Excerpt: Dark's heart

“Cassie Smales made up a story about me in the playground, it wasn’t even true because I never did that to a dog, I don’t even have a dog and Charles doesn’t count ‘cause he’s more like a person anyways, and she told Jacob that I was a dirty motherless cunt. What’s a cunt? Jacob won’t speak to me anymore. Cassie Smales’s got everyone against me and they threw chewing gum at the back of my chair at break so Miss Cole thought it was all mine and when we came back from break she sent me to the girl’s loos with my chair to pull it all off and wipe it, when I got back they kept whispering when Mrs Cole wasn’t there and then they’d stop whenever I looked over and they wrote dog cunt on my blue pencil case that... mum bought me.” Nathalie was crying. Her fingers, still splayed, were pushing the hair from her eyes. Arthur wrapped his arms around her and pulled her tight. He imagined that the tighter he pulled her, the more he might be able to protect her from absolutely anything in this whole damn world that might hurt her any further, but as he eventually released his bear grip, and pushed her hair off her wet cheeks, he knew it to be impossible.