31Surprise people!
I bet you didn't expect to see any more of this little piece! Well, truth be told, me neither, but I had this hovering in my head for months, and in the wake of the finale of Series 4, I felt the need to finally put it in words.
Warnings: Contains mentions of suicide and hypothermia.
"I've just texted Johnny!" Tee announced, walking into the foyer with her phone. "He says he's gonna come and visit."
Tee was too focused on thoughts about her brother to notice that Carmen was coming towards her with an extremely annoyed expression.
"Yeah well, he can't now, can he?" Carmen asked rhetorically, looking at her with disappointment and betrayal. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Carmen, I ..." Tee started, quickly realising what Carmen meant, but she didn't get a chance to finish.
"You wanted to have a look at both flats before you told me?" Carmen accused her. "You wanted to make sure you chose the best one?"
"What?" Jody asked suddenly, who was coming downstairs, almost ready to go to her 'dentist appointment'.
"Tee, I'm up there, packing all our stuff, planning stuff for us and all the while you're stabbing me in the back!" Carmen shouted, ignoring Jody.
"Typical Carmen," Tee sighed, crossing her arms.
"What?"
"Opening your big gob before engaging your brain!" Tee retorted.
"You know what? Maybe it's a good thing that we're not gonna be living together," Carmen said.
"Yeah, maybe it is," Tee agreed. "Maybe Floss was right and you are a mean girl."
"Really?!" Carmen yelled. "That's rich coming from you, Tee Taylor!"
"Hey hey hey hey!" Mike intervened, coming out of the office. "What's going on here?"
"What's that supposed to mean?!" Tee shouted, narrowing her eyes.
"You threw Toni and Billie under the bus just so you could have fun!" Carmen spat.
"Oh yeah?! Well YOU reported Mike to the police and caused him to get suspended!" Tee screamed.
Carmen was momentarily struck speechless, looking incredulous, before the dam broke and the words spilled out: "Well that's nothing compared to some of the stuff you've done!"
"Hey, this stops right-" May-Li tried to break up the fight, but she, along with everyone who had come to see what all the noise was about, was shaken to the bone when Carmen dealt her killing blow:
"RYAN'S BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS!"
Tee's eyes popped out of her head and her mouth dropped.
Mike buried his face in his hands.
The others watching looked utterly stricken, along with streaks on disbelief that Carmen had dared to go that far.
All except for Joseph and Archie, who had arrived too late for them to have known about the terrible tragedy that had taken place at Ashdene Ridge. Archie looked up at Kazima's shocked expression and asked, "Who's Ryan?"
He received no answer.
Carmen was shaking from adrenaline and breathing heavily, beads of sweat appearing on her forehead.
"Who killed Ryan?" Joseph asked no one in particular.
Bailey swallowed. "Ryan killed Ryan."
It had been nine whole months since the entire Dumping Ground was shaken in a way that it had not once been shaken before. Nine whole months since Harry had lost it, running away from home only to be found and tested for post-traumatic stress. Nine whole months since Ryan had taken his own life by means of hypothermia, and indelibly changed everyone who had known him at the time.
"Why?!" Joseph asked, his eyes popping as he stared up at Bailey. "W-why did he kill himself? When did he kill himself? How did he-"
His tirade of questions was cut off by Tyler's firm hand on his shoulder. Turning to look at him, the look on his face was a mixture of grief and "you should probably stop talking."
For what felt like hours, the foyer was in complete silence, as the ghosts of the past everyone had been trying so hard to ignore and eliminate came back to haunt everyone's memory.
That was until Mike's hands dropped. "Right," he said wearily, catching everyone's attention, "Carmen, Tee, in the office. Everyone else, just ..." he sighed deeply, trying not to lose composure now of all times, "just, go do whatever you want."
With sadness and a hint of fear (and confusion on the parts of Joseph and Archie) the group shuffled away, while Jody trudged downstairs and out through the door. Mike and May-Li were too taken up with their newly-opened wounds to pay much attention to her.
Sitting side-by-side on the sofa in the office, both girls felt utterly horrendous. Tee felt as though she had swallowed a sackful of wet cement and it was sitting cold, wet and heavy in her stomach. Carmen felt much the same, except that she also felt like she was going to upchuck all that cement.
Mike leant on his desk with a deep sound that was somewhere between a sigh and a groan. Like all working people, he'd had his days where he'd wondered why he had ever wanted his current job in the first place. For him, those days had been the ones where the kids just couldn't be controlled, where they had managed it get themselves into more trouble than some may consider impossible for kids to get themselves into. But none of those days had come remotely close to the day that Ryan had committed suicide, leaving a shocked and devastated dumping ground behind.
This one, however, was a close second.
"Carmen, Tee," he began, "I know that this is your last day, and you've been worrying about the flats and the missing items, but ..." he paused for breath, "Carmen, that in no way means that you are excused from saying that ... that ..."
Carmen hung her head. "I'm sorry Mike," she mumbled, her voice thin and brittle.
Mike scoffed. "It's not me you should be apologising to."
"Alright," Carmen said, turning to her now-barely-friend. "I'm really sorry Tee, I shouldn't have said that to you."
"And one other thing," Mike said, kneeling on the floor so he was at Tee's eye level. "I need to know this Tee, so listen very carefully. I know that you and Ryan were never the best of friends, and he did some things to you and you did some things to him, but I need you to know that it is not your fault that he killed himself. You hear me? It's not your fault."
The blonde girl nodded with a snivel, wiping her eyes on the cuff of her sleeve. It came away smeared with black from her eyeliner.
A few hours later, the girls were in the car, their luggage and memories - good and bad -clogged in their with them. They exchanged words occasionally, neither of them daring to address the elephant in the room.
That was until Jim drove past the local cemetery.
"Wait!" Tee called, sitting up. "Jim, please, can we stop for a few minutes?"
"Stop where?" the man asked.
"The cemetery. Please, Jim, I need to talk to someone."
After a moment, Jim parked outside the cast iron gates of the cemetery and Tee clambered out of the car, not even caring enough to look back to see if Carmen cared enough to follow her.
It didn't take her long to find the right headstone - at Ryan's funeral, she had dug the location of his grave into her memory. The headstone was simply made from granite, as Social Services hadn't been willing to fork out for a more polished-looking grey or white marble one. The wooden skateboard lying on the grass in front of it had almost grown into the ground over the past nine months, but the epitaph was fresh:
Ryan Gavin Reeves
Born 23rd August 2001
Died 10th February 2016
You will never be forgotten.
Tee knelt down in front of it as carefully as she could, as if she was trying not to disturb her deceased rival's eternal slumber.
"Oh God, Ryan," she whispered to the still air, "what can I even say? I don't even know if you're there, or if you can hear me, but I just want to say ... I am sorry. Just, so sorry. I'm sorry that I threw you a birthday party when you didn't want it. I'm sorry I got Laces in to tell everyone your past. I'm sorry I told everyone about Chloe ..." Her breath hitched as she let the words settle.
Tee had never been one to believe the stories of life after death, or that your loved ones watched over you after you died, but she found herself straining her ears to hear the slightest whisper in response to her words.
There was nothing, but then Tee remembered that Ryan had died willingly, so he could leave it all behind.
He wouldn't have stuck around.
So that was that. As you have probably gathered, Chloe didn't move into the Dumping Ground in this storyline, for obvious reasons.