I only woke up because I could smell smoke. Not house-burning-down type smoke. The lightly-toasted skunk-flavored smoke that meant someone had weed nearby.
I rolled over with a muffled moan, which was followed by an entirely unmuffled yell. Ellery was sitting right there, back against the footrest, spliff in her hand.
She took a nonchalant toke. “So you’re here.”
“Um, you’re in my bedroom.”
“What is this—a be-more-obvious contest?”
“No, it’s a…” I was way too nonconsensually naked for banter. “What are you doing here?”
She shrugged and kept on smoking. For all her half-closed eyes and general stoner air, you didn’t have to be Jean Grey to notice she didn’t seem entirely happy. She was wearing New Rocks, suspender tights, and a barely there T-shirt dress with the Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers tongue on it. From the smudged glitter on her eyelids, she’d probably been out all night. I guess I was lucky she hadn’t a brought a bunch of friends with her this time.
“Do you want to crash?” I tried. “Take a shower or something?”
Another shrug. Another drag.
I resisted the urge to flap the smoke away with my hand. “Are you really just going to sit there? Getting high? On my bed?”
Shrug. I was sensing a theme.
“Okay, fine. But I think I might go back to sleep if it’s all the same to you.”
Since no answer forthcame, I wriggled onto my stomach, tucked myself into the duvet, and stuffed my head under the pillow. I didn’t actually believe I would prance off to slumberland with my…uh…okay I was still drawing a blank on what to call whatever I was doing with Caspian…with Caspian’s sister sitting right there, but it was better than effortfully extracting whatever the fuck was up Ellery’s arse.
“Are you coming to my birthday or what?” she asked, the moment I was settled. “Caspian was supposed to give you an invitation. But probably he didn’t bother.”
I refused to exit the pillow. “I got it. And I’m definitely coming.”
“You didn’t RSVP.”
“I haven’t had time.” Also RSVPing scared the crap out of me. What if I did it wrong and everybody was secretly laughing at me?
“If you don’t RSVP they won’t let you in.”
“Ellery, what time is it?”
No reply.
I sighed into the bed. “I’ll RSVP today. I promise.”
There was a long silence. I was starting to regret my sleep-based strategy because it meant I was essentially stuck facedown with nothing to do until Ellery got bored, passed out, or we both died of old age.
“It’s lame.”
If Hazel had been here, she’d have thrown back not as lame as your use of ableist language, just like she did when I was in my teens. The words sounded so familiar in my head it was almost as if she was there to say them. I thought better of trying them out on Ellery, though. “What is?”
“The party.”
That was a pretty low-key way of describing what was likely to be the poshest do of my life. A party was when you went to someone’s house with a bottle of £4.99 wine and ended up sitting on the floor because the living room was too small for the twelve people who’d turned up. A masquerade ball was…something else. “It sounds, uh, amazing.”
“It’s Trudy’s thing.”
I de-pillowed and turned, settling the bits of me that needed it as carefully as possible. “Trudy?”
She muttered something.
“Huh?
“My mother.” Her already husky voice had acquired that weed-hoarse edge so she sounded like Lauren Bacall in a bad mood.
“Um, you call your mother Trudy?”
She glanced up, her strange blue-green eyes sparking. “Textbook, aren’t I?”
“I’m not your counselor.”
She unfolded her legs and climbed off the bed, boot buckles jingling. Took the final drag of her joint and then vanished with the roach. Truthfully, I was relieved she didn’t just toss it onto the carpet or something.
As soon as she was out of sight, I shot out of bed, pulled on a pair of boxers and the biggest T-shirt I had—which I’d got at a John Grant concert, and the only size they’d had left was apparently elephantine. It said callipygian on it, with the definition underneath. Nik had bought it for me. Since it definitely applied.
I was trying to bring order to my hair, which had assumed its usual sleeping position of every-fucking-where when Ellery came back. She lingered in the doorway, toeing at the wall in a not-quite-kicking it way.
“I didn’t know where you’d gone,” she said finally.
I blinked. “Uh, home? I mean, back to Kinlochbervie, where my family live.”
“Did he hurt you? Is that why you had to leave?”
“Well…kind of.”
Her hands clenched into fists and now she did kick the wall, making me flinch. “Then you should have stayed away. He hurt his last boyfriend too. He hurts everyone. So they leave.”
Oh God. I had no hope of untangling that: layers of perception and interpretation and implication about people I hardly knew in a situation I only partially understood. “I left because we had an argument and I thought he didn’t want me here. But it was a moderately-sized misunderstanding and we’ve sorted it out now.”
She glared at me. “I had to ring him.”
“Ring who?”
“Caspian. I don’t like having to ring my brother. Because I couldn’t find you. He told me it was none of my business.”
Wow. That was a seriously dick move on Caspian’s part.
Which was when I got it. I’d hurt her. Or, rather, I’d acted like she was irrelevant to me, and that had allowed her own stupidhead brother to hurt her. It was a realization that helped banish a lot of my own frustration. “I’m so sorry. Of course it was your business.”
“We’ve only hung out once. I don’t care where you go or what you do.”
“You know, I’m not going to leave, Ellery.” Now I’d figured out what was happening, it was easy to ignore what she was actually saying and try to address what she meant. Or, at least, what I thought was bothering her.
“That’s what Nathaniel said.”
Nathaniel. Again. It was all I could do to keep myself gruntled. “Yeah, well. I’m not him.” I seemed to be saying that a lot these days.
“He promised he’d always be there for me.” Ellery drove her boot even more viciously at the poor, defenseless, very expensive wall.
I sat down on the edge of the bed in the hope that it might encourage her to stop and sit down too. It didn’t. “You got on with him, then?”
“He was okay.”
From Ellery this was practically a declaration of undying devotion. And, God, when was I going to stop getting all freaked out over Nathaniel? Every time I heard his name, I got skewered by this spike of bad feels. Sort of general dislike and, well, I guess it was some relation of jealousy. This nasty sense of always following in his footsteps.
I fully intended to be a mature grown-up about it. Unfortunately, what came out of my mouth was: “Did he go to many raves with you?”
Ellery glanced up—her eyes as sharp and bright as her sudden grin. Apparently, in being sullen and pathetic, I’d said the right thing, somehow. “No.” She finally stopped beating up the apartment. Slinking back into the room, she flumped onto the floor, knees pulled up to her chin so she was a grumpy knot of boots and legs and elbows. “We did other stuff. It was…I dunno. Like having a proper brother. But Caspian fucked it up.”
I didn’t want to argue with Ellery. But at the same time, I wouldn’t have been much of a friend if I’d twiddled my thumbs while she said unreasonable shit. “You wanted your brother to stay with a guy who didn’t make him happy?”
“Nathaniel was good for him.”
“By what metric?” She glared at me and I knew I was pushing my luck. But I continued anyway, “Look, it’s really hard to understand relationships from the outside. And, besides, you’re being super inconsistent right now.”
“Super inconsistent?” she repeated, with a sarcastic little lilt.
“Well, either you hate Caspian, in which case you wouldn’t care whether he’s with someone good for him, or maybe you do care about him at least a little bit. And either Nathaniel was your friend, in which case Caspian should have been irrelevant, or…or he wasn’t.” Okay, that hadn’t gone quite to plan. “Shit, sorry, that sounds bad.”
She was tugging at the buckles on her boots, making them catch and clink. “He said it was too complicated. And painful. Hanging out with me when he wasn’t—oh whatever. Doesn’t matter. Caspian takes everything. He always has.”
I couldn’t keep arguing with her about people I didn’t know and a past that wasn’t mine. So I changed tack. Gave her something I did understand. And could guarantee. “He won’t take me.”
“Yeah right.”
“It’s true. Chicks before dicks.”
She gave me a swift, sardonic look from beneath the tangles of her hair. “He’s definitely that.”
“And I’m really sorry I went running off to Scotland without telling you. I was just messed up and confused. I promise I won’t do it again. At least, I won’t if you give me your phone number so I can communicate with you instead of waiting for you to randomly turn up.”
“Whatever.” But she tossed her iPhone at me.
I added my name to her address book and sent myself a text before passing her mobile back.
There was a slightly awkward silence.
She fiddled with her phone a while. It had a gorgeous mother of pearl case that glinted with its own soft rainbows when it caught the light. Not very Ellery. Or maybe very Ellery. It was hard to tell sometimes.
“So.” She glanced up, at last. “Want to shoot some people?”
I made a gurgling noise.
She watched me for a little while, and then the corner of her mouth ticked up into a smirk. “I don’t like Mondays but not in the mass murder way. I meant on the PS4.”
The last time I’d fired up the epic flat-screen in the sitting area had been when Nik was staying. Because, the thing was, home cinema felt ridiculously fucking lonely if there was only you.
“Sure,” I said.
We got ourselves settled on the sofa and Ellery got everything set up, finally tossing the second controller into my lap. We played some kind of Call of Duty-alike (actually, it probably was Call of Duty) and I was basically terrible—dropping grenades on my own feet, banging into Ellery’s character, and wincing every time I had to shoot a person-shaped collection of pixels. By contrast, she was positively surgical, cutting through our enemies, headshot by headshot by headshot.
When she wasn’t laughing at me, anyway. She had a good laugh—throaty and uninhibited, just rarely seen in the wild. Strangely, it was when she most reminded me of Caspian.
I ordered a pizza at the point that a sensible-food-having time rolled round. It was Ellery’s choice, though she only ate a slice and then did coke off the box.
“Problem?” she asked, catching me staring.
“No. I mean…Um. Drugs are bad, aren’t they?”
“This isn’t bad. It’s some of the purest shit you can get.” She swung her legs up onto the sofa and sprawled out, lazy as an alley cat who had beaten up all the other cats and nicked the best spot in the sun. “Sure you don’t want some?”
I shook my head. “Aren’t you worried you’ll get addicted or your nose will fall off or something?”
“Nah. They’ll send me back to rehab before I go full Winehouse.”
“Good to know.”
We were quiet for a bit. It was probably the longest I’d ever seen Ellery sit still.
“Why do you do it?” I blurted out, sounding like Squarey McSquareson, the Squarest Square in Squaresville. The only place in the universe they still said square.
“Do what?”
“You know.”
“Ohhhh, you mean getting tweaked. Getting geeked. Blowing out. Making it snow. Hitting a bump. Chillin’ with mah white bitches.”
I pouted. “I feel mocked and derided.”
“You should. Because that’s what’s happening to you.”
“It’s not a completely unreasonable question,” I mumbled.
“It’s boring, which is worse. I do it because it feels good. Obviously.”
“But it’s not real.”
“Have you noticed nobody ever says that about the shitty stuff?”
“I…hadn’t thought of it like that.”
She gave one of her I’m-almost-too-apathetic-to-express-my-apathy shrugs. “Life is just another come down. Least this way I get to choose.”
“Steady on.” She’d managed to put me off the pizza. Apparently pepperoni didn’t go with ennui. “There must be something else that makes you happy.”
“Like what?”
“Um, a beautiful sunset?”
She shot me a look from beneath her half-closed eyes: this sliver of greenish malice. “A beautiful sunset? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I panicked, okay?”
No reply.
Wow. In less than ten minutes, I’d achieved an almost one hundred percent fun to awkward conversation rate. Go me.
Ellery swung her boots off the sofa and stood up.
“I’m going now.”
A glance out the nearest window confirmed it was late and dark. And maybe cold. “You can crash here if you like. I promise not to keep saying stupid things.”
“Got somewhere to be.”
That could have meant anything from shooting up in the toilets of a twenty-four-hour McDonalds or floating down the Thames in a bag. Although probably she was just on her way to some kind of soul-crushingly trendy party.
Anyway, I wasn’t her keeper.
She had more than enough of those already.
“You can come if you like?” she offered.
Admittedly, One Hyde Park wasn’t the most homey of places. But at least I was allowed to hang out there in my underpants. “Once I’ve engaged pajama mode I’m kind of locked in.”
“I get it. Pajamas are dangerously cozy. Fuck pajamas.”
And with that, she was gone.
Since I’d fallen into that weird space where it was too early to go to bed and too late to do anything useful—like attempt to have a career—I decided to fix my toes. Marshalling my bottles of nail polish, I got rid of the remains of the Sally Bowles experiment, and repainted in alternating sparkly purple and silver. While I was glad Caspian couldn’t see me, hunched unattractively over my own feet like something from a National Geographic pull-out, I was hoping he’d appreciate the end result. After all, he’d told me in Kinlochbervie that he found my taste in self-decoration distracting. Which now I thought about it, didn’t sound all that flattering. But the way he’d said it…oh God the way he’d said it. Insta-melt.
Proud of my handiwork, but also conscious that Caspian might not be up for a barrage of needy selfies, I sent it to Nik.
Nothing.
Boo.
And here I thought Nik could always be depended upon to find me cute on demand. What time was it in Boston anyway? Eight? Nine? A quick social media stalk soon revealed he was in the on-campus pub with some of his MIT friends. They looked like they were having fun, huddled round a rickety table and drinking what was probably craft beer. It gave me a weird pang for my barely over university days, though it was mainly the sense of community I missed, not so much the whole being expected to get a degree in English thing.
At that moment my phone buzzed. It was Nik:
Sry, crap reception. Adorbs.
I sent him back a kissy face, feeling mildly bad for having interrupted his evening with my feet, and then went to bed. Lounged around on the edge of sleep, wanking idly, and thinking about Caspian. About Friday.
Which was foreverrrrrr away.
Though, actually, while I generally preferred my gratification undelayed, it wasn’t too bad—waiting for Caspian like this. Knowing I meant something to him and that he wanted to be with me as much as I wanted to be with him. There was no more nervy uncertainty, just a warm flutter of anticipation. Maybe we’d be able to spend the whole weekend together. A prospect so sweet it made my newly bright toes curl as I came.