Read Online The Day Of Second Chances by Julie Cohen - Free Book Online

stayed up ridiculously late. Then I went on honeymoon with them to Thailand, which was brilliant in a way, but in another way it was awful, because Richard wasn’t happy that I had come along. He tried to hide it, and he bought me lots of things to make up for it, but I got the impression that all of this had been Mum’s idea, and he’d have rather been alone with her. Every morning I got up early and I saw how many lengths of the pool I could swim before they emerged from their room. I tried not to think about what they were doing in there, but I knew anyway.
    One night in one of those fancy outdoor restaurants by the sea, where there were all these candles and fairy lights and impossibly beautiful people serving you your dinner, I tried to bring up one of the memories we’d talked about. ‘Remember how Dad always wanted to build the highest tower made out of sand? All those different techniques he’d try to stop it from crumbling?’
    I expected my mother to laugh, like she usually did, and counter with the story of the one time he’d used the beach umbrella and it had opened up and flown away, but she didn’t. She glanced at Richard, whose mouth had narrowed, and who was reaching for his wine. ‘Isn’t it a beautiful sunset?’ she’d said instead. ‘What is it, do you think, that makes them so much more colourful here than in England? It’s the same sun, isn’t it?’
    It’s exactly the sort of inane thing Mum says when she wants everyone to be happy. And I got the message loud and clear. Of course a man on honeymoon wouldn’t want to talk about his wife’s first husband. Of course not. But the real message I got was that everything had changed now, and everything that had been, was over. And within a week of us returning from Thailand we’d moved out of our own house in the centre of Brickham near my primary school, to this new house, and then Mum was pregnant with Oscar, and everything had changed.
    On top of starting secondary school, I was totally new in town as well. My new summer uniform was too big and it was scratchy, and I was scared. The summer was over and I had to stop pretending I was special and start to think about coping with how I was different.
    I already knew I was different; I’d known for a long time, as long as I can remember, maybe even before Dad died. But I never really figured it out properly, never really thought it through, until that autumn, when everything was new.
    Sometimes I used to pretend that I had a superpower that nobody had noticed yet except for me. For example, that I had eyes that saw too much, that could see beyond the visible spectrum, beyond ultraviolet and infrared. I used tell myself that I had to wear sunglasses in order to fit in with normal human beings.
    But that wasn’t it. The sunglasses were just pretend. I didn’t have superpowers; I don’t. I have to hide in a much more obvious way than wearing sunglasses. At age eleven, about to start secondary school, I was learning about it.
    Mum walked me to school on my first day. She wore a blue dress that was nearly the same colour as my new scratchy school uniform, and though that was naff beyond words, I was sort of grateful for it. I suppose it was meant to be a sign of solidarity. After a few weeks of feeling increasingly like I was in the way in Richard’s house, I felt that I needed all the help I could get.
    â€˜I’m so proud of you,’ said Mum. She is always saying things like that. She is proud of every little thing that I do, which is nice and I know it’s meant to build self-esteem, but when you get to a certain age, you begin to realize that tying your own shoe-laces or starting secondary school or even getting top marks in your year isn’t really such a big thing to be proud of. We were getting near the school gates now, and I was looking for someone I knew, anyone, maybe someone who’d