Kiss of Death

by Lauren Henderson

  “And, Plum, for what it’s worth,” I add, “I thought you and Susan looked really beautiful together.”

  That does it. Behind me, I hear Plum burst into tears; she slumps against the doorframe, crying her heart out. I wonder if I should go back, try to comfort her, but there’s nothing I could say to make her feel any better. At least, there’s nothing I can think of. Perhaps it’s a failure in me. Perhaps I’m not compassionate enough. Or maybe it’s that Plum’s atrocious behavior to me over the years has burnt me out.

  I’m not comfortable hearing anyone sobbing like that, not even my worst enemy. But my feet are carrying me away down the corridor in Taylor’s wake. And I have no impulse to turn around and go back.

  I park my case outside Taylor’s room for the meantime, since there’s no one here to trip over it.

  “Matron said they’d move us after you pick out what stuff you want from your old bedroom,” Taylor says, already plopped down on her bed, peeling open a pack of chocolate chip cookies. “I miss Oreos,” she adds wistfully. “These just aren’t as good. I’d’ve gotten Seth to bring some over from the States, but he flew out in kind of a hurry.” She stuffs a cookie in her mouth. “The FunStix are unbelievable,” she says, spewing crumbs over her T-shirt. “They’re like straws. You can drink through them. Isn’t that amazing? Cookies you can drink milk through.”

  “I don’t know why you Americans are so obsessed with milk,” I say, scooping a whole handful of cookies out of the packet.

  “Makes us big and strong,” Taylor says, spilling more crumbs as she talks.

  “Honestly,” I comment, “even if I were gay for you before, watching you stuff down those cookies would turn me straight. Never let Callum see you eat.”

  Taylor goes bright red at the mention of Callum’s name.

  Hah, I think happily. I’m going to have a lot of fun with this.

  And then I think: Oh God. Was I like that when Jase and I got together?

  “What?” Taylor says, looking up at me, her boob area now a crumb shelf.

  “Nothing,” I say as my phone pings in my pocket, signaling an incoming text. I pull it out eagerly. And I’m not disappointed.

  “Ooh!” I say happily. “Got to go!”

  “I don’t need to ask you why,” Taylor says, reaching for more cookies. “You’ve gone as red as a London bus.”

  Trust her to get the last word.

  nineteen

  BORING AND NORMAL

  I stuff down the handful of cookies I’ve grabbed as I go, wanting (a) to avoid Jase being put off by seeing me gorge, and (b) to give my face enough time for the blush to fade. But though I achieve (a), (b) was a waste of time; as soon as I see him leaning against the huge wrought-iron gates to the Hall, next to his parked bike, I know I’ve gone red with excitement all over again.

  It’s so unfair that Jase is darker than me, dark enough for a blush to be much less obvious on his caramel skin. But as soon as he spots me, his golden eyes light up, and he opens his arms wide for me to run into; I hurtle into him so fast I knock the breath out of him, and he’s laughing as he hugs me back so tight he squeezes the breath out of me in return. I squeal with everything I have left as he picks me up and swings me around in a big circle, my legs flying out almost parallel to the ground. I cling to him for dear life, my hair whipping round my face, and I have a flash of memory: my father doing this to me when I was really small, my little hands gripping the collar of his shirt, my mouth wide, screaming into his face with delighted terror.

  It doesn’t last. I try to picture his face, but the memory fades as quickly as it came. No one’s done this since I was tiny, I think. There wasn’t another adult who would have picked me up and swung me through the air after my parents died. I’ve been craving touch ever since, longing for someone to hug and hold. No wonder I loved gymnastics so much; you’re endlessly being pushed and pulled and squashed flat and thrown through the air by big strong hands.

  I must ring up Alison and Luce, I resolve as Jase sets me down. We could go and get a coffee, talk about what’s been going on with them since I left St. Tabby’s. Maybe go to some gigs in London together. Wow. I grin. I sound really grown-up.

  “Nice to see you smiling,” Jase says, finally setting me down on my feet again.

  I’m dizzy, but that’s not why I throw my arms around his neck; I pull his head down and kiss him and kiss him till we’re both reeling, backing him against the gatepost, wrapping myself around him, kissing him with total and utter abandon.

  “Wow,” he says, when we finally pull apart, gasping once more for breath, our mouths soft and moist, our eyes shining. “I didn’t get back a moment too soon.…”

  “Do you realize, this is the first time we’ve ever been able to kiss properly in daylight!” I say happily. “Isn’t that amazing?”

  “Yeah,” he says, his arms still wrapped around me, his expression suddenly serious. “I can’t actually get my head round it yet. I keep expecting my dad or your aunt to come shooting out of a rosemary bush and start screaming at us to get away from each other.”

  We stand there, looking at each other, the fact that both Mr. Barnes and Aunt Gwen are dead truly sinking in.

  “I want to say I can’t believe it,” I say in a smaller voice. “But I can. I keep seeing her falling, over and over again.”

  “Oh, baby—” Jase pulls me tighter, so that my head snuggles into the hollow of his collarbones. “Are you having nightmares?”

  “No,” I say simply. “I’m happy that she’s gone. I don’t even feel awful about it. She always hated me, and then she tried to kill me. I can’t feel anything but incredibly relieved.”

  Jase heaves a long sigh against me. “Fair enough,” he says. “I’m the one who’s having nightmares, to be honest. I keep seeing that ambulance pull up outside the school. And them carrying a body out on a stretcher, all covered over.”

  “Oh, Jase—” I pull back, looking up at his face.

  His full lips are drawn together, the skin across his cheekbones tight. Because I was so zonked by the antihistamines Aunt Gwen gave me, I pretty much passed out after the strain of keeping it together for long enough to talk to the police. And I’d lost any sense of time. My phone was turned off—they made us do that for the ghost walk—and it hadn’t occurred to me, in all the commotion, to turn it on again. Jase, who’d been hanging around outside the school, hoping I’d be able to sneak out and see him for a bit, saw me come back in a cab with Aunt Gwen and then an ambulance rushing up the drive forty minutes later. No wonder he was freaked out.

  “I thought it was you,” he says quietly. “I really did think it was you.”

  “I’m so sorry I didn’t ring!” I say, my face creasing into a grimace of apology. “I was really zonked—”

  He presses both my hands.

  “I asked them,” he says. “The paramedics. They wouldn’t tell me much, but they did say”—he pulls a sort of ironic grin as he makes a stab at the Edinburgh accent—“one of them did say, ‘Dinnae worry, pal, this cannae be your gurrrlfriend.’ And the other one went, ‘Not unless his name’s Oedipus, eh?’ And then they both laughed a lot.”

  “Wow,” I say, my eyebrows rising. “Black humor.”

  “Oedipus married his mum, right?” Jase says. “I remember that from school.”

  I nod. “They were talking about Aunt Gwen being a lot older than you.”

  “Hey!” He grins wider. “I may not have gone to private school, but at least I learned something at the comp, right?”

  “Did you know it was Aunt Gwen’s body?” I ask, boosting myself up to sit on the stone wall.

  “Nope.” He shakes his head. “They wouldn’t let me see her. Said she was pretty bashed up. But obviously, I was doing my nut by then. I didn’t know what to do. After everything that happened with my dad, I was worried about being there when the police showed up. So I went back to the bike and started ringing you. I rang for hours.”

  “I’m sorry!” I wail.
When I turned my phone back on this morning, I could have died, listening to his frantic messages—and I didn’t even know it could log that many missed calls. “Thank God for Taylor,” I add. She’d come back to school, seen Jase across the road on his bike, and rung him as soon as she had some idea of what was going on.

  “No, I’m sorry,” Jase says intensely. He moves toward me where I’m sitting on the wall. “I wasn’t there to look after you. I hate that I wasn’t there. I hate that Taylor’s brother had to save you instead. I should have guessed somehow—I should have been there for you—”

  I reach out my arms to him, and open my legs, wrapping them around his waist, hugging him in reassurance. He’s stiff against me, frowning in anger at himself.

  “Jase, how could you have known?” I ask, trying to be as reassuring as I can. “All you saw was me coming back to school with my aunt. How could you possibly have known what she was going to do?”

  He hangs his head. I reach out and rub his curls, feeling them crunch in my palm; they’re squashed from being under the motorbike helmet. Jase set off this morning from Edinburgh, but it takes a lot longer on the bike than it does on the train. He’s only just got back to Wakefield.

  Or so I thought.

  “I’ve been to see your gran,” he says, looking up at me. “Just now.”

  “Really?” My eyes widen.

  “She rang me when I was on the road,” he says. “Asked me where I was, said to come and see her if I was anywhere near Wakefield. I said I was on my way back, to see you.” His eyes gleam gold, a little defiantly. “I thought I might as well say it straightaway. That we’re still together.”

  I gulp, still stroking his hair.

  “She was never the one who made a fuss about it,” he goes on. “Your gran was always nice to me.”

  “She thinks you’re a good boy and a hard worker,” I say, doing my best to imitate my grandmother’s impeccable upper-class accent.

  “Well, I bloody am!” he says, and unexpectedly, his face cracks into a huge smile. “She’s bloody right!”

  “What did she want to see you about?” I ask.

  “You ready for this?” he says more seriously. “She wanted to see if I’d like to live there.” He nods back at the gatehouse, where, until so recently, I lived with Aunt Gwen.

  “Wow,” I say. “It didn’t take her much time to work everything out, did it?”

  He grins. “That’s your gran for you. She said you wouldn’t be living there anymore. But I can’t go back to my dad’s old cottage, and she’d like me to stay on the estate. There’s a job for life for me here, I know that. Running the grounds.”

  I nod. Jase loves gardening; it’s the one thing he’s inherited from his dad.

  “And what did you say?” I ask, my heart rising in nervous anticipation of his answer.

  I don’t know if Jase will want to stay at Wakefield, not even for the moment, let alone long-term. Just a few months ago he told me that he didn’t know if he’d ever come back, that the guilt of what his father had done to my parents meant that he wasn’t sure if we could ever be together. Now it seems that the two of us are okay; but my future is tied to Wakefield, my inheritance, and if Jase can’t face being here, it doesn’t bode well for us as a couple.

  He heaves a long, slow breath, and I feel the blood drain from my fingers and my toes as I wait for his answer. I’ve gone very cold. So much rides on how Jase feels about this, and there’s nothing I can do to change his mind.

  “It’s all changed now, hasn’t it?” he says soberly, looking over my shoulder at the bulk of the Hall.

  “What do you mean?” My voice is almost infinitesimal.

  “Well”—he looks back at me—“your aunt was as bad as my dad, wasn’t she? They were in it together.”

  I nod. We managed a short conversation this morning, before he set off down the M1 for London; enough for me to fill him on Aunt Gwen’s revelations to me yesterday.

  “So don’t you see?” His eyes are intent, shining bright as stars as he looks down at me. “Your family—my family—they’re as rubbish as each other. At least, the bad seeds are. My mum, your mum and dad—nothing wrong with them. But my dad and your aunt were both bastards. They did their best to ruin our lives.”

  I swallow hard as Jase mentions my parents. But I nod in agreement with every word he’s saying.

  “So I don’t have to feel bad anymore,” he explains urgently. “See? My dad, your aunt—they were shits. My dad killed your mum and dad. Your aunt tried to kill you. So we’ve both got shitty horrible relatives. We’re even.”

  Blood floods back into my face as I realize what he’s saying.

  “I don’t have to feel guilty,” Jase concludes triumphantly. “Or that I don’t belong here anymore, ’cos my dad did something so awful that I don’t deserve to be here. I don’t have to stay away from Wakefield.” He beams at me. “I love it here, Scarlett. I mean, I was born here, I grew up here. It’s the only home I’ve ever known. And I had all these ideas for it too. My dad’d never listen to me—he just wanted to keep things as they’d always been. But I was thinking the Hall should grow its own fruit and veg, you know? Make the estate more self-sufficient. There’s so much space, we could use it for all sorts. Bring back the old kitchen garden and the orchard, keep hens, maybe some pigs and sheep—get all the girls here working to grow their own food, learn about farming—”

  He breaks off, stepping back, running his hand over his hair, laughing at himself.

  “Wow, I’m getting carried away!” he says. “But I’ve been sort of flying ever since I heard about your aunt. I feel like I’ve been freed.” He spreads his arms wide, his motorcycle jacket hanging open over his T-shirt, a huge smile on his face. “Like, it’s not just me! It’s not just my family that’s all messed up! It’s yours too! We’re just the same!”

  I’m giggling now in sheer happiness.

  “We can have a party to celebrate!” I suggest. “Only people with horrible relatives invited!”

  “They’d have to be really bad, though,” Jase says. “Hard-core stuff.”

  “Okay, it’d be small and highly exclusive,” I agree. “Oh ick, I sound like Plum.”

  And then it occurs to me that, by the sound of things, Plum is the only person I know who’d qualify for an invitation. Taylor’s parents are obviously fantastic; you just have to look at her enviably high self-confidence level to see that. Alison and Luce’s are equally lovely. Even Lizzie Livermore is coddled and adored by her largely absent tycoon father.

  While Plum’s expression of absolute fear when she talked about her father spoke volumes. And though she has Susan, Viscount Saybourne would clearly come down on Plum like the wrath of God if he ever found out about his daughter and her girlfriend. Whereas Jase and I are free, finally, to kiss in public.

  I’m much better off than Plum. What a strange feeling that is.

  Jase snaps his fingers in front of my face.

  “And when I do that, you will come out of your trance!” he says, like a stage magician.

  “Sorry,” I say, back to reality. “All right, no party. Just the two of us in the Appalling Relatives Club.”

  “Works for me,” he says, smiling down at me.

  I look at the gatehouse behind him. If I manage to blot out all memories of Aunt Gwen, of how much I dreaded coming back here and having to call it home when it was no such thing, I can see that it’s a charming little cottage, like something out of a fairy tale. Red shutters at its windows, wisteria trained around the door. You wouldn’t exactly think it was the obvious house for a nearly eighteen-year-old boy, but it’s very generous of my grandmother to offer it to Jase.

  “Are you going to live there, then?” I ask, nodding toward it.

  He glances back too, then turns back to me.

  “Not yet,” he says seriously, and my heart sinks. “I’m just not ready for all that.”

  “All what?” I ask, my voice tiny again.

  “Running my
own place. Having to be all grown-up. Because it’s your gran’s house, and she’s doing me a big favor. I’d have to be really careful, y’know? What if I wanted to have some friends round, have a party or something?” He pulls a face. “It wouldn’t be respectful. I’d be looking over my shoulder the whole time.”

  “So what are you going to do?” I say, and I’m amazed he can hear me at all, because I’m sure by now my voice has gone so high and squeaky that only dogs can pick up the frequency.

  He cups my face with both his hands, his eyes glowing affectionately.

  “Don’t worry, Scarlett,” he says gently. “I’m not going far. I’m still going to start my estate management degree at college in the autumn, down Havisham way. I’ve met a couple of lads who’ve been doing the part-time course there this year, that I’ve been on, and they’ve all signed up for the degree course too. Nice lads—we have a good laugh together. We thought we’d find a place we could share in Wakefield village. It’ll probably be pretty slobby—three boys sharing—but I’ll have my own room, and you can come and visit all the time. We can practically live in each other’s pockets if we want to.”

  Panic drains from me in a lovely clean rush, like water pouring from a fountain. I realize I’ve been holding my breath. And then, as I inhale with great relief, I realize something else: I’m not just relieved because Jase isn’t planning to move miles and miles away. I’m also grateful that he’s chosen not to move into the gatehouse.

  Huh, I think. Why is that? You’d think I’d be desperate for him to be living here, so close to me!

  “It’s all been so weird and crazy, ever since we got together,” Jase is saying. “Like you said, we haven’t even been able to kiss or hold hands or anything, without worrying that my dad or your aunt are going to pop up like jack-in-the-boxes and start yelling at us. We haven’t had a chance just to hang out, do what we want. Be ourselves.”

  I nod fervently in agreement.

  “And if I move in to your aunt’s old house,” he continues, nodding back toward it again, “that’ll feel weird too. I mean, it’s your old house! It’d almost be like you were there as well!”