by French, Tana
Becca finds it. “There,” she says, and clicks Selena’s music case shut. Then she leans in and presses her cheek to Selena’s. Her eyelashes moth-wing against Selena’s skin and her lips are stone-cool. She smells like ripped green and hyacinths. Selena wants to hold her tight and breathe her all in, till her blood feels erased to pure again, like none of this ever happened.
After that Selena stays as still as she can and listens to how her heartbeat’s changed, gone slow and rolling in underwater dark. She thinks maybe if she follows it far enough down the tunnel she’ll find Chris. Probably he’s dead if they all say so, but there’s no way he’s gone. Not the taste of his skin, not the hot mountaintop smell of him, not the upward curl of his laugh. She thinks if she concentrates hard enough she’ll at least find what direction he’s in, but people keep interrupting her.
People ask her questions in McKenna’s office. She keeps her mouth shut and doesn’t break down.
Just like Holly said, they get called into McKenna’s office one by one. There’s McKenna, there’s a woman with black hair, and there’s a fat old guy, all sitting in a row behind the long battered gloss of McKenna’s desk. Becca never noticed before—the couple of times she was in here, she was too panicky to notice anything—that McKenna’s chair is extra tall, to make you feel little and helpless. Actually, with three of them back there and only one tall chair, it just looks funny, like the woman detective’s feet must be dangling in mid-air, or like McKenna and the guy detective are midgets.
They start with the stuff they ask everyone. Becca thinks back to what she was just a few months ago and does that, huddling up and tangling her legs and answering into her lap. If you’re shy enough, no one sees anything else. The guy detective takes notes and bites down on a yawn.
Then the lady detective says—examining an unraveling thread in her jacket cuff, like this is no big deal—“What did you think about your friend Selena going out with Chris?”
Becca frowns, bewildered. “Lenie never went out with him. I think maybe they talked to each other a couple of times at the Court, but that was ages ago.”
The detective’s eyebrows go up. “Nah. They were a couple. You mean you didn’t know?”
“We don’t have boyfriends,” Becca says disapprovingly. “My mum says I’m too young.” She likes that touch. Looking like a kid might as well come in useful for once.
The lady detective and the man detective and McKenna all wait, staring at her from behind the sun-patterns slanted across the desk. They’re so huge and meaty and hairy, they think they’ll just squash her down till her mouth pops open and everything comes gushing out.
Becca looks back at them and feels her flesh stir and transform silently into something new, some nameless substance that comes from high on pungent-forested mountain slopes. Her borders are so hard and bright that these lumpy things are being blinded just by looking at her; she’s opaque, she’s impermeable, she’s a million densities and dimensions more real than any of them. They break against her and roll off like mist.
That night Holly stays awake as long as she can, watching the others like just by watching she can keep them safe. She’s sitting up with her arms around her knees, too electric to lie down, but she knows none of them will try to start a conversation. Today has gone on long enough.
Julia is sprawled and far away. Becca daydreams, eyes dark and solemn as a baby’s, flicking back and forth as she watches something Holly can’t see. Selena is pretending to be asleep. The light over the transom does bad things to her face, turns it puffy and purple in tender places. She looks pounded.
Holly remembers that time back when she was a kid, how everything felt ruined, around her and inside her. Slowly, when she wasn’t looking, most of that washed away. Time does things. She tells herself it’ll do them for Selena.
She wants to be in the grove. She can feel it, how the moonlight would pour over them all, calcify their bones to a strength that could take this weight. She knows they would be insane even to think about trying it tonight, but she falls asleep craving it anyway.
When Holly’s breathing evens out, Becca sits up and takes her pin and her ink out of her bedside table. In the faint light from the corridor the line of blue dots swings across her white stomach like the track of some strange orbit, from her rib cage down to her belly button and back up to the ribs on the other side. There’s just room for one more.
Selena waits till even Becca’s finally gone to sleep. Then she looks to see if there’s a text for her on the red phone, but it’s gone. She sits in the tangle of sheets and wants to go frantic, scream and claw, in case it did come from Chris. But she can’t remember how—her arms and her voice seem like they’ve been unhooked from her body—and anyway it would be too much work.
She wonders, like a retch, if she did see this waiting all along, and closed her eyes because she wanted Chris so much. The more she tries to remember, the more it slips and twists and leers at her. In the end she knows she’s never going to know.
She goes back to staying still. She carefully cordons off enough of her mind to do the necessary stuff, like showers and homework, so people won’t come bothering her. She puts the rest into concentrating.
After a while she understands that something destroyed Chris to save her.
After a while longer she understands that this means it wants her for its own, and that she belongs to it for good now.
She cuts her hair off, for an offering, to send the message that she understands. She does it in the bathroom and burns the soft pale heap in the sink—the glade would be better, but they haven’t been back there since it happened, and she can’t tell if that’s because the others know some reason she hasn’t figured out. Her hair takes the lighter flame with a fierceness she didn’t expect, a whump and a widemouthed roar like faraway trees taking forest fire. She whips her hand away, but not fast enough, and her wrist is left with a small drumming wound.
The smell of burning stays. For weeks afterwards she catches it on her, savage and holy.
Chunks of her mind fall off sometimes. At first it frightens her, but then she realizes once they’re gone she doesn’t miss them, so it doesn’t bother her any more. The burn scars red and then white.
When Chris has been dead for four days, Julia hears that Finn’s been expelled for hotwiring the fire door, and starts waiting for the cops to come for her.
They gave her and the others some hassle about Selena going out with Chris, but it was the cunning mirage hassle Holly talked about, looked impressive till you got up close and saw there was nothing solid there. It dissolved after a few days of blank headshakes. Which means that Gemma couldn’t keep Joanne from flapping her yap altogether—in fairness, nothing short of surgery could—but she must have managed to get it through Joanne’s thick skull that, no matter how incredibly awesomesauce the drama would be, they need to keep the details quiet for their own sakes.
But Julia couldn’t exactly get that through to Finn. (Hi, Jules here! Remember how u thot i was usin u 2 shag ur mate? U no wat wd b totes amazeballs? If u cud not mention dat 2 d cops. Kthxbai!!) All she could do was keep her fingers crossed he would somehow work out all the stuff Holly warned about, and this is the kind of situation that requires more than crossed fingers. A bunch of Colm’s idiots versus those two detectives: of course someone slipped up, in the end.
She doesn’t have a clue what she’ll say when they come. As far as she can see, she has two options: spill her guts about how she wasn’t the only one meeting Chris, or deny everything and hope her parents get her a good lawyer. A month ago she would have said she’d go to jail before she’d throw Selena under a bus, no question; but things have changed, in ferocious tangled ways she’s having trouble getting a grip on. Lying awake late, she runs through each scenario in her head, tries to imagine each one playing out. They both feel impossible. Julia understands that doesn’t mean they can’t happen.
The whole world has come apart and gone lunatic, gibbering.
By the end of the week she thinks the cops are playing mind games with her, waiting for the suspense to break her down. It’s working. When she drops a binder—she and Becca are in the back of the library, collecting binders full of old Irish exams for the class to practice on—she almost leaps through the roof. “Hey,” Becca says. “It’s OK.”
“I’m actually smart enough to decide for myself whether it’s OK or not,” Julia snaps in a whisper, scooping dusty pages off the staticky carpet. “And believe me, it fucking isn’t.”
“Jules,” Becca says gently. “It is. I swear. It’s all going to be totally fine.” And she runs the backs of her fingers along Julia’s shoulder, down her arm, like someone calming a spooked animal.
Julia, whipping upright to rip her a new one, finds Becca looking back with steady brown eyes and not a hint of a flinch, even smiling a little. It’s the first time in weeks she’s looked at Becca properly. She realizes that Becca is taller than her now, and that—unlike Selena and Holly and, Christ knows, Julia herself—she doesn’t look like shit. The opposite: she looks smoothed, luminous, as if her skin’s been stripped away and remade out of something denser and so white it’s almost metallic, something you could shatter your knuckles on. She looks beautiful.
It makes Julia feel even farther away from her. She doesn’t have the energy to rip anyone anything; she just wants to sit down on the disgusting carpet and lean her head against the bookshelves and stay there for a long time. “Come on,” she says instead, heaving up her armful of binders. “Let’s go.”
After another week she realizes that the cops aren’t coming. Finn hasn’t given them her name. He could have used it to bargain down the expulsion into a suspension, thrown it to the cops to get them off his back, but he didn’t.
She wants to text him, but anything she said would come out as Ha-ha, you’re in the shit and I’m not, sucker. She wants to ask his friends how he’s doing, but either he’s told them everything and they hate her, or he hasn’t and it would start rumors, or they’d tell him and he’d hate her even more, and the whole mess would just bubble up viler. Instead she waits till the others are asleep and bawls like a stupid whiny baby all night long.
After two and a half weeks the center of the world is starting to turn away from Chris Harper. The funeral is over; everyone’s talked themselves tired of the photographers outside the church and who cried and how Joanne fainted during Communion and had to be carried outside. Chris’s name has fallen off the front pages, into the occasional snippet in spare corners that need filling. The detectives are gone, most of the time. The Junior Cert is just a few days from pouncing, and the teachers get narky instead of guidance-y if someone messes up a class by bursting into tears or seeing Chris’s ghost. He’s drifted off to one side: there, all the time, but in the corner of your eye.
On the way to the Court, under trees puffed up with full summer green, Holly says, “Tonight?”
“Hello?” Julia says, eyebrows shooting up. “And walk straight into a dozen of your dad’s buddies just waiting for someone to be that incredibly fucking stupid? Seriously?”
Becca is hopscotching over cracks, but Julia’s whipcrack voice gets her watching. Selena keeps on walking with her head tipped back, face turned up to the sweet swirls of leaves. Holly has her elbow to make sure she doesn’t smash into anything.
“There aren’t any detectives. Dad’s always complaining about how he can’t even get surveillance authorized on, like, major drug dealers; no way would they authorize it on a girls’ school. So duh, incredibly fucking stupid yourself.”
“Well, isn’t it just awesomesauce to have an expert on police procedure right here. I guess it never occurred to you that maybe your daddy doesn’t tell you everything?”
Julia is giving Holly her fiercest better-back-down glare, but Holly’s not backing anywhere. She’s been waiting weeks for this; it’s the only thing she can think of that might fix things. “He doesn’t need to tell me. I have brain cells—”
“I want to go,” Becca says. “We need it.”
“Maybe you need to get arrested. I honest-to-God don’t.”
“We do need it,” Becca says, stubborn. “Listen to you. You’re being a bitch. If we have a night out there—”
“Oh, please, don’t give me that crap. I’m being a bitch because this is a stupid idea. It’s not going to get any less stupid if we—”
Selena wakes up. “What is?”
“Forget it,” Julia tells her. “Never mind. Go think about pink fluff some more.”
“Going out tonight,” Becca says. “I want to go, so does Hol, Jules doesn’t.”
Selena’s eyes float over to Julia. “Why not?” she asks.
“Because even if the cops don’t have surveillance on the place, it’s still a dumb idea. Have you even noticed that the Junior Cert starts this week? Have you even heard them, every single day: ‘Oh you have to get sleep, if you don’t get sleep you can’t concentrate and you won’t be able to study—’”
Holly’s hands fly up and out. “Oh my God, since when do you care what Sister Ignatius thinks you should do?”
“I don’t give a fuck about Sister Ignatius. I care if I end up stuck in, like, needlework class next year because I fail my—”
“Oh, yeah, right, because of one hour one night, you’re totally going to—”
“I want to go,” Selena says. She’s stopped walking.
The rest of them stop too. Holly catches Julia’s eye and widens hers, warning. This is the first time in weeks that Lenie has wanted anything.
Julia takes a breath like she’s got another argument ready, the heaviest of all. Then she looks at the three of them and puts it away again.
“OK,” she says. Her voice has dulled. “Whatever, I guess. Just, if it doesn’t . . .”
“If what doesn’t what?” Becca asks, after a moment.
Julia says, “Nothing. Let’s do it.”
“Woohoo!” Becca says, and jumps high to pull a flower off a branch. Selena starts walking and goes back to watching the leaves. Holly takes her elbow again.
They’re almost at the Court; the warm sugary smell of doughnuts reaches out to make their mouths water. Something seizes Holly, in the tender space between where her breasts are growing, and drags downwards. At first she thinks she’s hungry. It takes her a moment to understand that it’s loss.
Outside their window the moon is slim and running wild with streaks of cloud. Their movements as they dress are filled up with every other time, with the first can’t-believe-we’re-doing-this half-joke, with the magic of a bottle cap floating above a palm, of a flame turning them to gold masks. As they pull up their hoods and take their shoes in their hands, as they slow-motion like dancers down the stairs, they feel themselves slowly turn buoyant again, feel the world flower and shiver as it waits for them. A smile is tipping the corner of Lenie’s mouth; on the landing Becca turns her palms to the white-lit window like a thanksgiving prayer. Even Julia who thought she knew better is beating with it, the bubble of hope expanding inside her ribs till it hurts, What if, maybe, maybe we really could—
The key won’t turn.
They stare at each other, wiped blank.
“Let me try,” Holly whispers. Julia steps back. The rhythm in their ears is pounding faster.
It won’t turn.
“They’ve changed the lock,” Becca whispers.
“What do we do?”
“Get out of here.”
“Let’s go.”
Holly can’t get the key out.
“Come on come on come on—”
The terror leaps like wildfire among them. Selena has her mouth pushed into her forearm to keep herself quiet. The key rattles and grates; Julia shoves Holly out of the way—“Jesus, did you break it?”—and grabs it
in both hands. In the second when it looks like it’s really stuck, all four of them almost scream.
Then it shoots out, slamming Julia backwards into Becca. The thump and oof of breath and scrabble for balance sound loud enough to call out the school. They run, flailing clumsy in slipping sock-feet, teeth bared with fear. Into their room and the door closing too hard, clawing clothes off and pajamas on, leaping for their beds like animals. By the time the prefect drags herself awake and comes shuffling down the corridor to stick her head in at each door, they have themselves and their breathing all neatly arranged. She doesn’t care if they’re faking or not, as long as they’re doing nothing that could get her in trouble; one glance around their smooth sleeping faces, and she yawns and closes the door again.
None of them say anything. They keep their eyes closed. They lie still and feel the world change shape around them and inside them, feel the boundaries set solid; feel the wild left outside, to prowl perimeters till it thins into something imagined, something forgotten.
29
The night had turned denser, ripening with little scurries and eddies of scent, things we couldn’t trace. The moonlight was coming down thick enough to drench us.
I said, “You got that, what she gave us. Yeah?”
Conway was moving fast back along the path, mind already leaping up that slope to Rebecca. “Yeah. Selena and Rebecca go to their room for their instruments. Either Rebecca’s pissed off enough with Selena that she hides Chris’s phone to frame her, or she gives it to Selena—here you go, your dead fella’s phone, just what you’ve always wanted—and Selena stashes it to deal with some other time.”
We were keeping our voices down; girls could be hidden like hunters behind any tree. I said, “That, and Holly’s out. Rebecca was working on her own.”