The Graces Page 2

  ‘I just don’t like bullies so much,’ I replied.

  ‘You can be our resident superhero. Save the innocent. Wear a cape.’

  I offered him a smile, a wry twist of the mouth. ‘I’m not nice enough to be a superhero.’

  ‘No? Are you trying to tell me you’re the villain?’

  I paused, wondering how to answer. ‘I don’t think anyone is as black and white as that. Including you.’

  His grin widened. ‘Me?’

  ‘Yeah. I think sometimes you must get bored of how much everyone worships you, when maybe they don’t even know the real you. Maybe the real you is darker than the one you show the world.’

  The set of his mouth froze. Another me from another time recoiled in horror at my recklessness. People didn’t like it when I said things like this.

  ‘Huh,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘Not out to make friends, are you.’

  Inside, I shrivelled. I’d blown it. ‘I guess … I’m just looking for the right ones,’ I said. ‘The ones who feel like I do. That’s all.’

  I’d told myself I wouldn’t do this any more. They didn’t know me here – I could be a new me, the 2.0 version, now with improved social skills.

  Stop talking. Stop talking. Walk away before you make it worse.

  ‘And how do you feel?’ he asked me. His voice wasn’t teasing. He seemed curious.

  Well, I might as well go out with a bang.

  ‘Like I need to find the truth of the world,’ I said. ‘Like there’s more than this.’ I raised a hand helplessly to the grey school building looming over us. ‘More than just … this, this life, every day, on and on, until I’m dead. There’s got to be. I want to find it. I need to find it.’

  His eyes had clouded over. I thought I knew that look – it was the careful face you made around crazy people.

  I sighed. ‘I have to go. Sorry if I offended you.’

  He said nothing as I walked away.

  I’d just exposed my soul to the most popular boy in school, and in return he’d given me silence.

  Maybe I could persuade my mother to move towns again.

  *

  It was raining the next day, so I ate my lunch in the library. I was alone – the friendly girls I’d hung out with when I’d first arrived never asked me to sit with them in the cafeteria any more, and I was glad to have the time to read more of my book before class. It was too cold to go outside, and Mr Jarvis, the librarian, was nowhere to be seen, so I put my bag on the table and opened my Tupperware behind it. Cold beans on toast with melted cheese on top. A bit slimy, but cheap to buy and easy to make, two important factors in my house.

  I took out my lunch fork, the only one in our cutlery drawer that didn’t look as though it came from a plastic picnic set. It was a thick kind of creamy-coloured silver and had this flattened plate of scrollwork on the handle bottom. I washed it every night and took it back to school with me every day. It made me feel a bit more special when I used it, like I wasn’t just some scruff, and my mother never noticed it was missing.

  I’d worried about my conversation with Fenrin that whole day and well into the night, turning my words over again and again, wondering what I could have done better. In my mind, my voice was even and measured, a beautiful cadence that positioned itself perfectly between drawling and musical. But in reality, I had an awkward town accent I couldn’t quite shift, all hard edges and soft, dopey burrs. I wondered if he’d heard it. I wondered if he’d judged me because of it.

  I ate and read my book, this particular kind of fantasy novel that I secretly loved. It was my favourite thing to do – eat and read. The world just shut up for a while. I’d just got to the bit where Princess Mar’a’tha had shot an arrow into one of the demon horde attacking the royal hunting camp, and then I felt it.

  Him. I felt him.

  I looked up into his face, which was tilted down at my shit, embarrassing book and my shit, embarrassing lunch.

  ‘Am I interrupting?’ said Fenrin. A long wave of his sungold-tipped hair had slipped from behind his ear and hung by his cheekbone. I actually caught a waft of him. He smelled like a thicker, manlier kind of vanilla. His skin was lightly tanned.

  I hadn’t lowered my fork; I just looked at him dumbly over it.

  It worked. I told him the truth and it worked.

  ‘Eating in the library again, when the rest of the school uses the cafeteria,’ he mused. ‘You must enjoy being alone.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. But I had misjudged it because his eyebrow rose.

  ‘Er, okay. Sorry for disturbing you,’ he said, and turned away. I lowered my fork.

  NO, WAIT! I wanted to shout. You were supposed to say something self-deprecatingly witty at this point, weren’t you, and get a laugh, and then you’d see it in his eyes – he’d think you were cool. And like that, you’d be in.

  But nothing came out of my mouth, and my chance was slipping away.

  The only other person in the library was this guy Marcus from Fenrin’s year (always Marcus, never just Marc, I’d heard someone say with a sneer). He had the kind of presence that folded inward, as if he couldn’t bear to be noticed. I understood that and gave him a wide berth.

  So I found it interesting when Fenrin turned to Marcus and locked eyes with him instead of ignoring him. And instead of trying to be invisible, Marcus held his gaze. Fenrin’s mouth drew into a thin, tight line. Marcus didn’t move.

  After a moment more of this strangeness that wasn’t quite aggression and wasn’t quite anything easy to read, Fenrin snorted, turned and caught me watching. I tried to smile, giving him an opening.

  It seemed to work. He folded his arms, rocked on his feet.

  ‘So, at the risk of looking like an idiot coming back for another serving,’ he said to me, ‘why do you enjoy being alone?’

  My mouth opened and shut and I gave him a truth, because truth had got me this far, and truth seemed like it would endear him to me more than anything else ever could.

  I forced myself to look straight into his eyes. ‘I can stop pretending when I’m alone.’

  Fenrin smiled.

  Bingo, as my mother often said.

  CHAPTER 3

  There was a story about the Graces, a story so woven into the fabric of this town that even my mother had already heard about it from someone at work. It was about Thalia and Fenrin’s eighth birthday party.

  Grace birthday parties had been legendary up until then. Most of the mothers around town would pray that their child would get an invitation, so they could come, too, and lounge in Esther Grace’s spacious French country kitchen, drinking cocktails in slender flutes and stealing glances at her pretty husband, Gwydion, as he passed by with his easy, loping stride.

  The party had been fairly standard all afternoon. The mothers had put on their most carefully chosen outfits, their most vibrant shades of lipstick, and had lingered in the kitchen drinking freshly made mojitos with mint from Esther’s sprawling herb garden. Their tinkling laughter had grown stronger as the day wore on, and they had stopped checking on the children so often, who had had their fill of food and party games and were congregating in the parlour. The Graces had the kind of house with a parlour.

  No one knew for sure who suggested the Ouija board, but most of the children thought it was Fenrin. He was a show-off, after all. They’d been strictly forbidden to touch it, but that didn’t stop him from producing the key to the cabinet it was stored in and balancing carefully on a chair to reach the highest shelf. Down it came, a solid shape wrapped in a rust-coloured velvet cloth and bound with loops of black ribbon. When the ribbon was undone and the velvet unravelled, there sat a sandalwood box that gave off a creamy wood smell when you put your nose right up to it.

  Half the children felt their hearts quicken in fear. Because what if? But Fenrin just laughed at them and said there was no such thing as ghosts, and did they want to play or did they want to be sissies for the rest of their lives?

  So they played – every last one
of them.

  For the truth of what happened next, you’d have to talk to the parlour walls. Accounts varied so wildly from child to child, no one ever did know for sure exactly how it had played out.

  When the adults heard screaming, they rushed into the parlour and found Matthew Feldspar on the floor, his eyes shut and his breathing shallow. No matter how violently his mother shook him, he wouldn’t wake up.

  He was rushed to hospital.

  By the time they arrived he had come to, and the doctor who examined him assured his mother that he exhibited no signs of physical abuse. Tests turned up nothing unusual, and the eventual conclusion was that he had suffered a fainting fit of some kind. Perhaps he hadn’t eaten enough that day. Perhaps it was a reaction to all the excitement a birthday party could bring.

  Mrs Feldspar, however, was not having any of that. She was adamant that Matthew was not a weak boy and had never fainted in his life. She much preferred the idea that something had been done to him, something that a doctor wouldn’t be able to see. Something only the child of a witch could inflict.

  Accusations flew around for weeks afterwards. Some said it was revenge – Matthew had a reputation for spreading rumours, as well as for goosing other kids to make them cry. He’d apparently done it to Fenrin only a couple of weeks before, and then told everyone Fenrin had enjoyed it just a bit too much. Fenrin had tried to punch him in gym class and earned detention for it. After that, things seemed to have died down. Until the birthday party.

  Mrs Feldspar said that Matthew was a playful boy, that was all. She tried to press criminal charges, but the police laughed at her. She tried to sue the Graces, but lawyers told her there was no evidence of any kind of assault on her son, and without evidence she didn’t have a case.

  The Feldspars left town not long after that.

  No one was allowed to go to Fenrin and Thalia’s ninth birthday party; but instead of feeling snubbed, the Graces went right ahead with it, inviting a whole swathe of people from out of town. For days before, you could see them arriving at the house. Some of them looked like rock stars and some of them like American Psycho, a few were as coolly bohemian as the Graces, and all of them were striking, in one way or another.

  The twins’ birthday was 1 August, and if you went past the top of their lane on that day, you could hear music and laughter coming from the garden, and smell ginger carrot cakes with cream cheese frosting, sausages in mustard sauce, and freshly made lemonade.

  Every year Thalia and Fenrin had their birthday party, but no one from school ever got another invitation. Two or three days before, the town was flooded with Grace strangers, and two or three days afterwards they were gone again. The most popular rumour was that they were witches from around the country gathering for some kind of debauched ritual. The birthday was an excuse, the town whispered – after the children went to bed, the adults held their own, darker kind of party.

  For a long time after that unpleasant eighth birthday, anything that went wrong was blamed on 1 August. It started as a joke between the town adults: ‘Stubbed your toe? Must be the Graces’ fault.’ This was taken on by their children and woven into scary fact. For instance, one year, old Mrs Galloway had fallen down for no reason and died the next day, not a week after 1 August. Another year, a fire in the school gym happened on 2 August. And how would a gym just catch fire like that? Another year, four separate kids came back to school in September with their parents’ recent decisions to divorce hanging over their heads like leprosy. Something bad happened every single year after Fenrin and Thalia’s birthday, without fail.

  It was the town’s own Friday the thirteenth. It was their punishment for judging them.

  CHAPTER 4

  That entire week I ate my lunch in the library.

  Every time someone came in, my heart skipped and I waited to see a shadow fall over my desk. But the only other person who was there as much as me was Marcus. I wondered why he was in the library every lunchtime. I wondered most of all what that look between him and Fenrin had meant. There was history there, but the town’s rumour mill on the Graces hadn’t supplied that particular story, and I could hardly ask either of them myself. Not yet.

  *

  Fenrin never showed up, but Summer did.

  The next Friday, the library’s double doors swung violently open, slamming back against the walls. Marcus, sitting two desks away from me, jumped. Summer strode in, looking around with undisguised disgust. She paused just inside, as if striking a pose. If anyone else had done that, I’d have choked on my own disdain. But Summer looked like she would forever not give two shits what you thought because what you thought wasn’t worth giving two shits over. And it just worked.

  She slowly folded her arms over her chest, scanning the room. Her long black hair had been wound into a coil at the nape of her neck and her lace-up knee boots creaked very slightly in the silence as she shifted her weight. All this I saw in the instant before her eyes fell on me, and one brow rose.

  She walked over to my desk.

  ‘Hey, new girl.’

  ‘Hi,’ I said, startled.

  ‘You’ve been here a couple of months, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’s March. How come you transferred in the middle of the school year?’

  The official reason was that we had to move because of my mother’s new job.

  The unofficial reason would die with me.

  She rolled her eyes at my silence, put her back to me and turned her head so it was silhouetted above her shoulder. I tried to commit the movement to memory.

  ‘Are you coming?’ she said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘One-time-only invitation.’

  One time only.

  This was it.

  Don’t screw it up, whispered the voice in my head.

  I didn’t intend to. I shoved my empty Tupperware box into my bag, the fork rattling around inside, as well as the dog-eared paperback I’d been reading. Summer had already moved to the doors, not even looking back to see if I was following. I had better keep up.

  She strode through the corridors ahead. Most people were in the cafeteria, but the few milling about watched her surreptitiously as she passed them. I walked a couple of paces behind – not enough to crowd her, but enough to signal to others that I was allowed to be there.

  We reached the locker corridor, and as we passed Jase Worthington, he said, ‘Stupid goth bitch.’

  Summer stopped.

  His friend Tom, whom I had briefly fancied when I first got here, hissed, ‘Dude, don’t.’

  They were both popular surfer types, Tom much shorter than the rest of them and constantly irritated by it. That meant they naturally fitted in with Fenrin, who was in the same year as them, and I had thought they were all friends. A friend of Fenrin’s would never dare to start on any of his family like that.

  Especially not Summer.

  ‘Oh, Jase-ington,’ she said, with a fluttery sigh in her voice. ‘I simply don’t have time for you today.’

  I began breathing again. Summer started to walk off.

  ‘Ooh, what are you going to do?’ Jase jeered. ‘Put a spell on me?’

  She threw him an impatient look over her shoulder. ‘Of course.’

  Silence.

  It wasn’t until we’d reached the double doors at the far end that Jase suddenly yelled, ‘I’m not afraid of you! You’re just a faker! Your whole family is a bunch of stupid carny fakers!’

  ‘What a superlative vocabulary,’ Summer muttered. ‘What an intellect. What a—’ She stopped herself.

  Someone else would try to comfort her or suck up. I said nothing.

  We moved across the outdoor hard courts, where a couple of other boys from Fenrin’s year were kicking a ball about. It was starting to drizzle, and their game looked dismal in the half-light.

  ‘Hey, Summer,’ said one of them. She stuck her tongue out at him as she passed, but there was a little smile on her face.

  I f
elt her gaze light on me.

  ‘What?’ she said, challenging me to comment.

  I shrugged.

  ‘Wow, you really are the silent type, aren’t you? Cards close to your chest, right?’

  Was that bad? Was I treading too carefully with her? I couldn’t tell.

  We were making for the copse at the end of the field, where a huddle of trees and low bushes gave people some shielding from prying teacher eyes.

  ‘I was kind of seeing him,’ Summer said, as if we had been talking about it already. ‘Jase. He may be hot, but my god he’s dull. It’s a smoke weed and surf a lot kind of life. I mean, there is literally nothing else that interests him. Plus he’s bad in bed. He’s all loud groaning, like a crap zombie.’

  I disliked these kinds of conversations. There wasn’t an obvious response. I didn’t know him, so I couldn’t exactly agree.

  ‘Oh right,’ I tried.

  We reached the copse. There was a lookout, this sullen girl called Macy who was good at making herself useful to popular people. She eyed me up and down.

  ‘Is everyone there?’ Summer asked.

  ‘Everyone who was invited.’

  The last was directed at me, but Summer didn’t even appear to notice.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. My shoes slid over a squelching carpet of leaves as we walked further in. It was pretty useful, this place. The clearing beyond was hidden from view by an array of tall bushes. No one could approach from any other way than the field, as the copse backed onto a wall, marking the boundaries of school property. One lookout on watch and you could do what you liked here without being seen.

  In the clearing, sitting in a ragged circle on their coats, were a few girls from our year. I knew two of them were particular friends of Summer’s right now. They had at least ten piercings each and always wore band T-shirts with snakes or insects or rivers of blood splashed across them. The one with jagged, pillar-box-red hair, Gemma, was the perky kind of girl who everyone liked. I’d never really hung out with her, but I’d been paired with her in maths a couple of times – she was unfailingly nice. The other girl, Lou, had jet-black hair like Summer, two nose piercings that she had to take out before school every day, and a low, wicked laugh.