They buried Abi on a day too beautiful.
Half the school littered the grounds of St Cecelia, some cross-legged on the grass, some sitting on broken gravestones. In the distance surfers carved the waves.
Reverend Baxter spoke choice words about God’s need for another angel, like he wouldn’t be drowning in them soon enough.
Though Abi was close to eighteen, she took her place in the children’s cemetery, in a spot beneath white blossom so fragile Mae kept her eyes fixed to it as Luke Manton screamed his daughter’s name, his knees in the mud, his hand on the coffin.
Abi’s mother hid behind large sunglasses, separate from her husband, separate from all of them.
Maybe it hit home then, to everyone there. The kids that came because there was nothing else to do. The neighbours showing face. Death in all its finality.
‘Are you okay?’ Felix said.
Mae took a breath. ‘She left us behind. Everything we did before. Our flawed idea of perfect.’
‘My father, the people here and the god they pray to, that’s flawed. Open your eyes, Mae. You’ll see it again.’
When it was done they drifted towards a church hall filled to bursting.
Luke Manton took a plastic chair and a bottle of vodka and remained by his daughter’s grave. No one went over, no one knew what to say. Of all the words left, not one of them fit.
‘Paper plates,’ Sally said, from the buffet table. ‘They don’t have the structural integrity for what I’ve got planned.’
Mae saw an empty foil serving platter and held it up.
‘That’s my girl,’ Sally said, taking it and loading it with sandwiches.
Mae watched her, the way she went through food, sweat ran down her forehead and dripped from her nose.
‘I’m surprised her ex came.’ Sally air-quoted ex with her fingers, then licked barbecue sauce from them. ‘You know she ditched him?’
Mae looked up, surprised.
‘He’s all right now he’s got his little minion with him.’ Sally nodded in the direction of Jeet Patel. ‘It’ll say understudy on his grave, you know, if he gets to have one. Theodore gets the solo, he’s got the voice. Not that Jeet complains. He’s like a rainbow … Makes you wonder what’s underneath though, right?’
She gripped a bottle of wine between her knees and wrestled with the cork.
‘Candice is here,’ Felix said, as Sally sat down beside them.
‘Candice Harper?’ Sally laughed. ‘You might want to pick easier prey, Javelin.’
‘She likes bad boys,’ Felix said. ‘And they don’t come badder than me.’
‘Yeah, I saw the Tird incident. That was actually bad. Nothing says sexy like being cut out of a fake leather jacket by the school nurse.’
‘You think Candice heard?’
Sally nodded. ‘I had French with her when you strolled topless past the window. Répugnant.’
‘The protein hadn’t kicked in yet.’
Sally looked him up and down. ‘I’m sure it’s made a world of difference.’
‘You want me to strip down and prove it?’
‘Sure. The buffet table is missing a Twiglet.’
Mae left them. Outside she saw Lydia Manton standing at the far wall, watching the water in the distance. Expensive dress and heels, her hair immaculate.
Lydia took a cigarette from her purse, lit another for Mae and passed it to her. ‘You think it was cold, the way she treated you.’
Mae said nothing.
‘I grew up poor, Mae. I know about judgement. You don’t look a certain way. We had a group in our school like Hunter’s.’
‘Everyone does.’
‘You have to want more for your own kids. You have to want them to have an easier time.’ She held the smoke deep, then blew it towards the clouds. ‘The Forevers.’ Lydia gripped the cigarette tightly. She wore diamond studs in each ear and the even expression born at the hands of a surgeon, forever fixed in neutral. ‘You must have known you’d drift apart. Abi was practising violin and you were practising … giving yourself a tattoo. We could finally afford tutors. We could –’
‘I get it.’
Lydia looked at her. ‘When you’re a teenager, you think you won’t change … but you think the world will.’ Lydia’s mouth tightened and she dropped the cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out. ‘Abi was supposed to be my little princess. I had this idea of her, how she’d be everything I wasn’t. But she and her father were always closer …’
Mae watched the water. ‘She loved you.’
‘Abi hated me. She could never see it, the bigger picture. Girls like Hunter live nice lives, Mae. Luke doesn’t believe she jumped. Thinking someone did this to her is easier than thinking she chose not to come to him with her problems. He’s slurring about murder and it’s not helping him, not this close to the end.’
‘You think it’s the end then? No one ever says that.’
‘Whatever happens with Selena, this is our end. People looked at us and I saw their envy, and I liked it.’
‘Everyone likes it, they just don’t admit to it.’
‘But what they saw wasn’t real. We’ve all got secrets, Mae. But now, with the time we have left, it’s how deep you bury them. That’s all that matters.’
‘They didn’t check … how she died?’
‘Lay her down, cut her open. My girl died a saint, that’s all anyone needs to remember.’
She squeezed Mae’s shoulder, a little too hard, then headed back inside.
Across the cemetery Mr Silver sat alone on a bench, away from Luke Manton but watching the freshly dug grave, the mountain of lilies.
‘Dead people receive more flowers than the living because –’
‘Regret is stronger than gratitude,’ Mae said, turning to see Hunter beside her, stylish in a short black dress, her hair scraped back, her cheekbones severe.
‘My mother sent me over here. She saw you by the cliff edge and feared the worst. And she hates a funeral as much as I do.’
‘Showing face.’
‘Like the rest. You think Sally wants to be here? Last I heard she and Abi almost clawed each other’s eyes out in class. And Theodore, Abi ditched him because he wouldn’t sleep with her.’
‘They wore purity rings.’
‘There was nothing pure about Abi Manton. She used to follow Hugo around like a bitch in heat. I only hung out with her because her mother kept stopping by to invite my parents to her pathetic parties. We used her for a while, used her mother’s need to make her fit. I’d come back from the beach and Abi would be waiting for me at my house. Like, she’d been there all day, just waiting. Tragic how far some people will go just to fit in, just to be me. And I thought envy was a sin.’
‘People say I’m cold.’
‘Oh, you are. They’ll find out for themselves soon enough.’ Hunter nodded in the direction of two girls who stood hand in hand, staring at Mae. ‘Like the Forevers wasn’t some forever-friends club where the loser girls bitch about the popular girls.’
Hunter took the cigarette from Mae’s hand, took a long drag and flicked it to the ground. ‘We have a sweepstake for who’s next. I got Sullivan Reed.’
They looked over at Sullivan. He sat on the grass, a sketch pad beside him, head tilted so his hair hid the scars.
‘So if you could hang on a little longer before you take your turn, that’d be great. Thanks, Mae.’
Mae drifted towards the cemetery, sat alone and watched the sunset.
They made the walk at twilight.
Two hundred filed from the church down to the beach, where chairs had been set out in neat rows before a stage wrapped with fairy lights. Flowers were arranged in stone vases as tall as Mae.
Theodore stood at the front.
Sally Sweeny took her seat behind a white piano, one last chance for Lydia Manton to paint the town green.
Service books were handed out. A sketch of Abi’s smiling face took the front page, Mae saw the delicate scrawl at the bottom. Sullivan Reed was a talented artist.
The Reverend Baxter thanked Abi’s friends for lending them their voices on that perfect summer night.
They played.
Theodore sang.
People cried.
Mae focused on the water, the lapping waves as night crept into the day.
It was as Sally led them into the last song, and Theodore sang about giving himself away, his hands tied, his body bruised, that they turned the last page of their book.
And then they saw it.
And two hundred heads bowed and read the last words of Abi Manton in delicate italics.
It takes a lot for Mae to cry. When her parents died I sat beside her at the church, held her hand and waited for her to break but she didn’t. She kept it together for Stella. Mae held strong. And she stayed that way.
Sometimes she drinks so much I know she’s trying to get away. She cares for her sister, for her bitch grandmother. That night on the beach, we were fifteen, nothing had happened, not that day, but maybe it was years of holding on that finally took their toll.
The sun set. The sky … that blaze of colour. You ever think maybe the world is too perfect to exist? Trillion-to-one odds. A star exploded and sparked our sun, volcanoes erupted and gave us water. Complex molecules reached a chance collision that every single one of us is born from. Oxygen. Asteroids. A chain of events so spectacular that two girls ended up on a beach drinking vodka and waiting for it all to be undone.
I didn’t realise she was crying. I just looked to the side, and she was watching this perfect sunset, and she cried her heart right out of her body.
Maybe it was then Mae Cassidy appreciated just what we’ll lose.
We’ll lose our chance to be better.
To fix ourselves and our mistakes.
We’ll lose our chance to be kind.
To be something.
To be true.
To live.
Right then Mae decided not to see Selena as a curse. She decided to see her as an opportunity. An opportunity to fast-track all the coming-of-age bullshit and become exactly who we are right now. Because deep down we all know.
All that confusion is just misplaced fear.
We don’t waste time living another person’s life, another person’s lie. We grab hold of it right now, and we say, I am. Not I might be. Not I could be.
I am.
I am.
I am.
‘So what am I?’ I said as Mae passed me the bottle of vodka.
Mae smiled. She’s got a great smile, but you have to be lucky to see it. ‘I know what I am. I’m a creep.’
I laughed. ‘And I’m a weirdo.’
Mae reached out a hand and I took it.
‘What if we take back Forever?’ Mae watched the stars blink out one by one as the old sky died and our new one took shape.
She looked tough, even crying, like her tears were so hot they scarred her. ‘Why can’t it be, for us? And I’m not talking God or some religion’s version of heaven. I’m talking our own Forever.’
She held her bottle to our moon and we grabbed hold of the Forever that was stolen from us. The Forever in fairy tales, the ever-after that doesn’t burn out.
It wasn’t for the perfect prince and princess, it was for the girl who lost both parents when she was ten, it was for the sides of us that we keep hidden because we know the world isn’t willing to accept. We rewrote the rules. We chose the Forever we dreamed of.
Tolerate, don’t subjugate.
I won’t ask you to live my life, so don’t ask me to live yours. We made Forever for the creeps and the weirdos, the freaks and the outlaws. We decided we’d be blind to anyone that was blind to us. If I can’t see your hate, it has no power.
If Selena didn’t come, or even if she did, we refused to live in their world any longer. A world where beauty is objective.
Where money equals class.
Where the misshapen are beaten till they fit or disappear. You can say it was childish bullshit, naive, impossible, but you know what? This was our summer of impossible things. So while we still had stars to wish on, we chose not to die in their world.
Mae took the needle and the ink, and she branded our wrists and our souls.
We knew long before that moment that we were Forevers. A simmering storm since the day we were born. We made that pact then. If you’re crying because the world has spit in your face, you don’t have to cry alone. We are an army of each other, and an army of one.
That single word told you nothing and everything.
It told you we were good if you were one of us.
Bad if you weren’t.
We agreed to meet at midnight on the beach each night.
We’d do it till the end and till the beginning.
We’d pass each other in school corridors, in shopping centres and bars. And we’d see the word and know.
Together we held hands and ran at the water.
Forever was always.
And it would be again.