“Fuck me, it’s cold.”
Finn looks at his watch, then pulls the sleeves of his hoodie over his hands, clasping them in place with his thumbs, forming fists. The birds tell us it’s morning. Daylight is beginning to draw the shapes of the big wheel, the rollercoaster, the carousel. The water is shaded in, waves edged with silver highlights. The roads are pencilled in, rough lines sketched by the dusky light. The street begins to animate again.
“You OK?”
He waves, his hands like dancing puppets against a backdrop of painted sky. The sunrise is a wash of inky colour, intensifying rapidly with the haste of day, but gunmetal clouds are gathering.
“Hello? Carla?”
Finn unwraps his fingers and knots them with mine. “You’re freezing.”
“It was her. She spiked me.”
He sits down on the bridge, his legs dangling over the edge. He’s smoking. A silhouetted chimney. He leans in and I feel a cold shiver as his breath tickles my ear.
“You’ll never be able to prove it.”
“Time to let go,” I whisper. I close my eyes. When I open them again, he’s gone. Back to the party.
Adjusting my chemically widened pupils to the daylight I wonder if my mind’s been playing tricks. Have I made the last year up? Have I been playing games with myself because I’ve been so mind-fuckingly desperate to be noticed … so desperate for love? Was my Brainy Plain Girl invisibility so painful that this, this semi-crazed confusion was better?
The streetlights click off and another day begins.
But not for me.
I stare up at the sky with its brewing clouds. I see the drop. The first drop of the rainfall. I see it linger for a second on the edge of the world, and then fall, fall, fall to meet me. Dark crushes in on every side. Blackness shrinks my vision to a pinpoint of light, a single drop, and the world ends.