Valentine

by Jodi McAlister

  ‘Is that exactly what you said?’ I ask. ‘The exact words?’

  ‘They said that they would make sure that the Unseelie found no way of ever harming you,’ he says, ‘if I went with them willingly and promised to spend a year and a day with them. That’s it.’

  ‘All of it? Absolutely everything?’

  ‘Well, it’s not like we signed a contract in blood or anything,’ he says. ‘I was in kind of a hurry.’

  ‘Did they say when you had to spend this year with them?’

  He blinks. ‘What?’

  ‘Finn, you’re never going to die. If they didn’t say when you had to spend this year with them, then you can – in theory, anyway – put them off forever.’

  It takes a few seconds for the penny to drop. ‘Oh my God,’ he breathes.

  ‘You could go now, you could go in ten thousand years, you could go in ten thousand centuries,’ I say. ‘As long as you still theoretically intend to go sometime, you’re laughing.’

  A huge smile breaks out across his face. ‘I was . . . my mum – my dad – my brother,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know how – oh God. It’s all right. It’s all right!’

  I force myself to ignore the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. You’re smart, Pearl, but you’re seventeen. You saw through this in a second and they’ve had thousands of years of practice. There has to be a catch.

  But I’m not going to tell him that. This, at least, I can save him from.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says.

  He moves to hug me. I scramble backward before he touches me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  ‘What is it?’ he asks, hurt written large across his features. ‘It’s all over, Pearl. You’re safe and I get to stay here and –’

  ‘– we all get to live happily ever after?’

  ‘Well, why not?’

  ‘Finn,’ I say, ‘you might be a fairy and you might have woken me with a kiss, but this is not a fairytale.’

  ‘Is this your entire reason?’ he demands. ‘We can’t be together because you don’t like clichés?’

  ‘Of course not!’ I answer. ‘That’s not what I mean at all. It’s . . . what I mean is . . . life is more complicated than that.’

  He crosses his arms. ‘Why?’ he demands. ‘Why can’t we be together? That day we had together was the best day of my life and I’m pretty sure it was up there for you too. Why can’t we just keep going like that?’

  ‘In the real world,’ I say, ‘not every day is the first day of summer.’

  ‘One reason,’ he says. ‘Give me one reason why I shouldn’t walk over there and kiss you right now.’

  ‘Because I’ve told you I don’t want you to.’

  ‘Pearl –’ he takes a deep breath. ‘Okay, I’ll rephrase. Why don’t you want me to walk over there and kiss you?’

  I want to look away, but I don’t let myself. ‘Because even though you’ve explained it very prettily,’ I say, ‘you were in my mind, and that totally freaks me out.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘and I know it was wrong, and I’ll learn to control it and it’ll never happen again, but I can’t go back in my life and erase all my mistakes. I have a bunch of powers, but that’s not one of them.’

  ‘It’s not the only reason,’ I say.

  ‘What, there’s a list?’

  ‘I can’t think straight when I’m near you, Finn,’ I say. ‘You – you confuse me. You make me feel things – make me want things –’

  ‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it?’ he says desperately. ‘If we’re going to be together, I want you to feel like that.’

  ‘To not be myself?’

  ‘No! Stop twisting my words! I want you, and I want you to want me, and it sounds like you do, which is good. How isn’t that good?’

  ‘It’s too fast.’

  ‘You can’t map this kind of thing out! It doesn’t happen to a schedule or –’

  I take a big step towards him and put my finger against his lips. He stops talking. The all-too-familiar electricity courses through my body, but my will is stronger than my goddamn nervous system.

  ‘I’m not saying no,’ I say softly, taking my finger away. ‘Just not yet.’

  ‘I want you so badly,’ he whispers.

  ‘This all happened so quickly,’ I say. ‘It was like . . . it was one big adrenaline rush, and it was all intense . . .’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he says.

  ‘We’ve never been together when it’s calm, Finn,’ I say. ‘We’ve never sat through the day-to-day mundane things in our lives, we’ve never talked, we’ve never . . .’ my mind drifts to Phil, lying in that hospital bed, ‘. . . we’ve never been friends.’

  ‘You’re not seriously going to tell me that you just want to be friends, are you?’ he groans.

  ‘I want you so badly it makes my head spin and my heart ache and it feels like everything in the world is this tunnel which leads to you,’ I say honestly. ‘I want you. But I don’t know if I know you. And I don’t know if I like you. And even if you have been in my dreams, you’re in exactly the same position.’

  He doesn’t say anything. He looks at his feet.

  ‘Do you understand?’ I ask.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Finn –’

  ‘But if it’s what you want,’ he says, looking at me, ‘then that’s what we’ll do.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I whisper.

  He closes his eyes and for a long moment, there is silence. The whole world has narrowed to him and me, standing by the window, the last rays of sunshine illuminating us. ‘I was so scared,’ he says suddenly. ‘When I realised what you’d done, where you’d gone . . . I thought I’d never see you again. So I went running into the bush until I heard their music, and . . .’

  His voice trails off.

  ‘You gave up your secret for me,’ I say.

  ‘After all the crap you’ve already taken for me, it was the least I could do.’

  I let this one pass. I know if we stray back into sentimental territory, then my resolve will weaken. ‘Jenny and Kel,’ I ask. ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘Oh, well, they’re not dead,’ he says. ‘Even if the Seelie knew how to kill another fairy, they wouldn’t do it – killing’s not in our nature.’

  I think of Dave, wheezing his life away, and beg to differ. Soon, he’ll be just as dead as the person whose heart Kel tore out – the person that is not Cardy, but who was a person nonetheless. ‘Go on.’

  ‘The woman went for Jenny,’ he says, ‘and the guy went for the horse, and . . . I’m not sure what happened next, because I was in the water by then, looking for you, but Jenny and Kel looked, later . . . sort of broken, like the light had seeped out of them. They weren’t anything too powerful, I think . . . they were just minions, so . . . I don’t even know, really. They’ll have gone back to the Unseelie by now.’

  ‘So the Unseelie will be after you now and not me,’ I say. ‘Surely they’ll have worked out that you’re the Valentine.’

  ‘I guess. But you know too much, and so the Unseelie will still be after you as well,’ he says. ‘But the Seelie should protect you. It was part of the deal.’

  ‘But what about you?’ I ask.

  He shrugs. ‘I can look after myself.’

  I roll my eyes.

  ‘Hey!’ he objects.

  ‘That is such a guy thing to say,’ I say.

  ‘Well, you know, being a guy, I think it’s my – what’s that word? The one in that Britney song?’

  ‘Prerogative?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I know words!’

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘the Britney song!’

  He looks away, embarrassed. ‘Shut up.’

  ‘You have a secret Britney addiction, don’t you?’

  ‘I am neither confirming nor denying –’


  I double over laughing.

  ‘I’m glad you find it so amusing,’ he says icily.

  ‘If anyone knew –’ I wheeze, ‘– about this, then –’

  ‘No one will ever know,’ he says, ‘because if you ever tell them, then I will –’

  ‘You will what?’

  ‘Think of some incredibly creative form of revenge which I haven’t yet thought of but which will obviously be brilliant.’

  He looks at me and I look at him and although this isn’t over yet, not even close, I know somehow that for now, we’re all right. We’re cool.

  We laugh and laugh and laugh as the sun goes down.

  My school uniform feels foreign to me, my schoolbag a strange and unusual weight on my back. I scratch my shoulder as I stand outside the school gates. I didn’t remember my uniform being so itchy.

  A whole ton of people say hello to me as I stand there waiting. ‘Oh, wow, you’re back!’ Annabel exclaims. Tillie hugs me. Nearly all the teachers stop and tell me how good it is to see me back.

  There are a lot of people who aren’t back, some of whom will never be back again. Marie. Cardy. Holly-Anne. Phil. But those are other problems for other days, darknesses that I have dwelt on too often lately. Right now, I just want to get through my first day back at school.

  And there’s someone I want to share it with.

  ‘Hey!’ I call out as he approaches.

  ‘Hi,’ he says, smiling broadly.

  And then there’s another silence. Just when I thought we’d got over them.

  ‘So this is weird,’ he comments.

  ‘It’ll take some getting used to,’ I agree.

  I know that his hands are itching to touch me. I know because I feel the same way. But he keeps them in his pockets and I keep mine firmly by my sides.

  ‘School uniform suits you,’ he says.

  ‘Suits you too,’ I say, ‘though I can lie, so you’re just going to have to trust me on that one.’

  He laughs. ‘Come on.’

  And so, not touching but together, far apart but close, friends, captains, and something else indefinable, we walk into school.

  When I nearly killed the old man I knew I had to find a new job.

  It was awful. It ranks up there with some of my all time most awful moments – which says a lot, considering the last few months of my life have not exactly been what you would call happy party fun times. And what makes it worse is that I knew it was coming. I knew. But no, I had to be all ‘tra-la-la, nothing is wrong, I am fine, I can deal with anything, ahahaha’.

  I couldn’t deal with it.

  I was sitting in the lifeguard chair at the pool when it happened. I had my maths homework on my lap, drumming my fingers against my textbook and thinking intently about the way the tendons move in Finn’s hands when he digs his compass point into the desks at school when I heard the old man spluttering. I looked up, and there he was, floundering in the deep end.

  I scrambled down from the chair on autopilot. This wasn’t a new experience. I’d done this a bajillion times before. Old people get into trouble sometimes at the pool, and dragging them out is second nature. My maths homework fell to the ground (and landed, as I discovered later, in a puddle, because not enough stuff has gone wrong in my life lately). I took two steps towards the water, braced my legs to dive in, and –

  – nothing. I stood there frozen like an idiot for nearly a full minute before the squad swimmers in lane two saw what was happening and did my job for me. And even then, even when the old man was safe, I barely noticed. All I could see was water, and all I could feel was teeth, and did you really just wake me with a kiss did you really just wake me with a kiss?

  ‘What happened, Pearl?’ my boss asked me afterwards.

  I couldn’t tell him what happened. I quit my job instead.

  It was probably for the best. I mean, obviously the old people of Haylesford are now safe from my lifeguarding ineptitude – yay for them, I guess – but it’s not like it was a great job with an awesome boss or anything. I mean, not only did my boss give my job to vile Kel Greene the secret carnivorous horse-man while I was sick a couple of months ago, he completely failed to notice that since I’d been back at the pool, I hadn’t once gone in the water. Seems like a pretty basic thing to notice when you’re employing someone as a lifeguard.

  So now here I am, sitting in the library at school at lunch, working on my résumé. It’s a gorgeous November day and everyone’s out on the oval doing outdoor things – treating the playground like a playground, even though we’re technically in our last year of school now and way too adult to do anything as childish as ‘play’. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, bunnies and rainbows and good dreams are raining down from the perfect fluffy clouds, etc etc, so of course I’m staying inside to avoid it all.

  Something’s tapping. I look down and see it’s my fingers, drumming a beat on the desk. I clench my hands into fists. If you’ve ever tried to do this when your fingers are as bruised and battered as mine currently are, you’ll know it hurts like a mofo.

  But I don’t mind the pain, really. It keeps me focused, reminds me I’m still alive.

  Phil walks past the library window. Her boyfriend Julian is trailing behind her, saying something to her, but I don’t think she’s listening to him – she just keeps walking.

  I clench my fists tighter.

  I stare determinedly at what I have on the computer screen, trying to block out everything else in the world around me. Name: Pearl Linford. Age: 17 years. Year 12 student and School Captain-elect at Haylesford High. Previous employment: occasional bar singer at The Saffron Room (ongoing), lifeguard at Haylesford Leisure Centre.

  I am a keen and eager young individual with a great attitude. I am a quick learner, as well as being punctual, enthusiastic, responsible, and a hard worker. I have great organisational skills and am a strong problem-solver who is capable of working alone and in a team.

  Great. Some résumé.

  I recently overcame significant adversity when pursued by fairies, who thought I was some kind of lost princess. Some of them wanted to kidnap me, some of them wanted to kill me, but I managed to stay alive (though it’s not like I had anything to do with it – this guy that I can’t stop having intensely sexy dreams about saved the day while I nearly got eaten like a moron). I had to quit my last job because I’m now terrified of water. I spend all my time outside school and the job I no longer have trying to recreate a piece of music I once heard in the woods (it was the soundtrack to a girl dancing on hot coals, and I’m so obsessed with it that I’ve nearly broken my fingers from so much time in front of my keyboard).

  I avoid my problems rather than deal with them. I avoid people rather than deal with them. I am completely emotionally dysfunctional. I lie about everything all the time, because if I told the truth, a) you’d lock me up in a mental hospital, and b) I’d probably get you killed. Which I’ll probably do by working for you, so yes, you should absolutely employ me.

  My fingers are tapping against the desk again. I sit on my hands.

  And then I sigh, delete everything on the screen, sling my bag over my shoulder, and head to the music room, for another lonely lunchtime with the piano and the song I’ll never be able to capture, because I’m not magical. I’m not special. I’m terribly, horribly, awfully ordinary.

  About the Author

  Jodi is an author and academic from Kiama, a seaside holiday town on the south coast of New South Wales. She is a literary historian, and her PhD was awarded by Macquarie University in 2015. She is currently a lecturer in English at the University of Tasmania. Her academic work focuses on the history of love, sex, women and girls, popular culture and literature. It means that reading romance novels and watching The Bachelor is technically work for her.

  You can find Jodi on Twitter at @JodiMcA, where she tweets regularly about her research, her writing, cool things she finds interesting, her hero worship of Kate Bush and rainbows ou
tside her office window.

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

  India | New Zealand | South Africa | China

  Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies

  whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  First published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd, 2017

  Text copyright © Jodi McAlister, 2017

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Design by Marina Messiha © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Cover artwork by Marina Messiha and Shutterstock/vso

  penguin.com.au

  ISBN: 978-1-76014-298-8

  THE BEGINNING

  Let the conversation begin...

  Follow the Penguin Twitter

  Keep up-to-date with all our stories YouTube

  Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your Pinterest

  Like ‘Penguin Books’ on Facebook

  Find out more about the author and

  discover more stories like this at penguin.com.au