Heart-Shaped Bruise by Tanya Byrne Page A

films and those ads on the telly for animal shelters, the ones with the big-eyed, shivering dogs – but I didn’t think I
could
cry now, yet, as soon as Doctor Gilyard walked out, something in me buckled and I cried until I couldn’t breathe. Until I thought I was dying.
    I don’t think I would have stopped if Naomi and Lily hadn’t tried to pull me out. I’d been crying for a day, a week, a year, I don’t know. I just remember hearing footsteps, then someone lying on my bed next to me. I knew it was Lily because the mattress barely registered the weight of her. Then Naomi climbed on top of me, like Olivia used to when we were at St Jude’s and she was trying to get me out of bed.
    ‘Get off!’ I barked.
    Naomi buried her nose in my hair. ‘Not until you come for a fag.’
    ‘I don’t want a fag.’
    ‘Oh, my God. She’s dying! Nurse!’ She lifted her head and called out while Lily giggled next to me. ‘Nurse! Call an ambulance!’
    ‘Fuck off!’
    ‘Ladies don’t say fuck, they say pardon,’ she gasped.
    She rolled off me giggling and I don’t know how the three of us fitted on my narrow bed, but we did. Good thing Lily takes up less space than my blanket.
    ‘What’s his name?’ Naomi asked when I rolled on to my back with a surly sigh.
    ‘Who’s name?’
    Lily sat up. ‘Is it Sid?’
    I stared at her. ‘What?’
    ‘Don’t wind her up, Lil!’ Naomi huffed. ‘She hasn’t had a cigarette for six hours.’
    Lily gave me her best lost-little-girl look. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that you said his name the other day while you were sleeping so I thought he was the he.’
    ‘You been watching me sleep, Edward Cullen?’
    ‘Of course not! It was when you fell asleep while we were watching that episode of
Murder She Wrote
—’
    ‘Lily, stop talking,’ Naomi interrupted, rolling her eyes.
    ‘Yes, stop talking. Both of you. There’s no he.’
    ‘There’s always a he,’ Naomi told me with another sigh.
    I scoffed. ‘So every time a girl falls apart, it’s because of a boy?’
    Naomi raised an eyebrow at me and I huffed. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
    ‘You still love him!’ Lily gasped, all big eyes and hair.
    ‘I don’t.’
    ‘You do!’ they said in unison.
    They’re turning into quite the double act.
    ‘I don’t! It was nothing. We didn’t even—’
    I couldn’t finish the sentence, but I didn’t need to because Lily was already shaking her head. ‘That’s worse.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘Because you’ll never get over it.’
    I laughed, but Naomi poked me in the side with her finger. ‘She’s right. You’ll never get over it because you won’t get it out of your system. It’s there for ever.’
    I laughed again. ‘For ever? Stop being so melodramatic.’
    ‘I’m not! It’s like a dream. You never remember a dream if you dream it out, you only remember it if you’re interrupted, like if you wake up, or something. So if you let a relationship run its natural course, it will just fizzle out and die and you won’t give a shit. But if something happens, like the timing’s off or he’s with someone else, then it’s just on hold, like you’ve hit the pause button or something.’
    ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
    ‘It’s true.’ Lily nodded. ‘We did this poem at school and it said that only one type of love lasts – unrequited love.’
    I rolled my eyes. ‘I love you, Lil. You don’t know who Hello Kitty is, but you can quote Somerset Maugham.’
    ‘Whatever.’ Naomi waved her hand. ‘If you ever want to get out of here, you need to talk about it. You can’t avoid Doctor G for ever.’
    ‘Says the girl who schizes out every time her boyfriend comes to visit.’
    Naomi sat up. ‘At least I let myself feel something.
That
’s what you’re scared of, Emily.’ She pointed at me. ‘What all of us in here are scared of, of being happy. We haven’t felt it for so long, we wouldn’t know what to do with it.’
    When I looked at Lily she was nodding and