by Helen Eve
Having been so strong until now, he was crumbling. As he took a tentative step towards her, I moved firmly into his path. He’d thank me later.
‘Do you want to dance?’ I asked him as a slow song began.
He and Stella locked eyes as if they were connected by something gossamer-thin but enduring. Then somewhere in the room a champagne flute shattered, and their eye contact was severed.
Luke shrugged as Stella’s face fell in something like despair. ‘Why not?’
We walked to the centre of the dance floor and I wrapped my arms around him, making sure we were right in the spotlight. He was a good dancer, but then again he was good at everything. We fit together, and soon he would see that.
I moved to kiss him, but he held back. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, Caitlin.’
It figured that he wanted us to be alone before we kissed again. That was fine with me: we’d be spending the summer in the same city, with Stella thousands of miles away. Laying my head against his shoulder, I looked around, but she was nowhere to be seen.
Chapter Fifty-four
Stella
For a moment I watch Luke dance with Caitlin, and knowing how much I deserve this pain makes it even more acute. As it overwhelms me, I walk out of the hall and into the plush bathroom, which by some miracle is empty. My heavy heels echo as I check each of the stalls before standing in front of the giant mirror.
I’ve spent hours in front of mirrors over the years, wondering what it is that makes me beautiful. Tonight my features haven’t changed and yet I’m ugly, because everything beneath this glossy surface is monstrous, and the surface is as brittle as porcelain.
I take off my shoes and hold one by its heel. They are silver, with heels that look like glass, and, even though they don’t match my dress, I wore them because they were Siena’s favourites. I wonder fleetingly how they fit us both, but it’s not the size that’s important; it’s the weight. I hurl one at the mirror as hard as I can.
I don’t expect it to break; at most, I hope to crack it into a spider’s web that distorts and conceals my reflection. But the heel strikes a weak spot and the glass shatters like an explosion. The noise fills my ears and I see sparks as diamond shards fly everywhere, one stabbing my cheek as the others splinter on the floor.
Good, I think. Now I’m as ugly as I feel.
I’m addicted to my reflection and yet I hate it. I hate my face for making people look at me and judge me before I speak a single word. I hate my face for blinding people to the chaos beneath, and allowing me to lie and cheat while still they clamour to be my friend. I hate my face because it belongs to my mother, and to Siena; because it’s not only destroyed each of us in turn but taken everyone around us with it.
I pace the room, noticing belatedly that I’m walking in broken glass so that bloody footprints follow me on white marble. In this instant I can’t see a way out, and I don’t want a way out. I feel like gouging the glass into myself, but I don’t. Instead I pick up a razor-edged shard and use it to cut through my hair. It’s made excuses for me for long enough. And, as I cut, I see that the glass belongs not to the mirror, but to the heel of Siena’s shoe.
Cutting my hair frees me from my self-imposed plans for the future; by extension, it frees me from my sisters too. But forcibly separating myself from them seems suddenly nonsensical. How could I have thought I wanted to be free of Siena? How could I have believed that loving Syrena would damage or weaken us, when it’s obvious – excruciatingly so – that the ties binding me to her are the only earthly things that matter?
As yards of my gilded prison slip away from me to the floor, I trace my hands over what remains. And, at the very instant I forfeit my best hope of seeing Siena again, I hear the chant begin outside.
Chapter Fifty-five
Caitlin
After a bell signalled the end of voting I waited patiently, trying not to bite my nails before the moment Penny and Lila took to the stage. As a reward for their work on the Elevation Committee they’d been allowed to announce the results, and they looked as if they were going to enjoy their moment. Never ones to ignore a trend, they had made Stars and Stripes minidresses out of flags, knotting them like togas. I estimated that they would fall down within ten minutes, which might have been their intention.
‘Where’s Stella?’ I asked, looking around. ‘Surely she won’t miss the announcement, after all her drama?’
‘Please can the teams join us on the stage!’ Lila shouted as Katrina and I fought our way up the steps in front of Luke and Edward, Quentin and Tom. Mary-Ann waited on the floor, looking around anxiously.
‘Stella Hamilton, where are you?’ Penny said indistinctly, peering into the audience. ‘Get on stage right now!’
‘You can’t announce the results without Stella here,’ I objected. ‘Go and find her!’
Penny and Lila conferred and then turned to me. ‘We can’t delay this, Caitlin,’ Lila said. ‘If we don’t announce the winner now, the fireworks will be out of sync. It’s bad enough that we never found the crown.’
I looked at Edward in frustration, but he only shrugged. Penny was crying again at the mention of the crown, and Lila took the microphone from her.
‘This has been the most closely fought election Temperley High has ever seen,’ she intoned seriously. ‘But it’s finally time for the results. Are you ready?’
Everyone had clustered around the stage and started to chant, although I couldn’t hear who for. The band’s reprise of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ drew to a close before a moment of tense silence.
But as the spotlights zoomed from me to the audience, I squinted in confusion. Instead of waiting intently for the announcement, the students were crowding around the windows at the back of the hall. The noise levels increased until I could hear nothing except the name they were whispering.
‘What’s going on?’ Luke asked uneasily. ‘Is this something to do with…?’
Not pausing to tell anyone where I was going, I ran down from the stage and out of the room.
Out in the courtyard I could see that the door leading to the clock tower was open. There was no way I was going to let Stella get away with hiding out there any longer, and as new Head Girl I should be the one to bring this to an end. The punishment for being caught up there was so severe that, no matter what the vote count, she’d just disqualified herself from the whole event. All I needed to do was catch her in the act.
I was out of breath by the time I’d climbed the spiral stairwell, and I took a second as I reached a heavy door at the top. Using both hands, I turned the rusty metal latch and pushed against it.
The room I entered was empty but for a ladder up to an open trapdoor in the ceiling. I reluctantly took off my heels, wishing I’d had time to change before my dress got covered in dirt, and began to climb the rungs.
The floor I landed on was filthy, and I brushed dust from my hands and knees, blinking as my eyes adjusted. There was no electric light, but candles littered the wooden floor.
‘I knew it,’ I said.
This decrepit garret was the polar opposite of Stella’s sterile bedroom, but the evidence I needed was right here. Essays, clothes, books and paintbrushes encapsulated her entire world in this tiny space. Wealth and decline were oddly juxtaposed in opulent, shroud-like evening dresses slung across the dusty floor; in brightly coloured, forgotten gemstones jammed into cracked floorboards; in exclusive, discarded beauty products covered in cobwebs. This attic, like Stella herself, was a memorial to unrealized expectations.
Light from the room below spread through gaps in the uneven floorboards that teetered with every movement. No wonder students were forbidden to set foot up here: too much weight and the whole tower would collapse into itself.
When I saw the portrait I wondered if my eyes were playing tricks on me, but, as I moved closer across the creaking floorboards and away from the safety of the trapdoor, it remained. It was changed from the last time I’d seen it, showing Stell
a now accessorized with the famous Head Girl crown and sash. Aside from the fact that her hair hung loose, the painting was a replica of the famous image of Siena. Her painted eyes stared at me in sad defiance of the coveted future she herself had shattered.
And then, hearing a noise, I picked up a candle to see better and walked towards the open window.
Chapter Fifty-six
Stella
Even as I look up at the clock tower I can believe it’s not happening. Even as my eyes lock on the figure standing with nothing between her and the ground seventy feet below, I can believe that it’s only my imagination.
Only when the students swarm from the hall and gather, as if this is entertainment, to watch the figure in the tower that they can see as clearly as I can, do I accept it. And then I can do nothing but watch the girl who wears my white dress, her feet bare and her hip-length hair shining like a river in the moonlight, until she blurs into my past.
* * *
Siena had left the dining room after her fight with Seraphina, and I followed her into the garden to see her drag off her beautiful white dress and throw it onto the ground. Before I could stop her, she had struck a match. Her dress was vaporized.
Even in the firelight she was deathly pale. She stood inches from the flames in her petticoat and bare feet as the remains of her ambition floated into the night like burning confetti.
I hurled myself at her. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked as she pulled away from me.
‘There’s something I have to do,’ she said. ‘One day you’ll understand.’
‘No.’ I reached for the sash that she was still wearing. ‘Tell me what I did wrong and I can change. But don’t leave.’
She prised my hands from the sash. ‘Stay away from this,’ she said gently.
She pulled the comb out of my hair so that waves crashed to my waist. ‘This is what I want you to do for me,’ she said, smoothing it with her fingers. ‘I want you to wear your hair like this, and not listen to anyone who tells you differently.’
‘Don’t leave me,’ I sobbed as I clung to her.
She was never demonstrative, but even less so now as she stepped away. ‘I have to,’ she said as she headed towards her car that final time and drove back to school.
* * *
Seraphina spent the next day as she would spend most of the ensuing years, at the head of the dining table amongst the remains of the celebration dinner, clad in some variation on the flimsy white georgette dress she’d worn that night. The room stood as it would stand forever, white streamers floating and falling, balloons deflating, decorative stars losing their sheen as the white tablecloth turned grey and dust obscured the unwashed plates. In the centre, candle wax had burned craters through the cake icing, and the figurines of Siena and Jack, unbalanced as the sponge began to subside, lay cracked on opposite sides of the plate.
After the funeral I returned to the cold embers of Siena’s dress and swept everything that remained into her favourite Balenciaga bag. The bones of the corset were steel survivors, and I preserved them too. For years I did nothing more than stare at the ashes, but as Elevation drew closer I began to rebuild the dress from its skeleton. I draped dupion and organza, taffeta and lace. I sewed crystals and roses and leaves. I laced the corset with ribbons that tightened and tautened as if I might one day vanish into layers of tulle and crêpe. I worked until the dress was indistinguishable from its previous incarnation; until it was ready to fulfil the destiny for which it was intended.
* * *
Everyone on the ground gasps as the girl in the tower stands on tiptoe, reaching for something in the centre of the clock face. She works industriously, but someone shouts my name up at her and she’s distracted. Her foot slips and her palms slap against the wall. The name-calling turns into a chant and finally, hideously, the courtyard echoes with an incantation of my name that rises on the air like confetti and fills every corner of the school.
The girl in the tower – the girl everyone believes is me – is unwinding something from the axis of the clock face. It’s a gold sash; the Head Girl’s sash, and I hear Siena telling me, Stay away from this.
And finally I understand that Siena never planned to leave me; that she climbed the tower that night in order to hide the symbol of the behaviours she despised in a place I’d never find it. She hid the sash to keep me from becoming as heartless as she believed she was; to give me a chance of loving someone the way she’d been incapable of loving Jack. When she died, she was trying to save me.
And now the clock is ticking, its rhythm filling my ears, and I see the girl’s foot slip; see her fall to the ground where, soon afterwards, roses will grow.
‘Siena!’ I scream before I can stop myself.
My voice breaks as I feel Siena’s loss again and again, shattering over me like glass. But, when I look up, the girl is still standing high on the ledge. This time she doesn’t plummet to the ground. This time she recovers her balance and edges her way back, grabbing the window and swinging herself inside. This time she’s safe.
Someone turns at the sound of my voice and nudges their neighbour in confusion. One by one they turn and stare, trying to connect the familiar girl on the ledge with the blood-streaked and hysterical vision I’ve become.
Then their attention turns back to the tower as something flames at the place where the girl just stood.
The tower is on fire.
* * *
I am running; I am fighting; I am screaming as I push my way through the crowds. Before I reach the door someone grabs hold of me, pulling me off my feet.
‘You’re not going up there,’ says Edward fiercely. ‘I won’t lose you again.’
I twist around until I see Luke. He’s running towards us and I struggle harder.
Tears are streaming down my face. ‘Luke, please,’ I say, my words hot and ragged.
Edward’s face is set and he’s hurting my wrists. He has his hand over my mouth and I can’t breathe, but I kick as hard as I can against him, and suddenly I’m free, and Edward and Luke are behind me.
My chest burns as I claw my way through the once-locked doorway. I take the stairs two, three at a time; I become disconnected from myself as I climb higher and higher, pushing through another doorway and climbing a ladder into an attic filled with smoke.
Chapter Fifty-seven
Caitlin
It happened too fast for me even to be sure of the sequence of events. The curtain was old and threadbare, yet my candle was enough to set off a dull roar that dripped burning embers onto evening dresses in a blaze that spread to every corner of the room. I was surrounded by flames, too many to beat out, separating me from the trapdoor and the window and filling my head and lungs with disorientating, asphyxiating smoke that converged on me from all angles until the fire was a never-ending circle that spat and danced and laughed.
The doleful chime of the clock filled my head. One.
‘Where is she?’ yelled Luke as he and Katrina zoomed into vision. Edward was somewhere behind them.
I didn’t know for sure who he was talking about, but I pointed into the thick black smoke beyond which nothing was visible.
Two, three.
Luke’s reckless movements sent a piece of burning floor hurtling to the room below. Katrina pushed me out of the way and followed him into the blackness.
Four, five.
There was too much smoke; too much confusion. I saw a girl trapped by the window as flames licked. I saw her reach for Luke’s outstretched hand, using the rotten wood of the ledge to feel her way to safety.
Six, seven.
‘Don’t lean on that!’ Luke shouted, but his voice was eclipsed by splintering wood and, beyond that, a shattering that filled my eardrums. There was nothing but glass; nothing but pain. An explosion like fireworks lit the world orange.
Eight, nine.
The force cleared a path, but the burning floor disintegrated as Luke stepped directly into the flames. I fell into nothing as wood an
d sparks rained down. I felt myself land; felt something hit me, and I saw black.
Ten, eleven.
They say that hearing is the last thing to go.
Stella.
Chapter Fifty-eight
Stella
The whole world is suspended as I fight and strain against steel bonds. I am trapped by throngs of students chanting my name; by a competition I despise; by a relationship that chokes me.
I am tipping; I am circling; I am swimming between light and dark, red and blue, weightlessness and deadening agony. I am giving myself over to it; I am gripping my diminishing senses. I am waiting to fall from a narrow ledge through time and space and infinity.
Something holds me there, in the heat and the pain and the past. But when it happens there is no choice to make. There is only her.
And I can push her away from danger, away from fire, away from me; until instead of falling, I soar.
I am a house of cards. I am the pieces of my sisters, jagged and dysfunctional and yet fitting me perfectly like wings made of feathers. I am a shooting star turning white in a galaxy of stars. And the light that surrounds me now is benign.
* * *
At the lakeside party of last summer, Edward holds my hand as I try to let him go.
‘You’ll change your mind,’ he says. ‘We’re fate, Stella. It’s inescapable.’
‘Fate?’ I ask, even though I understand. Sometimes we both wonder if we would exist without a legacy of identical siblings that sustains us like oxygen but suffocates us like failure.
He smiles slightly. He’ll have no trouble spinning a version of our break-up that works to his advantage, but I know him better than that and I see a flash of the boy who also lost his pole star at the instant the clock stopped ticking.
* * *
Edward is gone, and I watch the smouldering vestiges of the campfire as I take in what’s happened. Splitting with him is the first time I’ve ever veered off-course, but, as Luke arrives, my fear transforms into something else.