The most popular girl in school asked me to prom while everybody else was calling me names — twenty years later she brought a takeaway to my door and did not know who I was.
The most popular girl in school asked me to prom while everybody else was calling me names — twenty years later she brought a takeaway to my door and did not know who I was.
My parents died on the ninth of November, 2005.
A lorry came across the central reservation on the Bellwater road at about half four in the afternoon. Nell and Gerald Renwick, fifty-one and fifty-three.
I was in the back. I was eighteen.
Seven weeks in hospital and about four months before I could walk any distance, and I went back to school in the March of 2006 into a body and a life that I did not recognise.
I am not going to write about what that year did to me physically, because it is nobody’s business and because there is nothing useful in it.
What I will say is that by the March of 2006 I had stopped being a person at that school and had become a thing that other people said words about in a corridor.
So I was not going to prom. That was not a decision. It was just a fact, like the weather.
And then on about the fourth of May, Siobhan Doherty came and found me by the science block.
Head of the cheer squad. The prettiest girl in that school by a distance that everybody agreed on. Eleven boys in my year would have walked into traffic.
And she said: “Will you take me to prom?”
I looked behind me. I genuinely, physically turned round, because I assumed she was talking to somebody standing behind me.
