Chapter Eleven: Discomfort Shared is Discomfort Doubled
.
.
The school year continued, mostly, without event. Holidays came and went and the Sometimes homes settled into a kind of permanence, Emily and Spencer both becoming sure that they would simply remain there until some unforeseeable distant future when they became 'grown', which seemed unlikely and not really relevant to their day to day lives. These instead consisted of waking up early enough that they could both check the hares before they got ready for school—behaviour which they insisted upon, after discovering just how warlike and dangerous a leporid's life could be when watching Watership Down—, going to school separately, spending the day separately, returning home separately, and then, upon coming home, spending every minute from they hit the ground running right up until the descent of the sun playing together. Michael had been convinced by Diana that after-school classes were hardly a necessity if Emily kept her grades up, therefore giving them some more time to play, at the expense of her weekends. Emily, after several occurrences of her grades slipping, learned very quickly that if she wanted to play, it was best to slip Spencer her homework first. Spencer hardly minded, since the concept of grades ever being below 'top' was alien to him.
So life was good for them, in the year that they were eight, in every way but two.
Firstly, they both missed someone. Neither wanted to talk about it, but the hurt was always there. Spencer ate dinner in the big house at night and watched enviously as Emily commanded effortlessly all of her doting father's attention. Emily, in turn, sat in lessons with Diana and silently seethed over the ease with which Spencer could request to sit upon her lap or be read to or hugged, a motherly care that Emily had never been afforded.
Secondly, school was only bearable because of the simple fact that every night, without fault, it ended. Emily hated it entirely, from the classes to the teachers to the friends she made that didn't last, constantly flitting from group to group and making shallow connections that she shed just as easily as she gained them. No friend was Spencer, no person was interesting enough to be. They were all boring, utterly, utterly boring, and she spent the year in a waiting kind of loneliness, quick to anger and always bored, solving both of these things by disrupting the class or teasing the other girls to prove how boring they were, especially after the incident that she refused to tell anyone at home about. Spencer just hated being alone. Everyone in his class was older than he was, the teacher was too awed by his intelligence to realise that he was still only eight, and all the kids his age had decided he was too shy and weird to hang out with. He sat in the library and read every book, waiting for the bell to send him home to Emily.
Luckily, that bell always came.
.
That night, he found Emily trying to feed paper to Balthy. Balthy, who'd been glum ever since her babies had grown up and started filtering away, was refusing to eat the paper, instead nibbling on Emily's fingers and making her giggle.
"What are you doing?" Spencer asked, readjusting his chess board under his arm as he joined them under the tree. It was a wet, cold spring day, the winter thaw coming and leaving the trees barely ready to turn green once more. Despite their heavy coats, both kids were still shivering. "Hares don't eat paper."
"Someone has to eat it," Emily said, shredding the paper further. Spencer caught a glimpse of the word 'disciplinary' and guessed, correctly, that Emily had probably gotten in trouble at school again and was taking advantage of the fact that Michael rarely fielded phone calls from her teachers in order to hide the evidence. "I'll do it if I have to."
"You know, not getting in trouble is easier than eating the evidence of that trouble." Spencer nodded wisely, ignoring Emily's eyeroll at his naivety. "Do you have any homework?"
"Tons." Emily took her book out of her bag and tossed it at him, watching him page through and frown at her notes, most of which consisted of drawings of badgers, her latest interest. "I'm going to fail."
"You're perfectly capable of doing the work. You just need to apply—"
Emily snorted so loudly that Balthy jumped at the sound, taking off into the trees and vanishing from sight. Standing and brushing her hands on her pants, shreds of letter blowing across the wet grass, Emily snapped, "You sound like a teacher," and tried not to let too much of her crankiness edge into her voice.
"Sorry." They stood there for a moment, both shivering still, until Spencer thought of something that they could do, since staying outside was probably out of the question. "Want to come help turn my house into a pillow fort? Mom said I could, so long as I was careful not to invite danger and disorder into the premises, which I think means make too much of a mess."
The answer was obviously yes.
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Diana returned home from a rather concerning phone call with Elizabeth to find that her home was her home no longer, but now the domain of two badgers, as they declared themselves to be, who were claiming sovereignty over her living room, staircase, and her son's bedroom. Sidling past a complicated series of sheets and blankets engineered into tunnels and coves all through the hall, Diana admired for a moment the ingenuity of the craftwork put into the badger warren before crouching down and peering into the largest of the gaps underneath to find her two badgers. They were sitting in a veritable sea of papers and books, both looking out innocently at her with clothes pins on their shirts and Emily still in her school uniform.
"You're going to get your skirt dusty," Diana warned her first.
"Badgers don't care about dust, we only care about worms."
"And colonisation of the rabbits' native homelands," Spencer declared, sitting upright and revealing that he was wearing Diana's bathrobe as some kind of cape. "We're at the beginning of a race war, motivated by a lack of resources—"
"Worms," Emily explained. "And holes."
"Yeah, those, back in our homelands. The rabbits have all the worms and holes, and, also, we don't like their ears. And they have a thriving spice trade—what?"
Diana stared at them.
"Spencer's reading a book," Emily finally explained, looking bored with proceedings. "It's not about badgers. My book is though." It was clear which book she was sure was better, purely by whether it contained badgers or not. Both books were held up proudly. Emily, who'd begun the year sure that reading outside of school was an unnecessarily tedious undertaking, had taken to the hobby like a duck to water once Diana had managed to find books that catered more to her than the ones she currently owned. Todays was The Wind in the Willows, which Diana assumed was where the badgers had been inspired from.
Spencer's was Burmese Days, and Diana made a mental note to find him some wider reading on the history of British Imperialism before he ended up radicalised at the age of eight. She didn't remove the book, however—if he was old enough to pick up George Orwell on his own and read it by choice, he was old enough to come to her about any worries he had about it. Or, alternatively, he was old enough to re-enact nineteenth-century colonisation practices while pretending to be a badger.
"Not hares?" was all she asked.
"We tried that," Spencer replied, looking contrite. "Hopping in the fort was a mistake."
"Hopping down the stairs was a mistake," Emily grumbled, rubbing her elbow where a nasty red graze could be seen.
"Well, imperialistic badgers must have worked up an appetite," Diana finally stated, standing and wincing as her knees and almost permanent headache both complained about the action. Her medication wasn't working correctly anymore, leaving her tired and nervous, worrying that they wouldn't find an alternative soon enough before more apparent symptoms showed up. "How about a pre-dinner snack?"
"Worms?" two voices chorused from inside the fort, both hopeful.
Diana winced. "Perhaps, if they're in this season. We may be unlucky and have to settle for potato chips—also a staple of our friends', the Mustelidae, diet."
From the kitchen, she could hear them chattering in both English and Italian—Emily's fluent, Spencer's slow and careful—as they planned their assault on the hapless rabbits. Diana listened carefully, recognition sparking as Emily rattled off a list of 'targets for annexing', which she seemed to think involved a lot of bombs and very little diplomacy.
"Ah," said Diana, recognising the names and realising that there might be a bigger problem here than Emily's easy acceptance of nuclear warfare.
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That night at dinner, Diana sent both children to wash their hands—not falsely, both were grimy from a long afternoon of badgering—and mentioned to Michael: "I believe Emily is having trouble with her peers."
"Hmm?" He looked up from his paper, frowning. "Nonsense. Last time I spoke to her teachers, they said she was getting along finely with her friends. Lots of friends, very friendly. She'd have said if she was unhappy."
"Today while they were playing, Emily was using the names of the girls at school as, ah, representations of the 'villains' of their pretend," Diana said carefully, skirting around the details of their game. "There's resentment there that I find concerning. Perhaps a call to her teacher might be in order?"
Michael frowned, looking around as Emily and Spencer bounded in, having a quick but ferocious battle over who got in the door first that used a lot of elbows and very few 'pleases'. "Emily," he said firmly, Emily freezing in place and going pale. Spencer immediately looked at his shoes, his reddening ears and the hands that snapped up to nervously fumble together immediate and clear signs of a guilty conscience. "Are you having trouble with your girlfriends at school?"
Emily stared. "I don't have friends at school," she said finally, scowling dangerously. It was a show of temper Diana hadn't seen for a while, and she tensed and waited to see if Michael would provoke it or dissuade her from giving into it. "They're all boring and stupid and I hate them."
Spencer shrunk down more, eyes flicking up to meet Diana's before darting away. Michael, focused on his daughter's stormy expression, noticed none of this.
"Nonsense, they're lovely girls. You go to their birthday parties all the time, you're very popular. Why would you go to the parties of girls you hate?"
Emily didn't answer, just bit at her lip and began to tremble. Despite her reddening eyes and pale face, she wasn't about to cry—it was raw anger and she struggled to push it down, aware that Diana was watching and that they'd talked about this, about being mad for no good reason. She recited in her head what she'd been told: breathe, step back, think. What her mom called compartmentalising, which Emily didn't really understand but thought mostly meant shoving the angry bits of her away where they didn't show or feel.
Easier said than done.
"Spencer, do you know anything about this?" Michael asked. Diana frowned, tensing at the direct query aimed at her son.
But Spencer just stared at his shoes and shook his head, saying nothing.
"We're going to talk later about this." This was directed at Emily once more, and Diana relaxed, nodding at Spencer to come sit next to her, which he did with obscene haste, burrowing into her side and hiding his sniffling. Emily stood alone, her expression no longer angry but deceptively blank, despite her red-rimmed eyes. "I don't understand why you're being like this when they're such nice girls, with such lovely families."
Diana winced. Spencer froze.
And Emily said in a quiet, low voice, "I hate them and I hate their families and I hate you. You don't even care that they hate me back, you just want me to like them because their families are important—well, they won't ever like me because I made sure they wouldn't so you can't make them!"
And, with that, she turned and stormed out, refusing to return and eat.
"Mom?" Spencer murmured after Michael had followed his daughter to either console her or scold her, whichever took his fancy at the time—Diana doubted either option would lead to him understanding the tumultuous drama of being an eight-year-old girl, with all the petty miseries that came of it. "Emily told me not to tell, but she's in trouble at school for being mean to the others." He looked immensely troubled by this, as he would, Diana realised. A victim of bullying himself in the past, his confusion about his friend suddenly being the bully was vast. "I told her to stop being mean to them and she said I didn't get it, she had to be…"
"Why?" Diana queried, concerned.
"I don't know." Spencer stared at Emily's abandoned plate, a clock ticking somewhere distantly and all their meals untouched. "She said it was the only way to be sure what they felt about her was real. I don't know what that means."
Diana, looking around at the big house they were in with no candid photos on the walls, only the most carefully selected images of the lives within, rather thought that she understood perfectly. After all, Emily had something this year she hadn't all those years prior—and it took only a single real friendship to expose false ones. And for a girl like Emily, surrounded by other girls with parents just like hers, Diana didn't doubt that Emily had only just crashed up against that grim reality and decided that hatred was better than deceptiveness when it came to her peers.
"I think, my boy," she said finally, Spencer looking up at her hopefully, "I'm going to need you to do something for your friend, before her rather radical plan backfires on her."
And Spencer with a fierceness he rarely showed, said, "Anything."
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That night, Emily—who had been curled up under her covers crying until her head hurt and her nose hurt too and she felt sick from not having enough of the hot, damp air under there to breathe—heard a noise at her door. A soft whisper of a noise.
"Daddy?" she asked, her voice thick and gross, mouth and nose wet. But the room was dark, the only light moonlight from the still-open curtains. Still in her dusty-kneed school uniform, she slid out of bed and padded over to the door, opening it. No one was in the hall.
But, when she pushed it closed again, she looked down and found an envelope against her toes.