They walked slow.
Mae stopped off to let the dog into the old house, watched it climb the stairs and take its place at the foot of her sister’s bed. She imagined Stella’s face when she woke, her smile reaching Mae’s.
Every now and then Sally stopped and caught her breath. Tourists stood outside the Rose and Crown and drank. Mae caught snippets of conversation, talk of their last weeks, talk of Selena. One man raised a glass to the sky, spilled most of the contents down his arm and then began to cry. His wife slipped an arm around him.
‘Goddam summer people,’ Sally said.
‘Your stepfather, he said something about not recognising the house when he came back. Was he a leaver?’
‘Yeah,’ Sally said. ‘But he came back. I didn’t expect to see him again, but then we got a letter out of the blue, and then another.’
‘People make mistakes.’
‘Forgiveness takes strength. But it also takes strength to hold a grudge. I mean really hold it, so tight you worry it’ll break you.’
As they rounded the curve they saw the beach fire.
This time there were twenty of them.
And that night the new Forevers of West told their stories. They passed around a bottle of champagne, stolen from Hannah Lewis’s parents. It was a special bottle they were saving for their twentieth wedding anniversary. Mae treated it with the appropriate respect.
‘Jesus, pass it on,’ Betty said as Mae chugged.
Most stories had been told before, but no one interrupted, no one dared take anything from the person holding the bottle. There were no rules, you could speak about anything, but for those fleeting moments you had an audience that listened, you got to feel like you had a voice in a deafening world.
Mehmet Ceyhan took the bottle and he told them how he cheated in his exams, and that his parents found out but they kept it from the school.
Becky Lane stood, so far from the fire all Mae could see was the dark of her hair, and she slurred and held the bottle like a microphone.
‘When Selena comes, in that last moment, I’m going to go up to my bedroom and I’m going to get off and I’m going to have the world’s biggest orgasm because the world … it’ll be small, right?’
There was laughter, applause and cheers as she curtsied and passed the bottle along.
Sail lay beside her.
She hadn’t seen him arrive, he just drifted across the beach and settled with the group.
Matilda stood. She said some nights she was so afraid of dying she crept across the hallway and climbed into bed with her parents. On another day she might have been mocked, but everyone there understood that fear too well.
It came back to Mae and she did not stand, instead drank some more and passed it to Sail.
‘I don’t like public speaking,’ he said, a slight slur.
‘Say anything,’ came a voice from the darkness.
Mae saw the profile of his face beneath the moonlight.
‘My Selena story.’
A couple of people encouraged. Everyone liked to hear these stories, it took them back to when it began, and maybe to before.
‘I had a sister.’
Mae saw a slight shake in his hand.
‘Alice, and she was five and she was sick. I mean, the kind of sick you don’t get better from. We knew that when she was born. We knew she’d die. They said that, everyone said that she’d die like that would somehow lessen her life. I couldn’t breathe. I thought I’d die too.’
Silence fell then, the kind Mae had not heard at the beach before.
‘My parents … we went to a hospital in Switzerland because that’s where this doctor was, but even he couldn’t do anything. Money, it gets you so far, but there’s always things that you can’t …’
He glanced down at Mae.
‘So, she died in the morning. And I sat at the hospital, in one of those rooms where there’s a TV and games. They wouldn’t let me see her, they said she was gone. But we stayed there the whole day. And when we were driving back I saw cars pulled over to the side of the road, some just stopped dead. And they were broadcasting it on every radio station. People climbed out and stood on the motorway and stared at the sky.’
He drank again. ‘When I look back now, there’s something beautiful in that. But I don’t know exactly why. The uniformity … everyone reduced to human. Kind of like we were Forevers.
‘My parents don’t have photos of her. Or rather they have them, they just don’t put them out on display. And they don’t like to talk about her. I think they died that day, I think we all did. My house is a mausoleum, we exist in our own tombs. Sometimes we pass each other by, we might nod or smile, but we’re nothing to each other. We’re nothing without Alice.’
He held their attention with his words.
‘I have photos on my laptop, every picture I could find, I scanned them and sometimes when I hear about Selena, I go to my bedroom and I check in with Alice. And I feel better. You know, live or die, whatever happens. If there’s somewhere, after, then I’ll see her again, and if not then I’ll just go through whatever she went through. If it’s dark, that’s all right. Alice went there, and I’d follow her into hell.’
He passed the bottle.
Mae got to her feet and ran from them, from the Forevers calling her back, from the boy who’d finally let her see the part of his life that broke him.
He ran after her.
Up the curve of Ocean Drive, the mansions nothing now, the cars and the pools.
She slowed a little when they reached his house. And then finally she turned to face him.
‘The laptop I took.’
He smiled like it was nothing.
The pain in her stomach, catching her out, the dryness in her throat. Sometimes she laboured under the illusion she was a good person dealt a losing hand. She knew right from wrong, her heart was in the right place. But right then, standing before him, beneath the harsh lights of his world, she saw herself.
He tried to say something, maybe he read her, the look on her face.
‘I’m nothing good,’ she said.
He tried to take her hand but she slipped it from him. ‘I need to go and you need to stay here,’ she said. ‘And that’s how it will be.’
He watched her walk away.
She knew he couldn’t really see her, because she was never really there.
On the edge of the bay she heard footsteps, only this time she didn’t run.
She was shoved hard, fell forward, hitting the ground. She turned over and looked up to see Hunter standing above her, fists clenched.
Mae didn’t wait to find out what Hunter wanted, instead she grabbed a fistful of sand and threw it up into Hunter’s eyes.
Hunter stepped back, and in that time Mae was up and on her. She knocked the other girl off her feet and came to land heavily on top of her. She pinned Hunter’s hands down and straddled her.
‘Get off of me,’ Hunter said, blinking back sand. She tried to heave herself up but Mae kept her pinned.
‘Calm down,’ Mae said.
‘Fuck you.’
‘In a minute I’ll let you up. And then you can tell me what you’re so mad about. But if you come at me again I’ll knock your perfect teeth out. Tell me you understand.’
Hunter stared into her eyes, that fire burning so hot Mae didn’t know how it would go.
She got off, let Hunter up and took a single step backwards to give her some room. They were far enough from the crowd that no one saw the fight.
‘You stole my necklace,’ Hunter said.
Mae frowned.
‘I want it for the Final. My father gave it to me. Everyone knows you’re a thief, Mae.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Bullshit. I thought I’d lost it, but I always keep it in a jewellery box hidden in the back of my wardrobe. And then I found out from Hugo that you broke into his house. And I realised it was you, you broke into my pool house. You’re a thief.’
‘You think I’m dumb enough to break into the headmaster’s house?’
The fight left Hunter as quick as it arrived. ‘It’s special. Look, if you took it, even if you sold it, I’ll give you the money and you can get it back. I won’t even say anything to Sergeant Walters.’
‘I didn’t take your necklace. I never take anything special. I take shit that can be replaced. Nothing sentimental.’
Hunter shook her head.
Mae gripped the gold cross she wore. ‘My mother gave me this. It can’t be replaced. I’d never steal someone else’s memories.’
Hunter sat down on the sand.
Mae sat beside her.
‘He’s going to kill me. He thinks I don’t like it because I never wear it. But it’s too special to wear, that’s what he doesn’t realise. Everyone has a Selena story, right?’
Mae nodded.
‘It was Saviour 3 when I got it. You remember that one?’
‘We were ten. It was autumn.’
‘That was the first time I understood it. Before it was just some fairy tale. The big bad monster in the sky. But Saviour 3, when it failed I saw it in their faces. You see my parents, they’re, like, perfect. They’ve got their shit together. I watched it unravel that night.’ Hunter swallowed.
Mae said nothing, just watched her.
‘They put me first, they protect me from everything bad. That’s what parents should do, but how many of them actually do it? How many of them would live their whole life solely for their children?’
Mae might have believed most would, but that was before.
‘But this was something they couldn’t protect me from. I repay them every day, Mae. I’m so sickly sweet sometimes I gag. My mother’s idea of her perfect little girl. We go to church, shit, we knit together. I bake. I wear a goddam apron and bake cupcakes for old ladies. I’m head girl. I counsel, I give speeches, I even take the mail to the post office since the secretary declared herself a leaver.’
Mae watched her then, the shift, so slight others might not have noticed. The veneer didn’t slip, but maybe dulled a shade.
‘How I am, to you, to others. How I can be behind their backs. If I don’t do that I might explode. I’ll smile one last sickly smile and then my body will blow into a million pieces. I’ll splatter my perfect pink bedroom with brains and guts.’
Mae let the warm sand run through her fingers as she watched a couple of Forevers slow-dancing on the beach.
‘It hit him hard. When he realised he couldn’t save me from this. He gave me the necklace and told me to hold on to it when I get scared. It’s shaped like the moon. It’s everything.’
Mae felt her pulse quicken. ‘The stone. What colour is it?’
‘Blue. He said it matched my eyes.’