The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #5)(42)
‘The little shit,’ Holly says, through her heartbeat and her breath running wild. ‘The little prick. I hope he dies of cancer.’
Selena stretches out a leg so that her foot touches Julia’s. This time Julia jerks her foot away.
Becca says, ‘What did you do? Did you, did he . . . ?’
‘I kneed him in the balls. Which actually works, just in case you ever need to know. And then when we came back here I showered the living shit out of myself.’ They remember. They never thought to connect it up with James Gillen (Julia offhand, flipping a shoulder, Shouldn’t have bothered, like snogging a Labrador). Now, in the seething space of their new knowledge, it feels slap-in-the-face obvious.
‘And I don’t know about you, but being the genius I am, I figure James Gillen didn’t feel like telling the rest of Colm’s that all he got out of his afternoon was a bruised ballsack, so he told them I was a slut who couldn’t get enough. And that’s why Marcus f*cking Wiley feels I’d just love a photo of his dick. And it’s just going to keep on coming, isn’t it?’
Selena says, but there’s a thread of uncertainty flawing her voice, ‘They’ll forget about it. In a few weeks—’
‘No. They won’t.’
Silence, and the watchful moon. Holly thinks about finding out some disgusting secret about James Gillen and spreading it till everyone laughs whenever he walks past and finally he kills himself. Becca tries to think of things to bring Julia, chocolate, funny poems. Selena pictures some yellowed book with curled writing, a low rhyming chant, knotted grass and the smell of burning hair; a shimmer closing around the four of them, turning them impermeable. Julia concentrates on finding animals in the clouds and digs her fingernails through the layers of grass into the ground, till clumps of dirt stab up into the quick.
They have no weapons for this. The air is bruised and swollen, throbbing in black and white, ready to split open.
Julia says, hard and final as a slamming door, ‘I’m not touching any guy from Colm’s again. Ever.’
‘That’s like saying you’re never going near any guy ever,’ Holly says. ‘Colm’s guys are all we meet.’
‘So I won’t go near any guy ever, till college. I don’t care. Better than having another of those stupid pricks telling the whole school exactly what my tits feel like.’ Becca goes red.
Selena hears it like a single ding of silver on crystal, shivering the air. She sits up. She says, ‘Then me neither.’
Julia shoots her a ferocious stare. ‘I’m not just being all, “Oh, my ickle feelings are hurt so I’m giving up men forever.” I mean it.’
Selena says, unruffled and sure, ‘Me too.’
In daylight it would be different. In daylight, in indoor light, this would never come to them. Powerless and stifled, the rage would turn ingrown. The stain on their skin would burn deeper, branding them.
The clouds are gone but the moonlight is speeding faster, turning around them. Becca says, ‘Same here.’
Julia’s eyebrow flicks, half wryly. Becca can’t find how to tell her that it’s not nothing and that she wants it to be more, she would bring the biggest thing in the world to put in the middle of their circle and set it on fire if she could, so that she’d deserve this; but then Julia gives her a small smile and a private wink.
All their eyes have gone to Holly. She has a flash of her dad, his grin as he sideslips when you try to pin him to an answer: never get tied down, not till you’re beyond sure, not even then.
The others, blazing white against the dark trees, triple and waiting. The soft curve of shadow under Selena’s chin, the narrow back-bend of Becca’s wrist where she leans on her hand in the grass, the downward quirk at the corner of Julia’s mouth: things Holly will know by heart when she’s a hundred, when all the rest of the world has been scoured away from her mind. Something throbs in the palms of her hands, pulling towards them. Something shifting, the smoke-spiral ache of something like thirst but not, catching her in the throat and under the breastbone. Something is happening.
‘Same here,’ she says.
‘Oh, God,’ Julia says. ‘I can hear it now. They’re gonna say we’re some kind of lesbian orgy cult.’
‘So?’ Selena says. ‘They can say what they want. We won’t have to care.’
A breathtaken silence, as that sinks in. Their minds race wild along its trail. They see Joanne wiggling and giggling and sneering in the Court to make the Colm’s guys fancy her, they see Orla howling helpless into her sodden pillow after Andrew Moore and his friends ripped her apart, they see themselves trying desperately to stand right and dress right and say the right things under the guys’ grabbing eyes, and they think: Never, never ever, never never never again. Break that open the way superheroes burst handcuffs. Punch it in the face and watch it explode.
My body my mind the way I dress the way I walk the way I talk, mine all mine.
The power of it, buzzing inside them to be unlocked, makes their bones shake.
Becca says, ‘We’ll be like the Amazons. They didn’t touch guys, ever, and they didn’t care what people said. If a guy tried to do anything to them, he ended up . . .’ A second that whirls with arrows and flares of blood.
‘Whoa,’ Julia says, but the small smile is back and it’s her own smile, the one that most people never get to see. ‘Chill. This isn’t forever. It’s just till we leave school and we can meet actual human guys.’