Begin Again | ongoing

five

Another bus sails past the stop at the bottom of Sandy Hill. Sunny's been sitting there for ten minutes, waiting on the 11A and wondering if she should have used Delilah's phone to warn her parents that she's on her way, but she knows that even if they didn't answer, her plan wouldn't change. She's relieved to find that she still keeps her keys in her purse – and slightly befuddled when she realises she's thinking of herself as two halves: there is the Sunny she is, the one she has lived as her whole life, and there is this other Sunny. The one who has lived this life. And yet she is both, with the memories of original Sunny and the hair of Sunny two point oh.

A fourth bus approaches, the 19, and her heart twinges because if she gets on that bus, she can go back to her flat and root through her life. She can change out of her pyjamas and find her Walkman and maybe pick up on some clues as to who she is now, and her brain has only half kicked into gear when she launches out of the bus stop with her hand raised. This time she remembers the fare hike and drops 70p in the tray, and she settles into the closest seat for the short ride back to Jupiter Court, hoping that Fenfen won't be home.

Not because she doesn't want to see her, but because she is so fucking exhausted and the day is still young, and for the next twenty-four hours at least, she wants to pretend like nothing is wrong. She wants to pack a bag and secure her headphones over her ears and blast Britney all the way home.

She's in luck. There's no sign of Fenfen when Sunny nudges open the door to her flat – thank fuck she hasn't moved in the past year – and she's glad that it smells the same, looks the same. The aroma of Fenfen's perfume and the novels balanced precariously on every surface; the scent of hairspray and the row of fake plants on the coffee table that Fenfen watered for weeks before realising they were plastic.

A heavy sigh wrenches itself from Sunny's chest as she picks her way across the organised chaos she and Fenfen live in, and when she reaches her bedroom – only a few steps from the door, their flat barely big enough for the two of them – it's hard not to throw herself onto her bed and bury herself under the duvet and will sleep upon herself.

This is the sight that should have greeted her this morning: her messy room with three mugs in various stages of growing new cultures; clothes piled so high on a chair that it isn't even recognisable as a chair anymore; a stack of CDs balanced on her dresser, half of the discs in the wrong cases because she has a terrible habit of using whatever's closest and empty when she switches out her music. The stack is higher now. An extra year of music she doesn't remember. Lyrics and melodies she learnt at some point and has now forgotten.

Almost everything is the same. Except for the corkboard above her desk, littered with photos – that's new. There are people in every picture, shots of her and Delilah; her and Ravi; the three of them together; all of them plus Fraser. Her and Vivian. Her with her friends and Vivian. A photobooth reel of miniature pictures: her and Vivian mid-laugh. Mid-kiss. Arms slung around each other; heads pressed together. She looks so happy, and it's so weird to see, so disorientating. Sunny doesn't consider herself to be an unhappy person – she sees herself as mellow, steady, low-key – but she can't recall the last time she felt as happy as she looks in these pictures.

In these photos, she matches her name: bright and sunny, an exuberant beam that shows off her teeth. Sunny never shows her teeth when she smiles. Her canines are longer than her incisors, like a pair of baby fangs; her lower incisors got pushed out of line when her wisdom teeth came in and now the middle two cross over; there's a slight gap between her front teeth that a couple of cruel girls teased her for when she was in secondary school. Sunny doesn't hate her teeth – she's indifferent, really – but she developed a closed-lip smile early in life. It's jarring to see herself so blatantly happy.

Goosebumps prick her arms, fine hairs standing on end. She studies the photos, and she isn't even sure what she's doing when she unpins them from the corkboard and slips them between the pages of the nearest book. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. She has never heard of the book or the author but the spine is cracked, the pages curling, like she's read it several times already and a new sense of disorientation floors her, knocking her so hard she drops onto the end of her bed with the book clutched in her hand. How many books has she read and now forgotten, lost to that fourteen-month-long gash in time? How much music has she consumed? When a new song plays on the radio, will she know the lyrics already, words she has been singing all year? Or is that knowledge lost too?