During first study period Selena goes to the toilet. On the way, she slips into their bedroom, pulls the pick-and-mix bag out of her coat and shoves it into the pocket of her hoodie.
The phone is dusted with sugar and it’s empty: nothing in the contacts folder, nothing in the photo album, even the time and date haven’t been set. The only thing on it is one text, from a number she doesn’t recognise. It says Hi.
Selena sits on the toilet lid, smelling cold and disinfectant and powdered sugar. Rain blows softly against the windowpane, shifts away again; footsteps slap down the corridor and someone runs into the bathroom, grabs a handful of toilet paper, blows her nose wetly and runs out again, slamming the cubicle door behind her. Upstairs, where the fifth-years and sixth-years are allowed to study in their own rooms if they want to, someone is playing some song with a fast sweet riff that catches in your heartbeat and tugs it speeding along: Never saw you looking but I found what you were looking for, never saw you coming but I see you coming back for more . . . After a long time Selena texts back, Hi.
By the first night they meet, the rain has stopped. No wind rattles the bedroom window to wake the others when Selena eases her way out of bed and slips the key, millimetre by millimetre, out of Julia’s phone case. No cloud blocks the moonlight as she pushes up the sash window and slides out onto the grass.
She’s barely taken two steps when she starts to realise: outside is a different place tonight. The shadowy spots are seething with things she can almost hear, scuttles and slow-rising snarls; the patches of moonlight stake her down for the night watchman, for Joanne’s gang, for anyone or anything who happens to be on the prowl. It reaches her vividly that the usual protections aren’t in place tonight, that anyone who wants her could walk up and grab her. It’s been so long since she felt this, it takes her a moment to understand what it is: fear.
She starts to run. As she dives off the lawn into the trees it sinks into her that she’s different tonight, too. She’s not weightless now, not skimming over the grass and jack-knifing between trees deft as a shadow; her feet snap great clusters of twigs, her arms snag branches that bounce back wildly through rustling bushes, every time she moves she’s screaming invitations to every predator out there and tonight she’s prey. Things pad and sniff behind her and are gone when she leaps around. By the time she reaches the back gate her blood is made out of white terror.
The back gate is old wrought iron, backed with ugly sheet metal to stop anyone getting ideas about climbing, but the stone wall is rough with age, handholds and footholds everywhere. Back in first year Selena and Becca used to climb up and balance along the top, so high that sometimes passers-by on the lane outside walked right under them without ever realising they were there. Becca fell off and broke her wrist, but that didn’t stop them.
Chris isn’t there.
Selena presses into the shadow of the wall and waits, trying to muffle her breathing to nothing. A fresh kind of fear is rising inside her, whirling and horrible: What if none of those texts were him at all, what if he was setting me up with some friend of his and that’s who shows up – what if the whole thing was one huge big joke and they’re all waiting to jump out from somewhere and howl laughing, I’ll never live it down ever – serve me right— The sounds in the dark are still circling, the moon overhead is sharp-edged enough to slice your hands to separate bones if you dared lift them. Selena wants to run. She can’t move.
When the shape rises over the top of the wall, black against the stars, pulling itself up to hunch above her, she can’t scream. She can’t even try to understand what it is; she only knows something has turned solid and come for her at last.
Then it whispers, ‘Hey,’ in Chris’s voice. The sound zaps white lightning across her eyes. Then she remembers why she’s there.
‘Hey,’ she whispers back, shaking and hoping. The black shape rears up on top of the wall, miles high, stands tall and straight for a second and then soars.
He lands with a thud. ‘Jesus, I’m glad it’s you! I couldn’t see you properly, I was thinking it was a watchman or a nun or—’
He’s laughing under his breath, brushing down his jeans where the leap landed him on his knees. Selena thought she remembered what he was like, how when he’s there the world snaps into focus almost too real to bear, but he hits her like a searchlight to the face all over again. The vividness of him sends the circling things scuttling backwards into the darkness. She’s laughing too, breathless and giddy with relief. ‘No! There is a watchman, though, he checks this gate when he does his rounds – we’ve seen him. We have to move. Come on.’
She’s already moving, backwards and beckoning down the path, with Chris bounding after her. Now that the terror’s gone she can smell the air, rich and pulsing with a thousand signs of spring.
There are benches along the paths, and Selena’s aiming for one of those, the one shadowed under a wide oak between two open stretches of grass, so you can see anyone coming before they see you. The best thing would be one of the deepest corners of the grounds, the ones where you have to fight through bushes and clamber over awkward undergrowth to find a tiny patch of grass to sit on – she knows them all – but you would have to sit close, almost touching already. The benches are wide enough to leave an arm’s length between you. See, she says in her mind, see, I’m being safe. Nothing comes back.
As they pass the rise to the glade, Chris’s head turns. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Let’s go up there.’
That dark prickle hits Selena’s back again. She says, ‘There’s a place just down here that’s really nice.’
‘Just for a minute. It reminds me of somewhere.’
She can’t think of a reason to say no. She climbs the slope side by side with Chris and tells herself maybe it’s on purpose to help her, maybe the glade is going to keep her untempted, but she knows: she’s not getting help tonight. As they step into the clearing the cypress branches boil and hiss. This is a bad idea.
In the middle of the clearing, Chris turns, his face tipped up to the stars. He’s smiling, a small private smile. He says, ‘It’s good here.’
Selena says, ‘Where does it remind you of?’
‘There’s this place. Near home.’ He’s still turning, looking up at the trees; it catches at Selena, the way he looks at them like they matter, like he wants to remember every detail. ‘It’s just an old house, Victorian or something, I don’t know. I found it when I was a kid, maybe seven; it was empty, like you could tell it’d been abandoned for ages – holes in the roof, the windows were all broken and boarded up . . . It’s got this big garden, and right in one corner there was a circle of trees. Not the same kind as these – I don’t know what they are, I don’t know that stuff – but still. It reminded me.’
He catches her eye and pulls back into a shrug and a half-laugh. In texts they’ve talked about stuff Selena doesn’t even tell the others, but this is different; they’re so close they make each other’s skin fizz. ‘I mean, I don’t go there now. Someone bought it a couple of years back; they started locking the gates. I climbed up and looked over the wall once, and there were a couple of cars in the drive. I don’t know if they actually live there, or if they did it up, or what. Anyway.’ He heads over to the edge of the clearing and starts poking a foot into the undergrowth. ‘Do animals live in here? Like rabbits or foxes?’
Selena says, ‘Did you go there when you wanted to be on your own?’
Chris turns and looks at her. ‘Yeah,’ he says, after a moment. ‘When things weren’t great at home. Sometimes I’d get up really early, like five in the morning, and I’d go there for a couple of hours. Just to sit there. Out in the garden, if it wasn’t raining, or inside if it was. Then I’d go home, before anyone else was awake, and get back into bed. They never even knew I was gone.’
In that instant it’s him, the same guy whose texts she’s cupped in her hands like fireflies. He says, ‘I never told anyone that before.’ He’s smiling at her, half-startled, half-shy.
Selena wants to smile back and tell him how she and the others come to the glade, in exchange, but she can’t; not till she’s cleared away the thing pinching at her. She says, ‘The phone. The one you gave me.’
‘You like it?’ But he’s looked away again. He’s peering back under the cypresses, even though there’s no way he could see into that dark. ‘There could even be badgers in here.’
‘Alison Muldoon’s got one exactly the same. So’s Aileen Russell, in fourth year. So’s Claire McIntyre.’
Chris laughs, but it sounds like an attack and he doesn’t feel like the guy she knows any more. ‘So? You can’t have the same phone as any other girl? Jesus, I didn’t think you were that type.’
Selena flinches. She can’t think of anything to say that won’t make everything even worse. She says nothing.
He starts moving again, fast mean-dog circles round the clearing. ‘OK. I gave phones like that to some other girls. Not Alison Whatever, but the others: yeah. A couple more, too. And? You don’t own me. We’re not even going out. What do you care who else I text?’
Selena stays very still. She wonders if this is her punishment: this, like a whipping, and then he’ll be gone and she can drag herself home through the dark and pray that nothing comes skulking to the smell of blood off her. And the whole thing will be over.
After a moment Chris stops circling. He shakes his head, almost violently. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I shouldn’t’ve . . . But those other girls, they were months ago. I’m not in touch with any of them any more. I swear. OK?’
Selena says, ‘That’s not what I meant. I don’t care about that.’ She thinks that’s true. ‘Just: when you say you’ve never told anyone something before, I don’t want to wonder if you’ve actually told the same story to a dozen other people and said “I never told anyone this before” every time.’
He opens his mouth and she knows he’s going to rip her apart, rip this into shreds they can never put back together. Then he rubs his hands up the sides of his jaw, hard, clasps them behind his head. He says, ‘I don’t think I know how to do this.’
Selena waits. She doesn’t know what to hope.
‘I should go. We can keep texting; I’d rather just do that than try seeing each other and have the whole thing go tits-up.’
Selena says, before she knows she’s going to, ‘It’s not like this has to go tits-up.’
‘Yeah? We’ve been here two seconds, and look at us. I shouldn’t have come.’
‘That’s just being dramatic. We were fine outside the dance. All we have to do is talk to each other. Properly.’
Chris stares at her. After a moment he says, ‘OK: I meant it. I never told anyone about the house before.’
Selena nods. ‘See?’ she says, ‘How hard was that?’ and grins at him, and gets a startled half-laugh back. Chris blows out a long breath, and loosens.
‘I survived.’
‘So you don’t have to leave. It won’t go tits-up.’
He says, ‘I should’ve been straight with you about the phone. Instead of . . .’
‘Yeah.’