Page 127 of Breaking the Dark

“Yes. They will wonder why he doesn’t die.” I pause. “But you will die?”

“Yes. Thank God. I will die. And it will be soon. And I will be glad.”

Our session ends. I press a red button that says leave and I am staring at a black screen. I don’t know what I have learned from my talk with Ophelia, but I know that I feel sad. I feel sad for the lonely girl who walked alone through life for almost two hundred years, and I feel sad for the lonely mother whose son found someone he loved better than her after only twenty years.

Three days after I spoke to Ophelia, she passed away. Prison guards said that she was smiling.

A bit after that I spoke to Grace Partridge from Barcelona, where she now lives with her parents near the boutique hotel that they own and run there. Since the events of last summer, Grace has become one of the most followed people on social media. At the time of writing she has eighteen million followers on Instagram and the number goes up another ten every few minutes. She posts as Not Perfect, Just Grace, and her message is loud and clear:

Don’t be perfect. Be real.

She was recently listed as one of Time magazine’s Twenty Most Influential Under Twenty and tours schools and colleges talking to children about the toxic and negative effects of social media and advising big corporations on how to mitigate the inherent malignancy. I ask Grace how she feels about Ophelia’s death, and she is, strangely, but also maybe understandably, sad.

“She really loved me,” she says, “weird as it sounds, and I know it does. But she really did. She loved all three of us.”

“And what about Amina and Audrey, or the Dorian Gray Girls, as they are now widely known? Do you still see them? Are you still friends?”

“That’s hard,” she says. “It’s been…” She sighs. “We were so close, before. We were everything to each other. We all lived and breathed the same air, had the same obsessions. And we were so excited to be part of Peach’s plans, to help her with this huge project. I mean, what idiots we were, in retrospect. What total idiots. And then one day they were taken away and I was left behind.”

“Why do you think you were left behind?”

“I had to be on the other side of the process. They had to test it on someone. And they chose me.”

“Why you?”

She sighs. “I don’t know why me. But I think…I think it was Debra’s choice. Ophelia. Because as mad as it sounds, she really loved me. I was her favorite. And that’s what caused this rift. Because what happened to me was bad, but Amina and Audrey, they have experienced something that no human being should ever have to experience. Their physical and mental trauma is too immense to even begin to comprehend. Locked away down there for months, their beautiful bodies, their beautiful faces, their beautiful minds being used as receptacles for other people’s defects, other people’s misery, sucking it all away, taking it in against their will.” Grace shudders. “I hope one day they will be strong enough to find their places in the world again. But it’s going to be a long, long journey.”

“Is there anything you’d like to say to them, if they’re reading?”

Grace glances away for a few seconds and I see her composing her thoughts into a message that she can share, not just with her former friends, but also with the wider world. She looks back up at me and I see how strongly she feels about what she is about to say. “We were perfect before Miranda, if only we’d all known it. Perfection isn’t a goal. Perfection is a scam. You were perfect then and you’re perfect now. We all are. Every single one of us. Trust me.”

And now I look at my beautiful baby girl and I know that that is my single greatest job, as her mother. To let her know that she is already perfect. That perfect isn’t in a bottle or on a screen or in a crazy black light made out of voodoo and high tech. Perfect is not defined by people who make money out of your insecurities, nor is it defined by a male gaze or the opinions of those who wish to demean you. Perfect is what you are when you are listening only to the beat of your own heart, the sound of your own feet on the road ahead of you, the one pure voice that exists inside you telling you that you are fine, just the way you are.