My meltdowns when I was younger used to be quite loud. Until I was about six years old, if I became distressed and something triggered me, everyone knew about it—screaming, hands flapping, all sorts. But Mum made it very, very clear to me how unacceptable that was. So clear, that by the time I turned six, I was silent all the time, not just when I was having a meltdown.
Silence had seemed to be the best option for me. Anything I said was usually met with irritation or outright hostility, so I just gave up trying. I wasn’t mute anymore, but if I did melt down, it was very rare for me to scream like I had when I was little.
The last time was when my half-sister from my mum’s side of the family tricked me into coming out with her and her friends, telling me we were going to a quiet bar. The quiet bar had been a nightclub where you could actually feel the beat through the floor it was so loud.
Rebecca dragged me to the middle of the dance floor and then left me there with my hands over my ears in a crush of people. I couldn’t move through the bodies around me, and it was so loud that I totally lost it. Luckily, a couple of girls, one of whom had an Autistic brother, noticed me on my knees with my hands over my ears, and helped me get out. By the time they put me in a taxi outside the club, I’d screamed myself so hoarse that I could barely say my home address. That was the only time in the last decade that I’d had an obvious meltdown, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t had them. It was just that now they were of the silent variety, exactly as it had happened this time.
I’m not sure how long Ollie held me on that sofa. I barely noticed when Lottie left to go and get her eight-year-old sister, Hayley, from school. Eventually I calmed down enough to let Ollie get me a cup of tea and some Jaffa cakes. I had to revert to my preferred method of just eating the tops off them, but I needed food, and it was better that than nothing.
Unfortunately by the time Lottie returned with Hayley, the silent tears had started up again, and Ollie had to pull me back into his side on the sofa.
“Is Vicky okay?” Hayley’s little voice came from the doorway.
“She’s fine, lovebug,” Lottie said quietly.
“I don’t think she’s fine,” Hayley said. She sounded closer now, and there was a thread of real worry in her tone.
The last thing I wanted was for Hayley to worry about me. Hayley was struggling herself. She’d only just partly recovered from her own long stint of mutism. Hayley and Lottie had enough problems without adding me into the mix.
“Vicky?” her hesitant little voice was right next to me now, and I felt her small hand join her sister’s on my back.
I heard a sniffle behind me and realised that Lottie was crying too.
I swallowed and tried to slow my breathing like I’d been taught in therapy.
“S-sorry,” I forced out through my tears, turning my head slightly so I could look at Lottie and Hayley. I tried to speak again, but my tight throat just wouldn’t let me.
“Vics, we got a message on Hogwatch,” Lottie finally said after a few more minutes of my silent crying.
I blinked a couple of times as my brain slowly shifted gears. As my thoughts moved to hedgehogs, the vice-like grip on my throat began to loosen. My hands unclenched from the fists they’d formed, releasing the handfuls of Ollie’s shirt I’d been clutching, and I swiped away the tears from my face.
“What did it say?” I asked as I pushed up from my position buried in my half-brother’s chest.
“I think there’s a mum and babies in Dulwich out in the open. They’re not sure whether to leave them or secure them for tonight.”
I bit my lip.
“Did they send photos?”
“They did, but they don’t show the hedgerow very clearly,” Hayley told me.
Hayley was my little hedgehog protégée. I was training her up to be able to answer Hogwatch queries when I couldn’t.
“Let me see,” I said, my voice steady now, the tears drying on my face and neck.
Ollie’s arms loosened sufficiently so I could move to sit next to him instead of on top of him, and I felt him let out a relieved exhale. Ollie worried about me. I tried to hide my worst meltdowns from him normally because I really didn’t want Ollieto worry. It was years since he’d caught me like this. My chest still felt tight, but as I started to read the hog enquiry, my breathing evened out, and I began to feel calmer.
It wasn’t until later, on my way to Dulwich with a cardboard box filled with straw on my lap, wearing my soft leggings instead of those horrid jeans, that I thought of Mike again, and I even managed a very small smile.
Which was worse: a stuck-up, upper-class, cold, rich woman who “wanted a bit of rough,” as he put it, and felt nothing, or a weird, hedgehog-obsessed, neuro-diverse one who felteverythingand fell in love with a man who hates her?
Neither were ideal, but for my pride’s sake, I thought sticking with the first would be safer.
Chapter 4
If we knew the trigger
Mike
