by French, Tana
The back gate is old wrought iron, backed with ugly sheet metal to stop anyone getting ideas about climbing, but the stone wall is rough with age, handholds and footholds everywhere. Back in first year Selena and Becca used to climb up and balance along the top, so high that sometimes passers-by on the lane outside walked right under them without ever realizing they were there. Becca fell off and broke her wrist, but that didn’t stop them.
Chris isn’t there.
Selena presses into the shadow of the wall and waits, trying to muffle her breathing to nothing. A fresh kind of fear is rising inside her, whirling and horrible: What if none of those texts were him at all, what if he was setting me up with some friend of his and that’s who shows up—what if the whole thing was one huge big joke and they’re all waiting to jump out from somewhere and howl laughing, I’ll never live it down ever—serve me right— The sounds in the dark are still circling, the moon overhead is sharp-edged enough to slice your hands to separate bones if you dared lift them. Selena wants to run. She can’t move.
When the shape rises over the top of the wall, black against the stars, pulling itself up to hunch above her, she can’t scream. She can’t even try to understand what it is; she only knows something has turned solid and come for her at last.
Then it whispers, “Hey,” in Chris’s voice. The sound zaps white lightning across her eyes. Then she remembers why she’s there.
“Hey,” she whispers back, shaking and hoping. The black shape rears up on top of the wall, miles high, stands tall and straight for a second and then soars.
He lands with a thud. “Jesus, I’m glad it’s you! I couldn’t see you properly, I was thinking it was a watchman or a nun or—”
He’s laughing under his breath, brushing down his jeans where the leap landed him on his knees. Selena thought she remembered what he was like, how when he’s there the world snaps into focus almost too real to bear, but he hits her like a searchlight to the face all over again. The vividness of him sends the circling things scuttling backwards into the darkness. She’s laughing too, breathless and giddy with relief. “No! There is a watchman, though, he checks this gate when he does his rounds—we’ve seen him. We have to move. Come on.”
She’s already moving, backwards and beckoning down the path, with Chris bounding after her. Now that the terror’s gone she can smell the air, rich and pulsing with a thousand signs of spring.
There are benches along the paths, and Selena’s aiming for one of those, the one shadowed under a wide oak between two open stretches of grass, so you can see anyone coming before they see you. The best thing would be one of the deepest corners of the grounds, the ones where you have to fight through bushes and clamber over awkward undergrowth to find a tiny patch of grass to sit on—she knows them all—but you would have to sit close, almost touching already. The benches are wide enough to leave an arm’s length between you. See, she says in her mind, see, I’m being safe. Nothing comes back.
As they pass the rise to the glade, Chris’s head turns. “Hey,” he says. “Let’s go up there.”
That dark prickle hits Selena’s back again. She says, “There’s a place just down here that’s really nice.”
“Just for a minute. It reminds me of somewhere.”
She can’t think of a reason to say no. She climbs the slope side by side with Chris and tells herself maybe it’s on purpose to help her, maybe the glade is going to keep her untempted, but she knows: she’s not getting help tonight. As they step into the clearing the cypress branches boil and hiss. This is a bad idea.
In the middle of the clearing, Chris turns, his face tipped up to the stars. He’s smiling, a small private smile. He says, “It’s good here.”
Selena says, “Where does it remind you of?”
“There’s this place. Near home.” He’s still turning, looking up at the trees; it catches at Selena, the way he looks at them like they matter, like he wants to remember every detail. “It’s just an old house, Victorian or something, I don’t know. I found it when I was a kid, maybe seven; it was empty, like you could tell it’d been abandoned for ages—holes in the roof, the windows were all broken and boarded up . . . It’s got this big garden, and right in one corner there was a circle of trees. Not the same kind as these—I don’t know what they are, I don’t know that stuff—but still. It reminded me.”
He catches her eye and pulls back into a shrug and a half laugh. In texts they’ve talked about stuff Selena doesn’t even tell the others, but this is different; they’re so close they make each other’s skin fizz. “I mean, I don’t go there now. Someone bought it a couple of years back; they started locking the gates. I climbed up and looked over the wall once, and there were a couple of cars in the drive. I don’t know if they actually live there, or if they did it up, or what. Anyway.” He heads over to the edge of the clearing and starts poking a foot into the undergrowth. “Do animals live in here? Like rabbits or foxes?”
Selena says, “Did you go there when you wanted to be on your own?”
Chris turns and looks at her. “Yeah,” he says, after a moment. “When things weren’t great at home. Sometimes I’d get up really early, like five in the morning, and I’d go there for a couple of hours. Just to sit there. Out in the garden, if it wasn’t raining, or inside if it was. Then I’d go home, before anyone else was awake, and get back into bed. They never even knew I was gone.”
In that instant it’s him, the same guy whose texts she’s cupped in her hands like fireflies. He says, “I never told anyone that before.” He’s smiling at her, half startled, half shy.
Selena wants to smile back and tell him how she and the others come to the glade, in exchange, but she can’t; not till she’s cleared away the thing pinching at her. She says, “The phone. The one you gave me.”
“You like it?” But he’s looked away again. He’s peering back under the cypresses, even though there’s no way he could see into that dark. “There could even be badgers in here.”
“Alison Muldoon’s got one exactly the same. So’s Aileen Russell, in fourth year. So’s Claire McIntyre.”
Chris laughs, but it sounds like an attack and he doesn’t feel like the guy she knows any more. “So? You can’t have the same phone as any other girl? Jesus, I didn’t think you were that type.”
Selena flinches. She can’t think of anything to say that won’t make everything even worse. She says nothing.
He starts moving again, fast mean-dog circles round the clearing. “OK. I gave phones like that to some other girls. Not Alison Whatever, but the others: yeah. A couple more, too. And? You don’t own me. We’re not even going out. What do you care who else I text?”
Selena stays very still. She wonders if this is her punishment: this, like a whipping, and then he’ll be gone and she can drag herself home through the dark and pray that nothing comes skulking to the smell of blood off her. And the whole thing will be over.
After a moment Chris stops circling. He shakes his head, almost violently. “Sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t’ve . . . But those other girls, they were months ago. I’m not in touch with any of them any more. I swear. OK?”
Selena says, “That’s not what I meant. I don’t care about that.” She thinks that’s true. “Just: when you say you’ve never told anyone something before, I don’t want to wonder if you’ve actually told the same story to a dozen other people and said ‘I never told anyone this before’ every time.”
He opens his mouth and she knows he’s going to rip her apart, rip this into shreds they can never put back together. Then he rubs his hands up the sides of his jaw, hard, clasps them behind his head. He says, “I don’t think I know how to do this.”
Selena waits. She doesn’t know what to hope.
“I should go. We can keep texting; I’d rather just do that than try seeing each other and have the whole thing go tits-up.”
Selena
says, before she knows she’s going to, “It’s not like this has to go tits-up.”
“Yeah? We’ve been here two seconds, and look at us. I shouldn’t have come.”
“That’s just being dramatic. We were fine outside the dance. All we have to do is talk to each other. Properly.”
Chris stares at her. After a moment he says, “OK: I meant it. I never told anyone about the house before.”
Selena nods. “See?” she says, “How hard was that?” and grins at him, and gets a startled half laugh back. Chris blows out a long breath, and loosens.
“I survived.”
“So you don’t have to leave. It won’t go tits-up.”
He says, “I should’ve been straight with you about the phone. Instead of . . .”
“Yeah.”
“Being a prick to you, and all. That was shit. Sorry.”
“It’s OK,” Selena says.
“Yeah? We’re OK?”
“We’re fine.”
“God. Phew.” Chris does a big exaggerated forehead-swipe, but he means it. He crouches to feel the grass. “It’s dry,” he says, dropping down, and touches a spot beside him.
When Selena doesn’t move, he says, “I’m not going to . . . I mean, don’t worry, I know you’re not—or we’re not— Jesus. I can’t talk. I’m not going to try anything. OK?”
Selena is laughing. “Relax,” she says. “I know what you mean,” and she goes over and sits down next to him.
They sit there for a while, not talking, not even looking at each other, just getting used to the shapes of them in the shape of the clearing. Selena feels the hidden things thinning away to black veils you could pop with a fingertip, puddling into harmless sleep on the ground. She’s a foot away from Chris, but that side of her is rich with the warmth off him. He has his hands clasped around his knees—they’re like a man’s hands, strong-knuckled and wide—and his head tilted back to look at the sky.
“I’ll tell you something else I’ve never told anyone before,” he says quietly, after a while. “You know what I’m going to do? When I’m old enough, I’m going to buy that house. I’ll fix up the whole place, and then I’ll invite all my friends round and we’ll have a party that lasts like a week. Great music, and lots of drink and hash and E, and the house is big enough that when people get tired they can just go off to one of the bedrooms and crash for a while and then come back to the party, right? Or if they want some privacy or just some quiet, there are all these empty rooms, there’s the whole garden. Whatever mood you’re in, whatever you need right then, this place will have it.”
His face is glowing. The house flowers in the air above the clearing, every detail carved and shimmering, every corner ringing and fountaining with someday music and laughter. It’s as real as they are.
“And we’ll all remember that party for the rest of our lives. Like, when we’re forty and have jobs and kids and the most exciting thing we ever do is golf, that party’s what we’ll think about when we need to remind ourselves what we used to be like.”
It comes to Selena that Chris has never once thought it might not happen. What if when he’s old enough the people who own the house don’t want to sell it, what if it’s been knocked down to build an apartment block, what if he doesn’t have enough money to buy it: none of these have ever crossed his mind. He wants it; that makes it as simple and certain as the grass under their legs. Selena feels a shadow like a great bird’s flit across her back.
She says, “It sounds incredible.”
He turns towards her, smiling. “I’ll invite you,” he says. “No matter what.”
“I’ll come,” she says. She hopes with every part of her that they’re both right.
“Deal?” Chris asks, holding out his hand to shake on it.
“Deal,” Selena says, and because she can’t not, she stretches out her hand and shakes his.
When it’s time to go, he wants to walk her back to the school building, see her safe in at the window, but she won’t let him. The moment they started talking about separating, she felt the things in the shadows stir and raise themselves, hungry; felt the watchman get restless, legs twitching for a walk in the full spring air. If they take any chances, they’ll get caught.
Instead she lets him watch her up the path towards the school till she knows she’s blurred into the dapple. Then she turns and stays still, feeling the shadows thickening at her back.
He’s thrumming in the center of the clearing, full to exploding. When he leaps, it’s head back and punching the sky, and she hears the low jubilant burst of breath. He comes down grinning, and Selena feels herself smiling back. She watches while he runs down the rise to the path, in big bounds so he won’t crush the starting hyacinths, and heads for the back gate at a jog like he can’t keep his feet on the ground.
Last time he was the one who touched her, before she knew it was coming. This time she reached out to touch him.
Selena’s ready for the punishment. She expects the others to be wide awake and sitting up when she slips into the bedroom, three pairs of eyes slamming her back against the door, but they’re so floppy asleep they’ve barely moved since she went out—it feels like nights ago. She waits all the next day to be called into McKenna’s office so the night watchman can say Yes that’s her, but the only time she sees McKenna is sailing past in a corridor with her general-purpose majestic half smile. In a bathroom cubicle, she tries whether she can still flicker the lights, whether her silver ring will still spin above her palm. She does it on her own so the others won’t see her fail and guess why, but everything works perfectly.
After that she realizes it’ll be less obvious than that, more oblique, a blow from the side when she isn’t braced. A phone call telling her that they’ve lost all their money somehow, and she’ll have to drop out of Kilda’s. Her stepdad losing his job and they all have to emigrate to Australia.
She tries to feel guilty about it, whatever it is, but there’s no space in her mind. Chris is shining into every corner. His laugh, sliding higher than you’d expect from someone with such a deep voice, turning him suddenly young and mischievous. The chop of pain, When things weren’t great at home, slicing off all his careful cheerful façade, turning his face taut and private. The narrow of his eyes against moonlight, the shift of his shoulders as he leans forward, the smell of him, he’s in every moment. She can’t believe the others don’t taste her hot and cinnamony, don’t see it spinning off her like gold dust every time she moves.
There’s no phone call. She doesn’t get hit by a lorry. Chris is texting her When? The next time Selena and the others go to the glade, she thinks up at the moon: Please do something to me. Or I’m going to meet him again.
Silence, cold. She understands that Chris is her battle; no one is going to fight it for her.
I’ll tell him we can’t meet up any more. I’ll tell him he was right and we should just text. The thought of it knocks her breath out, like icy water. If he’s not OK with that, then I’ll stop texting him.
The next time they meet, in a grassy and moonless silence between two secrets, she takes his hand.
19
We went to the bedroom door, watched Selena down the corridor and safe to where she was supposed to be. The singsong was over; when Selena swung the common-room door open, the silence surged out at us, tight and brittle, thrumming.
Conway watched the door click shut. “So,” she said. “You think Chris raped her?”
“Not sure. Gun to my head, I’d say no.”
“Same. But there was more to the breakup than she’s saying. Who dumps a guy because they kissed? What kind of reason is that?”
“Once we get those texts, they might give us something.”
“If Sophie’s guy’s gone home for his dinner, I swear I’m gonna get his address and track the little bollix down.” A couple of hours earlier, it would’ve co
me out like she meant it. Now it was auto-pitbull, too tired to clamp down. She checked her watch: quarter to seven. “Fuck’s sake. Come on.”
I said, “Even if Chris didn’t rape Selena, someone could’ve thought he had.”
“Yeah. They break up, she’s all upset, crying into her unicorns. One of her mates knows she was seeing Chris, figures he did something to her . . .”
I said, “She thinks one of her mates killed him.”
“Yeah. She’s not sure, but she thinks so, yeah.” This time Conway wasn’t pacing: slumped against the corridor wall instead, head back, trying to rub the day out of her neck. “Which means she’s out. Not officially, but out.”
I said, “She’s not outside, but. She’s . . .” That vortex pull of Selena, things spinning round her axis, I didn’t know how to say that. “When we get the story, she’ll be in it.”
Talking like an eejit, and in front of one of the Murder squad, but Conway wasn’t sneering. Nodding. “If she’s right and one of her mates did the job, it was because of Chris and Selena. One way or another.”
“That’s what she thinks, too. At least one of the mates knew all about her and Chris, and didn’t like it. And Selena knew they wouldn’t; that’s why she didn’t tell them to start with.” I leaned on the wall beside Conway. Fatigue kicking in, me too, the wall felt like it was swaying. “Maybe they knew he was a player, thought he’d end up hurting Selena. Maybe he’d done something shite on one of them—just casually, like what Holly told us about—and he was the enemy. Maybe one of them was into him. Maybe one of them had already been with him, earlier in the year.”