Perfect. Cecelia Ahern

something deep in their core, they’ve got something to fight for, they’ve got something worth saving.

      Granddad owns one hundred acres, not all strawberry fields like the one we’re in now, but he opens this part of the land up to the public in the summer months. Families pay to pick their own strawberries; he says the income helps him to keep things ticking over. He can’t stop it this year, not just for monetary reasons but because the Guild will know he’s hiding me. They’re watching him. He must keep going as he does every year, and I try not to think how it will feel to hear the sounds of children happily plucking and playing, or how much more dangerous it will be with strangers on the land who might unearth me in the process.

      I used to love coming here as a child with my sister, Juniper, in the strawberry-picking season. At the end of a long day we would have more berries in our bellies than in our baskets, but it doesn’t feel like the same magical place any more. Now I’m de-weeding the soil where I once played make-believe.

      I know that when Granddad talks about plants growing where they’re not wanted, he’s talking about me, like he’s invented his own unique brand of farmer therapy, but though he means well, it just succeeds in highlighting the facts to me.

      I’m the weed.

      Branded Flawed in five areas on my body and a secret sixth for good measure, for aiding a Flawed and lying to the Guild, I was given a clear message: society didn’t want me. They tore me from my terra firma, dangled me by my roots, shook me around, and tossed me aside.

      “But who called these weeds?” Granddad continues, as we work our way through the beds. “Not nature. It’s people who did that. Nature allows them to grow. Nature gives them their place. It is people who brand them and toss them aside.”

      “But this one is strangling the flowers,” I finally say, looking up from my work, back sore, nails filthy with soil.

      Granddad fixes me with a look, tweed cap low over his bright blue eyes, always alert, always on the lookout, like a hawk. “They’re survivors, that’s why. They’re fighting for their place.”

      I swallow my sadness and look away.

      I’m a weed. I’m a survivor. I’m Flawed.

      I’m eighteen years old today.

      

      The person I think I should be: Celestine North, daughter of Summer and Cutter, sister of Juniper and Ewan, girlfriend of Art. I should have recently finished my final exams, be preparing for university, where I’d study mathematics.

      Today is my eighteenth birthday.

      Today I should be celebrating on Art’s father’s yacht with twenty of my closest friends and family, maybe even a fireworks display. Bosco Crevan promised to loan me the yacht for my big day as a personal gift. A gushing chocolate fountain on board for people to dip their marshmallows and strawberries. I imagine my friend Marlena with a chocolate moustache and a serious expression; I hear her boyfriend, as crass as usual, threatening to stick parts of himself in. Marlena rolling her eyes. Me laughing. A pretend fight, they always do that, enjoy the drama, just so they can make up.

      Dad should be trying to be a show-off in front of my friends on the dance floor, with his body-popping and Michael Jackson impressions. I see my model mum standing out on deck in a loose floral summer dress, her long blonde hair blowing in the breeze like there’s a perfectly positioned wind machine. She’d be calm on the surface but all the time her mind racing, considering what is going on around her, what needs to be better, whose drink needs topping up, who appears left out of a conversation, and with a click of her fingers she’d float along in her dress and fix it.

      My brother, Ewan, should be overdosing on marshmallows and chocolate, running around with his best friend, Mike, red-faced and sweating, finishing ends of beer bottles, needing to go home early with a stomach ache. I see my sister, Juniper, in the corner with a friend, her eye on it all, always in the corner, analysing everything with a content, quiet smile, always watching and understanding everything better than anyone else.

      I see me. I should be dancing with Art. I should be happy. But it doesn’t feel right. I look up at him and he’s not the same. He’s thinner; he looks older, tired, unwashed and scruffy. He’s looking at me, eyes on me but his head is somewhere else. His touch is limp – a whisper of a touch – and his hands are clammy. It feels like the last time I saw him. It’s not how it’s supposed to be, not how it ever was, which was perfect, but I can’t even summon up those old feelings in my daydreams any more. That time of my life feels so far away from now. I left perfection behind a long time ago.

      I open my eyes and I’m back in Granddad’s house. There’s a shop-bought cold apple tart in a foil tin sitting before me with a single candle in it. There’s the person I think I should be, though I can’t even dream about it properly without reality’s interruptions, and there’s the person I really am now.

      This girl, on the run but frozen still, staring at the cold apple tart. Neither Granddad nor I are pretending things can continue like this. Granddad’s real; there’s no smoke and mirrors with him. He’s looking at me, sadly. He knows not to avoid the subject. Things are too serious for that now. We talk daily of a plan, and that plan changes daily. I have escaped my home; escaped my Whistleblower Mary May, a guard of the Guild, whose job it is to monitor my every move and assure that I’m complying with Flawed rules; and I’m now off the radar. I’m officially an ‘evader’. But the longer I stay here, the higher the chance I will eventually be found.

      My mum told me to run away two weeks ago, an urgent whispered command in my ear that still gives me goose bumps when I recall it. The head of the Guild, Bosco Crevan, was sitting in our home, demanding my parents hand me over. Bosco is my ex-boyfriend’s dad, and we have been neighbours for a decade. Only a few weeks previously we’d been enjoying dinner together in our home. Now my mum would rather I disappear than be in his care again.

      It can take a lifetime to build up a friendship – it can take a second to make an enemy.

      There was only one important item that I needed with me when I ran: a note that had been given to my sister, Juniper, for me. The note was from Carrick. Carrick had been my holding-cell neighbour at Highland Castle, the home of the Guild. He watched my trial while he awaited his; he witnessed my brandings. All of my brandings, including the secret sixth on my spine. He is the only person who can possibly understand how I feel right now, because he’s going through the same thing.

      My desire to find Carrick is immense, but it has been difficult. He managed to evade his Whistleblower as soon as he was released from the castle, and I’m guessing my profile didn’t make it easy for him to seek me out, either. Just before I ran away, he found me, rescued me from a riot in a supermarket. He brought me home – I was out cold at the time, our long-wished-for reunion not exactly what I’d imagined. He left me the note and vanished.

      But I couldn’t get to him. Afraid of being recognised, I’d no way of finding my way around the city. So I called Granddad. I knew that his farm would be the Guild’s first port of call in finding me. I should be hiding somewhere else, somewhere safer, but on this land Granddad has the upper hand.

      At least, that was the theory. I don’t think either of us thought that the Whistleblowers would be so relentless in their search for me. Since I arrived at the farm, there have been countless searches. So far they’ve failed to uncover my hiding place, but they come again and again, and I know my luck will eventually run out.

      Each time, the Whistleblowers come so close to my hiding place I can barely breathe. I hear their footsteps, sometimes their breaths, as I’m crammed, jammed, into spaces, above and below, sometimes in places so obvious they don’t even look, sometimes so dangerous they wouldn’t dare to look.