Chapter 1
I’m Lara
The first thing people usually notice about me is that I’m quiet.
That’s not true.
I’m not quiet.
“I just don’t believe everyone needs to know everything.”
I don’t like most of the words people use to describe me. Quiet, stubborn, aloof, too proud…
Perhaps there’s a bit of truth in all of them.
I draw everything I can’t put into words for people.
My mum doesn’t know this.
My mum is convinced I’ll become a doctor. Sometimes she speaks with such certainty that it’s as if she’s already lived my future and made the decision for me.
As for me, at night, after everyone’s gone to sleep, I lock my bedroom door and open my drawing tablet.
I draw characters. I draw faces. The eyes, hands and smiles of people I’ve never met...
Sometimes I draw people I’d rather forget.
My relationship with my mum isn’t actually bad.
In fact, most people say we get on well when they see us.
—and they’re right.
We have breakfast together. At dinner, we talk about our day. Sometimes we laugh for hours at silly things. When my mum thinks I’m cold, she leaves a blanket in my room. And I put her coffee—which she’s always forgetting—on her table in the mornings.
There are just certain topics.
That neither of us talks about.
Like my dad, for instance.
I last saw him when I was little.
He’s been absent from my life ever since.
At least in the part of my life my mum chose to tell me about.
I found out later that he’d phoned, sent letters, and tried to get in touch with me. But
my mum never showed me any of them.
She wouldn’t even mention his name at home.
So, over time, I learnt not to ask.
Sometimes people stay silent not because they fear not getting an answer, but because they fear what the answer might be.
So I stayed silent too.
Until one day, when my mum opened my cupboard.
And all the drawings I’d been hiding for years spilled out onto the floor.
It was on that day that my mum truly saw who I was for the first time.
And for the first time, I wondered what she’d been hiding from me.
