The Happy Family by Jackie Kabler (electric book reader txt) 📕

her shoulder-length hair pulled back with a purple headband, just like Daphne did in the cartoons we’d watch at home on Saturday mornings.

‘Hey, it’s Daphne!’ people would say, and laugh, and she’d smile shyly, enjoying the unaccustomed attention.

Daphne. Daphne Blake.

Daphne Blake was Lucy Allen’s nickname.

Chapter 26

I killed Lucy Allen.

Well, that’s what I always believed, anyway. I still do.

The official inquest verdict was, of course, suicide. But I knew that I’d killed her just as surely as if I’d put that noose around her neck myself and pulled it tight. She did it because of me. She died, at thirteen years of age, because of me. Because of the things I said, the things I did.

Years later, when I was in therapy, talking it all through with Rita, she suggested that maybe I didn’t know the whole truth, that maybe there were other things going on in Lucy’s life, that maybe what I’d done to her at school was just a tiny part of a bigger, darker whole. Rita was right about many things but I disagreed with her on that one. I knew she was trying to tell me that unless I knew all the facts, I shouldn’t shoulder the entire burden of guilt myself; that it may, after all, not have been entirely my fault. But I knew it was. And I knew that, no matter what I did, I could never fix it. Instead of directing my anger and frustration at my mother for leaving me, I directed it elsewhere, and that was my choice. That was down to me.

The only person I ever told was my dad. In the days after she died, after the headteacher sent letters to all the parents telling them what had happened, I fell apart. And when my poor, puzzled father finally realised that this couldn’t just be grief, that it didn’t make sense for me to be so desperately upset about the death of a girl I barely knew, when he sat me down and made me talk to him, I told him everything. I think I confessed because I wanted to be punished, because I felt I should be made to suffer for what I’d done.

He was horrified, of course, horrified and ashamed. And then, hours later, while he was still processing it all, still trying to work out what to do, he got the phone call. The phone call from Lucy’s distraught mother, screaming at him. Lucy had left no note but they’d found her diary. And in it she’d detailed it all. The things I’d whispered in her ear, the photograph I’d pinned to the board. And the family were, she said, taking it straight to the police.

‘Your little bitch of a daughter is going to pay for what she’s done,’ she said.

And I did. I paid for years, knowing what a vile, worthless person I was, watching every word I said, terrified of hurting someone else. Avoiding getting close to anyone, convinced I didn’t deserve happiness or love. Even believing, for a very long time, that I didn’t deserve to have children because I’d caused the death of another woman’s child and how, then, could I ever be worthy of motherhood myself? Yes, I paid. But … officially? Formally? Publicly? No. No, I didn’t. I didn’t pay at all.

The Allens did go to the police and I was questioned. I know now that I was lucky, that taking and pinning up that photograph of Lucy was actually a criminal offence; I shared an indecent image of a child, and if it had been today, if I’d put it on social media for example, I may well have been prosecuted. But it was a long time ago and I was a child myself; it was one photo, pinned on a noticeboard for a short time, and I was let off with a warning. Mrs Allen wanted me to be charged with manslaughter, but in the end no charges were ever brought. Lack of evidence that it was actually my bullying – and that of course, is exactly what I was: a nasty, vindictive little bully – that tipped her over the edge. Lucy’s diaries, although they detailed what I’d done to her, were full of all kinds of teenage angst: how stressed she was about exams, how sad she was that Tony, her first crush, seemed to have no interest in her, all the usual stuff. There was, it was concluded, no proof that she’d taken her own life because of me; that although my behaviour probably did play a role in her death, it was impossible to know how significant that role was.

It was exactly what Rita tried to tell me when I finally sought counselling all those years later, but I didn’t believe it at thirteen and I still didn’t believe it then. I knew it was me. And her family knew it was me too. I still remember their faces when we saw them, her dad and a woman – an aunt maybe – in the corridor at the police station after I was questioned. I remember the malevolence in her father’s eyes as he stopped dead in his tracks, his gaze following me as I shrank behind my dad and shuffled past him; I remember the venom in his voice as he said, ‘That’s her, look.’ I remember the way she glanced at me too then, and immediately averted her eyes, as if I was something disgusting, too loathsome to look at for more than a second.

When the entire school filed into the church for the funeral, I was told I wasn’t welcome. I never went back to Fairbridge after that. We moved away, Dad and I, started over yet again at another new school in Cheltenham where nobody knew me, or what I’d done. And, although for years I feared that one of Lucy’s family or friends would come after me, would make me pay, they never did.

‘They’ll want to put