They come back to school for fourth year in the rain, thick clammy rain that leaves your skin splashed with sticky residue. The summer was weird, disjointed: someone was always away on holiday with her parents, someone else always had a family barbecue or a dentist appointment or whatever, and somehow the four of them have barely seen each other since June. Selena’s mum has taken her to have her new short hair cut properly—it makes her look older and sophisticated, till you get a proper look at her face. Julia has a hickey on her neck; she doesn’t tell, and none of them ask. Becca has shot up about three inches and got her braces off. Holly feels like she’s the only one who’s still the same: a little taller, a little more shape to her legs, but basically just her. For a dizzy second, standing with her bag dragging at her shoulder in the doorway of the Windex-smelling room they’ll be sharing this year, she’s almost shy of the others.
None of them mention the vow. None of them mention getting out at night, not to talk about how cool it was, not to suggest they could find a new way. One tiny corner of Holly starts to wonder if for the others it was one big joke, just a way of making school or themselves more interesting; if she made a tool of herself, believing it mattered.
Chris Harper has been dead for three and a half months. No one mentions him; not them, not anyone. No one wants to be the first, and after a few days it’s too late.
A couple of weeks into term the rain lets up a little, and on a restless afternoon the four of them can’t face another hour of the Court. They slip on their innocent faces and drift round the back, into the Field.
The weeds are higher and stronger than last year; rockslides have taken down the heaps of rubble where people used to perch, turned them into useless knee-high jumbles. The wind scrapes wire against concrete.
No one’s there, not even the emos. Julia kicks her way through the undergrowth and settles with her back against what’s left of a rubble-heap. The others follow her.
Julia pulls out her phone and starts texting someone; Becca arranges pebbles in neat swirls on a patch of bare earth. Selena gazes at the sky like it’s hypnotized her. A leftover spit of rain hits her on the cheekbone, but she doesn’t blink.
It’s chillier here than round the front, a wild countryside chill that reminds you there are mountains on the horizon, not that far away. Holly shoves her hands deep in her jacket pockets. She feels like she’s itchy, but she can’t tell where.
“What was that song?” she says suddenly. “It used to be on the radio all the time, last year? Some girl singer.”
“What’s it go like?” Becca asks.
Holly tries to sing it, but it’s been months since she heard it and the words have gone; all she can find is Remember oh remember back when . . . She tries to hum the melody instead. Without that light speeding beat and the thrum of guitar, it sounds like nothing. Julia shrugs.
“Lana Del Rey?” Becca says.
“No.” It’s so totally not Lana Del Rey that even the suggestion depresses Holly. “Lenie. You know the one I mean.”
Selena looks up, smiling vaguely. “Hmm?”
“That song. In our room one time, you were humming it? And I came in from the shower and asked you what it was, but you didn’t know?”
Selena thinks about it for a while. Then she forgets it and starts thinking about something else.
“God,” Julia says, shifting her arse on the dirt. “Where is everyone? Didn’t this place use to be, like, interesting?”
“It’s the weather,” Holly says. Her itchy feeling has got worse. She finds a Crunchie wrapper in her pocket and twists it into a tight ball.
“I like it like this,” Becca says. “All it used to be was dumb guys looking for someone to pick on.”
“Which at least wasn’t boring. We might as well have stayed inside.”
Holly realizes what the itchy feeling is: she’s lonely. Realizing makes it worse. “Then let’s go in,” she says. Suddenly she wants the Court, wants to stuff herself full to the seams with synthetic music and pink sugar.
“I don’t want to go in. What’s the point? We have to go back to school in like two minutes.”
Holly thinks of going inside anyway, but she can’t tell whether any of the others would come too, and the thought of dragging through the gray rain on her own swells the loneliness. Instead she launches the Crunchie wrapper into the air, spins it a couple of times and hovers it.
No one does anything. Holly floats the wrapper temptingly towards Julia, who bats it away like an annoying bug. “Stop.”
“Hey. Lenie.”
Holly practically bounces it off Selena’s forehead. For a second Selena looks bewildered; then she gently plucks the wrapper out of the air and tucks it into her pocket. She says, “We don’t do that any more.”
The reasons hum in the air. “Hey,” Holly says, too loud and ludicrous, into the wet gray silence. “That was mine.”
No one answers. It comes to Holly, for the first time, that someday she’ll believe—one hundred percent believe, take for granted—that it was all their imagination.
Julia is texting again; Selena has slid back into her daydream. Holly loves the three of them with such a huge and ferocious and bruised love that she could howl.
Becca catches her eye and nods at the ground. When Holly looks down, Becca skips a pebble through the weeds and lands it on the toe of Holly’s Ugg. Holly has just time to feel a tiny bit better before Becca smiles at her, kindly, an adult giving a kid a sweetie.
It’s Transition Year, things would be weird anyway. The four of them do their work-experience weeks in different places with different hours; when teachers split the class into groups to do projects about internet advertising or volunteer work with kids with handicaps, they break up gangs of friends on purpose, because Transition Year is all about new experiences. That’s what Holly tells herself, on days when she hears Julia’s laugh rise out of a crowd across the classroom, on days when the four of them finally have a few minutes together in their room at lights-out and they barely say a word: it’s just Transition Year. It would have happened anyway. Next year everything will go back to normal.
This year when Becca says she’s not going to the Valentine’s dance, no one tries to change her mind. When Sister Cornelius catches Julia snogging François Levy right on the dance floor, Holly and Selena don’t say a word. Holly isn’t positive that Selena, swaying offbeat with her arms around herself, even noticed.
Afterwards, when they get back to their room, Becca is curled on her bed with her back to them and her earbuds in. Her reading light catches the flash of an open eye, but she doesn’t say anything and so neither do they.
The next week, when Miss Graham tells them to get into groups of four for the big final art project, Holly grabs the other three so fast she almost falls off her chair. “Ow,” Julia says, jerking her arm away. “What the hell?”
“Jesus, chillax. I just don’t want to get stuck with some idiots who’ll want to do a massive picture of Kanye made out of lipstick kisses.”
“You chillax,” Julia says, but she grins. “No Kanye kisses. We’ll go with Lady Gaga made of tampons. It’ll be a commentary on women’s place in society.” She and Holly and Becca all get the giggles and even Selena grins, and Holly feels her shoulders relax for the first time in ages.
“Hi,” Holly calls, banging the door behind her.
“In here,” her dad calls back, from the kitchen. Holly dumps her weekend bag on the floor and goes in to him, shaking a dusting of rain off her hair.
He’s at a counter peeling potatoes, long gray T-shirt sleeves pushed up above his elbows. From behind—rough hair still mostly brown, strong shoulders, muscled arms—he looks younger. The oven is on, turning the room warm and humming; outside the kitchen window the February rain is a fine mist, almost invisible.
Chris Harper has been dead for nine months, a week and five days.
Dad gives Holly a no-hands hug and leans down so she can kiss his cheek—stubble, cigarette smell. “Show me,” he says.
“Dad.”
“Show.”
“You’re so paranoid.”
Dad wiggles the fingers of one hand at her, beckoning. Holly rolls her eyes and holds up her key ring. Her personal alarm is a pretty little teardrop, black with white flowers. Dad spent a long time searching for one that looks like a normal key ring, so she won’t get embarrassed and take it off, but he still checks every single week.
“That’s what I like to see,” says Dad, going back to the potatoes. “I heart my paranoia.”
“Nobody else has to have one.”
“So you’re the only one who’ll escape the mass alien abduction. Congratulations. Need a snack?”
“I’m OK.” On Fridays they use up their leftover pocket money on chocolate and eat it sitting on the wall at the bus stop.
“Perfect. Then you can give me a hand here.”
Mum always makes dinner. “Where’s Mum?” Holly asks. She pretends to focus on hanging up her coat straight, and watches Dad sideways. When Holly was little her parents split up. Dad moved back in when she was eleven, but she still keeps an eye on things, especially unusual things.
“Meeting some friend from back in school. Catch.” Dad throws Holly a head of garlic. “Three cloves, finely minced. Whatever that means.”
“What friend?”
“Some woman called Deirdre.” Holly can’t tell whether he knows she was looking for that, some woman. With Dad you can never tell what he knows. “Mince finely.”
Holly finds a knife and pulls herself onto a stool at the breakfast bar. “Is she coming home?”
“Course she is. I wouldn’t bet on what time, though. I said we’d make a start on dinner. If she gets back for it, great; if she’s still off having girl time, we won’t starve.”
“Let’s get pizza,” Holly says, giving Dad the corner of a grin. When she used to go to his depressing apartment for weekends, they would order pizza and eat it on the tiny balcony, looking out over the Liffey and dangling their legs through the railings—there wasn’t enough room for chairs. She can tell by the way Dad’s eyes warm that he remembers too.
“Here’s me giving my mad chef skills a workout, and you want pizza? Ungrateful little wagon. Anyway, your mammy said the chicken needed using.”
“What are we making?”
“Chicken casserole. Your mammy wrote down her recipe, give or take.” He nods at a piece of paper tucked under the chopping board. “How was your week?”
“OK. Sister Ignatius gave us this big speech about how we need to decide what we want to do in college and our whole entire lives depend on making the right decision. By the end she got so hyper about the whole thing, she made us all go down to the chapel and pray to our confirmation saints for guidance.”
That gets the laugh she was looking for. “And what did your confirmation saint have to say?”
“She said I should be sure and not fail my exams, or I’m stuck with Sister Ignatius for another year and aaahhh.”
“Smart lady.” Dad tips the peelings into the compost bin and starts chopping the potatoes. “Are you getting a little too much nun in your life? Because you can quit boarding any time you want. You know that. Just say the word.”
“I don’t want to,” Holly says, quickly. She still doesn’t know why Dad is letting her be a boarder, especially after Chris, and she always feels like he might change his mind any minute. “Sister Ignatius is fine. We just laugh about her. Julia does her voice; once she actually did it all the way through Guidance, and Sister Ignatius didn’t even realize. She couldn’t work out why we were all cracking up.”
“Little smart-arse,” Dad says, grinning. He likes Julia. “The Sister’s got a point in there, though. Been doing any thinking about what comes after school?”
It feels to Holly like the last couple of months that’s all any adult ever talks about. She says, “Maybe sociology—we had a sociologist come in to talk to us in Careers Week last year, and it sounded OK. Or maybe law.”
She’s focusing on the garlic, but she can hear that the rhythm of her dad’s chopping doesn’t change, not that it would anyway. Mum is a barrister. Dad is a detective. Holly doesn’t have a brother or a sister to go Dad’s way.
When she makes herself look across, he’s showing nothing but impressed and interested. “Yeah? Solicitor, barrister, what?”
“Barrister. Maybe. I don’t know; I’m only thinking about it.”
“You’ve got the arguing skills for it, anyway. Prosecution or defense?”
“I thought maybe defense.”
“How come?”
Still all pleasant and intrigued, but Holly can feel the tiny chill: he doesn’t like that. She shrugs. “Just sounds interesting. Is this minced enough?”
Holly’s been trying to think of a time when her dad decided she shouldn’t do something and she ended up doing it anyway, or the other way around. Boarding is the only one she could come up with. Sometimes he says no flat-out; more often, it just ends up not happening. Sometimes Holly even winds up, she’s not sure how, thinking he’s right. She wasn’t actually planning to tell him about the law thing, but unless you concentrate you end up telling Dad stuff.
“Looks good to me,” Dad says. “In here.” Holly goes over to him and scrapes the garlic into the casserole dish. “And chop that leek for me. Why defense?”
Holly takes the leek back to her stool. “Because. There’s like hundreds of people on the prosecution side.”
Dad waits for more, eyebrow up, inquiring, until she shrugs. “Just . . . I don’t know. Detectives, and uniforms, and the Technical Bureau, and the prosecutors. The defense just has the person whose actual life it is, and his lawyer.”
“Hm,” says Dad, examining the potato chunks. Holly can feel him being careful, looking over his answer from every angle. “You know, sweetheart, it’s not actually as unfair as it looks. If anything, the system’s weighted towards the defense. The prosecution has to build a whole case that stands up beyond a reasonable doubt; the defense only has to build that one doubt. I can swear to you, hand on heart, there’s a lot more guilty people acquitted than innocent ones in jail.”
Which isn’t what Holly means, at all. She’s not sure whether Dad not getting it is irritating or a relief. “Yeah,” she says. “Probably.”
Dad throws the potatoes into the casserole dish. He says, “It’s a good impulse. Just take your time; don’t get fixed on a plan till you’re a hundred percent definite. Yeah?”
Holly says, “How come you don’t want me to do defense?”
“I’d be only delighted. That’s where the money is; you can keep me in the style to which I wish to become accustomed.”
He’s slipping away, the nonstick glint coming into his eyes. “Dad. I’m asking.”
“Defense lawyers hate me. I thought you were going to do your hating me around about now, get it out of your system, and by the time you were twenty or so we’d get on great again. I didn’t think you’d be just getting started.” Dad heads for the fridge and starts rummaging. “Your mother said to put in carrots. How many do you figure we need?”
“Dad.”
Dad leans back against the fridge, watching Holly. “Let me ask you this,” he says. “A client shows up at your office, wanting you to defend him. He’s been arrested—and we’re not talking littering here; we’re talking something way out on the other side of bad. The more you talk to him, the more you’re positive he’s guilty as hell. But he’s got money, and your kid needs braces and school fees. What do you do?”
Holly shrugs. “I figure it out then.”
She doesn’t know how to tell her dad, only half of her even wants to tell her dad, that that’s the whole point. Everything the prosecutors have, all the backup, the system, the safe certainty that they’re the good guys: that feels lazy, feels sticky-slimy as cowardice. Holly wants to be the one out on her own, working out for herself what’s right and what’s wrong this time. She wants to be the one coming up with fast zigzag ways to get each story the right ending. That feels clean; that feels like courage.
“That’s one way to do it.” Dad pulls out a bag of carrots. “One? Two?”
“Put two.” He has the recipe right there; he doesn’t need to ask.
“How about your mates? Any of them thinking of law?”
A zap of irritation stiffens Holly’s legs. “No. I actually can think all by myself. Isn’t that amazing?”
Dad grins and heads back to the counter. On his way past he lays a hand on Holly’s head, warm and just the right strength. He’s relented, or decided to act like it. He says, “You’ll make a good barrister, if that’s what you decide on. Either side of the courtroom.” He runs his hand down her hair and goes to work on the carrots. “Don’t sweat it, chickadee. You’ll make the right call.”
The conversation’s over. All his careful probing and all his deep serious speeches, and she slipped right past without him laying a finger on what she’s actually thinking. Holly feels a quick prickle of triumph and shame. She chops harder.
Dad says, “So what do your mates have in mind?”
“Julia’s going to do journalism. Becca’s not sure. Selena wants to go to art school.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem. Her stuff’s good. I meant to ask you: is she doing OK these days?”
Holly looks up, but he’s peeling a carrot and glancing out the window to see if Mum’s on her way. “What do you mean?”
“Just wondering. The last few times you’ve had her round, she seemed a little . . . spacy, is that the word I’m looking for?”
“She’s like that. You just have to get to know her.”
“I’ve known her a good while now. She didn’t use to be this spacy. Anything been on her mind?”
Holly shrugs. “Just normal stuff. School. Whatever.”
Dad waits, but Holly knows he’s not done. She dumps the bits of leek into the casserole dish. “What’ll I do now?”
“Here.” He throws her an onion. “I know you and your mates know Selena inside out, but sometimes those are the last people to cop that something’s wrong. A lot of problems can show up around your age—depression, whatever we’re supposed to call manic depression these days, schizophrenia. I’m not saying Selena’s got any of those”—his hand going up, as Holly’s mouth opens—“but if something’s up with her, even something minor, now’s the time to get it sorted.”
The balls of Holly’s feet are digging into the floor tiles. “Selena’s not schizophrenic. She daydreams. Just because she’s not some stupid cliché teenager who goes around screaming about Jedward all the time doesn’t mean she’s abnormal.”
Dad’s eyes are very blue and very level. It’s the levelness that has Holly’s heart banging in her throat. He thinks this is serious.
He says, “You know me better than that, sweetheart. I’m not saying she has to be Little Miss Perky Cheerleader. I’m just saying she seems a lot less on the ball than she did this time last year. And if she’s got a problem and it doesn’t get treated fast, it could do a pretty serious number on her life. Yous are going to be heading out into the big wide world before you know it. You don’t want to be running around out there with an untreated mental illness. That’s how lives end up banjaxed.”
Holly feels a new kind of real all around her, pressing in. It squeezes her chest, makes it hard to breathe.
She says, “Selena’s fine. All she needs is for people to leave her alone and quit annoying her. OK? Can you please do that?”
After a moment Dad says, “Fair enough. Like I said, you know her better than I do, and I know yous lot take good care of each other. Just keep an eye on her. That’s all I’m saying.”
A key rattling in the front door, impatient, and then a rush of cool rain-flavored air. “Frank? Holly?”
“Hi,” Holly and Dad call.
The door slams and Mum blows into the kitchen. “My God,” she says, flopping back against the wall. Her fair hair is coming out of its bun and she looks different, flushed and loosened, not like cool good-posture Mum at all. “That was strange.”
“Are you locked?” Dad asks, grinning at her. “And me at home looking after your child, slaving over a hot cooker—”
“I am not. Well, maybe just a touch tipsy, but it’s not that. It’s—My God, Frank. Do you realize I hadn’t seen Deirdre in almost thirty years? How on earth did that happen?”
Dad says, “So it went well in the end, yeah?”
Mum laughs, breathless and giddy. Her coat hangs open; underneath she’s wearing her slim navy dress flashed with white, the gold necklace Dad gave her at Christmas. She’s still collapsed against the wall, bag dumped on the floor at her feet. Holly gets that pulse of wariness again. Mum always kisses her the instant one of them gets through the door.
“It was wonderful. I was absolutely terrified—honestly, at the door of the bar I almost turned around and went home. If it hadn’t worked, if we’d just sat there making small talk like acquaintances . . . I wouldn’t have been able to bear it. Dee and I and this other girl, Miriam, back in school we were like you and your friends, Holly. We were inseparable.”
One of her ankles is bent outwards above the high-heeled navy leather shoe, leaning her lopsided like a teenager. Holly says—Thirty years, never, we’d never—“So how come you haven’t seen her?”
“Deirdre’s parents emigrated to America, when we left school. She went to college there. It wasn’t like now, there wasn’t any e-mail; phone calls cost the earth, and letters took weeks. We did try—she’s still got all my letters, can you imagine? She brought them along, all these things I’d forgotten all about, boys and nights out and fights with our parents and . . . I know I’ve got hers somewhere—in Mum and Dad’s attic, maybe, I’ll have to look—I can’t have thrown them away. But it was college and we were busy, and the next thing we knew we were completely out of touch . . .”
Mum’s long lovely face is transparent, things blowing across it bright and swift as falling leaves. She doesn’t look like Holly’s mum, like anyone’s mum. For the first time ever, Holly looks at her and thinks: Olivia.
“But today—God, it was as if we’d seen each other a month ago. We laughed so hard, I can’t remember the last time I laughed that hard. We used to laugh like that all the time. The things we remembered—we had this silly alternative verse for the school song, ridiculous stuff, dirty jokes, and we sang it together, right there in the bar. We remembered all the words. I hadn’t thought of that song in thirty years, I’d swear it wasn’t even in my mind any more, but one look at Dee and the whole thing came back.”
“Getting rowdy in pubs at your age,” Dad says. “You’ll be barred.” He’s smiling, a full-on grin that makes him look younger too. He likes seeing Mum like this.
“Oh, God, people must have heard us, mustn’t they? I didn’t even notice. Do you know, Frank, at one stage Dee said to me, ‘You probably want to get home, don’t you?’ and I actually said, ‘Why?’ When she said ‘home,’ I was picturing my parents’ house. My bedroom when I was seventeen. I was thinking, ‘Why on earth would I be in a hurry to get back there?’ I was so deep in 1982, I’d forgotten all of this existed.”
She’s grinning through a hand pressed over her mouth, ashamed and delighted. “Child neglect,” Dad says to Holly. “Write it down, in case you ever feel like dobbing her in.”
Something skitters across Holly’s mind: Julia in the glade a long time ago, the tender amused curl of her mouth, This isn’t forever. It snatches Holly’s breath: she was wrong. They are forever, a brief and mortal forever, a forever that will grow into their bones and be held inside them after it ends, intact, indestructible.
“She gave me this,” Mum says, fishing in her bag. She pulls out a photo—white border turning yellow—and puts it down on the bar. “Look. That’s us: me and Deirdre and Miriam. That’s us.”
Her voice does something funny, curls up. For a horrified second Holly thinks she’s going to cry, but when she looks up Mum is biting her lip and smiling.
Three of them, older than Holly, maybe a year or two. School uniforms, Kilda’s crest on their lapels. Look close and the kilt is longer, the blazer is boxy and ugly, but if it weren’t for that and the big hair, they could be out of the year above her. They’re messing, draped pouting and hip-jutting on a wrought-iron gate—it takes a strange twitch like a blink before Holly recognizes the gate at the bottom of the back lawn. Deirdre is in the middle, shaking a raggedy dark perm forward over her face, all curves and lashes and wicked glint. Miriam is small and fair and feather-haired, fingers snapping, sweet grin through braces. And over on the right Olivia, long-legged, head flung back and hands tangled in her hair, halfway between model and mockery. She’s wearing lip gloss, pale candy-floss-pink—Holly can picture the mild distaste on Mum’s face if she wore it home one weekend. She looks beautiful.
“We were pretending to be Bananarama,” Mum says. “Or someone like that, I don’t think we were sure. We were in a band that term.”
“You were in a band?” Dad says. “I’m a groupie?”
“We were called Sweet and Sour.” Mum laughs, with a little shake in it. “I was the keyboard player—well, barely; I played piano, so we assumed that meant I’d be good at the keyboard, but actually I was terrible. And Dee could only play folk guitar and none of us had a note in our heads, so the whole thing was a disaster, but we had a wonderful time.”
Holly can’t stop looking. That girl in the photo isn’t one solid person, feet set solidly in one irrevocable life; that girl is an illusive firework-burst made of light reflecting off a million different possibilities. That girl isn’t a barrister, married to Frank Mackey, mother of one daughter and no more, a house in Dalkey, neutral colors and soft cashmere and Chanel No. 5. All of that is implicit in her, curled unimagined inside her bones; but so are hundreds of other latent lives, unchosen and easily vanished as whisks of light. A shiver knots in Holly’s spine, won’t shake loose.
She asks, “Where’s Miriam?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t the same without Dee, and during college we grew apart—I was terribly serious back then, very ambitious, always studying, and Miriam wanted to spend most of her time getting drunk and flirting, so before we knew it . . .” Mum’s still gazing down at the photo. “Someone told me she got married and moved to Belfast, not long after college. That’s the last I heard of her.”
“If you want,” Holly says, “I’ll have a look for her on the internet. She’s probably on Facebook.”
“Oh, darling,” Mum says. “That’s very kind of you. But I don’t know . . .” A sudden catch of her breath. “I don’t know if I could bear it. Can you understand that?”
“I guess.”
Dad has a hand on Mum’s back, just lightly, between her shoulder blades. He says, “Need another glass of wine?”
“Oh, God, no. Or maybe; I don’t know.”
Dad cups the back of her neck for a second and heads for the fridge.
“So long ago,” Mum says, touching the photo. The fizz is fading out of her voice, leaving it quiet and still. “I don’t know how it can possibly be so long ago.”
Holly moves back to her stool. She stirs bits of onion with the point of the knife.
Mum says, “Dee isn’t happy, Frank. She used to be the outgoing one, the confident one—like your Julia, Holly, always a smart answer for anything—she was going to be a politician, or the TV interviewer who asks the politicians the tough questions. But she got married young, and then her husband didn’t want her to work till the children were out of school, so now all she can get is bits of secretarial stuff. He sounds like a dreadful piece of work—I didn’t say that, of course—she’s thinking of leaving him, but she’s been with him so long she can’t imagine how she would manage without him . . .”
Dad hands her a glass. She takes it automatically, without looking. “Her life, Frank, her life isn’t anything like she thought it would be. All our plans, we were going to take the world by storm . . . She never imagined this.”
Mum doesn’t normally talk like this in front of Holly. She’s cupping one cheek and looking into air, seeing things. She’s forgotten Holly is there.
Dad asks, “Going to meet up with her again?” Holly can tell he wants to touch Mum, put his arms around her. She wants to as well, to press in against Mum’s side, but she stays back because Dad is.
“Maybe. I don’t know. She’s going back to America next week; back to her husband, and the temp work. She can’t stay any longer. And she’s got all her cousins to see before then. We swore we’d e-mail this time . . .” Mum runs her fingers down her face, like she’s feeling the lines around her mouth for the first time.
Dad says, “Maybe next summer we can think about taking a holiday over in that direction. If you want to.”
“Oh, Frank. That’s lovely of you. But she’s not in New York or San Francisco, anywhere that . . .” Mum looks at the wineglass in her hand, bewildered, and puts it down on the counter. “She’s in Minnesota, a smallish town there. That’s where her husband’s from. I don’t know if . . .”
“If we headed to New York, she might come up and join us. Have a think about it.”
“I will. Thank you.” Mum takes a deep breath. She picks up her bag off the floor and tucks the photo back into it. “Holly,” she says, holding out an arm and smiling. “Come here, darling, and give me my kiss. How was your week?”
That night Holly can’t sleep. The house feels stuffed with heat, but when she kicks off the duvet a chill flattens itself along her back. She listens to Mum and Dad going to bed: Mum’s voice still rising faster and happier, dropping suddenly now and then when she remembers Holly; the low rhythm of Dad adding in something that makes Mum laugh out loud. After their voices stop, Holly lies there in the dark on her own, trying to stay still. She thinks about texting one of the others to see if she’s awake, but she doesn’t know which one, or what she wants to say.
“Lenie,” Holly says.
It feels like stretched hours before Selena, face down on her bed reading, looks up. “Mm?”
“Next year. How do we decide who shares with who?”
“Huh?”
“Senior rooms. Do you know who you want to share with?”
A thick skin of rain coats the window. They’re stuck indoors; in the common room, people are playing a nineties edition of Trivial Pursuit, trying out makeup, texting. The smell of beef stew for tea has somehow made it all the way up from the canteen. It’s making Holly feel slightly sick.
“For fuck’s sake,” Julia says, turning a page. “It’s February. If you want something to worry about, how about that stupid Social Awareness Studies project?”
“Lenie?”
Senior rooms hang over the whole of fourth year. Friendships go down in flames and tears because someone picks the wrong person to share with. All the boarders spend most of the year edging carefully round the choice, trying to find some way to navigate it undamaged.
Selena gazes, lips parted, like Holly’s asked her to fly a space shuttle. She says, “One of you guys.”
A flutter of fear catches at Holly. “Well, yeah. Which one?”
Nothing out of Selena; empty space, echoes. Becca has felt something in the air and taken out her earbuds.
“Want to know who I’m going to share with?” Julia asks. “Because if you’re going to start getting hyper about stuff that isn’t even happening yet, it’s definitely not you.”
“I didn’t ask you,” Holly points out. “What’ll we do, Lenie?” She wills Selena to sit up and think about it, come up with an idea that makes sure no one’s feelings get hurt, that’s what she’s good at; names out of a hat maybe—please Lenie please . . . “Lenie?”
Selena says, “You do it. I don’t mind. I’m reading.”
Holly says, feeling her voice too loud and too sharp-edged, “We all have to decide together. That’s how it works. You don’t get to just make the rest of us do it.”
Selena tucks her head down tight over her book. Becca watches, sucking the cord of her earbuds.
“Hol,” Julia says, giving Holly the crinkle-nosed smile that means trouble. “I need something out of the common room. Come with me.”
Holly doesn’t actually feel like letting Julia boss her around. “What do you need?”
“Come on.” Julia slides off the bed.
“Is it too heavy for you to carry by yourself?”
“Hahahaha, such a comedienne. Come on.”
The force of her makes Holly feel better. Maybe she should have said something to Jules straight off; maybe the two of them together will come up with a decent answer. She swings her legs off the bed. Becca watches them out of the room. Selena doesn’t.
The early darkness outside turns the light in the corridor a dirty yellow. Julia leans back against the wall with her arms folded. She says, “What the fuck are you doing?”
She doesn’t bother keeping it down; the rain battering the landing window covers their voices from any listeners. Holly says, “I was just asking her. What’s the big huge—”
“You were hassling her. Don’t hassle her.”
“Hello, how is that hassling her? We have to decide.”
“It’s hassling her because if you keep going on at her, she’ll just get upset. The rest of us work it out, we tell her, she’ll be happy with whatever we think.”
Holly matches Julia’s folded arms, and her stare. “What if I think Lenie should get a say too?”
Julia rolls her eyes. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
“What? Why not?”
“Did you have a lobotomy for lunch? You know why not.”
Holly says, “You mean because she’s not OK. That’s why not.”
Julia’s face closes over. “She’s fine. She’s got shit she needs to sort out, is all. Doesn’t everyone.”
“It’s not the same thing. Lenie can’t manage. Like just normal stuff: she can’t do it. What’s going to happen to her when the rest of us aren’t there every minute of every—”
“You mean, like, when we’re in college? Years from now? Excuse me if I don’t have a total drama attack over that. By then she’ll be fine.”
“She’s not getting better. You know she’s not.”
It spins between them, razor-edged: she hasn’t got better since then; since that; you know what. Neither one of them reaches out to touch it.
Holly says, “I think we need to make her go talk to someone.”
Julia laughs out loud. “What, like Sister Ignatius? Oh, yeah, that’s totally going to make everything OK. Sister Ignatius couldn’t sort out a broken fingernail—”
“Not Sister Ignatius. Someone real. Like a doctor or something.”
“Jesus Christ—” Julia shoots off the wall pointing both forefingers at Holly. The angle of her neck is one degree off an attack. “Don’t even fucking think about it. I am serious.”
Holly almost slaps her hands away. The rush of fury feels good. “Since when are you the boss of me? You don’t get to give me orders. Ever.”
Neither of them has been in an actual fight since they were tiny kids, but they’re eye to eye, on their toes and boiling for it, hands twitching for something soft to gouge and twist. Julia is the one who finally drops back, gives Holly her shoulder and sinks against the wall.
“Look,” she says, to the landing window and the swollen streaks of rain. “If you care about Lenie, like even the tiniest bit, then you won’t try and get her talking to a psychologist. You’re going to have to take my word for it: that’s like the absolute worst thing you could do for her, in the whole world. OK?”
The immensity of it is coiled tight inside every word. Holly can’t get a hold on her, amid the relentless buzz of both their circling secrets, can’t catch at what Julia knows or guesses. It’s nothing like Julia to back down.
“I’m asking you as a favor here. Trust me. Please.”
Holly wishes, right down into deep parts of herself that she didn’t know existed, that it were still that simple. “I guess,” she says. “OK.”
Julia’s face turns towards her. The layer of suspicion makes Holly want to do something, she can’t tell what: scream it right off, maybe, or give it the finger and walk out the door and never come back. “Yeah?” Julia says. “You won’t try and get her talking to anyone?”
“If you’re sure.”
“I’m so sure.”
“Then OK,” Holly says. “I won’t.”
“Good,” Julia says. “Let’s go get something out of the common room before Becs comes looking for us.”
They head off down the corridor, in step, baffled and alone.
Holly isn’t leaving it because Julia says so. She’s leaving it because she has an idea.
It’s the psychologist thing that made her think of it. She got sent to a counselor, that other time. He was kind of a moron and his nose sweated, and he kept asking questions that were none of his business so Holly just played with his stupid puzzles and ignored him, but he kept talking and he did come out with one thing that actually turned out to be true. He said it would get simpler once the trial was over and she knew exactly what was going on; either way, he said, knowing would make it easier to put the whole thing out of her head and concentrate on other stuff. Which it did.
It takes a few days before Julia lets go of the wary look and leaves Holly and Selena alone together. But one afternoon they’re at the Court and Julia needs to get her dad a birthday card, and Becca remembers she owes her gran a thank-you card; and Selena holds up her bag from the art shop and starts drifting towards the fountain, and by the time Holly heads after her it’s too late for Julia to change anything.
Selena arranges perfect tubes of paint in a fan on the black marble and strokes the color bands with a fingertip. Across the fountain a gang of guys from Colm’s turn to eye her and Holly, but they won’t come over. They can tell.
“Lenie,” Holly says, and waits the long stretch till Selena thinks of looking up. “You know one thing that might make you better?”
Selena watches her like she’s made of cloud-patterns, shifting gracefully and meaninglessly across a wide sky. She says, “Huh?”
“If you found out what happened,” Holly says. Coming this close to it makes her heart skid fast and light, no traction. “Last year. And if someone got arrested for it. That would help. Right? Do you think?”
“Shh,” Lenie says. She reaches over and takes Holly’s hand—hers is cold and soft, and no matter how tight Holly squeezes, it doesn’t feel solid. She lets Holly hang on to it and goes back to her paints.
Holly learned from her dad a long time back that the difference between caught and not is taking your time. She buys the book first, in a big secondhand bookshop in town on a busy Saturday; in a couple of months’ time Mum won’t remember I have to get this book for school can I have ten euros I’ll only be a sec, no one at the till will remember some blond kid with a musty mythology book and a glossy art thing to wave at Mum. She finds a phone pic that has Chris in the background and prints it off a few weeks later, on a lunchtime dash for the computer room; in no time the others will have forgotten her taking a few minutes too long to get back from the toilet. She slices and glues on her bedroom floor that weekend, wearing gloves she stole from the chem lab, with the duvet ready to yank over the whole thing if Mum or Dad knocks; after long enough they’ll forget any comforting play-school whiff of paper glue. She dumps the book in a bin in the park near home; within a week or two it’ll be well gone. Then she slides the card down a slit in the lining of her winter coat, and waits for enough time to move past.
She wants a sign to tell her when the right day comes. She knows she won’t get one, not for this; maybe not for anything after this, ever again.
She makes her own. When she hears the Daleks talking about OMG this stupid project taking forever have to go up on Tuesday evening so booooring, Holly says, at the end of art class, Study time again on Tuesday? Watches the others nod, while they pour drifts of powdered chalk into the bin and coil copper wire away.
She is meticulous. She makes sure to chatter the others past the Secret Place, on their way into the art room and out again, so none of them see what isn’t there. Makes sure to leave her phone out of sight, on a chair pushed under the table, so no one spots it for her. Makes sure to say, “Oh, pants, my phone!” after lights-out. Makes sure to run through every step, the next morning, up in the empty corridor: pin it, see it (quick gasp, hand to her mouth, like someone’s watching), get the envelope and the balsa knife, lever out the thumbtack as delicately as if there might actually be fingerprints there. When she runs back down the corridor, the sound of each footstep flies up into a high corner, slaps onto the wall like a dark handprint.
The others believe her when she says she has a migraine—she’s had three in the past two months, matching Mum’s symptoms. Julia pulls out her iPod, to keep Holly from getting bored. Holly lies in bed and watches them leave for school like it’s the last time she’ll ever see them: already half gone, Becca flipping through pages for her Media Studies homework, Julia hauling at a sock, Selena tipping a smile and a wave over her shoulder. When the door slams behind them, there’s a minute when she thinks she’ll never be able to make herself sit up.
The nurse gives her migraine pills, tucks her in and leaves her to sleep it off. Holly moves fast. She knows what time the next bus into town leaves.
It hits her at the bus stop, in the cool-edged morning air. At first she thinks she actually is sick, that what she’s doing has called down some curse on her and now all her lies come true. She hasn’t felt it in so long and it tastes different now. It used to be vast and dark-bloody; this is metallic, this is alkaline, this is like scouring powder eating through your layers one by one. It’s fear. Holly is afraid.
The bus howls up like a stampeding animal, the driver eyes her uniform, the steps sway precariously as she climbs to the top deck. Guys in hoodies are sprawled along the back seat blasting hip-hop from a radio and they eye-strip Holly bare, but her legs won’t take her back down those stairs. She sits on the edge of the front seat, stares out at the road diving under the wheels and listens to the raw laughs behind her, tensed for the surge that would mean an attack. If the guys come for her then she can push the emergency button. The driver will stop the bus and help her down the stairs, and she can get the next bus back to school and climb back into bed. Her heart punching her throat makes her want to throw up. She wants Dad. She wants Mum.
The song starts so small, fading up through the hip-hop, it takes a minute to reach her. Then it hits her like a shock in the chest, like she’s breathed air made of something different.
Remember oh remember back when we were young so young . . .
It’s crystal-clear, every word. It surges away the sound of the engine, bowls away the hoodies’ hooting. It carries them over the canal and all the way into town. It soars the bus through chains of lights all flashing to green, leaps it over speed bumps, slaloms it two-wheeled around jaywalkers. Never thought I’d lose you and I never thought I’d find you here, never thought that everything we’d lost could feel so near . . .
Holly listens to every word of it, straight through. Chorus, chorus again, again, and she waits for the song to fade. Instead it keeps going and it rises. I’ve got so far, I’ve got so far left to travel . . .
The bus skids towards her stop. Holly waves good-bye to the hoodies—openmouthed and baffled, looking for an insult, too slow—and flies down the rocking stairs.
Out on the street, the song is still going. It’s fainter and tricky, flickering between traffic sounds and student-gang shouts, but she knows what to listen for now and she keeps hold of it. It spirals out in front of her like a fine golden thread, it leads her nimble and dancer-footed between rushing suits and lampposts and long-skirted beggarwomen, up the street towards Stephen.