by James Dawson
Unlike Alisha though, Rox was, and always had been, selfish. A ride on the Rox Train was sure to be the night of your life, but it was always rolling in the direction she wanted to head.
Looking at her now, Ryan could only hope her travels abroad had matured her. ‘Is this a good spot, do you reckon?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, it’ll work. Ryan, you should have seen the beaches in Thailand. They are, like, seriously swoon-worthy.’ For a moment her eyes misted over. ‘I missed you this year.’ She seemed genuine.
‘Yeah. It’s been a funny old year,’ he replied, also honestly.
Just like that, the sentimentality left her, drifting away like the wisps of cotton-wool cloud overhead. Rox smiled. ‘Oh, let’s not get all “Camp Boo-Hoo”!’
There was the Rox Ryan remembered. He looked up to see Alisha marching down the stone steps with purpose, making a beeline for them. He lowered the lounger, wishing he had a dart gun like a safari ranger – he might need to use it on one or both of his friends. ‘Rox, Alisha’s coming . . .’
‘Good. We should clear the air.’
Ryan fixed her in a steel-trap glare. ‘Roxanne Dent, I want you to play nice.’
‘I always do,’ she said with mock innocence. She perched herself on the lounger and waited for her rival with bored nonchalance, as if she were freaking Cleopatra.
Alisha reached their position. Behind her, Greg and Ben carried another lounger, while Erin held a cooler. Katie trotted beside Alisha, struggling to keep up. Roxanne didn’t stand to greet her foe. She reclined on the lounger. If she was scared of Alisha, her body language didn’t give that impression.
Alisha stood over her, casting a shadow. ‘I’m sorry about that. I lost it.’ For once, Ryan was happy to stand back and be a passive viewer. This scene had been a long time coming: Alisha vs Rox – The Showdown.
Roxanne shielded her eyes with one hand. ‘It’s OK. I thought you knew I was coming.’ Next to Alisha, Katie winced.
Alisha threw down her beach towel and sat on it. Katie sat alongside, lending moral support. Ryan stood in the surf, cooling his feet.
Alisha finally spoke. ‘I know. I’m not happy, though, Rox.’
‘Look. I handled things really badly but it all feels like a hundred years ago. Can we move on, Lish?’ Roxanne tossed her artfully tousled waves over her head. ‘I missed you guys. If I’ve learned one thing on my travels, it’s this: boys come and go, but friends are forever.’
Spoken like a true boyfriend-stealer, thought Ryan. There was something odd about Roxanne’s delivery – it was oddly fake and stagey, even for her.
Alisha took a deep breath. ‘What about Cal? Did he . . . come and go?’
Roxanne giggled. ‘Ha! Yeah. Things fell apart as soon as we got to Thailand. We just didn’t get on. I went off to Goa and left him there. I think he was planning on going to Sydney.’
Ben and Greg caught up, dropping the last of the loungers onto the sand.
‘You OK, Lish?’ Greg, protective as ever, cast a wary eye over the conversation.
‘Yeah,’ Alisha said. Even in the sweltering sun, her expression remained ice-cold. Far from impressed, she looked up at Roxanne with wide, hurt eyes. ‘So it was all for nothing then? He left me for you and then you dumped him?’
Roxanne made an overly horrified face, the result grossly disingenuous. ‘Oh, no! Not at all!’
Katie took Alisha’s hand (possibly as a subtle form of restraint). ‘Roxanne, I’m not taking sides, I’m really not, but that’s what it sounds like,’ she said.
‘You know the real shame about the whole thing?’ Roxanne said, lying on the lounger with her back perfectly arched to show off all her assets. Her flawless, toned body almost glowed under the sun. Her bikini was little more than dental floss. Even Ryan could appreciate how smoking hot she was. ‘If there had been more of a gap between us, it wouldn’t have been a big deal,’ she finished.
Ryan bit his lip to prevent himself laughing aloud and heard Katie make a quiet huffing noise under her breath. He highly doubted Roxanne was right about that.
She went on. ‘But the fact is, Lish, you know you and Callum were on the rocks before he even met me.’
That was true, but Alisha had been the last person to see it coming – as is often the way with break-ups.
‘OK. Got ya,’ Alisha said with icy calm.
‘I think you’re being really cool with this, Alisha. I so hope we can be friends again, don’t you?’
Alisha stood up. ‘Roxanne. I’d love for us to be friends again.’ Then she leaned in and gave Roxanne a glorious OTT kiss on the mouth.
Roxanne’s eyes widened in shock and Ryan stifled a giggle; his respect for Alisha Cole had just shot through the roof.
Alisha pulled back and grabbed a snorkel set from her beach bag. ‘Right. If my new bestie will excuse me, I’m gonna go swimming. There aren’t sharks out here, are there?’
‘Not in the water,’ Ryan said with a sly smile.
‘Yes, there are,’ Roxanne said, apparently failing to pick up on his jibe. ‘This is the Atlantic coast and it’s the height of summer. There are sharks everywhere.’
Ryan couldn’t help but wonder whether she was referring to the ones in the sea.
With Alisha in the water, the atmosphere cleared. Frankly, it was too hot to be angry. The midday sun beat down and lethargy fell over them all. As Ryan sunned himself, Katie hid under a beach umbrella, shifting her lounger to follow the shade every fifteen minutes like a vampire with OCD.
‘Dear Lord, this is so dull!’ Katie exclaimed, throwing aside her course text. ‘The Role of the Novel in Bourgeois Ideology. Kill me now.’
Ryan grinned up at her from his towel. ‘There’s a copy of Heat in my bag upstairs.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘That’s going from one extreme to the other, isn’t it?’
Ben had resolved to keep himself busy, or so it seemed. He was affable and polite to Roxanne, but wouldn’t engage with her either. He’d wheeled the portable barbecue down and now fatty burger smoke billowed across the beach. He was quite the pyromaniac this week.
Greg and Erin, bless them, had taken on a time-honoured project – namely, Digging a Massive Hole. Ryan had to admit, it was pretty impressive – only the tops of their heads now poked out above ground level. The goal, as ever, was to see how far you could dig before hitting water. It kept them quiet.
Eventually, Alisha emerged from the sea, every inch the Bond girl in her bikini. Water ran off her enviable curves and Ryan wasn’t the only one who noticed. Even through the spiral of smoke twirling from the barbecue, Ben couldn’t take his eyes off her. Ooh, that was interesting. Instinctively, Ryan looked at Katie to see if she’d seen Ben gawping, but she was waving her phone around searching for a signal and didn’t seem to have noticed.
‘I thought I could smell food,’ Alisha called from the surf.
‘Grub’s up!’ Ben replied, blushing.
They helped themselves to burgers and salad, ketchup and mustard and formed a picnic circle on a beach mat. Roxanne and Alisha kept their distance, but it was a relatively civilised lunch.
‘So what’s the plan, Rox?’ Ryan asked through a mouthful of burger. ‘What are you doing next year?’
‘Oh, God knows. I missed all the UCAS deadlines. I’ll probably go back to Telscombe Cliffs for a year.’
‘Oh, brilliant,’ Alisha muttered under her breath.
‘My uncle’s bought this massive new house. He says I can help him renovate it. I quite like the idea of that instead of uni – sort of property-developer-type stuff.’
‘Sounds good,’ Ryan replied.
‘I don’t wanna stop travelling really, but I’m running out of money.’
‘Bummer,’ said Greg. He opened his cool box, which was filled with stub bottles of beer. ‘It’s after lunch. That’s beer o’clock, right?’
‘Absolutely!’ Ben grabbed a bottle. ‘It’s happy hour somewhere.’
‘Do you know what we sh
ould do?’ Roxanne squealed. ‘We should play a drinking game!’
‘No,’ Katie groaned. ‘I’m not even drinking.’
‘Oh, go on! It’ll be fun! You can just drink your Coke.’
‘I’m in,’ Alisha said. Ryan suspected there was no way Alisha was going to back down to Rox. Anything Rox could do, she could do better.
‘Awesome. Does everyone know how to play I Have Never?’ Another groan rippled around the circle. Only Erin shook her head. ‘It’s easy,’ Roxanne told her. ‘You take it in turns to say something you’ve never done. If someone else has done what you’ve said, they have to take a drink. It’s hilarious!’
‘OK,’ Erin said. ‘So, like, I have never been skiing?’
‘Yes! Everyone who has been skiing takes a drink!’ Roxanne said.
Ryan took a swig of ice-cool beer, condensation trickling over his fingers. Alisha, Greg and Ben all took a mouthful of whatever they were drinking, too.
‘But it’s much more fun if you go a little more hardcore than skiing,’ Roxanne added.
Ryan sat forward. Roxanne Dent could try as hard as she liked, but he was head of entertainment this week. ‘OK, I’ll go first,’ he said. ‘I have never snogged a girl.’
Ben, Greg, Erin, Alisha and Roxanne all took a drink. Only Katie failed to drink. ‘Oh, wow!’ she exclaimed. ‘How lame am I? And that’s not even true, Ry; you and Janey kissed.’
Ryan laughed. He and Janey had ‘dated’ in the way that thirteen-year-olds ‘date’ – namely he’d bought her a McDonald’s and taken her to see Transformers. They’d even had a snog in her bedroom; Janey had turned Radio One up to full volume to mask the sound of their lips smacking, lest her dad hear them and go on the warpath. Even then he’d known, on a fundamental level, that girls, for all their sweetness and softness, just didn’t hit him where it counted. ‘So sue me, I lied!’
‘When did you snog a girl?’ Greg turned to Erin.
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ Erin winked.
‘I snogged her.’ Alisha jabbed a finger at Roxanne, unable to keep a smile off her face.
‘Oh, God, that under-eighteens club in Brighton, I remember. Shameful!’ Roxanne laughed.
‘Nothing like a bit of faux lesbianism for the lads.’ Ryan emphasised the last word as if it had a Z in it. ‘So predictable.’
‘In that case,’ Ben said. ‘I have never snogged a boy.’
Everyone but Ben and Greg drank.
‘That was a little easy, don’t you think?’ Katie smiled.
‘I just wanted to see you all drink,’ Ben replied with a grin.
‘You should give it a whirl, you might like it.’ Ryan waggled his tongue in Ben’s direction. Ben flicked him on the forehead. ‘Ow!’
Roxanne leaned forward, an odd expression on her face. Ryan couldn’t quite read it, but, if pushed, he’d have to say she looked self-satisfied. What was her game? Katie and Alisha weren’t even drinking alcohol, so the game seemed a bit pointless – unless she wanted to find out something. ‘OK. I have a juicy one,’ she said. ‘I have never made a kinky little video.’
Oh, the clever little witch. Ryan didn’t say anything and certainly didn’t take a drink; he was admitting nothing. He looked around the circle. That had been a little more risqué than anyone had been expecting. There were a few nervous giggles but no one drank.
‘Really?’ Roxanne said.
Deny everything. While there was still a possibility that this was just a wacky party game, he wasn’t confirming a thing. It could be a coincidence that Roxanne had mentioned vids. ‘I’ve texted some pretty choice photos – does that count?’ Ryan asked, testing the water.
‘You know,’ Roxanne began in a sing-song voice, ignoring Ryan, ‘this game only works if everyone tells the truth.’
The gang shared confused glances. Ryan put his acting skills to the test, playing the part of confused innocent.
‘What do you mean?’ Ben asked.
‘Well, I know for a fact that at least one of you is lying,’ Roxanne said flatly.
‘And how do you know this for a fact?’ Greg did a pretty good Rox impression.
‘Because I’ve seen it.’ Roxanne had a wicked glint in her eye. This was the relish on her burger.
‘No way!’ Ryan exclaimed, almost blowing his cover. Was she really going to expose him? In front of everyone? She wouldn’t dare . . . would she? He fought to keep his cool.
‘I have!’
‘So who was it then?’ Greg asked.
‘I don’t think it’s my place to say. Apparently, the subject doesn’t want anyone to know about it. Shame. It was pretty hot.’
Ryan knew full well how hot it had been, but that wasn’t the point. If Roxanne had seen it . . . oh, God, it didn’t bear thinking about. Maybe it wasn’t even that video she was referring to. Call him an insane optimist but maybe Katie and Ben had had a video moment back in the day. Yeah, fat chance.
‘Are you sure?’ Ben demanded. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t just a porn look-a-like?’
Roxanne laughed. ‘No. It was the Real McCoy.’
Alisha looked sceptical. ‘And how have you seen it? Were you in it, too? That wouldn’t be a massive surprise.’
Roxanne brushed off the dig. ‘Well, that’s the thing with committing stuff to a camera phone: these things tend to get about. Personally, I’d never be dumb enough to leave evidence lying around.’
There was a moment’s silence. ‘OK, this is a bit weird,’ Ben said, visibly cringing. ‘I don’t need to think about my mates in the buff. It’s a bit creepy, Rox. How about, I have never wet myself in public?’
Thank God for Ben Murdoch. Ryan could have hugged him for changing the subject.
Greg took a big drink. ‘Cheers mate!’ Nervous laughter ran round the group, everyone relieved at the reminder of Greg’s primary-school incident.
Ryan was still preoccupied with the video. He could only pray he hadn’t flushed beetroot-red. How? How had Rox seen it? When? Where? HOW? He had gone to great lengths to make sure that video didn’t exist.
The game carried on, as did the satisfied look on Roxanne’s face. She was the cat among the pigeons, never mind the person who put the cat there.
Ryan sat on his hands to stop them from shaking. He dare not even look in Roxanne’s direction; if she caught his eye it was all over. He’d never been on the receiving end of her stirring until this point, but now he knew exactly how Alisha felt: burning, white-hot hatred.
SCENE 13 – RYAN
It was so weird. Ryan had searched high and low, but he couldn’t find the scarecrow mask anywhere. Greg had denied bringing it, which didn’t make any sense. If it weren’t for the fact that Ben had seen it as well, Ryan would have assumed he’d dreamed the whole encounter. He didn’t know why it was bothering him so much, but why wouldn’t anyone admit to bringing it? And where was the bloody thing, now? He’d left it on the table, but it was no longer there. In a TV drama, this would definitely be relevant somehow.
Ryan had come in from the sun to find the horrid thing gone from the dining table and, even worse, he was unable to recall if it had been there over breakfast. The missing mask bugged him and he couldn’t resist raising it with the group. No one had seen it and, once again, Ben denied bringing it, even though it had been in his bag.
Ryan spent the rest of the afternoon looking under plates and magazines with no success. Now, at sunset, Ryan gazed out of his bedroom window as the sea reflected the purple and tangerine stripes of the sky. It was beautiful. You didn’t get views like that in Manchester.
When Erin called them all for dinner, he gave up looking with a sigh and joined the others. After the second day of uninterrupted sunshine, Greg and Alisha were more tanned than ever, Ben’s forehead looked a little red while Katie, of course, was still pale and interesting. Ryan was quietly satisfied with his bronze glow. It suited him – he could easily audition for an Australian soap, now, with his gold skin and surfer’s curls. They noisily settled th
emselves at the table, Ryan choosing to sit next to Katie.
Roxanne made a late entrance. Ryan swallowed his anger and battled to maintain a poker face. Tonight she wore a distressed grey dress that, on anyone else, would have looked like it had come out of the bin, but on Roxanne looked rock and roll. She’d managed to pull off the same look with her hair too: effortless pillow-damaged waves.
That was the thing with Rox. Ryan had never known someone to be so self-consciously sexy, including himself (and he thought he was mighty fine). Boys ate it up with a spoon. She knew full well she was sexy, but always followed it with a chaser of Who, little ol’ me? It was impressive. If he tried that with guys, he’d get a black eye for his efforts. Ryan decided if straight boys were dumb enough to fall for it, it was their problem.
Roxanne’s wrist caught Ryan’s eye. She was wearing a charm bracelet he recognised at once. It was Katie’s – the one Ben had got her on their first anniversary. Ryan had helped Ben design it, although, he had to hand it to his friend, he had great taste. Ben Murdoch made a devastatingly thoughtful boyfriend. The charms were a K, A, T, I and E (obviously); a tiny silver copy of Jane Eyre; a pair of sneakers to reflect their first date at Foot Locker; a heart made out of her birthstone and a spaniel (apparently he was like the puppy she’d never had).
Katie had noticed, too. She looked embarrassed, but said nothing. Ryan wondered how bold you’d have to be to wear someone else’s charm bracelet. Why had Rox really come here? To humiliate him? Why bother – he hadn’t crossed Roxanne as far as he knew. No. He sensed there was something bigger brewing just out of sight and, not for the first time, he felt entirely at the whim of the great executive producers in the sky.