Reckless Girls(36)
“Wanna defend the island?” I ask her. “Make booby traps, go full Swiss Family Robinson?”
I’m joking, obviously, but Brittany says, “Maybe we could go get that skull back at the airstrip. Put it on the beach, scare them into leaving.”
When she sees my horrified expression, she laughs, bumping her hip against mine. “Oh my god, your face.”
Before turning her gaze back to sea, she asks, “Speaking of, what were you and Eliza doing in the jungle?”
It’s right there on the tip of my tongue to tell her all about the pool, that perfect hidden spot, but something stops me. “Oh, just walking around. Nothing special.”
She nods as the boat motors over the breakers and into the harbor. From this distance, I spot a single figure, standing at the wheel.
“And then,” Jake says with a sigh, “there were seven.”
BEFORE
Eliza is almost seventeen when it all comes crashing down.
Before that night in April, her life hadn’t exactly been charmed. There was never enough money, her dad split before she even really knew him, and she and Mum had moved so many times. They’d lived in big cities like London and Manchester, and tiny villages with names that sound like something out of a storybook—but, for Eliza, they were still just a series of council flats and shitty schools.
She’s glided by, Eliza has, because she’s pretty, because she’s quick, because she worked out that thing, that secret, that takes most people ages to learn—no one really wants you to be yourself. They only want themselves reflected back at them.
Eliza is very good at doing just that.
So while she never has the nicest clothes or the hottest brands, she always has friends, always finds herself at the center of things, and that’s where she likes to be, where she feels the most in control.
By the time she’s sixteen, things have settled. Her mum has a good job now, working as a housekeeper for a rich family just outside of London, while Eliza is firmly ensconced in the social hierarchy of her school: queen bee, a perfect golden girl despite her rather dingy semidetached house and her drugstore makeup. She’s studying for her GSCEs, smart enough to get into a decent university, smart enough to ensure that the life that trapped her mother isn’t going to trap her.
And then, of course, there’s Jake.
* * *
SHE MEETS HIM ON A typically rainy afternoon. They’ve only got the one car, she and Mum, and Eliza needed to drive into the village to do some shopping after school. Mum let her use it, but only if Eliza agreed to pick her up from work that afternoon. Eliza is irritated that her shopping trip has been cut short, and then more irritated when her mum doesn’t come out at the appointed time, even after she blows the horn.
Rain splatters on her, slithering down the back of her jacket as she jogs up to the front steps of the fancy brick house with its box hedges and its smart red door.
Eliza rings the bell, pissed off and wet, her hair already curling in the damp, and when the door opens, she’s ready to snap at her mum or some other tight-arsed maid standing there.
She doesn’t expect him.
Tall, with hair just a few shades darker than her own golden blond, and eyes that are almost painfully blue, Jake Kelly is, she’ll eventually learn, both his family’s pride and their black sheep, a Problem Child already kicked out of two boarding schools back in Australia, where the Kellys are from. This move to England is a sort of last resort, a chance to finally “straighten the boy out.”
It won’t take. Nothing ever will. But Eliza doesn’t know that yet.
She only knows that he is the fittest boy she’s ever seen, standing there in his school uniform with his tie undone, his jacket off. He’s a year older than her, she knows, having heard her mum mention Mr. Kelly’s son, how he goes to the posh boy’s school in the next village over, how there are already “issues,” and that Mr. Kelly is thinking of transferring him somewhere a bit stricter.
“Um, hi,” she says, and he smiles at her appraisingly, leaning against the doorframe.
“G’day.”
He does this, she’ll eventually learn. Leans heavy on the Aussie thing with new people. He is charm and sunshine itself when it suits him.
It’s a long time before Eliza figures out that it’s all mostly surface, an act, as much as her queen bee thing is.
But all that is still to come. Right now, Eliza just returns his smile and says, “I’m here to pick up my mum? Beth?”
“Here I am, love. Sorry.”
Her mum rushes toward the door, pulling on her coat, and Eliza notices that her hair is mussed, the pretty pink lipstick she was wearing that morning is gone, and she won’t figure it out, not then, but it turns out cleaning is not the only thing Beth does for Mr. Kelly.
“See you around,” Jake says to Eliza, and it feels like a promise and a threat all at once.
She likes that.
* * *
IT’S A SECRET AT FIRST, Eliza and Jake. She starts needing the car more regularly so that she has to pick Mum up from that big fancy house, starts turning up earlier so that she has to hang around and wait.
The first time Jake kisses her, it’s in the car, parked in the driveway while the rain pours down outside, and he tastes like smoke and cinnamon gum, and Eliza falls hard, so hard that she doesn’t notice what’s going on with her mum. Her sudden distraction, the phone ringing at all hours, the way she always seems to be at the Kellys, even on Saturdays—none of it registers as strange. Eliza is in her own bubble of school and Jake, so she’s genuinely shocked when, about a month after that first kiss, Jake says to her, “You know our parents are fucking, right?”