Chapter 26
May comes in restless, fizzing in the warm air. Summer is almost close enough to touch and so are the exams, and the whole of third year is wound too tight, laughing too loud at nothing and exploding into ornate arguments full of slammed desks and tears in the toilets. The moon pulls strange hues out of the sky, a tinge of green you can only see from the corner of your eye, a bruised violet.
It’s the second of May. Chris Harper has two weeks left to live.
Holly can’t sleep. Selena still has her fake headache, and Julia is being a bitch; when Holly tried to talk to her about whatever’s up with Lenie, Julia blew her off so viciously that they’re still only kind of speaking. The bedroom is too hot, over-intimate heat that sends waves of itch across your skin. Things feel wrong and getting wronger, they twist and pull at the edges, drag the fabric of her all askew.
She gets up to go to the toilet, not because she needs to but because she can’t lie still another second. The corridor is dim and even hotter than their room. Holly is halfway down it and thinking cold water when the shadow of a doorway convulses, only a foot or two away. She leaps back against the wall and grabs a breath ready to yell, but then Alison Muldoon’s head shoots open-mouthed out of the shadow, vanishes in a burst of urgent squeaky noises, and pops back out again.
‘Jesus!’ Holly hisses. ‘You almost gave me a heart attack! What is your problem?’
‘OhmyGod, it’s you, I thought— Jo!’ And she’s gone again.
By this point Holly is getting curious. She waits and listens; the rest of the corridor is silent, everyone deep under the weight of the night.
After a minute Joanne appears in the doorway, frizz-haired and wearing pale-pink pyjamas that say ooh baby across the chest. ‘Um, that’s Holly Mackey?’ she snaps, examining Holly like something in a display case. ‘Are you retarded or what? I was asleep.’
‘Her hair,’ Alison bleats, just above a whisper, behind her. ‘I just saw her hair, and I thought—’
‘OhmyGod, they’re both blond, so is like everybody? Holly doesn’t look anything like her. Holly’s thin.’
Which is the biggest compliment Joanne knows. She smiles at Holly, and rolls her eyes so they can share a laugh at how thick Alison is.
The thing about Joanne is you never can tell. Today she could be your snuggled-up best friend, and she’ll get all wounded if you don’t play along. It puts you at a disadvantage: she knows who she’s dealing with; you have to figure it out from scratch, every time. She makes Holly’s calf muscles go twitchy.
Holly says, ‘Who did she think I was?’
‘She came out of the right room,’ Alison whines.
‘Which means she was going the wrong way, duh,’ Joanne says. ‘Who cares if she goes to the loo? We care if she goes out. Which, hello, is that way?’ Alison chews a knuckle and keeps her head down.
Holly says, ‘You thought I was Selena? Going outside?’
‘I didn’t. Because I’m not retarded.’
Holly looks at Joanne’s tight face, too hard for the cutesy pyjamas, and it occurs to her that Joanne is kicking Alison because she’s some strange combination of relieved and disappointed. Which is crazy. She says, feeling her way, ‘Where would Selena be going?’
‘Don’t you wish you knew?’ Joanne says, tossing Alison a smirk. Alison lets out an obedient sharp giggle, too loud. ‘Shut up! Do you actually want to get us caught?’
Holly’s heartbeat is changing, turning deeper and violent. She says, ‘Selena doesn’t go out on her own. Only when we all do.’
‘OhmyGod, you guys are so cute,’ Joanne says, with a nose-crinkle that doesn’t thaw her eyes. ‘All this blood-sisters-tell-each-other-everything stuff; it’s like an old TV show. Did you actually do the blood-sisters thing? Because that would be so totes adorbs I could just die.’
Not bessie mates, not tonight. ‘Just give me a sec,’ Holly says. If Joanne shows you her teeth, you bite first and hard. ‘I’m trying to look like I actually care what you think about us.’
Joanne stares, hand on her hip, in the thin dirty light. Holly catches the moment when she starts seeing a more interesting football than Alison. ‘If you’re such perfect little buddies,’ she says, ‘how come you don’t know where your friend goes at night?’
Holly reminds herself that Joanne is a lying cow who would do anything for notice, while Selena is her best friend. She can’t picture Selena’s face.
‘You’ve got trust issues,’ she says. ‘If you don’t do something about them, you’re going to turn into one of those crazy women who hire private investigators to follow their boyfriends around.’
‘At least I’ll have a boyfriend. One of my own, not one I had to steal.’
‘Yay you?’ Holly says, turning away. ‘I guess everyone has to be proud of something?’
‘Hey!’ Joanne snaps. ‘Don’t you want to know what I’m talking about?’
Holly shrugs. ‘Why? It’s not like I’m going to believe you.’ She starts for the toilets.
The hiss flicks after her: ‘Come back here.’
If things were normal, Holly would wave over her shoulder and keep walking. But they’re not, and Joanne’s clever in her own special way, and if she actually knows any of the answers—
Holly turns. Joanne snaps her fingers at Alison. ‘Phone.’
Alison scurries back into the sleep-smelling cave of their room. Someone heaves herself over in bed and asks a drowsy question; Alison lets out a wild shush. She comes back carrying Joanne’s phone, which she hands over like an altar boy at the offertory. Part of Holly’s head is already hamming up the story for the others, snorting into her palm with laughter. The other part has a bad feeling.
Joanne takes her time pressing buttons. Then she hands the phone to Holly – the curl of her mouth is a warning, but Holly takes it anyway. The video is already playing.
It hits her in separate punches, with no room to get her breath in between. The girl is Selena. The guy is Chris Harper. That’s the glade. It’s turned into something Holly has never seen it be; something gathered and dangerous.
Joanne feels closer, licking up anything Holly lets out. Holly makes herself start breathing again and says, with no blink and her dad’s amused half-grin, ‘OMG, some blond chick is snogging some guy. Call Perez Hilton quick.’
‘Oh, please, don’t act stupider than you can help. You know who they are.’
Holly shrugs. ‘It could be Selena and Chris Whatshisname from Colm’s. Sorry to ruin your big moment here, but so?’
‘So oopsie,’ Joanne says, pursed-up and cute. ‘I guess you’re not bessie blood sisters after all.’
Bite fast and hard. Not one I had to steal— ‘What do you even care?’ Holly says, lifting an eyebrow. ‘You were never with Chris Harper. Just fancying him doesn’t make him your property.’
Alison says, ‘She was too.’
‘Shut up,’ Joanne hisses, whirling around on her. Alison gasps and vanishes into the shadows. To Holly, icy again: ‘That’s none of your business.’
If Chris actually dumped Joanne for Selena, Joanne is going to take Selena’s throat out. ‘If Chris cheated on you,’ Holly says, carefully, ‘he’s a prick. But why be pissed off with Selena? She didn’t even know.’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Joanne says, ‘we’ll get him.’ Her voice calls up a sudden cold gleam, away in the thick dark corners of the corridor; Holly almost steps back. ‘And I’m not pissed off with your friend. It’s over between them, and anyway I don’t get pissed off with people like her. I get rid of them.’
And with that video, she can do that any time she wants. ‘Clichés give me a rash,’ Holly says. She hits the Delete button, but Joanne is watching for that: she grabs the phone back before Holly can confirm. Her nails scrape down Holly’s wrist.
‘Excuse me, don’t even think about it?’
‘You need a manicure,’ Holly says, shaking her wrist. ‘With, like, garden shears.’
Joanne slaps her phone back into Alison’s hand, and Alison scuttles off to put it away. ‘You know what you and your pals need?’ Joanne says, like it’s an order. ‘You need to stop acting like you’re such super-special amazing bessie friends. If you were, that manatee wouldn’t be lying to you about shagging Chris Harper; and even if she did, you’d like know telepathically, which you so didn’t. You’re exactly the same as everyone else.’
Holly has no comeback to that. It’s over between them. That scraped-out look to Selena, ice wind ripping right through her: this is why. This, the most obvious typical clichéd reason in the world, so typical she never even thought of it. Joanne Heffernan got there first.
Holly can’t take one more second of her face, swollen fat with all the delicious gotcha she was after. The corridor lights flicker, make a noise like paint spattering and pop out. Through the surge of chicken-coop noises from Joanne’s room, Holly feels her way back to bed.
She says nothing. Not to Becca who would freak out, not to Julia who would tell her she was talking bullshit, not to Selena; especially not to Selena. When Holly can’t sleep a few nights later, when she opens her eyes to Selena’s whole body one curve of concentration over something cupped glowing in her palms, she doesn’t sit up and say softly Lenie tell me. When a long wait later Selena takes a shivery breath and shoves the phone down the side of her mattress, Holly doesn’t start making up excuses to be on her own in the bedroom. She lets the phone stay where it is and hopes she never sees it again.
She acts like Selena is totally fine and everything’s totally fine and the biggest problem in the world is Junior Cert Irish which OMG is going to destroy her brain and turn her whole life into a total failure. This makes Becca chill out and cheer up, at least. Julia is still a bitch, but Holly decides to think this is because of exam stress. She spends a lot of time with Becca. They laugh a lot. Afterwards Holly can’t remember about what.
Sometimes she wants to punch Selena right in the soft pale daze of her face and keep punching. Not because she got off with Chris Harper and lied to them and broke the vow that was her idea to begin with; those aren’t even the problem. But because the whole point of the vow was for none of them to have to feel like this. The point was for one place in their lives to be impregnable. For just one kind of love to be stronger than any outside thing; to be safe.