by Nicci Cloke
I shrugged. ‘Can you blame me? You lie about where you are that night – you buy petrol –’
‘How do you know about that?’ Zack asked sharply, and I thought, Got you.
‘I found the receipt. So don’t try and lie. Again.’
Zack rolled his eyes. ‘All right, fine. You want to know what happened that night, Miss Marple? Take a seat. Let me fill you in on the kind of guys you’re friends with.’
I sank back down into my chair, because the habit of listening to Zack was a hard one to break.
‘Yeah, OK, we went out that night,’ he said, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. His eyes hadn’t left mine. ‘You were passed out and snoring, and I was still buzzing from the fight. So sue me. Then I get a call from Nate, off his tits and lost on the strip somewhere, says he can’t remember how to get home.’
He paused to raise an eyebrow at me, like You know how he is. ‘So I head back out, Uncle Zack to the rescue, but on my way out I run into Dev. He’s acting all sheepish cos he’s obviously blown his chance with Lucy like a total fanny, but I rope him into coming with me to get Nate. Nate’s not exactly a small guy – I figured I could use the help keeping him upright.’
I stared at him. ‘Right.’
‘Anyway.’ He straightened up again and leaned back, relaxing into it. ‘When we get there, Nate’s actually sorted himself out a bit. I don’t know, coffee or drugs or Red Bull, something – someone’s helped him out somewhere along the line, because he’s just chilling outside some bar, perfectly happy and making sense.
‘And you know, we figure, well, we’re out now. We may as well make the most of it. So we have a couple of drinks, we’re having a good time –’
‘With Emily?’ I asked, my voice flat.
Zack shook his head, his face creased like I was an idiot. ‘Of course not. Logan, I swear, I can barely even remember the girl.’
I looked away.
‘The petrol …’ I said.
‘I’m getting to it. So, yeah, we’ve had a couple of drinks and, well, it was a big day, right? We were all completely caned. So it’s time to hit the sack, and we head off towards the hotel. Except – look, this part is kind of funny, but it’s also kind of bad. I don’t know how you’re gonna take it.’
I looked back at him, feeling sick. I didn’t say anything.
‘Well, look, we see these two mopeds parked down the side of one of the restaurants. I don’t know – some tourists left them there thinking they were safe, or they belonged to the owner or whatever. Dev happened to wander down there to have a slash, and he sees them.’
He looked at me, eyes wide again. ‘I mean, it was just a laugh. The keys were right there, it was funny.’
‘You stole them.’
‘Well, yeah.’
‘You took mopeds for a joyride in that state?’
Zack shrugged. ‘Look, like I say, it was kind of bad. That’s why we didn’t tell you about it the next day. So you wouldn’t get into any trouble if anyone asked. You know, if we’d been caught on CCTV or whatever.’
I swallowed. I couldn’t really get my head round this, not when I’d spent so long suspecting something so much worse. ‘What happened to the bikes?’
Zack laughed. ‘Dev fucking stacked it into a parked car halfway up the road,’ he said. ‘That boy should never be allowed a licence, I’m telling you. He couldn’t steer a fucking trolley.’
‘And the other one?’
He shrugged. ‘Nate took it back first thing that morning. Turns out he even filled the petrol back up, according to you.’
I was silent, taking it all in. I’d got it so wrong.
Zack laughed again. ‘I can’t believe he did that. What a gay.’
‘Don’t do that,’ I said. ‘Don’t use that word as an insult.’
Zack frowned. ‘What, gay? Come on, Lo, it’s just banter. Don’t change the subject just because you feel like a tit for blowing this whole thing way out of proportion.’
‘You can’t just cut him out!’ I yelled, surprising myself.
‘Who, JB?’ Zack shrugged. ‘Why would he want to hang out with us now anyway?’
‘Oh, what, because he doesn’t want to shag girls, suddenly he won’t want to hang around with his oldest friends?’
Zack shrugged again and looked back at me.
I was angry now, really angry. It felt like all the energy I’d been missing for weeks was suddenly flooding through me. ‘Is that really all you think we are? Is that all friends are meant to talk about?’
I’d expected another shrug – I was ready to go in on him even harder – but Zack dropped his gaze to the floor. ‘You don’t understand, mate,’ he said eventually. His voice sounded different to the way it normally did. He sounded like he really wanted me to understand. ‘My dad, the lads at rugby … They’d think …’ He trailed off.
‘They’d think what? That you caught a dose of gay? Jesus, Zack, you sound like you just walked out of the 1950s. JB is our friend and he fancies guys and it’s really not a big deal.’
Zack’s face turned red, but after a minute his eyes narrowed. ‘I don’t see you hanging around with him though, do I?’
I hadn’t been hanging around with anyone. I’d been lying in a darkened room for weeks because I couldn’t even face the postman most days. But I couldn’t tell Zack that. And so I just stared back at him.
He took my silence to mean that I agreed. He often did that.
‘See? You find it weird too. It’s messed up the whole group, Lo.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It hasn’t. No one else cares apart from you, Zack. And that’s a problem you need to deal with.’
He laughed, and I knew I’d handled this wrong. No one criticised Zack; he didn’t understand it.
‘Yeah. I’m the one with the problem. I’m not the one sitting here accusing my best mates of murdering some random girl. I’m not the one sitting here in the state you are. It’s lunchtime, Logan, and you’re in your pyjamas, stinking like something out of a swamp. All because you’re scared you’re not enough of a man for your girlfriend.’
I felt like he’d punched me in the face.
‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it?’ he said, getting up. ‘Why don’t you think about that before you try and lecture me. You need to man up, Logan. You’re a mess.’ He moved to the door, shaking his head. Before he stepped into the hallway, he turned to look back at me.
‘Seriously, it’s pathetic. You need to sort yourself out. You need to do something.’
People say blackouts are convenient. People who’ve never had one think they’re a lie – they think it’s something you say when you’ve done something you regret. Like saying, ‘I can’t remember anything,’ is some kind of magic wand you can wave to make it all OK again. A blank slate, a do-over. They think it’s a kind of denial.
A way to put your head in the sand.
They don’t know what it’s like to lose a small piece of your life like that. A moment or a minute or an hour where you are no longer your own. A section of time that exists only then, that you can never revisit. You can’t even pinpoint the moment you’d change, the thing you’d rather you hadn’t said or done – because as far as your brain’s concerned, you never did.
The rest of the world knows differently.
They remember.
YOU WILL SAY that you don’t deserve this.
You will say that what happened happened. You will say that you did nothing wrong.
Sometimes I wonder if you’re right.
We are all a year older now. We are all grown up, about to leave school behind. We are all ready to leave you behind.
It seems a long time, doesn’t it, since you guys came home from Malia? Seems a long time ago that all we had to worry about were AS results and whether Georgie and Charlotte could both be invited to a party. That summer and all its strangeness is past and far away, like it doesn’t even belong to us any more.
You turned eighteen first; September,
a week into Year 13.
A week after you did what you did.
But wait.
Rewind.
I REMEMBER, OFTEN, this one afternoon late last summer. It wasn’t long before we were due to go back to school, and I’d been shopping online for stationery. It’s something everyone has always laughed at me for, the excitement I can feel over an empty notebook, a new pack of highlighters. But it makes me happy – nothing makes me feel calmer than a sheaf of blank pages, the possibilities they hold. It sounds silly now, maybe. But it was a nice thing to be doing on a lazy Thursday with September just around the corner.
Something made me watch that footage again. The stupid link Charlotte had sent me. Sun, Sand and Secrets: The Unseen Footage. I saw you all there, saw all of you sun-singed and wild, set free. And I wondered.
I know you’ve always thought that the girls were stupid for cancelling their holiday. I was never really part of the plans – I don’t know if I would have gone. It seems strange, now, to think of all those afternoons and phone calls and free periods spent listening to Charlotte complain about Georgie. About how she’d changed, how she’d lost herself, how she was twice as interested as Josh was and almost definitely going to get hurt.
Josh never did hurt Georgie, not as far as I know. They’re off to Sunderland Uni, both of them, with plans to share a flat in their second year.
It’s funny how things turn out, don’t you think?
I turned off the clip because it scared me – maybe you won’t believe that. But then maybe you might. Instead I opened the file where I kept the notes for my novel and started working through what might happen next.
I don’t think you’ve ever been interested in the stories I write, and that’s OK. We all have our things, right? I’ve never really been able to explain why I write, why I can’t stop. Charlotte laughed once, when I told her I was writing a novel. You’re seventeen, she said. You need to get out more.
Well.
But yes, that afternoon – stationery and planning, still feeling park-lazy. And then the text.
So sorry to do this. I don’t know what to say. But I think we should stop seeing each other. I think we’re better apart.
I do wonder, sometimes, if that was the beginning.
THE DAY AFTER I got dumped, I cancelled my plans. Some people don’t do that, right? They just carry on as normal, pick up the pieces and drink some drinks and be done. I can’t. I couldn’t do it when me and my first boyfriend, Alex, broke up in Year 11, and I couldn’t do it this time, either. I needed time to decompress or something; time to just let it hurt.
And dumped by text? Yeah, ouch.
So I cancelled my plans with Charlotte and I sat in my room. Picture me in fast-forward – I’m lying in bed with the duvet over my head; I’m sitting on the floor with my phone on the carpet in front of me, willing myself not to call. I’m lying across the foot of my bed on my back, looking at the ceiling; I’m lying on the floor on my front watching Jessica Jones throw someone through a wall. I’m curled up in my desk chair, staring at my laptop screen; I’m leaning back with my slippers up on the desk, watching Buffy throw someone through a wall.
Girl, Wallowing. You get the idea.
Look, the truth is, I want to say that I brushed it off, pulled on my best hot pants and hit a dance floor somewhere. I want to say that I danced all night and laughed with my friends and didn’t think a single thing about anything but whether I needed a new drink or a different song.
I want to say all that, but I promised myself I would tell the truth here, and so I will.
I wallowed.
Maybe I would’ve gone on wallowing, wondering. But the third day, my phone rang and I felt like answering. It was Georgie, suggesting I go over; not asking anything. And I thought: why not? I peeled my pyjamas off and got into the shower.
Georgie’s house was full of noise, just how it always is. Her dad was in the kitchen, blitzing some kind of juice in the blender while classical music tried to compete from the radio. JB and his mum were in the living room, trying to stick glitter to some kind of plinth. The air was swirling with it and thick with paint fumes and the smell of baking – Georgie was making cupcakes again. She brought out a plate of them and we sat on the sofa and watched JB try to brush the glitter off his jeans.
‘You guys really aren’t helping me come out without the clichés,’ he told his mum with a grin, and then picked up one of the cupcakes – neon yellow icing on lilac batter – and ate half of it in one bite. He flopped down onto the sofa next to me. ‘How’s it going, Dais?’
I smiled and picked at a bit of the icing on my own cake. I knew Georgie would’ve told him about the break-up, but I didn’t know if I was ready to talk about it in front of them all. Georgie glanced at me, reading my mind. ‘Shall I give you a hand with that, Dinah?’ she asked, getting up to help her stepmum lug some of the leftover fibreboard out towards the back door.
‘You doing OK?’ JB asked, once they were gone.
I want to say that I was angry, that I told him how much it hurt. But I said I wouldn’t lie. I shrugged. I said, ‘I’m fine.’ And then I asked the thing I really cared about: ‘Is he doing OK?’
JB scrunched up his cake case and stared at it. ‘I honestly don’t think so. But I can’t get him to talk to me or admit it.’
It came over me then, this crushing wave of feeling that I hadn’t been expecting. It was failure. I felt like I’d failed. ‘He’s shutting us all out,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand why.’
‘I think he’s going through some things,’ JB said, unfurling the cake case and refolding it into a neat triangle. ‘I guess we all are.’
‘How are you doing?’ I asked. I put my cake down on the table, mostly uneaten. I’m not sure you’ve ever really known me, but I think you’ll still understand that this was deeply out of character.
JB’s turn to shrug, that handsome, angled face turned down. ‘I’m all right. Everyone’s been great.’
‘Not everyone.’
He glanced up at me and smiled a small, sad smile. ‘Can’t win ’em all, I guess.’
Georgie came back in then, brushing wood dust from her hands. ‘You guys want to go up and watch crappy horror films?’
JB stood up. ‘I’m gonna have to leave you to it. I said I’d help Nate with something.’
I followed him into the hall while Georgie went to put the kettle on for us again. ‘Do you think I should call him?’ I asked, as he shoved his feet into his trainers and patted his pockets in search of keys. ‘Not to … you know. But just to check he’s all right?’
He’d been about to leave, hand already on the door knob, but he came back over to me then and put his arms round me.
‘We’re gonna be OK, Dais,’ he said, breath warm against my neck. ‘All of us. I promise.’
I spent the afternoon snuggled on the couch in JB and Georgie’s den, watching terrible B-movies and drinking endless cups of tea and feeling like maybe, somehow, JB was right. Maybe we’d all get back to normal somehow, whatever normal was now.
THINGS DID GET better, just a bit, during those days, that last week or two of summer. I was sad but I was OK – sometimes you can be both. Charlotte and I cycled all the way around the lake and drank beers at the tiny bit of beachy shore until the sun went down; cycled back laughing on wobbly wheels. Georgie and Josh took me to a gig, the band of some guy he knew through his sister, and we danced together and pretended the music was good and ate chips on the bus home. And I wrote too. The words found me, and it helped. This world I’d built welcomed me back and so I tried to lose myself in it. I still do. Sometimes I wonder if you have anything like that.
The first book was easier, maybe because I was writing just for me. It felt amazing when people started reading it, when I would check each morning to see the number of reads, with its little eye-shaped icon, tick slowly up. The first time someone commented on a chapter, I felt like my cheeks were about to burst, I was smiling so much. I remember it
so well, lying on my bed, looking at it over and over.
kcinthecity: love this so much! can’t wait to find out what happens next
I uploaded the next chapter that night. I actually had almost all of the book written by then – it’d been on my laptop for a while, but I kept playing around with it, thinking of new stuff to add in or deciding I didn’t like parts of it. I don’t even know what had made me upload the first couple of chapters to StoryCity in the first place. I’d been a little bit drunk, after a party round at Charlotte’s, and I’d been in bed reading but not really reading. I’d been thinking about it for a while, because I loved that site, loved reading some of the stories on there. But I hadn’t had the nerve to share my own stuff. Well, booze gives you the nerve sometimes, right? You know that.
So I started editing the rest of the stuff I had, and uploading a new chapter every couple of days. kcinthecity commented every time, and I can’t even explain how cool that felt, that someone was interested in Hannah, my main character, and all the weird stuff she was investigating.
But then when more people started reading, giving me stars and commenting too, I started to panic. I wasn’t sure how the story was going to end – I’d thought for a while that Hannah might give up her investigating, that something might happen that meant she couldn’t any more. But everyone seemed to love that stuff – they kept suggesting other paranormal things that might happen, or wondering if anyone would figure out that the famous author Hannah Hass was actually writing non-fiction in her novels. In Chapter Ten, Hannah met a vampire called Tobias and people really liked that bit. I started wondering if I should develop that more – I’d wanted them to become kind of friends but never really trust each other, but then kc and darkangel, another regular reader, started debating whether they were going to end up together.
omg id love that sooooo much
it’d be so cool
he could join the business! dream team!