The Accident Season

by Fowley-Doyle, Moïra

  We split up and find more big rocks in the garden and carry them in increasingly muddy hands into the house. Toby and I open the doors to all the rooms and prop them open with the rocks so that the whole house is wide and inviting.

  “This may well end up being the best party this year,” says Toby.

  “Oh yeah?” To hear that from someone like Toby is high praise.

  His cheeks dimple a bit when he smiles. “Yeah.”

  As we work, Toby tells me about some of the best parties he’s been to. The few parties we’ve been to with Alice got pretty drunk and disorderly, but some of Toby’s stories are wild. I’m not sure I believe them all, but I’m secretly kind of impressed.

  “And your parents let you go out that much?” I ask in disbelief. “How do you get away with it?”

  Toby laughs. “My parents are pretty cool, actually,” he tells me. “They understand that I’m eighteen and want to go out and party. Once I get the marks they expect, they let me do pretty much anything.”

  “But how do you get good marks if you’re out partying every weekend?”

  Toby shrugs. “I don’t want to waste my teenage years,” he says. “Study isn’t everything. I mean, I’ve applied to do medicine in Trinity next year. I’ve got the points in every practice test I’ve tried so far. I study hard, but that’s not all there is to me.”

  I don’t know what to say to that. Toby’s lips are full and his smile is easy. Energy shines out of him like glitter. “You’re not who I thought you’d be,” I say finally.

  “You either.”

  “Oh yeah? Who did you think I was?”

  Toby blushes in the light of the flashlight beams. It makes him seem less like an unattainable popular guy and more like a real person. He hands me an armful of decorations and we make our careful way down the staircase to put things up in the kitchen. Our shadows are long in the hall, but the kitchen is well-lit with brighter flashlights so people will be able to see their drinks. Martin has already brought over several cases of beer. I know better than to ask where he got them from.

  “I dunno,” says Toby. “More like Bea, I guess. But you aren’t like her at all.”

  I prickle a little at that. “I think I’m a lot like Bea, actually. I think it’s a great way to be.”

  Toby sees my expression and puts out his hands. “I don’t mean that in a bad way,” he says quickly. “Just—I thought you’d be kind of . . . I don’t know, weird or fake or something. You’d think people like you or Bea are posers, you know? But you’re just totally genuine. Carl was right about that.”

  I kind of want to tell him that Carl the poser is not exactly one to talk about authenticity, but then I realize he’s paying me a compliment. I reach up and readjust my mask a little nervously. “Carl?” I ask, because I’m not sure what else to say.

  He turns away from me to hang some fake spiders over the shelves that are already covered in real spiders’ webs. “Yeah. He’s been kind of interested in Bea since Joe’s party this summer, and after we heard about this party, he kept talking to me about you guys, and I didn’t know anything about you, I didn’t know I’d like you, but now I really do.” He turns back around and looks straight at me.

  “Yeah?”

  Toby leans on the kitchen counter and angles himself toward me. I wonder if he ever stops smiling, then I think, I hope he doesn’t, because he has a lovely smile. Then I wonder why I thought that. “Yeah,” he says, and the littlest fingers of our hands almost touch on the counter. “You’re a very interesting person, Cara Morris. A bit of a mystery.”

  “A mystery?” I like that. “You’re pretty interesting too,” I say. “I mean, I thought you were just this perfectionist overachiever who thought he could get anything he wanted because he’s good-looking.”

  “You think I’m good-looking?”

  Now it’s my turn to blush. “That’s not what I meant.”

  Martin comes into the kitchen with some more beers. “Cara, are you insulting people again?” he says playfully. I aim a swat at his head and he mimes tripping over and dropping all the beer. He straightens up and puts the crates carefully on the floor instead. He looks around the kitchen for a moment and says, “I understand why you guys are so obsessed with this place.” He cocks his head to one side. “It’s like you can almost hear something . . .”

  Toby and I turn our heads to be able to hear it too. There is music coming softly from upstairs still; there are voices—Alice’s and Kim’s—coming from another of the rooms. Someone is sliding a mattress across the floor in one of the bedrooms. Bea is singing to herself in the hall. Underneath that, though, I can hear the faintest whispering. I get down on my hands and knees and put my ear to the floor. Toby and Martin exchange a look, but then they crouch down with me. Our ears are cold against the dirty tiles.

  “Listen,” I whisper. We listen. Underneath us, the river is talking. I close my eyes. It’s calling my name. It sounds like footsteps coming toward me, about to take me away. The footsteps get louder. I look up and Sam is standing at the door to the kitchen, a bunch of blankets in his hands.

  “In case people get cold or need to crash,” he explains. He doesn’t ask why we’re all on the floor. Something tells me he knows already. I wonder what the river says to Sam. He looks at me lying on the floor beside Toby and his face is hard, his expression closed off. Something twists in my tummy like a knife, but I don’t move away. Toby’s smile is uncomplicated and his eyes aren’t sad, but mostly he isn’t my brother. Sam turns slowly and leaves us on the dusty kitchen floor.

  ***

  When the first people start arriving and the music gets cranked up—Bea’s mixes filling the house like air in a balloon—I slip upstairs and take the rocks away from the bottoms of the doors to the master bedroom. I close the double doors and press my forehead to the peeling paint of the wood panels. I tighten my grip on the door handles. I whisper into the cracks. “Please be closed, please close, close.”

  I imagine the sound of a key in the lock, or of a bolt sliding into place, but I know that there is neither a bolt nor a key for this bedroom (or, indeed, for any other). The noise from downstairs is getting louder. More people have come. I take a deep gulp from somebody’s bottle of whiskey I sneaked upstairs with me. It burns all the way down to my knees. It makes it easier to forget things.

  Downstairs, the flashlights are lit. The darkness retreats into the corners but it stays there crouching like a wolf about to strike. The music lilts and whistles like the deer the wolves are hunting. It dances about the place and no one can help but dance with it.

  Toby catches me at the door to the kitchen. He has changed into his costume. His is a harlequin mask, half red, half white. The bells on the top of it jingle. He takes my hands and leads me in a dance around the room and out into the hall. We catch up with Kim and Niamh, who are drinking out of jam jars. Niamh’s mask makes her look like an acrobat. It is delicate and made of something like porcelain. Kim’s is a black cat. They join us and we all dance in a line—cats, acrobats, harlequins, and fairies—and pick up more creatures on the way: pigs and wolves and pandas, Victorian doll children and Venetian revelers, blank white masks like ghost faces.

  The people keep coming. All those we invited and more; they come through the iron curlicued gates like a flood. They drink in the kitchen, they dance in the hall, they climb the rotting staircase, gingerly at first and then more and more fearlessly as the night progresses and the beer bottles empty. When I pass by some time later, I see somebody sliding down the banister rail.

  The house likes this. All the wild dancing, the pulsing music, the slamming of so many shoes on the floor, so many drunken bodies against the walls and against each other, so many lips meeting and hands meeting other places in shadowy corners and on the dusty mattresses of the smaller bedrooms upstairs. The house revels in it. The walls beat like hearts, the floorboards groan,
the staircase moans, and upstairs, the bedrooms whisper sweet nothings.

  I am drunk. One minute I am with Bea in the old living room and we are telling a bunch of Niamh’s friends about the ghosts, about the ceiling, about the faces in the windows, and the next I am upstairs with Joe and Carl with Toby and Martin and I am trying to steer the tipsy conversation away from sports. Then Martin and I are in one of the bedrooms and Bea is pushing Carl away from her because he’s swaying too close, and then Toby and I are out on the landing talking about our families, and then I am with Kim and some of her friends on the landing and we are dancing like there’s nothing else in the world but the dance, and in the hall below I think I see a girl with mousy brown hair and a Peter Pan collar peeking over the top of a shapeless sweater but when I hurry downstairs, there is no one like that around. I call out to Elsie, but no one answers except the music. Faces swim by under masks. I wander through the house looking for Elsie, but I find my friends instead. Only Sam never seems to be in the same room I’m in. That makes the forgetting easier too.

  In the back of my mind I think about the changeling siblings who keep showing up in my dreams. I imagine them arriving at their party, which is very like our party, only wilder and more dangerous. There are no humans there. If I close my eyes I can almost see them, their human masks nearly gone, walking into a room full of strange, dark creatures. They see ghosts and elves and fairies and giants, they see huge half-human things, and creatures more like cats and horses and tiny dancing dogs, they see small kids with sharp teeth and red eyes. What they don’t see, though, is that they are being followed. Just behind them, silhouetted in the dark door frame, is their stepfather.

  After that things get blurry. Masks shift and shimmer. I can’t always tell who’s underneath. I sling my arm around the waist of a boy I think is Toby, but when he turns to look at me properly, I see that it’s a boy in the year below me. I walk past Bea in the sitting room, but then she is standing out in the hall. I think I catch sight of a tartan skirt swishing around the corner, but when I run into the room, I see only strangers. Sometimes the music sounds like screaming. Alice is hugging me and apologizing for keeping secrets, and then there it is, the secrets booth, sitting in the front room that was probably once a study, or a library. Kim is sitting at it like she’s Elsie at school and people are typing tipsy and slotting secrets into the box.

  Bea sits down and types, and when she’s done she takes the paper and shows it to us instead of putting it in the box. It says: Sometimes I think my mother wishes I’d never been born. She throws the paper into the air and it flutters down onto the dusty floor.

  “Never,” Alice says. She takes Bea in her arms. “Nobody could ever think that.” She kisses her cheek and the gesture is so intimate it makes me want to cry. I think about Sam’s lips (I think about Sam’s lips far more than any girl has a right to think about her ex-stepbrother’s lips) and my heart hurts like a sprain. Can you break your heart by accident, I wonder, like you can break a wrist? If so, the accident season has me bruised and broken inside and out.

  I leave my best friend with my sister and their secrets and I wander through the crowded rooms. I am still hoping to find Elsie, but I’m finding it harder and harder to remember why. There is more whiskey in the kitchen. When I get to the bottle, I find Martin and Joe. Martin’s mask is half fire, half ice. Joe’s is the diamond pattern of juggling balls. Toby joins us and we drink whiskey. It does nothing to help my sprained heart.

  “Don’t look so sad,” Toby says with his ever-present smile. “You’ve just thrown the best party I’ve ever been to, and it’s not even midnight. People’ll be talking about this one for years.”

  I drink straight out of the bottle. “I’m not sad,” I tell him. “I’m melancholy.” Then I think of a cigarette like a shared kiss, secrets slotted into a wooden box, a heart full of the wrong kind of love. What even is love, anyway? I say, “Tonight I drink whiskey to forget.”

  “To forget what?” says Martin.

  I giggle. “To forget my melancholy!” I shout it out and spread my arms wide, and some whiskey sloshes over the side of the bottle and onto my arm and Toby licks it off. His tongue tickles and his lips make it sound like a kiss. I block out the thoughts of pizza sauce and river eyes. Toby’s eyes are an uncomplicated brown. I can see them clearly through the holes in his mask. Toby is always smiling. I smile with him.

  For a while things blur again. I see Sam every so often, and once or twice we are in the same room, but mostly we are blown around like the rest of the masked dancers. The whiskey warms my tummy and the cockles of my heart. I think: This is the best party. Upstairs, some people are playing spin the bottle. There are clothes discarded on the floor. Skin and more skin. I turn away and dance back downstairs.

  At the bottom of the stairs Toby stops me and we crowd into the hall with the rest of the dancers and he holds me close so I don’t get stepped on. My wings heave in time to the music; the hot air in the hallway is blasted with cold wind every time the door opens and it lifts them like I’m flying.

  Joe and Martin and Niamh and Sam are moshing in a corner. They look up and wave, but Toby and I are spinning past like music-box dancers. Under the arch of the staircase he kisses me. It tastes of whiskey, but we’ve drunk so much of it at this point, it’s unsurprising. I want to spin and dance away, but I kiss him again instead. We stay locked at the lips for what feels like a long time. It’s not unpleasant (I suspect Toby has had plenty of practice), but I know deep down that it’s not the kiss I want.

  I pull away finally and ask Toby to get me a drink, pretend I’m going to the loo, but instead I duck into the dusty study, where Kim is still sitting at the secrets booth and people are dancing and typing and talking, and on the other side of the room Sam is punching his fist through the wall. Joe and Martin take his arms and drag him outside and I hide until they’re gone.

  I feel a hand on my shoulder and I think Sam? but when I turn around, it’s Bea. She asks if I’m okay and I make myself grin wide, but she touches my cheek under my mask and her finger comes away glistening with tears. I think my grin must look strange, all tear-streaked and glittery.

  “Too much whiskey,” I say to her by way of explanation. Alice, who is just behind her, gives a little laugh.

  “I know what you mean,” she says. We are almost shouting to be heard over the music. It’s pounding at my temples. It sounds like my heart. It sounds like a hundred fists punching through old plaster walls. Alice and Bea are waltzing in a slow circle around me. I look over at Kim. I want to type up a secret, but I don’t think I have the words. I remember Alice apologizing for keeping secrets earlier and I want to tell her that I keep secrets too, but when I turn around, I see the wolf at the door.

  “Alice,” he says.

  Alice turns, startled. She drops her hands from Bea’s waist. “Nick?”

  Nick has come dressed for the masquerade. His face is a wolf face, his leather jacket covered in tufts of hair. His teeth are sharp and I think I can see a tail swishing behind his jeans. “Alice,” he says again. His voice is hoarse like he’s been singing all night. Singing for Alice. Maybe he is the siren after all.

  Bea moves back toward Alice and says in an urgent undertone, “I thought you said you were going to—” but Alice cuts her off.

  “What are you doing here, Nick?” she says in that slightly lower, older voice. Her mask makes her gaze look dark. She lowers her voice even more. “I thought we talked last night,” she says.

  “I just want to be with you, love.” Nick’s teeth are very sharp and white in the dim room. He holds his hand out to Alice as if to dance.

  “Don’t worry,” she whispers to Bea, her hand at the small of her scaly back. Nick’s eyes narrow behind his wolf mask. His hand is out, palm up. Alice steps forward and takes it.

  Bea makes a move toward Alice. “Don’t,” she says, but she says it too low.

 
; “Don’t,” I say, but Alice is already gone.

  Bea’s face is unreadable. She looks pale blue in the candlelight. Or green, maybe, like the ocean. She sits down at the little desk and Kim, who has witnessed the whole scene, tries to comfort her in a way I just can’t seem to do. She tells Bea that Alice is just going to talk to him, that if she hasn’t ended it yet, she will tonight, that this is why she wants them to have some privacy. Bea ignores her. I think about Nick’s siren voice and I wonder who is right. I think about Alice talking about his darkness. The room spins.

  Bea types fast. She rips the paper out of the typewriter. Kim starts to tell her to be careful, but then she bites her lip. Bea holds out the secret so we can read it. It’s all in block capitals. It says: LOVE IS NEVER WORTH IT. She lets the paper fall to the ground. Then she takes the box and throws its contents into the air so that all the secrets free themselves and fly around the room like big paper bats. Words come at us in the darkness.

  Sometimes I think I’m losing my mind, I am a virgin, I am not a virgin, I am a liar, I don’t like girls (I am a boy), I don’t know if I am a boy or a girl, There is no God, There are ghosts all around us, LOVE IS NEVER WORTH IT, The wolves are real, I am in love with the wrong person, I am afraid that I am incapable of love, I haven’t eaten a full meal in two years, I cut myself (no one knows), My ex-stepfather is a monster.

  I trip over my feet through the flying secrets, out of the room and toward the front door. It is black as the night outside. Outside (or is it the reflection of the hall in the glass of the porch?) I think I can see the changeling siblings, watery as the rain.

  They wander through the crowds, trying to find their evil stepfather before he has the chance to recognize them. They know that this may be their only chance to find him; they will only recognize him without his human mask, and this is the one night of the year in which their kind can be themselves. But their powers have weakened with every day they spend away from their home. They worry that they will not be strong enough to defeat him.