was too muffled to decipher and then you’d hear a mug smash or something and my mother would be crying, shouting, ‘I hate it here. I fucking hate it.’ She’d say the F word quietly sometimes.
    She’d run out and I’d hear her car drive off and when I got up nothing would be mentioned. I still don’t know why they split up. I think my mother thought my father was having an affair, but I know that he’d never do that. Not to me.
    The emotions I went through at the time were all over the place. But I never thought it was my fault, which can happen sometimes; the kids think it’s their fault. My tutor at school would say, ‘It’s not your fault,’ and I’d say, ‘But they were happy before they had me,’ because I was making fun of him.
    Of course I felt bad for my parents. I hated seeing them so unhappy. But I also wanted them to stay together and in that respect I was conflicted – I wanted them to stay together but it was their staying together that was making them unhappy, you know?
    Anyway, one night my dad came into my room and sat at the end of my bed. He gave me a long speech about how they’d decided to go their separate ways and that it wasn’t my fault. I snapped a little bit and told him to stay, not to leave. I was crying my eyes out like a baby, I really was. And I meant every tear. I was being torn apart.
    By morning I felt a little better and in less than a week I had concluded that it would be better this way because their happiness was the most important thing. The next feeling I had was embarrassment and it was far worse than the original grief. In school, I felt like a leper or something. Everybody knew what had happened and nobody said a word. It was just the most awful thing. Nothing was ever mentioned, not even amongst my best friends. The onlyperson I spoke to about it was Matthew. It really was embarrassing. I don’t think I ever really recovered from my parents’ split, even though they got back together a year later. I developed a lovely little fear of commitment – and I was only fourteen!
    There was a knock at my door. It was Clare. I made sure that the back of my jeans dragged on the floor underneath my bare