The Graces (16 page)

Then I heard voices, calling my name.

Then: ‘Fen!’

‘Where are you?’

They were coming closer. I tucked my bare arms round myself, huddling in a thin sleeveless T-shirt that wasn’t mine. Maybe it was Summer’s. God, it was cold. Dry leaves pricked my skin, scraping against my jeans.

‘Fen! River! Where the hell has everyone gone?’

Find me
, I thought. It was all I could think, and I thought it with everything I had.

They found me. Thalia and Summer came through the trees. I heard their voices, but I could only stare at the ground.

‘River! What are you doing?’ Relief, then nerves creeping their spidery legs into that voice. Summer’s voice.

‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m cold,’ I said.

Summer crouched down next to me, her eyes full of concern.

‘I thought we all fell asleep on the garden chaise longues. When I woke up, it was just Thalia and me,
and you weren’t in the house. How come you came out to the grove by yourself?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Have you seen Wolf and Fen?’

I shook my head.

Thalia sounded strange. ‘Sum, I think something’s happened.’

‘Don’t freak out,’ snapped Summer’s voice. An arm came around my shoulders. ‘We should go back.’

‘Maybe they went down to the cove.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘It’s like five minutes away. Shall we just check?’

‘Okay – but let’s do it quickly. If they come back to the house and find us gone, they’ll do the same thing we’re doing and we’ll be here all day.’

They were using matter-of-fact tones. I knew what those tones meant. They were pretending that everything was fine.

It wasn’t.

Summer helped me to my feet and we walked. The grove came to an abrupt halt. Beyond was a worn dirt track that led into the dunes, sandy hills covered in long windswept heather, rolling away from us and curving down to the sea. It was going to be sunny again. The sky was pink and gold. Summer was murmuring in my ear, but I couldn’t really concentrate on anything she
said. She wanted answers I couldn’t give to questions like ‘What happened?’ and ‘Are you okay?’

The closer we got to the cove, the more wrong everything felt, as if while we’d slept, we’d slipped into another version of this world, almost the same as ours but made of black glass, distorted and dark. They must have felt it, too, because when we got down to the cove and saw something slumped on the sand near the shoreline, none of us broke into a run, as if we weren’t even surprised.

It was Fenrin.

He didn’t move when they called, but when they rolled him over he woke, his eyes slitting against the light. He looked at us like he had no idea who we were, and for a moment everything dislocated because I was
convinced
, right then, that we had slipped into an alternate reality. But then he blinked.

‘What?’ he said, his voice rasping. He coughed, and his brow furrowed as if he couldn’t remember why his voice would do that.

‘Where’s Wolf?’ said Thalia.

He looked around, bemused. Then shook his head.

‘Ah. My throat hurts.’

‘What are you even doing down here?’

Fenrin sat up. He had his jeans on, at least, but the top button and zip were undone.

‘I don’t know.’

‘What d’you mean, you don’t know?’

His face screwed up. ‘Stop,’ he said, irritated. ‘I just woke up. I don’t remember last night very well.’

Thalia glanced at Summer.

I knew what that glance meant. They didn’t remember last night very well, either.

My body rolled with sickness. I crouched on the sand and threw up.

‘Oh god,’ said Summer, behind me. ‘We have to get her back.’

‘We need to find Wolf.’ Thalia’s voice was tight around the edges.

‘Well, maybe he went back to the house already.’

‘He wasn’t there when we left. And we would have passed him on the way here.’

‘We should go back and tell Esther.’

‘She’s not awake, and there’s no point in saying anything yet. He’s probably around somewhere.’

‘But—’

Their voices rose and rose. I tried to block everything out, but that was worse. There was nothing in my head I wanted to see or hear or feel.

Summer stayed with me while Thalia and Fenrin went back to the house, gathering up my sweater, shoes and bag and bringing it all to the cove. They used my
mobile to call a taxi. When it arrived, we would clamber over the rocks and then up to the Gull, the pub that sat on the main beach. And I would go home.

Fenrin looped the cove over and over while we waited.

He didn’t find Wolf.

No one did.

I’m running through the woods in the patchy purple grey of morning, so early it’s almost the night before. I’m running barefoot and I can feel the sting of crisp leaves scoring the pads of my feet.

I don’t know why I’m running. Only that if I stop, I will be caught.

Then I hear a whoop through the trees, and the noise gets me skimming across the ground, barely touching it, skating desperately. For a moment it feels free, victorious. But then I see shapes close in through the rods of tree trunks. They’re matching me.

More whoops. Howls, one, then two and three and four, joining to make a rising and falling cadence that makes me want to be sick. The pack is hunting.

I don’t know how long I run, but I’m going nowhere. The trees don’t break, there’s no flat plains beyond, there’s no end to it. I know they’ve spelled me so I never
get to the edge of the woods, but knowing a thing does nothing to stop it. I can’t fight this. I can’t think.

They’re right behind me now. The howls have stopped, and I feel their steady breath coming hot and fast on my shoulder. I’m slower, and slower. My legs wind down like a toy with dead batteries. Something touches my shoulder lightly, but it’s like being slammed into a wall. The next thing I know is that I’m on the ground, and they’re prowling around me.

I try to speak.

I try to say ‘please’.

But nothing comes out. My jaw is wired shut.

Summer is closest. The others hang back now. She grins at me, all fangs.

Please don’t. God, don’t do this. But my voice won’t form words. My throat feels like it’s bleeding with the noise I’m trying to force through it.

Summer has a long, curved blade in her right hand.

I can’t move. My arms and legs are heavy as mountains and as impossible to move. All I can do is lie there and watch her crawl up to me like a spider.

I feel myself crying, long tear strings rolling into my ears.

‘Shh,’ Summer says, as she raises the knife. ‘It’ll all be over soon.’

She stabs it into my chest. I feel the dull smack of it vibrating through my whole body.

I woke up.

I woke up with the heel of my hand pressed into my breastbone, as if to stop the blood I knew was spurting out from it, leaking my life away. I woke with a shout caught in my mouth, stopped before it could get out so it was more like a strangled gasp. I woke and I could still feel those cold, crunching leaves pressing into my back, the weight of Summer on me.

It took what felt like a long, miserable, heart-stopping time before my brain finally realised that what I had just experienced wasn’t real.

The tears were real, though – my hairline was wet with them.

These are the only things I remember about the time immediately after the disappearance of Wolf:

The funny expression on Summer’s face that day in the cove, while they were still looking for him and I was throwing up on the sand, when I said I didn’t want to go back with them, that I wanted to go home instead. I think it was the first time I’d ever chosen my own home over hers.

How I spent the rest of the day curled up in bed, cove sand still clinging to my skin, a blank, black hole for a head. The look on my mother’s face when I came in the front door, the surprise and then the panic, quickly swallowed.

The way the police interviews went. I remembered that they checked over and over what we drank and what we ate. We were truthful. I think that helped sway them over to the conclusion they eventually drew. I
know we had a lot that night. I know that alcohol wasn’t all we had. I remember us all taking half our clothes off and dancing around wildly. At the time, it had felt like freedom. Afterwards it was just excruciating, especially when you had to explain it to a police officer and watch the expression on her face.

How my mother, not long after my first interview with the police, caught me by the arm and shook me. Her hand gripped hard as she asked me what the hell was going on. It shocked me to tears. In between hard, dry sobs, I told her that I had absolutely no idea.

How I don’t remember living as much as existing. How I barely left the house and mostly only came out of my room at night, going to sit in the kitchen in the darkness, a blanket wrapped round me, watching the moon out of the window.

It had all gone so bad so fast. It only took a moment for your life to stop, and a grey, sickly version of it to slip quietly in and take its place. Every day when I woke up, it felt like a punishment.

When nearly three weeks had passed, the police search only half-heartedly continued.

They thought they knew exactly what had happened. We’d partied too hard and all passed out in drunken stupors. Wolf and Fenrin had woken up in the early hours of the morning, still drunk, and wanted to
go swimming. They’d gone down to the cove together, and Wolf had been caught in a vicious tide. He’d been washed out and broken on the rocks, probably while Fenrin was passed out on the beach. They were confident of finding his body any day.

In between all of this, Summer had called me fifteen times.

Sometimes I picked up the phone, sometimes I didn’t. Our conversations tailed off into uneasy nothings, and there was only one thing to talk about, which meant we always ended up asking each other exactly the same questions.

‘Have you got any news?’

‘No. You?’

‘No.’

‘Do you remember anything more about that night?’

‘No. You?’

‘No.’

‘Have the police interviewed you again? What did you tell them?’

That last was a favourite of hers. After a while, it started to grate on me. What did she think I’d told them? I knew the Graces would close ranks when questioned, and I did the same. What else was I going to do?

‘Just like before,’ I always said. ‘That we got drunk.
Really drunk. That I don’t remember anything after being in the garden that night.’

A pause.

‘Okay. Because the way we found you in the grove … it looked like maybe you tried to go after them, or something.’

‘I don’t know, Summer.’

‘Okay.’

And then the silence, and then the ‘I’d better go’ from her, and the click on the line as she put the phone down, and then just me, alone, wondering if she could hear the lie in my voice.

Because I did know. I knew exactly what had happened to Wolf. I was there. I saw it.

And I was the only one who seemed to remember it.

Summer had told me it was best not to come round for a while.

Just a little while, she had said on the phone when we were a few days into this nightmare, until they could all stop feeling like they were under a microscope. Her parents weren’t happy about the police’s involvement. Because, what – they could have handled it better on their own?

No. Because they could have handled it quietly. Secretly. The Grace way.

Fenrin was the one who had called the police. He’d taken charge, ringing Wolf’s parents, calling his friends in the city, checking, alerting, growing louder and more desperate with every phone call. Wolf’s parents had come to stay at the Grace house while the police search continued, and they were still there. Another reason for me not to go over there and be caught in the
midst of their grief. I was relieved to stay away, more than anything else. The lie I’d told Summer about not remembering anything lay gasping and flopping like a dying fish between us, and I couldn’t believe she couldn’t see it, smell the stench of it.

I should tell her.

No. I’d wait.

Did Fenrin remember? If so, why wasn’t he saying anything?

No. I’d wait until Fenrin said something. If he never remembered, there was absolutely no point in ever bringing it up. They assumed Wolf was lost to the sea at this point, anyway. I’d just cause them all more pain. I didn’t want that. I’d never, ever wanted that. I wanted to keep them from pain because I loved them. That was what you did with loved ones, wasn’t it?

I shut my eyes. Summer was on the phone again, and I had picked up this time, unable to stop missing the sound of her voice. I let the words in my ear wash over me, knowing I was a coward, feeling the coward’s sickness rising up from my belly, bulging in my throat. We were back in school tomorrow, and I was utterly, completely dreading it.

When I opened my eyes again, my mother was standing in my doorway.

‘Summer,’ I said into the phone. ‘I have to go. Yeah.
See you at school. By the lockers? Okay. Yeah. Bye.’

I put my phone down.

‘So that was Summer Grace,’ she said, her arms folded.

I waited, wary.

She launched straight in. ‘You know, all those times you were on the phone, or texting me to say you were at a friend’s house, or out in town with some people, and I never gave it a thought. Because you never told me it was the Graces you were friends with. And I suppose I still wouldn’t have known if not for this poor Wolf boy disappearing.’

I felt my hackles rise, defending me from attack. ‘You never asked me. You never ask me anything.’

‘I don’t keep tabs on you. I’m not that kind of mother. I let you have your freedom, as long as you don’t do anything silly with it—’

‘Like have friends?’

‘Like have
those
friends.’

‘What’s wrong with them?’

She sank into the doorway. The frame dug into her soft, round shoulder. She always looked tired.

‘There’s a lot said about that family around town, love, and not much of it’s good.’

‘You’re judging them based on gossip?’

Mum shot me a sharp look. ‘I just want what’s best
for you.’

I hated this line. It meant nothing at all. It was a line you could use to justify anything you liked, and she often did.

‘It’s a big school,’ she offered, after a moment. ‘Lots of kids you could hang out with.’

‘Mum, there’s no one else for me.’

‘Don’t be silly. You’re a bright girl. Funny. Well read.’ She tried to grin at her longstanding bookworm joke, the one I used to feel proud about whenever she made it. ‘Anyone would love to be your friend.’

My laugh came out watery and childlike. ‘No, they wouldn’t.’

‘Yes, they would! You just have to give them a chance. You never give it a
chance
. How do you know it won’t suit you if you don’t try it?’

It
meant
normal
. It always meant normal.

‘Mum,’ I said. I was pleading. I could never make her
see
. Why couldn’t I speak her language? Why couldn’t she speak mine?

She shuffled. ‘If you want … help,’ she said carefully, ‘we can—’

I buried my face in my hands. ‘Please, please, not this again.’

‘Your dad – he meant well.’

‘He wanted to lock me up!’ I said, my voice rising.
‘He thought I was crazy!’

‘He just …’ She cast around wildly. ‘He just
suggested
it—’

‘He’d already signed the forms! He didn’t want to deal with me! He just wanted to get rid of me!’

I sank downward into myself. I was drowning again. Just like last time with my father. Just like every time. Drowning, clawing desperately up.

‘What’s wrong with me?’ I whispered.

‘Nothing,’ she said, so forcefully that I looked up. ‘There is
nothing
wrong with you. You are normal and you are fine. So you listen to me. You’ll stop seeing those Graces. They are no good for you. No good, do you hear me? Look at what’s happened. Drunken parties, a boy dead.’ She rubbed her face. ‘Life isn’t all fun and play-acting because sooner or later the fun stops, and all that’s left is misery. I’m sorry, but there it is. You just have to get on with things, sweetheart. You have to learn to be happy with who you are and what you’ve got.’

It felt like I had a pillow over my face, suffocating me.

She shifted, obviously pleased that the conversation had gone the way she’d wanted it to. ‘Now come downstairs, and I’ll make us some tea. And you should get ready for school tomorrow. It’s a new year. A new start.’

When she left my room, I noticed how she’d never
put a foot in it the whole time. She never came near me any more.

I heard her heavy tread down the stairs.

There was nothing I could ever say that she would ever understand, and it had always been this way, and it would always be this way. She and I lived in parallel universes, similar enough from the outside, but look closer and you’d see subtle differences, here and there. Tiny little changes that kept us worlds apart.

I was alone in this.

No, not alone. I still had Summer.