Swords

“Scars have the strange power

to remind us that our past is real.”

Cormac McCarthy

All the Pretty Horses



“What did you do to Kieran?” Adam demanded as soon as Meg had left the kitchen and the door had swung shut behind her. “I know you did something. Where is he?”

James sat at the table, both hands curled around his glass. His eyes lifted to Adam’s, then dropped again, and he raised the glass and swallowed the rest of the whiskey down. His voice was hoarse when he answered. “If he went out there somewhere with my equipment, it’s not my fault. But that’s why I went to look for him. I didn’t want him caught in this storm.”

Adam hated the make-believe sincerity, the bollocksness. James fooled everyone with that, the way he made himself a victim.

Without Meg the kitchen was heavy and cold, empty, and Adam felt the weight of his own weakness in the silence. He should have made someone listen.

“Kieran told me you’ve been sneaking out at night,” he said to James.

“Did he tell you he snores so loud it’s impossible to sleep?” James retorted. “How about that he took the better bed and uses all the hot water in the shower and leaves his clothes around so it’s like living in a pigsty? You can’t sleep when your mind is cluttered.”

Disgusted, Adam shook his head. “Why did you go back to Kilmichael? Why did you say the metal detector was in with the equipment when it wasn’t?”

James’ glass crashed into the table, liquid splashing out onto the wood. His face pinched into a snarl. “Niall needs to put a leash on you. Don’t you think I get enough grief from Kieran? What do you want from me, Adam? Do you know what it’s like having someone nagging at you all the time? Wearing away at you? You do know, don’t you? You look the type to be picked on at school, so why can’t you understand?” His eyes slid over Adam, and one side of his mouth lifted in a sneer. “Or are you one of the hangers-on? The ones so desperate to be accepted you’re willing to make life hell for someone else.”

Adam’s gut twisted uncomfortably, but he looked away. “It was you who never gave Kieran a chance. You got everyone on your side.”

“There shouldn’t have been sides. This is my work, my career. And it’s none of your business.”

Adam stood up slowly. “Where is he? You know something, I can tell.”

“I don’t—and anyway, I don’t care! And that’s it. I’m through answering questions. I’ve tried to make allowances because of your mother, but you’re a bloody menace. You’re meddling in things you can’t begin to understand.”

Adam wanted to pummel him—hit him and keep hitting him. He was sick to death of people treating him as if he didn’t matter. As if his opinion didn’t matter. “Kieran’s my friend!”

“Don’t be naïve. He isn’t.” James reached for the whiskey bottle again, and then he straightened and looked back at Adam with his expression gone blank and cold. “The Kierans of the world don’t have friends. They have people who are useful to them and others they keep around to make them feel better about themselves. That’s all you are to someone like him—an audience. You show him what he wants to see in himself so he doesn’t have to face the mirror.”

In his damp clothes with the rain bulleting against the wide-paned windows, Adam found that he was shivering. Tears that wouldn’t reach his eyes burned in his throat and collected in a great pool deep inside his chest. He wanted to say James was wrong. And he was wrong. He was. Only what he’d said made Adam think of Declan and Rory at school, the way they’d hounded him until he’d started laughing with them so they’d leave him alone.

“You know what your real problem is?” James continued. “You’re afraid you’re more like me than you are like Kieran, that’s your trouble. And you don’t want to be. You think siding with the Kierans makes you stronger. Makes you matter more. You think it’s better to be stronger, that you’ll save yourself that way. But you won’t. That’s why we’re here now on this godforsaken island, why there was a massacre here. Because not enough people ever stand up to say something isn’t right unless they get a return out of it, admiration or money or power. Meanwhile they go along, bend over backwards searching for the common ground with the people who are holding swords against their throats.”

The empty glass glinted beneath the overhead light and the bottle of whiskey stood a few inches away on the table. The pressure of the tears Adam was holding back built up inside him until he thought his eyes would explode, everything that had happened in the last six weeks, his whole life, everyone telling him over and over how he didn’t understand, how he was wrong.

James was twisting everything. Everything.

It hadn’t been like that. It was Kieran who no one had listened to . . . wasn’t it? And Adam had tried to stand up, that was exactly what he’d done. He’d tried, and everyone told him not to make trouble, to be good. They were always telling him to be good, and he’d done his best. He’d tried not to mind when things were crap and nothing ever got better, when it only got worse and worse and then Ma was gone and he did mind. He minded everything, and he hated James and all those people who’d lied to him and all the pressure building inside him, building and building and building, the pressure and the emptiness of knowing something was wrong and no one would listen to him because he was just a stupid kid. But they were adults and they couldn’t see. They wouldn’t see. And he’d tried to tell them. He had, and they hadn’t listened.

Only maybe James wasn’t wrong, either, not completely. Because after a while, he’d stopped hating Declan and Rory, hadn’t he? He’d stopped hating that he had to laugh while they pantsed Aidan Wells or took photos up Kathleen Farrell’s skirt or made Tariq Ahmed give them his new trainers. He’d stopped hating them and he’d started hating Aidan and Tariq and all the other stupid kids who didn’t fight back.

Snatching the glass off the table, Adam threw it against the wall as hard as he could. He threw that, and he threw the half-empty bottle, and the explosions shattered the pressure inside him and left him breathing hard while the fragments rained down against the table and the chair and the floor and the honey, vanilla, and pencil eraser smell of the whiskey filled the air until he couldn’t breathe.