It was close to midnight by the time she made it to the bay front.
A fire burned high.
Driftwood twisted like horns. The float of voices and laughter, she stayed far enough from them.
She lay back on the sand and watched the stars, tried to pick out clusters Stella had spoken of, but could not place a single one.
‘The last Forever.’ Hunter came over, she wore denim cut-offs and a vest. She dropped her sandals to the sand. ‘That stunt you pulled at Abi’s funeral. You know you’re wasting your –’
‘Take the night off, Hunter. It’s been a long day.’
They sat in silence for a moment.
‘Did you even care when you heard?’
For a moment Hunter quietened, her voice lost its edge. ‘Time is condensed, right. Each day is a year of our lives. So I gave Abi one night. And the next day …’ She snapped her fingers.
‘If we’re saved, there’ll be an army of girls with deep frown lines. I don’t intend to be one of them.’
Mae frowned.
‘You see, Mae Cassidy, you’ll be their wrinkled queen.’
They heard lapping waves and the crackle of fire.
Hunter opened her bag and pulled out a bottle of wine. ‘Lafite-Rothschild. I think it was an anniversary present.’
Hunter drank, then lay back, her head beside Mae’s. ‘What if this is the end?’
‘Then we should be thankful for this.’
‘We’re each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.’
The two girls came towards them.
‘You came,’ Matilda said.
Hunter sighed heavily.
Betty looked at Mae. ‘Hunter calls us the dykes. And she says we’ll burn.’
‘And she calls me a scrubber because my mum cleans her house,’ Matilda said, with a smile.
Hunter raised the bottle to them.
‘At first it was just us two, and then the next night there was Adam, Casey, Mehmet and Bryony. And tonight there’s five more of us.’ Matilda stood tall, her pixie cut framed large, smoked eyes.
Betty’s lips were painted bold red against her golden skin, she knelt in the sand. ‘Make us Forevers, Mae. We’ll follow you into hell.’
‘Don’t you mean heaven?’ Hunter said.
Betty stared at her intently. ‘Not the way we’re going to spend the next weeks.’
They clustered around Mae.
‘Stick and poke, right,’ Matilda said, producing a needle and pen.
Mae stalled for a moment, then saw the way they looked at her, like she was all they needed.
She got to work as others drifted over.
Hugo and two of his friends, more of Hunter’s group, the girls and their silver hair.
Their beach was too perfect, it drew the crowds, even at night kids drove in from neighbouring towns.
Behind the pastel houses loomed.
They clustered together, printed each other and drank cheap wine and smoked cigarettes.
When she was done Matilda hugged her tightly. ‘Our perfect Forever. If you ever want us to kill Hunter for you …’
Mae smiled but Matilda just stared.
Betty nodded alongside her. ‘We’ll disappear the body. No trace. We watch CSI every night before bed.’
‘Thank you,’ Mae said, then puffed out her cheeks.
They passed around warm beer. Mae smelled weed.
‘You can see it now. With a telescope you can see the station on the moon,’ Hugo said. ‘There’s people living up there.’
‘They’re not living. They’re waiting,’ someone said. ‘They’re still building, I saw it on that show. It’s like … a holding pen or something.’
‘I heard there’s a hotel up there, for the rich, and restaurants and bars and you can go get wasted on the moon. And here we are, stuck on a beach, close to nowhere.’
The fire began to die, the moon and stars did enough, but still, the voices came from shadows.
They debated, cooked up facts, verbatim regurgitation, they talked about life and history and everything they would not know.
That night the Forevers grew to a handful. Kids that would spend their days hiding their wrists from parents and teachers, and their nights on the beach.
At midnight Sail came and sat beside her.
She wondered where he’d been, why he hadn’t been at school. She wondered who he was, who she was.
‘You reached people. What you said, it means something in a world of nothings.’
‘Maybe they just think it’s cool to walk round with a tattoo.’
‘Maybe, but sometimes the closer you look, the less you see.’
‘And that means?’
‘Take a step back. People believe in your words, that’s all.’
They walked up to the bay front, climbed the hill and crossed into the cemetery. Mae glanced at Abi’s grave, saw a dozen teddy bears had been left, and a sprawl of flowers that shamed the graves beside.
‘These ones,’ Mae said, stopping beside them, side by side and still so new. Too new.
‘James. Melissa,’ Sail said, reading their names.
She noticed he touched the stone.
‘A cemetery for lost souls. I try and wonder where they are,’ Mae said. ‘I try to see them some place light and bright and safe.’
Sail stared at the gold lettering, so ornate, like it had taken a million years to carve.
‘Why do we have to rest in peace?’ he said. ‘At our age the last thing we want to do is be resting.’
‘Go wild in peace?’
‘Better.’
She led him deeper, the moonlight their guide as they brushed past the limbs of a willow tree and found a bench behind the crumbling stone wall and the long drop to the water below.
‘Jesus, this town,’ he said, like maybe his parents had really found the perfect place to die.
‘This spot, it’s kind of hidden,’ Mae said.
Along the coast were other towns that cast their glows, black between making each an island.
‘Are we closer to the stars here?’ he said.
‘I need to know something about you,’ she said. ‘Because now you know I have a sister. And that’s too much. The balance …’
‘I was in Chicago,’ he said. ‘There’s a place there, and if you’re sick then you go there and you talk to this doctor. He takes people, people that everyone thinks are broken, and he tries to put them back together again.’
She looked over and wondered how someone like him could ever be broken.
‘So I was there and I looked out the window, and I was like forty floors up and I’m watching this sea of ants. And then it starts raining but I couldn’t smell it.
‘I had to get outside. But the windows don’t open, so I sneak out and I take the stairs. Forty flights. And I run into the street. There’s steam on the street and yellow taxis and businessmen with black umbrellas.’
Mae could feel it.
‘And I ran down the sidewalk, and I was wearing these slippers they make you wear and they’re soaked through. And the rain got heavier so I headed into this museum. Big stone steps and arches and flags. And people are looking at me like I’m crazy in my gown.
‘This painting. It’s like, there’s this perfect summer scene. The lake and the canoe and sailing boats, and the Victorian ladies. And I stepped closer, so close a guard started walking over. And that’s when I saw it.’
‘What did you see?’
‘That up close, it’s just colours. Just strokes. And that’s us, Mae. Up close, alone, we’re so nothing, so perfectly nothing.’ He stood, his eyes still on the sky. ‘And you can lift out a single dot of colour, a single person, and no one really notices. Because it’s still a masterpiece. And I’m happy I got to be part of it. Happy I got to sit in one perfect still of an imperfect world.’
‘But …?’
‘But if you’re not alone, if you matter too much, to too many people, then you don’t just lift out, because you drag them with you.’
He stepped close to the edge, the slightest breeze and he’d drop.
‘Sometimes breathing … if you focus on it. Because you have to do it, it becomes something too hard.’
She thought about kissing him. ‘I still hate you.’
‘You don’t know anything about me,’ he said.
‘I know enough.’
‘I don’t know anything about you.’
‘You know too much.’
‘I know Abi was a Forever.’
From her bag she took out her phone and together they looked through Counsellor Jane’s notes.
There were names at the top, traits at the bottom. The fear was cold, the talk of Selena, of both believing and not really believing they would die.
Mae smiled at Jeet Patel’s card, the single word, HAPPY, bold against the angst.
Only one stood out.
Sullivan Reed. There were some shorthand notes, and then, at the bottom, the name Abi Manton, with a question mark.
‘I think I want to die here in this spot,’ Mae said.
‘Okay.’
They sat in silence and felt the universe shrink a little. She did not tell him that the headstone beside that bench belonged to her parents.