CHAPTER EIGHT
‘Here you are, you two.’
Anna’s mum is carrying a plate of dips and tortilla chips, but they’re sort of floating in mid-air because there’s nowhere to put them. She raises her eyebrows at the state of Anna’s room.
‘Hang on.’ Anna sweeps a space clear on her dressing table, and a tsunami of eyeliner pencils and hairspray cans and Pringle tubes swooshes over the side, landing on the carpet.
‘Anna, this place is atrocious. You’re not going to Charlotte’s party until it’s sorted.’ She gives me a smile. ‘I bet your room doesn’t look like this, does it, Grace?’
‘You’re joking, Mother?’ Anna snorts with laughter. ‘Grace’s room is a health hazard. There was something growing in a cup under her bed.’
At home this morning, I’d decided that the best thing to do was to stay out of the way. Mum was grumpy and hoovering the stairs when I left the house earlier, and Leah was on the phone as usual. So I texted Anna and we agreed that the party (The Party. Oh God, it’s here . . .) was going to need an intensive all-day-getting-ready session.
So we’re here now, fixing nails and trying to work out how to clip blue hair-extension things on to the back of Anna’s head, and her mum’s going to take us up to Charlotte’s for half seven, and – I close my eyes at this bit because it makes me feel sick – we’re supposed to stay over. I don’t want to stay over. In fact, if I think about it, I can feel the knot in my stomach getting bigger and lumpier and I know I’m not going to be able to sleep all night in Charlotte’s house.
‘Is anyone else sleeping over besides us?’
I try to make my voice sound casual. Anna and Charlotte’s mothers have concocted this wonderful plan between them and I’m too polite to say no, even though it’s making me feel sick. I like routine and knowing what’s happening and everything being the way I organize it and most definitely not surprises like this.
Anna half turns from the mirror, her mouth half open, one finger still pulling her eyebrow where she’s trying to tweeze away completely invisible stray hairs.
‘No, just us.’ She puts down the tweezers for a second. ‘I’ve no idea what Mum was thinking when she agreed with Charlotte’s mum that it’d be easier for us to stay over.’
‘Probably that she wouldn’t have to get up at one in the morning to come and pick us up?’ I know it makes sense, but butterflies in my stomach are now stomping around in gigantic work boots.
‘Yeah, and she can have a glass of wine and some quality time with Dad.’ Anna rolls her eyes before turning back to look at her reflection.
‘Does she realize we don’t actually get on with Charlotte?’
‘She’s a parent.’ Anna drops the tweezers on to the carpet before turning round to show me her new and improved (can’t actually see any difference, but we won’t mention that) eyebrows. ‘She doesn’t think.’
I take a deep breath. We’re sharing a room – it’ll be fine – and Mum’s already texted to say that if I get stressed out she’ll come and get me. She followed that text with another, which said: except I’m going out to the cinema with Eve, so if you could try and have fun, darling, that’d be lovely. So we all know where we stand, really.
‘So Polly’s looking after Mabel?’
Anna’s scrolling through her phone, which is basically crammed with a million updates about tonight.
I nod. I’m sitting cross-legged on Anna’s bed in pyjamas because I don’t want to put my party stuff on yet. I know if I do I’ll spill something on it because I’m officially the clumsiest person on the planet – and even more so when I’m stressed out. And I am officially stressed out. I’ve already gnawed off all the nail glue that I got stuck all over my fingers when I was fixing on the fake black nails earlier.
‘D’you think people who wear fake nails all the time just stop noticing them after a while?’
Anna looks at my fingers, and I spread them out for examination. She doesn’t bite her nails, so she’s painted her own ones purple.
‘They look good.’
‘Yeah, but I couldn’t pull my trousers up properly when I went to the loo earlier.’
‘Maybe posh people have professional trouser-puller-uppers?’ Anna giggles at this and reaches across, plonking the dips and crisps on the bed between us.
‘I dunno.’ I look down at my nails and they look ugly all of a sudden, like I’m trying too hard. And they’re making my hands feel claustrophobic.
Breathe, breathe.
Tonight is going to be good.
I remember Polly’s words. ‘You’re cool, Grace.’
All I have to do is remember to be cool.
I don’t even have time to let the gigantic wave of utter terror hit me when we arrive at Charlotte’s farmhouse, because the music is already banging out of the barn so loudly that my brain stops working properly and I’m lost.
It’s dark outside and the doors are covered with twinkling fairy lights and there’s a fire pit on the terrace that wraps around the front of the house, which has warm light glowing from all the windows. And I remember that behind one of those windows is the room where me and Anna have to sleep tonight when I can’t escape to my own bed and my own things and the safety of rolling myself up like a burrito in a blanket and –
‘Anna, Grace.’ Charlotte’s mum, Lisa, is our GP. She smiles at me with that look that I get from doctors and teachers and people like that, the one that suggests she’s always half expecting me to burst into tears or set her dog on fire or something. She waves her arm, motioning us into the house, kissing Anna’s mum hello at the same time.
‘Girls, if you just head upstairs, your room is the third on the right. Put your bags down and fix your eyeliner or whatever it is you lot do –’ she shares a smile with Anna’s mum – ‘and then you can go and get the party started.’ She sings the last bit, which is so completely cringe-makingly awful that Anna and I gallop up the stairs in horror before slamming the door shut and bursting out laughing. Charlotte might have the poshest house and the most expensive sixteenth birthday party on the planet, but her parents are still mortifying. That’s sort of comforting, really.
When we were really small, Charlotte and I had a shared birthday party once, because our birthdays are so close together. Mum and Dad and Charlotte’s parents hired a hall and a magician. We were supposed to sit alongside him and help him with his act. Charlotte performed beautifully, and I spent the party under the table playing with a castanet that I sneaked out of his music box.
I can’t think of anything worse than a gigantic birthday party, apart from a gigantic surprise birthday party. I like knowing exactly what my birthday is going to have in it, and that’s me, Leah, Mum, Dad, pizza, unlimited Coke refills and ice-cream sundaes afterwards. I’ve done it every birthday since I was four.
Anyway, the room is amazing. It’s got two single beds with fat stripy duvets and an en-suite bathroom and there’s a bottle of mineral water on each bedside table, and magazines. It’s like a hotel. Anna and I drop our bags on the floor and we head downstairs.
Charlotte’s dad is stacking a load of glasses on a tray in the kitchen. He looks up at us over the top of his glasses, which are slipping down on his sweaty nose, and smiles.
‘All right, girls?’ He puts the tray down and pushes up his glasses with the back of his arm. ‘I think a few of them have arrived while you were upstairs. I’ll be out to the barn in a minute if you want to head over. Help yourselves to drinks and stuff.’
The barn looks like the director from every teen movie you’ve ever seen has been left in charge of decoration. No wonder Charlotte’s such a princess. She lives the life of a Disney Channel character. I’m half expecting everyone to burst into song in a moment just to finish the picture off. Anna looks at me sideways.
‘Were you expecting this?’
I shake my head in silent amazement.
‘OK, well, we can officially say that Charlotte has won at parties before it’s even started.’
There are fairy lights strung from the huge wooden beams, and casually stacked bales of straw divide the whole place up into cosy little mini-rooms where I can see people from school are already settling into their usual cliques. I feel my stomach tighten with anxiety and I’m tapping my fingers against the side of my thighs because it calms my nerves a bit. The music’s so loud I can’t hear myself think properly.
If I let this spiral, I could be out of here in two seconds flat, calling Mum out of the cinema and telling her I want to be back home where everything is safe. I put my hand into my pocket, feeling the comfortable rectangle of phone, when I remember.
She’s at the cinema with Eve, so she wouldn’t even get my text. And when we stopped by to collect my purse, which I’d forgotten, Mum was distracted and answered the door with her hair half dry and a brush in her hand. And Leah, who was supposed to be going for a sleepover with Malia, had been weirdly dressed up with a ton of make-up on and when I asked her why she’d been slidey-eyed and didn’t answer.
‘Anna, Grace, there you are.’
Charlotte, holding two glasses with something pink in them, smiles at us as if we’re her long-lost relatives. I look back at her, realizing that I’m frowning when Anna gives me a slight shove with her elbow.
‘What?’ I look at her sideways.
Anna widens her eyes and shakes her head almost invisibly.
‘So glad you could make it,’ continues Charlotte, sounding weirdly like she’s been taking etiquette lessons, and also like she’s about forty-five. ‘Dad made some fruit punch. Don’t tell, but I’ve sneaked in a little something.’ She gives a little smile and taps the side of her nose. ‘Now, if you need anything at all, just shout, and have a wonderful time.’
Charlotte’s dad appears as we’re standing by the side of the barn, taking our first mouthfuls of the punch. It tastes sort of strawberry-ish, but when it’s going down it gives a whoosh of something else in my throat and it makes me cough.
‘Now I know what you teenagers are like,’ Charlotte’s dad says, smiling, ‘so I’ve got you a little something.’ He motions to the big old trestle table behind us, which is laid out with neatly stacked bottles of beer and cider. ‘Nothing too strong, not enough for anyone to get into any mischief –’
‘Dad,’ says Charlotte, actually blushing, which makes her look slightly human for once. ‘Honestly, we’ll be fine.’
And she shoos him out, pulling the barn door behind her. Ed and someone I recognize from the other year group are fiddling with the music, and it drops down to silence for a moment before they’ve swapped whatever was playing for something on their phone. Charlotte fluffs up her hair and straightens her dress. It’s super tight, and appears to be made of the same fabric as Mabel’s leg bandages, but I suspect my fashion knowledge might be slightly lacking. She marches across the room to chat to her gang of girlfriends, all of whom are hanging on her every word, nodding their heads and sipping their glasses of punch through straws.
It’s all very civilized. In fact, if I’m honest, it’s not quite what I expected. Nobody’s dancing, the atmosphere is a bit weird – like primary-school Christmas parties, where the hired DJ would come in and play music and nobody would dance until the games started.
‘We need Musical Statues or something.’
‘We need something to look at, if you ask me,’ Anna shouts back in my ear. ‘Where’s Gabe?’
‘Maybe he’s not coming?’
Anna pouts her lower lip and fiddles with the straw in her empty glass. ‘D’you want some more?’
I feel a bit warm and whooshy inside, the way that a glass of red wine with dinner makes me feel. I don’t drink it because it tastes nice (it’s like flowery vinegar) but it feels polite to take it.
‘OK.’
Anna, with that weird friend-of-the-family confidence thing, marches up to the table where the punch bowl is sitting, and scoops up two glasses full to the brim. She brings them back over. As she’s walking, I notice she’s started something, and I see Emma and Daisy sidling over and helping themselves to some more too – and we clink the edges of our glasses together.
‘Here’s to whatever Charlotte put in this.’ Anna looks at me, and downs her drink in one.
And the next half an hour goes by in a weird whirl, which I think must be the punch because suddenly everything seems a bit blurry and I’ve been given a bottle of cider by Anna and we’re laughing about nothing and Charlotte’s parents have come in for what they promise is their last ‘we’re just checking everyone’s OK’ check. And everyone’s still huddled in little groups – we’ve joined Emily and Daisy and the others. Megan’s telling us about her big cousin taking her to Reading Festival in the summer holidays – again. We’re all listening politely and nodding in the right places – well, Anna is, I’m half watching the door and wondering why Gabe and his friends aren’t here, and I can see Charlotte is too, when there’s a crash and the door bursts open.
Charlotte’s Great Dane lollops into the room and launches himself at one of the tables at our side of the barn, which is covered with a cotton tablecloth. Somehow he manages to shove it out of the way and with his gigantic paws spread, he shoves his face into the neatly arranged party food, which lies underneath.
‘HAMISH!’
Charlotte’s mum is so loud she blasts over the music, which is pretty impressive.
‘Mum!’ Charlotte’s hands are on her hips and her sweet hostess-of-the-year expression has been replaced with utter fury. ‘I TOLD you not to let him in here.’
‘I didn’t!’ Charlotte’s mum pants with the effort of hauling Hamish off the table. Hamish, undeterred, turns his head sideways and takes a massive bite of birthday cake.
‘You absolute pig,’ shouts Charlotte at Hamish, who has a birthday candle sticking out of his mouth like a cigarette. ‘Out!’
Hamish, looking unimpressed, licking his lips, is dragged away from the table and towards the door and certain disgrace.
‘Gabe!’ Charlotte’s eyes light up as – just in time to save the day – he saunters in, late, accompanied by his best friends Archie and Jacob, and followed by –
‘Holly?’
The music is banging and the lights are dim and Charlotte’s mum is too busy extracting a disappointed Great Dane out of the room to notice that Gabe’s brought a plus one. And a plus one who was categorically Not Invited.
Charlotte’s face manages to register delight and fury in the space of about five seconds. She whirls round on her heel and gathers four glasses, tipping the last of the punch into them before turning round again, placing a stripy paper straw in three of them.
‘Nice T-shirt,’ says Holly to me as she passes, pulling a face. I look down at my feet.
‘Sorry, I’m out of straws,’ says Charlotte icily. ‘We had just the right amount, you see.’
I open my mouth to say that, no, there’s another packet on the table over there, and then I realize that Charlotte’s making a point. But even I can tell that that’s the lamest excuse ever, and Holly doesn’t even let it register. She just takes the strawless glass, downs it in one, and takes a flat bottle of something clear out of her bag.
‘Sausage rolls. Excellent,’ says Archie, helping himself to four at once.
I don’t really know how things happened. It’s like time kaleidoscoped and one minute they’d all arrived and the next – because, weirdly, Gabe has this effect on people – we were messing around and actually taking the piss, playing Musical Statues and laughing our heads off and it was childish and silly and brilliant and everyone was laughing. I suppose the cider helped. And I wasn’t even superglued to Anna’s side, which is what usually happens. She was off somewhere else and I was hanging out like an actual look-at-me-I’m-doing-this-properly proper person.
‘Just going to the loo,’ I say, leaving the girls, who are covered with straw after someone had broken open one of the bales and we’d ended up having a straw fight, throwing it around until the barn was carpeted with the stuff and the room smelled all deliciously soft and warm and like a stable and I felt safe.
‘All right, Grace?’
I can see shapes by the fire pit, but they’re in shadow.
‘Hi.’
I can’t see who it is and suddenly I feel awkward again, like I’m failing the how-to-do-this-right test. So I keep walking towards the house and the bathroom.
My eyeliner has smudged and I’ve got straw in my hair. The light in the bathroom is yellow-bright and my eyes look a bit mad and red and wild and I know if Mum was here she’d be giving me That Look, the one that says it’s time to calm down now, darling, but I don’t want to because I feel almost dizzy with the everything of it all.
I go back outside and the shadow people are still there, and I make my way over. It’s Emily, with Archie, Tom Higginson of two-broken-ankles fame, Megan and – with a sort of internal sigh of familiarity and relief I realize – Anna.
There’s a click and a flare of light, which illuminates Tom’s face. He inhales on a cigarette and passes it towards me, eyebrows raised, his mouth pursed as if he’s holding his breath.
‘I don’t smoke, thank you,’ I say, watching as he exhales a stream of green-smelling smoke, which swirls through the air. He gives a satisfied nod, and looks at me with an odd expression I don’t recognize. I look at Anna, whose eyes widen slightly, but she doesn’t say anything. He offers her the cigarette and she shakes her head.
‘I’m all right, thanks.’
I feel like I’ve missed something again. Anna seems to know what the right thing to say is, because nobody looks at her like she’s weird.
Archie reaches across and takes it between finger and thumb, sucking smoke into his lungs, his eyes narrowed.
‘I’ll have some,’ says Megan.
‘I’ll see you inside,’ I say to nobody in particular, and I make my way back to the barn.
I’ve screwed up somehow and because I’m already teetering on the edge it’s as if all the magic shatters out of the evening. My bones ache with tiredness and my head is crashing full of noise and the people are everywhere and I want it all to stop now, but when I look at my phone I see it’s midnight and there’s a text from Leah which says –
If Mum asks, I was at Malia’s house this evening, OK?
– which doesn’t make sense because obviously she was at Malia’s house, because that’s where she said she was going, and I want a cup of coffee and bed and –
‘Grace!’ Rhiannon drags me by the arm into the centre of the room where there’s a big circle of people sitting on the straw-covered floor. ‘Come on, we’re playing Spin the Bottle.’
It feels as if everything in my vision is beginning to melt. The music is banging and the voices are going wonky and everything feels as if it’s been smudged, as if someone took an oil painting and smeared it sideways with the palm of their hand.
‘You OK?’
Anna appears out of nowhere and sits down beside me. She’s cross-legged and she sort of bobs herself sideways, giving me a shoulder nudge, which is comfortingly familiar because it’s her, and because it reminds me of Mabel. The room smells of beer and too many perfumes and hot people and squashed sausage rolls.
‘I’m not sure I’m exactly a Spin the Bottle sort of person,’ I say to Anna.
‘You’ll be fine,’ says Anna, and for the first time since I can remember I worry that I’m a sort of awkward inconvenience. And she’s like a sort of talisman, and I don’t want to risk that. She keeps me safe. So I just sit there on the floor.
I’m feeling really weird now. I could just get up and leave, except I’m sort of jammed in between people and it would be super awkward and maybe I could just escape when nobody is looking, which isn’t now.
I try to distract myself. I watch as Holly positions herself directly opposite Gabe, and Charlotte edges herself in beside him, smiling at him sweetly. She looks a bit fuzzy round the edges and she’s got a bottle of cider, which she’s drinking, through a straw. (‘Do we assume they hadn’t run out after all?’ Anna whispers to me.)
Her make-up is still perfect, though. How do people do that?
‘Right then, everyone,’ says Holly loudly. The circle listens, because Holly’s like that. Charlotte looks unimpressed.
Gabe, who’s joking with the boy sitting next to him, doesn’t pay any attention to Holly.
Someone turns the music down, which helps my head a bit, but the jostling noise of everyone is so loud in my head that I want them all to just stop talking, now. I want to scream at them to shut up. I start picking at the fake black nails, pinging them off one by one. It hurts a bit, like I’m pulling the ends of my fingers off, but it distracts me from what’s going on, until Anna nudges me again.
‘Grace.’
I look up from the little nest of fingernails that sits between my crossed legs, and feel myself going ice cold.
There’s a noise, and it’s building.
It’s a roaring, jeering, cheering sort of noise.
And it’s directed at me.
‘Come on, then,’ says Gabe, standing over me.
He extends a hand downwards, offering to pull me out of my space in the circle. I shake my head slightly and push myself up. The nails skitter on to the floor and lie on their backs like ten little beetles.
And then the clapping starts, slowly.
Charlotte, who has somehow taken back the hostess role, is standing by a side door that leads out of the barn – not to the terrace where the fire pit is smouldering, but into a little room with concrete walls and stainless-steel sinks. It looks like some kind of milking parlour. Gabe steps back.
‘After you.’
For a moment I wonder if I could make a run for it, but I’d have to climb across a heaving circle before I made it out of the door.
So I walk into the room, and Gabe follows, and the door closes behind us.
I close my eyes. I can feel the smooth cold greyness of concrete on my hands, which are balled up behind my back and pressing up against the wall, which I’m leaning on for support. And it smells of dust and old things and faintly of something clinical, which reminds me of hospitals and headaches. I can hear the party outside and I wonder if Charlotte’s standing right by the door waiting to hear kissing noises, except kissing doesn’t make a noise, and this room is mainly just quiet and I realize something in my ears is rushing in the space where the music used to be. I close my eyes and bite the inside of my lip and I realize I’m counting breaths in out in out in and I know that I should have gone home ages ago because now I’ve had enough of all this and there’s no way of leaving and I don’t know how to say I want to go and . . .
‘David Tennant’s my Doctor.’
I open my eyes.
‘What did you say?’
‘He’s my Doctor.’ Gabe’s voice sounds loud in the echoey concreteness.
He nods his head towards the picture on my T-shirt.
‘Ten,’ he says, explaining unnecessarily, because of course I know what he means. David Tennant’s my Doctor too, just like Peter Davison is my dad’s. And he’s peering round the side of the TARDIS on the front of my shirt, with his sonic screwdriver in hand and his long brown dustcoat and his Converse.
‘I like it.’
‘Good.’
I swallow, and it’s so loud that I swear I hear it echo around the whole room.
‘It’s a bit mental out there, isn’t it?’
And I look at Gabe then.
Not Gabe the boy everyone fancies from our year, but Gabe the actual person. And I watch as he runs a hand through his hair, and he does a sort of smile at me, and I see his one tooth crossed over the other, and then he hitches himself up on to the work surface beside me so he’s close enough for me to feel the heat of him through his shirt, radiating towards my arm. And I think then that my heart is thudding so loudly that he can probably hear it and I feel like I’m made of shivers.
And I know why we’re in here. The rules say we have to kiss, because it’s Spin the Bottle and that’s the whole idea. And generally I’m really good with rules because they make life nice and uncomplicated and also hello, Asperger’s. Duh. We’re good on rules. But this is Gabe Kowalski and I am me, so that’s not going to happen. I decide to be practical.
‘The rules are that we’re supposed to kiss.’
Gabe’s eyes widen slightly.
He’s got really, really long eyelashes.
‘But it’s OK, because we don’t have to. Nobody will know.’
And then he looks at me for a second that lasts a really long time. And then he sort of cocks his head to one side slightly as if he’s thinking about something. And he sort of leans towards me, so the words are almost a whisper on my skin and not an actual sound.
‘What if we want to?’