by Nicci Cloke
Nate looked at me, and I looked at Hope again. I knew her pretty well by that point – I knew the way her voice sounded when she was happy, when she was angry. When she was sad. And I knew the way she sounded when she was trying to avoid a conversation.
‘We’ve gotta hit the strip hard,’ Zack said. ‘Give them something to remember us by, right?’
Hope laughed. ‘Yeah, OK then.’
‘Hope, are you sure you’re all right?’ JB asked.
‘Course she is,’ Zack said, draining the rest of his beer. ‘Hardly the first time you’ve got so hammered you can’t remember what you’ve got up to or who’s been in you, is it, Novak?’
And just like that, Hope got up and left, the apartment door slamming behind her. JB looked at the three of us, shaking his head, and then followed her. In the silence he left behind, we could hear him calling her name.
‘Fucksake,’ Nate said, standing up. ‘I can’t deal with this. I’m going to find Dev.’
The door slammed for a third time and then it was just me and Zack. I stared at him.
‘You can’t say anything,’ he said with a shrug.
‘They’re going to wonder where we were,’ I said. ‘They’re going to start asking questions.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘You can’t say anything,’ he said again. ‘And you know exactly why not.’
IT WASN’T EXACTLY the last night of the holiday any of us had imagined. Zack and I went to find Dev and Nate at the Red Lion, with Hope and JB nowhere to be seen. We ate burgers and drank beer and my mouth was dry and tasted like dust.
Lucy was obviously disappointed with us.
‘You guys were way more fun last night,’ she said.
‘Exactly!’ Zack put his arm round her. ‘You’re my kind of girl, Lucy. Shall we get the shots in?’
‘Yeah, all right.’ She hopped off her bar stool and followed him. Dev watched them miserably.
‘You reckon Hope and JB will come meet us?’ he asked, picking at the edge of the table. I could see that Nate was watching him. When Dev glanced up, Nate just shrugged and then looked away.
Lucy came back with a tray of tequilas. ‘So bored of all the apple-flavoured sugary shit,’ she said, shrugging. ‘Time to get serious, I say.’
Behind her back, Zack pressed a hand to his heart and mimed fainting. She wasn’t actually his kind of girl though – the only girlfriends he ever had were model-beautiful and snobby and preferred to stay at home with their friends while he was out with the lads. That was his type of girl.
‘Here you go,’ Lucy said, handing me a shot. ‘Hey, what happened to your hands?’
‘Oh nothing,’ I said, taking my glass and trying to resist hiding them under the table. ‘I just fell into a wall walking home last night. Pissed up.’
It was only a cut, a puffy knuckle. Hardly even noticeable – but she’d noticed.
‘Clumsy,’ Nate said, his voice even, his eyes locked on mine. It was me who looked away first.
‘Right, shots!’ Zack said, sliding a saucer of manky lemon wedges and a salt-shaker into the middle of the table. We all loaded ourselves up, and then downed our tequilas.
I was starting to feel like I needed it.
We ended up in Rodeo again. Rachel and a couple of people from the boat met us there, and by 10 p.m. everyone was drunk again. I drank and I talked and I even danced when Rachel and another girl pulled me onto the floor with them.
I tried to keep a smile on my face. I’ve had a lot of practice at that.
JB texted to say that he and Hope were having dinner and that they’d probably join us later. I wasn’t exactly holding my breath.
Whenever Zack got near me, he kept patting me on the back, offering to buy me drinks. ‘Enjoy yourself, buddy,’ he kept saying. ‘Forget about last night, mate.’ And I tried. I tried to take his drinks and tried to stop myself thinking about the boat, about that beach. About Hope flopping round the deck, starry-eyed and trusting everyone. Laughing her head off. Looking up at the stars.
Later, I was about to walk into the gents’ when I heard Zack and Dev standing at the urinals.
‘Listen,’ Zack was saying. ‘I don’t get what the big deal is. You want to play with the big boys, you’ve got to be up to the game. If Hope couldn’t handle it, she should’ve stayed at home. Nobody forced all those drinks on her, did they? You’ve gotta know your limits – you can’t just expect everyone else to pick up the pieces when you’ve got too messed up to look after yourself.’
I let the door click closed. I had to go and stand outside and breathe for a while. I thought about the time Zack’s brother made him do three dirty pints on his birthday and Nate and I carried him home. I thought about the time I drank a bottle of grappa my auntie bought back from holiday and Hope stayed up all night because she was afraid I’d choke on my own vomit.
I went back inside. I drank more.
JB and Hope never came to meet us. Like I say, I wasn’t surprised. By the end of the night, Dev was getting off with Lucy again, and Zack was doing Jägerbombs with the rest of the girls.
I was leaning against the railings outside, thinking about just going home in the hope that the others would be back there already, when Nate came out.
‘Shame they didn’t come,’ he said.
‘Yeah.’
‘She’s right to be angry. We were out of order.’
I nodded but I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t look at him.
‘She was fucked up,’ Nate said. ‘You saw her on that boat.’
I nodded. ‘I know. I know, OK.’
‘We shouldn’t have left her there.’
‘Well, you left all of us,’ I said, because there was panic in my chest and I couldn’t stand it. ‘What even happened to you, anyway?’
I knew he didn’t know. I knew he didn’t remember. I’d seen the state of him as he went staggering off towards the strip. We shouldn’t have left him either. But we did.
‘I don’t fucking know, all right?’ Nate said. ‘That’s not the point. We’re all friends and we’re supposed to look out for each other. So why weren’t any of us looking out for Hope?’
THE APARTMENT WAS dark when we got back, and the door to JB and Hope’s room was closed.
‘Anyone for a beer?’ Zack asked hopefully, and because none of us said no, he went to the kitchen and took out four.
The others sat down but I went out to the balcony and looked down at the empty pool. Without Lucy and the others around, the atmosphere between us all felt tense and weird. I’d been expecting Dev to go home with Lucy again – I got the feeling he had too – but when we’d left the club he’d come with us, muttering something about having to get up for the flight in the morning. I assumed she’d blown him off and he was just trying to save face and, unusually, no one ribbed him for it.
My insides twisted every time I thought about the night before. I put my hands on the balcony railing and focused on looking down at the water, taking deep breaths. But my eyes kept returning to my scraped, swollen knuckles, and when I turned away and saw one of Hope’s T-shirts hanging over the edge of the railing where she’d left it to dry, I had to turn around and go inside.
I went back in, hoping to think about something else, but Zack was sitting in one of the armchairs, feet up on the coffee table. ‘I dunno what JB’s got his knickers in a twist about anyway,’ he said. ‘Not like he was in a rush to take her home, was it? He buggered off with these mysterious new friends of his – and there’s something a bit off with that story anyway.’
‘Keep your voice down,’ I said, willing him to shut up. I couldn’t understand why he, of all people, would want to start picking at the threads of where we’d all been the night before.
Zack rolled his eyes at me, but he shrugged and shut up.
Nate had been quiet since he’d followed me out of Rodeo. He was drinking the beer Zack had given him fast, pulling it down in long swigs – when he noticed me watching him, it was me who looked away first.
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‘Can’t believe Dev’s the only one who got into a girl’s bed,’ Zack said, reaching over to chink his bottle against Dev’s. ‘Well in, mate. Not that it was all that difficult, huh? Lucy’s a right goer.’
Nate put down his bottle, hard, on the coffee table and stood up. ‘I’m gonna go to bed,’ he said. ‘Knackered.’
He went to the bathroom. Given that his bed was the sofa, that meant it was our cue to do the same, and I was glad. I went into our room and stripped to my pants, climbing under the sheet of the camp bed with my beer still in my hand.
Dev fell asleep almost straight away, one foot hanging over the edge of the bed, and Zack turned off the light as he came back from his turn in the bathroom, a towel round his neck. I took a sip of my beer and listened to him climb into bed next to Dev. I waited for him to say something, but there was just a shuffle as he turned onto his side, pulling the sheet up over him. And then his breathing got slower and longer until it started to turn into a snore.
I lay there in the dark, looking up at the ceiling and drinking my beer.
My bruised hand was starting to throb.
WE FLEW BACK to the UK the next day mostly in silence. Hope kept her headphones in for most of the coach journey and then she picked the window seat on the plane, with JB beside her and Nate on the other side of him. I was left to take the last of the seats in front, with Zack and Dev. It was Dev who was feeling sick this time after a dodgy kebab on the way home from Rodeo, and again nobody had the energy to tease him. He spent most of the time sleeping, and after a while I felt like maybe that was the easiest thing for me too.
I woke up as we were landing, my mouth dry and my neck cricked from sleeping in a weird position. The sky was grey and as the plane swooped down towards Stansted, I saw the flashing blue lights of three police cars racing along the motorway. I closed my eyes and kept them closed until the plane was parked at the gate and everyone had started taking their bags out of the overhead lockers.
Dev’s parents had come to pick him, JB and Hope up, which left me and Nate to get a lift with Zack’s dad. Zack’s dad in his blinged-up Range Rover and his designer jeans. He’d pulled up in a ‘No Parking’ zone outside Arrivals and honked at us as soon as we stepped out onto the walkway.
At least that meant less time for awkward goodbyes.
‘All right, boys!’ Zack’s dad, Gordon, said as we all climbed into the car. He had his hair slicked back and Radio 1 playing loud. ‘You all look like shit.’ He jerked his car out into the traffic, cutting up a taxi.
‘Yeah thanks, Dad,’ Zack said from the front seat. He was quieter than normal, and the tense journey had obviously bothered him too.
‘Good holiday then?’ Gordon asked, swinging out onto a roundabout and giving the middle finger to someone who honked their horn.
‘Yeah,’ we all said, unconvincingly.
‘Go on then,’ Gordon said. ‘Who got the most pussy? Bet it was you, Nate, eh? Bet you had them all over ya.’
Nate shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Nah, Mr C.’
‘Nope, not your kind of girl, I suppose,’ Gordon said, picking up the can of Red Bull in the cup-holder and taking a swig. ‘You like a classy lady, don’t you, Nate? You’ve always been a man of taste. That – what was her name?’
‘Polly,’ Zack said.
‘That’s right. Pretty Polly. What happened to her? She was a – I shouldn’t say this boys, but – she was an absolutely quality piece of ass, even at fifteen.’
‘She moved to Australia,’ Nate said, looking out of the window.
‘That’s right.’ Another slurp of Red Bull, and then the can went back into the cup-holder. Gordon’s attention turned to Zack. ‘What about you, boyo? Get your willy wet?’
This time Nate snuck a look at me. I raised an eyebrow at him, knowing we were both thinking the same thing. My dad had plenty of faults – living a continent away, for one – but one thing he had going strongly in his favour was that he’d never asked me if I’d got my … well, you know.
Zack laughed. ‘Spoilt for choice, Dad. They were throwing themselves at us, weren’t they, guys?’
That’s not exactly how I’d describe it, but I felt a bit sorry for him in front of his dad, so I just murmured something that could have been a yes.
‘Yeah, well, you don’t want the ones who are gagging for it, that’s what you always forget,’ Gordon said, overtaking a lorry. ‘No sport in that, son.’
I turned on my phone – I’d forgotten to after the flight. It buzzed with a message from Mum asking what time I’d be back, and then a Snapchat from my cousin Steph – her face with a zombie filter applied to it (‘Got ma hair did’) – but that was it. I thought about messaging the others, asking how the journey was going or saying how good the holiday had been or maybe just coming right out and saying how shit it was that things were weird between all of us.
But I didn’t.
The twisting, anxious feeling in my gut got worse.
At home that night, I lay on my bed watching some crap comedy on TV and looking through Instagram. I hadn’t had enough data to upload anything over the holiday, but JB had posted loads of stuff, and Dev was obviously going on a spree now he was back home. About a million selfies of him in his neon sunglasses, with various new friends in various bars. I scrolled through them, and saw one JB had posted yesterday, of him and Hope having dinner. He’d obviously asked the waiter or someone to take it as they were both in shot, sitting at a table absolutely covered with food.
He’d captioned it:
Last night dinner with ma girl @hopemnovak #fatties #malia2017 #ontour #whatababe
Hope was smiling, a loaded fork in her hand, a glass of wine in front of her. At least they’d had a good night. That made me happy.
My phone started ringing, the picture disappearing to show the caller ID. Zack. My heart sank.
‘Zack?’
‘Yo.’
‘All right?’
I could hear a door closing on Zack’s side of the phone, the noise of a TV getting quieter. ‘Look, mate, I just wanted to talk about the other night. I can tell it’s bothering you.’
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t trust myself to.
‘Loges, it’s really not a big deal. Just, you know, boys will be boys. I’m sure the kid was fine.’
When I still didn’t say anything, he changed tack.
‘He had it coming, Logan. You know it.’
When I couldn’t stay silent any longer, my voice didn’t sound like my own. ‘I don’t want to talk about this, Zack.’
‘Sure you don’t, mate. But I just want you to stop beating yourself up about it. You did what you had to do, we both did. And I’ve checked online, there’s nothing about it. No requests for witnesses, no mention anywhere. We’re all good.’
All good. Yeah, right. But I did feel relieved, I’ll admit. Of course I did.
‘I’ve gotta go,’ I said.
‘Yeah, OK, mate. See you round Nate’s on Friday though, right?’
‘Yep,’ I said, because it was easiest. That’s a thing I do. I’m not proud of that either.
After Zack hung up, I turned the TV off. I wanted to believe him that nothing was going to happen, no consequences. I hadn’t dared google it myself – I’d spent the whole of the flight expecting police to be waiting for us at the airport, and then the whole of the drive back expecting them to be outside my house. I knew it was stupid, but my brain’s good at imagining stuff like that. It runs away from me, sometimes.
I opened Instagram again and looked at the rest of JB’s photos. There was one of me and Zack on the beach at the island, grinning at the camera, his arm round my neck. I thought of all the times we’d had our picture taken like that – parties, matches, the one in the common room at school that was currently my profile picture. My mum had a photo of the two of us when we were seven in the same pose. We were dressed in our football kits, me gangly and awkward, Zack with two of his teeth missing. We’d grown up
together. In some ways we were like brothers.
But now all I could think about was the way he’d put his arm round me on the boat, his face furious.
The things he had made me do.
THE GUY HAD been difficult to miss from the start – loud and obnoxious on the boat, flashing his dick at a group of girls before we’d even left the shore. His vest top stretched and baggy, chest white and then burnt. Hair slicked back in a quiff. He’d bumped into me and Zack when we first got on, when we were at the bar getting drinks for everyone else. It was crowded on the deck, probably not that big a deal. But when Zack turned round and said, in his typical way, ‘Watch yourself, mate,’ the guy didn’t say, ‘Sorry,’ or walk off or whatever. He just smirked and said ‘How about you watch yourself ? Mate.’
He wouldn’t have been the first person to say that to Zack. But I got a bad feeling about him.
Later, in the woods on the island, I hadn’t wanted any trouble. It had been a kind of full-on day already and I wasn’t feeling myself. When the guy had appeared again and tried it on with Emily and then started with Nate, I just wanted to get away. I didn’t care what he called me but it made something burn inside me to see Hope defend me like that. The rest of the day suddenly looked much brighter.
I didn’t even pay much attention to his run-in with Zack in the queue to get back on the boat. Everything had that warm edge it gets when you’re drunk, and by the time I got there, the guy had disappeared and Zack was shrugging the whole thing off.
But when I saw him on the boat, saw the way this guy’s hand lingered as it slipped down Hope’s side, the way she smiled up at him like the look on his face meant nothing, I didn’t like it. I know I have no right.
I remembered Zack’s face close to mine, his arm tightening round my neck as he pulled me down closer. ‘You gonna let him get away with that? We’ve got to teach him a lesson, Logan. We’ve got to show him.’ His words pumping through me and everything spinning. All I could think about was that guy’s face, his sleazy smile, the word he muttered as he passed me in the woods.