Tell Me Everything Read Online Free PDF Page B

my friend gets it right. It's like a work thing, that's all. It's not kinky or anything.”
    Miranda went back to stretching her hair, but I could tell she was thinking by the way her body was more alert than before. I squeezed little dollops of shampoo from the shelf onto my hand and inhaled them as I waited for her to speak.
    Apple. Rosemary and pine. Honey. I stopped trying to make my skin absorb the liquid, just kept adding more and more onto the surface until my fingertips were swimming in the oil. Then I went to get a clean towel from one of the piles in the back room to wipe it all off.
    “We had this English teacher at school,” Miranda said when I came back. “What he always said when we were writing stories was that it didn't matter if the facts were true or not, but whether it was emotionally honest. For lots of reasons, it's something I've remembered.”
    She paused then and I thought about what she'd just said. “How can it be emotionally honest, but not normally honest?” I asked. “What's the difference? It doesn't make sense.”
    “I know,” Miranda sighed. “But the way he explained it was that not everything's black and white. He used to ask us if we'd ever been nervous about waiting for something and how five minutes could seem like hours.”
    I nodded.
    “Well, what he said was that if you were trying to tell someone about it, you were better to say you had to wait five hours because that gave a truer picture of what it felt like, even though it wasn't true.”
    “So something real doesn't have to have happened, but people believe it did,” I said at last. “And that's not bad?” The skin all over my body felt as if it was being charged by several hundred electric shocks. I willed Miranda to continue and after a few seconds— seconds that felt like hours—she did.
    Miranda shook her head. “In real life, it can be very bad,” she said. “Even ruin lives. But these are stories we're talking about, aren't they?”
    I couldn't leave it like that. “But what if you were a child and something an adult was doing to you felt wrong but you weren't sure why, and when you tried to explain, all the other adults came to the wrong conclusion and took over and spoiled everything, then that isn't lying? Even if all the facts weren't exactly right, but it was what it felt like. And then when you got older—” My words were spilling over each other.
    Miranda clicked her tongue against the top of her mouth hard and stared at me. “Molly,” she said. I guessed she meant to be kind, even encourage me, but it took me out of the trance I was falling into. My cheeks were red from the heat in the salon, and I could feel a flush coming up my neck. It was just as it had been in the schoolroom.
    “It was only something a friend told me,” I interrupted her before she could say anything else. “She said some things about her father, and I think she might have exaggerated everything just a bit but she didn't see what harm it could do, because her father wasn't a nice person. Not to her anyway. And then when everyone took her words as the exact truth, she still thought it wasgoing to be OK because her mum would know what to do. Trouble was her mum wouldn't talk to her about it because she was so upset and pretty quickly after that her dad left home. No one would tell my friend anything about what was going on, but they kept encouraging her to speak to other people as if that would make everything better. The strange thing was when she did try to tell the truth it was as if no one could hear her anymore. My friend didn't mean any harm.”
    Once again, the words fell over themselves as they trickled through my lips, and I was willing myself not to cry. Next to me Miranda was holding the hairbrush at chin level, her mouth open. She looked as if she was about to sing into a microphone but no sound came out.
    “It doesn't matter,” I lied, shaking my head. “It happened a long time ago and I think my friend's