by Helen Eve
‘Siena is,’ I say with deep satisfaction.
‘You’re suggesting that Siena did this?’ She’s horrified. ‘This isn’t Siena’s mission statement! There’s no order, or status, or reason. Why would she do this?’
‘I don’t think it matters why,’ says Madison. ‘Just that she did.’
Libby turns on her furiously. ‘Why are you talking? Why are you here? Siena has yet to decide if you can even remain a Starlet.’
‘Don’t you see?’ says Madison recklessly. ‘Siena has decided. There are no Starlets anymore, or anything else. We’re all just people.’
Chapter Fifty-one
Siena
As babies, infants and schoolgirls, my sisters and I strike identical poses in a mass of photographs as though we’re separated only by flimsy metal frames, rather than time or age. For months Stella conscientiously followed Syrena’s wriggling baby form with our father’s old camera, recapturing the poses she and I had struck apparently spontaneously at the same age. Shifting our pictures across the table top to make room, she wedged Syrena cuckooishly between us.
‘There isn’t space,’ I objected once, shoving Syrena’s face out of sight.
‘She belongs here.’ Stella pulled her back.
‘It’s not symmetrical,’ I said feebly.
The next time I saw the display, symmetry had been restored, but a closer glance showed that Stella had made herself the casualty. I pulled her back into place, making my own face invisible instead, and instigating an unspoken tug of war.
‘I’ve never seen this before.’ Stella stares at a new photograph of our parents’ wedding day. ‘Mother, I thought you wore a sash?’
All Seraphina’s wedding photographs depict her wearing a gold sash over her wedding dress; the sash I’ll wear if crowned tonight. This image is sashless, and I wonder why it makes such a difference to her appearance. Then my corset, which has needed surprisingly extensive alterations, pinches me more painfully than ever and I flinch.
‘I’m finished with you,’ Seraphina tells Stella. ‘Take the other one with you.’
Stella leads Syrena by the hand, turning a confused look towards me before leaving.
‘He married you because you were pregnant,’ I blurt out, running dates through my mind as I stare at this image; the only picture in which she appears relaxed. She’s facing rigidly forward in her other photographs, but here, turned towards my father and with one hand protectively placed on her swelling stomach, there’s no doubt. ‘You were pregnant at your wedding.’
‘He’d discovered my condition, yes,’ she says guardedly. ‘He agreed to support me.’
‘You blame Syrena for him leaving, but were we all mistakes to him?’
‘He’d never expressed a wish for children,’ she says, for once not flinching away from the subject. ‘But he was aware of his responsibilities. For a time.’
‘You only had us to make him marry you, and then to stay with you.’
‘That’s a cynical view of our relationship.’
‘It’s the truth,’ I say. ‘Did he love you?’
‘Look at me! How could he not?’
She’s thin and crumbling and frail. ‘People don’t fall in love with a face,’ I tell her. ‘I’ve believed that he was wrong for leaving us, but all this is wrong. You let me blame Syrena, and you made me believe that getting engaged was my only path.’
‘Am I to take it that your priorities have changed?’ she asks. ‘Because, if you no longer care for our values, or the significance of this dress, I’ll find someone else who will benefit from them.’
I shake my head violently. ‘I promise to use this dress for its intended purpose, if you promise me in turn that you’ll let me stay in school, and decide what’s best for Stella.’
‘Very well,’ she shrugs, but she pulls the sapphire comb from my head; the comb she gave me after Syrena was born. ‘I’ll keep this in case it’s needed.’
‘Please don’t give it to Stella,’ I beg her.
I walk to the balcony and watch Syrena digging holes in the lawn with a long spade. Where the ground is particularly hard, she swaps her spade for a sabre-toothed fork. The white dress into which she’s been bribed and coaxed and finally forced is covered in muddy handprints, and she’s ripped off the bottom six inches and tied it like a bandanna to keep her hair off her face. Her refusal to wear shoes has annoyed me for years, but now, as she stands in the rose garden and digs her little feet into the soil, it’s not so hard to see her as the changeling I once feared, who has never been able to sever her roots.
‘Paula…’ says Seraphina quietly, and Paula is beside us in a second. ‘Retrieve the pickaxe from Syrena, por favor. She’s known to be incautious with weaponry.’
Edward is showing Syrena how to strike the earth for the best impact whilst hanging from a tree by his knees, his face red with pride and rush of blood and the effort of calling out to Stella. She looks towards him occasionally, shielding her eyes from the sun and nodding politely as he risks life and limb to impress her.
I’ve sometimes wondered if Jack and Edward are the wrong way around; that is, that feckless, daredevil Edward would be a better match for me, and that careful, hardworking Jack would be good for Stella. But perhaps it’s the balance that matters; perhaps Edward and I would kill each other, and Jack and Stella bore each other to death. It occurs to me to hope that Edward and Syrena never get better acquainted.
‘What don’t you want for her?’ Seraphina asks. ‘Everywhere she goes, people will notice her. They will envy her, and desire her, and adore her.’
‘They’ll hate her too,’ I say with a certainty I’ve never understood before. ‘They’ll hate her as they hate us.’
She looks at me in amusement. ‘What does that matter, if the end result is the same?’
She gestures at Edward, who’s performing a one-armed, death-defying feat that Stella has tired of watching. ‘She’ll have everything she wants in him alone.’
I hope that Syrena achieves her own ambition, because taming lions and jumping through fires and swinging on trapezes surely pose less threat than this household.
In a departure from normal behaviour, and possibly with some idea of rebellion, I hold out my arms to my sisters as I say goodbye. Entwined and intermingled, we’re a blur of fair hair and lacy tulle and golden flowers; and, flanked by their baby chests, I feel their hearts beat with mine. This is how they hold each other.
Waiting for Stella to smile requires time. It doesn’t occur to me until now that our father, with his busy schedule, and his limited patience, and his reticence to listen or see or hear, probably never once saw that smile.
Stella is summoned away while Syrena hangs back. She wiggles her toes in the grass, which for the first time makes me not irritated but envious. ‘Are you bringing any friends tonight?’
‘Only Jack,’ I say. ‘The girls will be busy.’
‘Even Libby?’ she says impatiently. ‘What are we paying her for? She’s no good.’
‘You’ve got your wires crossed,’ I say. ‘We don’t pay Libby.’
She nods her head emphatically. ‘Yes, Miss Hamilton. No, Miss Hamilton. I promise she’ll win, Miss Hamilton. Of course that will make Jack propose. Don’t fire me! Wow, a bonus? For me?’
Her voice is squeaky and seven years old but I let it merge into Libby’s imperious tone. As she puts her hands over her heart and flutters her eyelashes, I see Libby’s face so vividly that I know she’s telling the truth.
‘Who else knows about this?’ I ask, lowering my voice. ‘Does Stella know?’
‘No, they always make sure Stella isn’t around.’ She tugs my hand. ‘Can I get paid to be someone’s friend? Weapons don’t grow on trees.’
I stumble away, but turn as she calls after me. ‘I don’t think we’d have to pay Romy,’ she says, her face illuminated in excitement at her good idea. ‘She’d be your friend for free.’
Chapter Fifty-two
Romy
> Siena doesn’t reappear all afternoon, by which time rumours have begun that she’s left Temperley High for a Swiss finishing school, and the Starlets have degenerated into brief panic before recuperating with the help of a team-building swimming trip with the Stripes.
She joins me in the Art studio an hour before Elevation is due to begin. The hall is locked, so she’s as yet unaware of the success of her project. ‘You look very pretty,’ I tell her.
‘Of course I look pretty.’
I roll my eyes. ‘Modest much?’
‘Modesty has nothing to do with it,’ she says honestly. ‘People tell me I’m pretty as if … as if they’re accusing me of something awful.’
‘You make yourself as beautiful as you can be,’ I say. ‘You wear it like a weapon.’
‘It’s not a weapon; it’s armour. I don’t know what I’d be without it. And it makes me scared of what Stella will become. Of what that face will make her.’
‘Her face isn’t her, any more than your face is you,’ I say. ‘What do you want for her?’
‘I want her to cut off all that hair and run around barefoot,’ she says. ‘Walk the Inca Trail. Fall in love with someone who loves her for her.’
She rattles the darkroom door, and, finding it locked, flops restlessly onto a chair beside me. ‘Don’t tell me you actually want to get in there?’ I ask her.
She tries to work out what I know, but I keep my expression bland until she gives up. ‘Of course not. You’ll be lucky if I bother to take a single photograph for you.’
She stares at my replacement Inspiration painting, copied from a photograph of her family on a boat trip. ‘Where did you get this?’
‘Jack gave it to me,’ I say. ‘Don’t tell me it’s wrong again? You’ve written on the back that it was the best day of your life.’
We stare at this image of Siena looking great on a boat despite high winds, with baby sisters who adore the ground she walks on, that might be anyone’s perfect day.
‘It was the best day of my life,’ she says. ‘Stella nearly drowned that day.’
I pause in disbelief. ‘Siena, every time I think you’ve changed…’
She picks up a paintbrush and describes, in words that match her even strokes, sunbathing on a Capri beach until Syrena screams. Stella’s gone.
Siena runs into the sea, choking as waves crash over her head and the current pulls her under. She’s tipped up and down and tossed back and forth as her eyes and ears fill with water. Then she sees a shock of golden hair.
Back on the shore, Siena pounds Stella’s chest and screams her name until Stella opens her eyes, and Siena promises her, as she twists Stella’s hair around her arm like ivy that will destroy a building before it can be uprooted, that she’ll never lose her again.
And Siena adds something into the painting that’s not visible in the photograph – a hideous stuffed rabbit with red eyes and buck teeth.
‘Oh God,’ I say. ‘Syrena had lost that rabbit in the sea, hadn’t she? Stella was fetching it for her.’
Siena nods. ‘It washed up later, unfortunately, missing a paw.’
‘This was your best day?’ I ask doubtfully. ‘It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.’
‘It wasn’t fun at the time,’ she says. ‘Stella and Syrena had always been such a unit that I thought they didn’t need me. That was the first time I felt we all needed each other. I’d never known before that day that we only make sense as a three.’
We turn at a knock on the door. Jack is outside, and Siena gets up to leave. ‘Syrena did one more thing that wasn’t so terrible after all,’ she tells me. ‘She introduced me to you.’
Chapter Fifty-three
Siena
Under the arbour of apple trees where Jack and I first kissed, he takes out Edward’s Swiss Army knife and carves into the tree: Jack Lawrence + Siena Hamilton.
‘What’s that for?’ I ask. ‘I don’t think we’ll be soon forgotten.’
‘That depends on what you want your legacy to be. Perhaps you want to be remembered as Head Girl.’
‘And you as Head Boy,’ I say.
‘In some ways,’ he acknowledges. ‘But mostly I want to be remembered for things I’m proud of. And the thing I’m most proud of is right in front of me.’
Leaning forward, I kiss his jaw, feeling him shiver. He kisses the edge of my mouth. Then my back is pressing hard against the tree and he’s holding my hands.
‘Is this what you wanted?’ he asks.
‘Something like this,’ I hear myself say.
Running his hands over my dress, he circles my hip bones in a sensation of hot and cold and light and dark and strength and weakness and silence and noise. I watch his pupils dilate as I gently rake my fingernails up and down the insides of his wrists.
‘I missed you,’ he says right into my ear, but I turn away as he twists his arm into mine.
‘I should never have kissed you that day,’ I say. ‘Because you were with Romy and I knew that…’
I wonder at his insensitivity as he impatiently shakes his head. ‘Have you tortured yourself with that for all these years?’
‘You said when we got together that it ruined the possibility of a beautiful relationship,’ I remind him. ‘Because Romy has always been in love with you.’
‘Listen to me,’ he says slowly and clearly. ‘I’m not keeping this secret any longer. Romy is in love with you.’
Romy is in love with me. I begin to tell him that he’s wrong, but then I remember the way Romy looks at me and Jack, with longing and regret. I see the way she’s protected me, and jeopardized her school career for me, and I see that my betrayal did break her heart, but not for the reason I’ve always understood.
‘So I was your first?’ I ask.
‘You were my first and only.’ He pulls me close. ‘Last term I asked if you really loved me, aside from weddings and expectations and everything else that isn’t us.’
I open my mouth to tell him yes, but the word is inadequate, because I’d also use it to say yes I like that dress or yes I want to win the election or yes I’d like to fire Libby from a cannon. Instead I kiss him as I always have, except that now we play each other not like toys but like strings, as if it doesn’t matter that our connection grew from at best desire and at worst deceit, as long as it’s grown until it’s bigger than either of us. And that maybe, if all these feelings co-exist like pearl drops on a necklace, our feelings for each other can be infinite, and that this infinity can mean as much, or even be the same, as love.
Chapter Fifty-four
Romy
I leave the Art studio as the clock strikes eight, looking up at the clock tower as Siena drops her usual calling card: a golden leaf that flutters to the ground and lands by my feet.
When I join her in the tower, only a few minutes since we sat and painted together, something has changed. I’m certain – even without knowing how – what Jack has just told her, but, though I’ve spent five years protecting this secret, I find that I no longer mind.
‘You know, don’t you?’ I ask as I climb out of the window to sit beside her. ‘I can tell, because I’ve been here for three seconds and you haven’t tried to pick a fight yet.’
‘That can change in an instant,’ she says. ‘But I’d rather not risk it when we’re sitting on such a narrow ledge. Especially with your track record.’
‘I didn’t push Libby.’ It’s a relief to say this now that Libby has nothing to threaten me with.
Siena’s suddenly crying for a friendship that never existed. ‘You found out that she’s on my mother’s payroll.’
Siena’s mother is paying you to make Jack propose? I asked Libby that evening. I’d noticed that she became wealthier when Jack and Siena were happy. She took a lot of telephone calls that made her very scared. Her obsession with Siena and Jack overstepped the boundaries of normal friendship. But it wasn’t until I asked the question that I knew for sure. We were the last to climb down the ladder, and I held her
arm to stop her from leaving.
I receive an allowance, she said stiffly. For necessary expenses.
Siena’s mother pays your school fees, I said. She buys you handbags and presents. Your chauffeur really belongs to her. You wouldn’t be in this school without Siena.
It’s important that Siena follows the right path. Libby was absolutely serious. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interfere.
You can’t expect me to keep this from her, I protested.
She took a step away from me, keeping one foot on solid ground while the other hovered in space. Think carefully about that in light of the secret you’re hiding.
What secret? I asked, vainly hoping that she was bluffing.
Back in control, her expression was triumphant. You love Siena.
You can’t prove that. You can’t prove anything at all.
The way you look at her is proof enough, she said. I’m surprised the whole school doesn’t know. Not to mention the fact that your relationship with Jack was completely fake.
How can you be sure? I asked lamely. And why would that stop me telling Siena that her mother pays you?
She rolled her eyes. Please. You’re terrified of Siena finding out about your feelings for her. You think it’ll ruin your friendship, and you’re right. But, just to make sure, let’s call this insurance.
With an ear-splitting scream, she fell backwards through the trapdoor.
* * *
‘Why did you say that Jack was your boyfriend?’ Siena asks me now. ‘That first day, in the rain?’
‘I didn’t want to lose my best friend. My only friend. I knew as soon as he saw you that he’d no longer need me. Pretending he was my boyfriend was my only chance of keeping him.’
‘But it made me want him more,’ she smiles. ‘It made me jealous.’
‘How do you think I convinced him to go along with it?’ I ask her drily.
‘I’m sorry I stole him,’ she says. ‘Friend, boyfriend; I know now that it’s just as bad.’
‘Why do you come up here so much?’ I ask her. ‘It’s dark, and dank, and dusty … it’s the kind of place that you usually run a mile from.’