Secret Place (9780698170285)

by French, Tana

  Julia puts her cup down on a windowsill. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Finn, who apparently catches on fast, do the same thing.

  Becca falls over. Sister Cornelius gets a wild missionary look and charges off down the hall, shoving dancers out of her way right and left, to interrogate Becca and breathalyze her and run tests for Young People’s Drugs. Holly will deal with her, no problem; grown-ups believe Holly, maybe because of her dad’s job, maybe just because of the total sincere commitment she puts into lying. “Go,” Julia says, and zips out the door, hearing the slam behind her a split second later but she doesn’t look round till she’s down the corridor and into the dark maths room and the footsteps echoing behind her turn into Finn swinging around the door frame.

  Moonlight stripes the room, tangles confusingly in chairbacks and desk-legs. The music has turned into a distant hysterical pounding and shrieking, like someone has a tiny Rihanna locked in a box. “Nice,” Julia says. “Shut the door.”

  “Fuck,” Finn says, banging his shin off a chair.

  “Shh. Anyone see us go?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  Julia is unscrewing the window bolt, moonlight slipping over her fast-moving hands. “They’ll have someone patrolling the grounds,” Finn says. “Or anyway they do at our dances.”

  “I know. Shut up. And get back; you want to get seen?”

  They wait, backs against the wall, listening to the small tinny shrieking, keeping one eye on the empty sweep of grass and one on the classroom door. Someone’s forgotten a uniform jumper, squiggled down the back of a chair seat; Julia grabs it and pulls it on, over her polka-dot dress. It’s not exactly flattering—it’s too big and it has boob dents—but it’s warm, and they can feel the outdoors cold striking through the glass. Finn zips up his hoodie.

  The shadows come first, sliding around the corner of the boarders’ wing, long on the ground. Sister Veronica and Father Niall from Colm’s, marching side by side, heads whipping back and forth while they scan every inch of cover.

  When they stomp out of sight, Julia counts twenty to let them get around the corner of the nuns’ wing, ten more in case they stopped to look at something, ten more just in case. Then she shoves up the window, braces her back against the frame, swings her feet around and slides out to drop on the grass: one move, smooth enough that if Finn’s mind hadn’t been occupied he would have copped this wasn’t her first time. As she hears him land behind her she takes off, running fast and easy for the cover of the trees, her ears still ringing from the music, stars jingling overhead to the beat of her footsteps.

  Red lights, pink, white, spinning strange crisscrossing patterns like coded signals gone too fast to catch. The beat in the floor and the walls and in all of their bones, pulsing through them like electric current, leaping from one lifting hand to the next all along the hall, never letting up for a second, go go go.

  Selena’s been dancing too long. The weaving lights are starting to look like living things, giddy and desperately lost. Selena’s going watery at the edges, starting to lose hold of the boundary line where she leaves off and other things start. Over by the punch table Chris Harper tilts back his head to drink and Selena can taste it, someone bashes into her hip and she can’t tell whether the pain belongs to her or them, Becca’s arms rise and they feel like hers. She knows to stop dancing.

  “You OK?” Holly yells, without breaking the beat.

  “Drink,” Selena yells back, pointing at the punch table. Holly nods and goes back to trying out some complicated hip-and-footwork. Becca is jumping up and down. Julia’s gone, sneaked out somehow; Selena can feel the gap in the room where she should be. It throws things even more off balance. She puts her feet down carefully, trying to feel them. Reminds herself: Valentine’s dance.

  The punch tastes all wrong, grassy-cool long-ago summer afternoons running barefoot in and out of open doors, not right for this sweaty thumping dark tangle. Selena leans back against the wall and thinks about things with lots of weight and no give. The periodic table. Irish verb conjugations. The music has gone a notch quieter, but it’s still getting in her way. She wishes she could put her fingers in her ears for a second, but her hands don’t feel like hers and getting them to her ears seems too complicated.

  “Hi,” someone says, next to her.

  It’s Chris Harper. A while back this would have surprised Selena—Chris Harper is super-cool and she’s not; she doesn’t think she’s ever had an actual conversation with him before. But the last few months have been their own place, lush and waving with startling things Selena knows she doesn’t need to understand. At this point she expects them.

  “Hi,” she says.

  Chris says, “I like your dress.”

  “Thanks,” Selena says, looking down to remind herself. The dress is confusing. She tells herself: 2013.

  “Huh?” Chris says.

  Crap. “Nothing.”

  Chris looks at her. “Are you OK?” he asks. And, like he thinks she might be dizzy, before she can move away, he puts out a hand to cup her bare arm.

  Everything slams into focus, bright colors inside sharp outlines. Selena can feel her feet again, tingling fiercely like they’ve been asleep. The prickle of her zipper down her back is a tiny precise line. She’s looking straight into Chris’s eyes, hazel even in the dimness, but somehow she can see the hall as well and the lights aren’t signals or lost things, they’re lights and she never knew anything could be so red and so pink and so white. The whole room is solid, it’s vivid and humming with its own clarity. Chris—light glossing his hair, warming his red shirt, catching the small puzzled furrow in between his eyebrows—is the realest thing she’s ever seen.

  “Yeah,” she says. “I’m fine.”

  “Sure?”

  “Totally.”

  Chris takes his hand off Selena’s arm. Instantly that clarity blinks out; the hall turns jerky and messy again. But she still feels solid and warm all over, and Chris still looks real.

  He says, “I thought . . .”

  He’s looking at her like he’s never seen her before; like some ghost of what just happened found its way into him, too. He says, “You looked . . .”

  Selena smiles at him. She says, “I felt weird for a second. I’m OK now.”

  “Some girl fainted earlier, did you see? It’s boiling in here.”

  “Is that how come you’re not dancing?”

  “I was, before. I just felt like watching for a while.” Chris takes a swallow of his punch and makes a face at the cup.

  Selena doesn’t move away. The handprint on her arm is shining red-gold, floating in the dark air. She wants to keep talking to him.

  “You’re friends with her,” Chris says. “Right?”

  He’s pointing at Becca. Becca is dancing like an eight-year-old but the kind of eight-year-old who barely existed even back when they were eight, the kind who’s never even seen a music video: no booty-shake, no hip-wiggle, no chest-thrust, just dancing, like no one’s ever told her there’s a right way; like she’s doing it just for her own fun.

  “Yeah,” Selena says. Seeing Becca makes her smile. Becca looks totally happy. Holly doesn’t; Marcus Wiley is dancing behind her, trying to rub up against her arse.

  “Why’s she wearing that?”

  Becca is wearing jeans and a white camisole with lace at the edges, and she has her hair in a long plait. “She likes it,” Selena explains. “She doesn’t really like dresses.”

  “What, is she a lesbian?”

  Selena considers that. “I don’t think so,” she says.

  Marcus Wiley is still trying to rub up against Holly. Holly stops dancing, turns around, and spells something out in small words. Marcus’s mouth opens and he stands there, blinking, till Holly gives him an off-you-go finger-wave; then he half dances off, trying to look like he just happens to be edging away, and m
anically checking whether anyone saw whatever just happened. Holly holds out her hands to Becca and they start spinning around. This time they both look happy. Selena almost laughs out loud.

  “You should’ve talked to her,” Chris says. “Got her to wear something normal. Or even something like what you’re wearing.”

  “Why?” Selena asks.

  “Because look.” He nods at Joanne, who is wiggling to the music and gabbling something in Orla’s ear at the same time. Both of them are wearing smirks and staring over at Becca and Holly. “They’re slagging her off.”

  Selena asks, “How come you care?”

  She’s not being snippy, she just wonders—she wouldn’t have guessed that Chris even knew Becca existed—but Chris glances around sharply. “I’m not into her! Jesus.”

  “OK,” Selena says.

  Chris goes back to watching the dance floor. He says something, but the DJ is fading up a song loaded with bass, and Selena can’t hear. “What?” she yells.

  “I said she reminds me of my sister.” The DJ slides the volume up to earthquake level. “Jesus!” Chris yells, a sudden rush of irritation jerking his head back. “This fucking noise!”

  Joanne’s spotted them; her eyes snap away when she sees Selena looking, but the curl to her top lip says she’s not pleased. Selena shouts, “Let’s go outside.”

  Chris stares, trying to work out if she means what most girls would mean. Selena can’t think of a good way to explain, so she doesn’t try. “How?” he yells, eventually.

  “Let’s just ask.”

  He looks at her like she’s mental, but not in a bad way. “Since we’re not going to be snogging,” Selena explains, “we don’t need somewhere private, just somewhere quiet. We can sit right outside the doors. They might be OK with that.”

  Chris looks taken aback about five different ways. Selena waits, but when he doesn’t come up with anything, she says, “Come on,” and heads for the doors.

  Most times people would be staring at them all the way, but Fergus Mahon just poured punch down Garret Neligan’s collar so Garret Neligan tackled him and they fell over on top of Barbara O’Malley who has spent the last couple of weeks telling everyone that her dress is by Roksanda Somebody and who is screaming at the top of her lungs. Chris and Selena are invisible.

  Something is on their side, smoothing the way for them. Even at the doors: if Sister Cornelius was there, they’d have no chance—even if Sister Cornelius wasn’t crazy, this year the nuns take one look at Selena and get the urge to lock her up, for guys’ sake or hers or the sake of morality in general, probably even they don’t know—but it’s Miss Long standing guard, while Sister Cornelius is off shouting at Fergus and Garret.

  “Miss Long,” Selena yells. “Can we go sit on the stairs?”

  “Of course not,” Miss Long says, distracted by Annalise Fitzpatrick and Ken O’Reilly huddled together in a corner, with one of Ken’s hands out of view.

  “We’ll just be right out there. At the bottom of the steps, where you can see us. We just want to talk.”

  “You can talk here.”

  “We can’t. It’s too loud, and it’s . . .” Selena spreads out her hands at the lights and the dancers and everything. She says, “We want to talk properly.”

  Miss Long takes her eye off Annalise and Ken for a second. She examines Selena and Chris skeptically. “‘Properly,’” she says.

  Something makes Selena smile at her, a burst of a smile, real and radiant. She doesn’t mean to; it happens by itself, out of nowhere, because there’s a pinwheel whirl deep in her chest telling her something amazing is happening.

  For half a second, Miss Long almost smiles back. She presses her lips together and it’s gone. “All right,” she says. “At the bottom of those stairs. I will be checking on you every thirty seconds, and if you’re not there, or if you’re so much as holding hands, you will both be in enormous trouble. More trouble than you can even imagine. Is that clear?”

  Selena and Chris nod, putting in every drop of sincerity they can find. “It’d better be,” Miss Long says, with one eye on Sister Cornelius. “Now go on. Go.”

  As she turns away from them, her eyes sweep the hall like for that minute it’s turned different, it’s leapt up to meet her sparkling and strawberry-sweet and chiming with maybes. Selena, slipping out the door, understands that she and Chris weren’t the ones who got the permission; that it was a decades-lost boy at some half-forgotten dance, his bright eager face, his laugh.

  15

  Conway banged the door open hard enough that I jumped a mile, hands leaping out of the wardrobe like I’d been doing something dirty. The corner of a grin, malicious, said she hadn’t missed it.

  She dumped her bag on Rebecca’s bed. “How’d you get on?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing. Julia’s got half a pack of smokes and a lighter wrapped up in a scarf at the back of her bit of wardrobe. That’s it.”

  “Good little girls,” Conway said, not like a compliment. She was moving around the room, fast, tilting the frames on the bedside tables to glance at the photos; or to make sure the room looked good and searched. “Any of them come looking for you? Looking to talk, jump your bones, whatever?”

  I shut my mouth on the slice of shadow at the door; maybe that grin, maybe the fact that I couldn’t swear there had been anything there. “Nah.”

  “They’ll come. The longer we leave them to it, the tighter they’ll wind themselves. I listened outside the common room: they’re up to ninety, the place sounds like a wasps’ nest. Give them long enough and someone’ll snap.”

  I shoved Selena’s flute case back into the wardrobe, shut the door on it. “How’s Alison getting on?”

  Conway snorted. “Tucked up in the sick room like she’s dying in some season finale. Little fadey voice on her and all. She’s having a great old time. The arm’s grand, almost; the mark’s still there, but the blisters have gone down. I’d say she’d be back in the common room by now, only McKenna’s hoping the mark’ll go, doesn’t want the rest of them gawping at it.” She pulled Holly’s book out of her bedside table, zipped a nail through the pages and tossed it back in. “I tried to get at whether Joanne put the whole stunt in Alison’s head, but the minute she heard Chris’s name she shut down, gave me the bunny stare. I don’t blame her: McKenna and Arnold were right there, dying to jump on anything they didn’t like. So I backed off.”

  I said, “How about the phone?”

  Triumph lifted Conway’s chin. Winning looked good on her. She flipped her satchel open, held up an evidence bag. The mobile I’d seen on Alison’s bed: pretty pearly-pink flip-phone, small enough to fit in a palm, silver charm dangling. Chris had picked carefully.

  “Alison got it off Joanne. She didn’t like admitting it; tried to dodge, pretended she felt faint. I didn’t fall for it, kept pushing, in the end she came clean. Joanne sold her the phone just after last Christmas, a year and a bit ago. Sixty quid, she charged her. Robbing bitch.”

  Conway threw the phone back in her satchel, started circling again. The triumph had worn off fast. “That’s all Alison would give me, though. When I started asking about where Joanne got the phone, why she was selling it, Alison went whiny on me: ‘I don’t know I don’t know my arm hurts I feel dizzy can I have a drink of water?’ That helium voice girls do, what the fuck is that? Do guys think that’s sexy?”

  “Never thought about it,” I said. Conway was still moving. Something had her wound tight. I stayed back against the wall, out of her way. “Does nothing for me, anyway.”

  “Makes me want to punch them in the mouth. There’s nothing left on the phone from before last Christmas, no texts, no call logs: Joanne wiped it before she sold it. Here’s the good part, though. Alison didn’t swap her old SIM card into Joanne’s phone. When she bought it, her old one was out of credit, and Joanne’s one had twenty-odd quid left on
it, so she just binned her old one and switched to using Joanne’s number. Which means we don’t need to track that number down, beg the network for the records, all that shit: we’ve got them already. Me and Costello pulled records on half the school, last year, including Alison. I rang Sophie; she’ll have them e-mailed to me any minute.”

  “Hang on,” I said. “I thought you said none of the girls’ numbers linked up to Chris’s.”

  “They didn’t. But if Chris gave Joanne this phone”—Conway gave her bag a slap, as she paced past—“to keep the relationship secret, that means he thought people might go through their normal phones. Right?”

  “Kids snoop.”

  “Kids, parents, teachers, whoever. People snoop. If Chris didn’t want that, and he was loaded, like Julia said? I guarantee he had a dedicated girlie-phone of his own. We go through the records off Joanne’s one”—another slap to the bag, harder—“what’s the odds we find one number showing up for a couple of months before last Christmas, a shitload of contact back and forth?”

  I said, “And then we check that number, Chris’s secret number, for links to the phone that texted me today. If he did this with one girl, chances are he did it with a few. If Selena actually was with him, she might have her own spare phone lying around.”

  “We cross-check Chris’s secret number for links to everyone. I knew, back last year, I knew it was weird he didn’t have his phone on him. These kids, they don’t take a shite without bringing their phones along. I should’ve—Jesus!” A savage kick to Rebecca’s bedpost; it had to hurt, but Conway kept pacing circles like she felt nothing. “I should’ve fucking known.”

  There it was. Anything like reassurance—No way you could know, no one could’ve—would get me ripped apart. “If Joanne’s our woman,” I said, “she’d have a good reason to take Chris’s phone off his body. It would’ve linked her to him.”