The Secret Place

Chapter 14

The Valentine’s dance. Two hundred third- and fourth-years from Kilda’s and Colm’s, shaved and waxed and plucked, carefully anointed with dozens of substances in every colour and texture, dressed up in their agonised-over best and sky-high on hormones and smelling of two hundred different cans of body spray, crammed into the Kilda’s school hall. Mobile screens bob and flicker blue-white among the crowd, like fireflies, as people record each other recording each other. Chris Harper – there in the middle of the crowd, in the red shirt, shoulder-bumping and laughing with his friends to get the girls’ attention – has three months, a week and a day left to live.

It’s only half past eight and Julia is bored already. She and the other three are in a tight circle on the dance floor, ignoring the OMG LOL!!! mileage that Joanne’s gang are getting out of Becca’s jeans. Holly and Becca both love dancing so they’re having a blast, and Selena looks happy enough, but Julia is about ready to fake epic period cramps to get out of this. The sound system is banging them over the heads with some love-based song that’s been autotuned to a slick perky shine, Justin Bieber or possibly Miley Cyrus, someone smooth in front and jerking through all the motions of sexy. The lights are flashing red and pink. The committee – shiny-haired gold-star types already working on their CVs – has decorated the hall with lacy paper hearts and garlands and whatever, in predictable colours. The whole place is gloopy with romance, but there are two teachers guarding the door in case some couple decides to sneak out and do unspeakable things in a classroom, and if anyone is wild and crazy enough to start slow-dancing, like for example because a slow song is playing, then insane Sister Cornelius charges over and practically sprays them with a fire hose full of holy water.

Most people who aren’t on the committee are keeping a careful eye on the hall doors. On the afternoon before a dance, Colm’s guys go down the road behind Kilda’s and throw booze over the corner of the wall into the bushes, where they pick it up later if they manage to sneak out of the dance. The next day, Kilda’s girls scavenge anything that didn’t get collected and get drunk in their dorm rooms. This has been a tradition for so long that Julia can’t believe They haven’t figured it out, specially since two of the teachers actually went to Kilda’s and presumably did the same thing themselves. Miss Long and Miss Naughton both look like they were born forty-year-old Irish teachers in 1952 and haven’t changed anything including their revolting tan tights since, so maybe if they actually ever were teenagers it’s been wiped out of their memories, but just recently Julia has wondered if it’s more complicated than that. If Miss Long and Miss Naughton might be ninety-nine per cent dreary teacher and still somehow one per cent fifteen-year-old muffling whiskey giggles, and loyal to that. If this is one of the secrets that grown-ups keep unmentioned: how long things last, invisible, inside. Either that or they were such losers back in school that they never heard about the booze bushes.

Julia dances on autopilot and checks furtively for pit-stains while she’s got her arms up. Last year she enjoyed the Valentine’s dance; or maybe ‘enjoyed’ isn’t the word, but it felt like it mattered. It felt knife-edge, last year, felt breathtaking, felt ready to boil over with its own momentousness. She was expecting it to feel the same way this year, but instead the dance feels like it matters considerably less than your average nose-picking session. This is pissing Julia off. Most of the stuff she does every day is blindingly pointless, but at least no one expects her to enjoy it.

‘Back in a sec,’ she yells to the others, miming drinking, and drops out of the dance. She starts squeezing her way through the crowd towards the edge. The lights and the dancing and the crush of bodies have turned everyone sweaty. Joanne Heffernan’s makeup is already melting, which doesn’t surprise Julia given how much of it there is and which doesn’t seem to bother Oisín O’Donovan who is trying to manoeuvre his hand inside Joanne’s dress and getting frustrated because the dress is complicated and Oisín is thick as shite.

‘OhmyGod, get off me, you lezzer,’ snaps Joanne over her shoulder, as Julia tries to slide past without brushing up against one molecule of Joanne’s designer arse.

‘In your dreams,’ Julia says, stepping on Joanne’s heel. ‘Oops.’

At the end of the hall is a long table of cupid-covered paper cups, arranged in rows around a big fake-glass punch bowl. The punch is a lurid baby-medicine shade of pink. Julia takes a cup. It’s squash with food colouring.

Finn Carroll is leaning against the wall by the table. Finn and Julia know each other, sort of, from debating society; when he sees her he cocks an eyebrow, lifts his cup to her and shouts something she can’t hear. Finn has bright red hair, long enough to flop into loose curls at the back of his neck, and he’s smart. These would add up to social death for most guys, but Finn has the minimum of freckles to go with the hair, he’s decent at rugby and he’s getting height and shoulders faster than most of his class, so he gets away with it.

‘What?’ Julia yells.

Finn leans down to her ear. ‘Don’t drink the punch,’ he shouts. ‘It’s shit.’

‘To go with the music,’ Julia yells back.

‘That’s just insulting. “They’re teenagers, so they must love shitty chart crap.” It never occurs to them that some of us might have taste.’

‘You should’ve hotwired the sound system,’ Julia yells. Finn is good with electronics. Last term he wired up a frog in Bio so that when Graham Quinn went to dissect it, it jumped, and Graham and his stool both went over backwards. Julia respects that. ‘Or at least brought something sharp we could stick through our eardrums.’

Finn says, close enough that he can stop shouting, ‘Want to see if we can get out?’

Finn is actually pretty sound, for a Colm’s guy; Julia likes the idea of having an honest-to-God conversation with him, she thinks there’s a decent chance he might be able to manage that without spending too much of the time trying to stick his tongue down her throat, and she can’t see him bragging to all his moron buddies that they had hot monkey sex in the bushes. Someone will notice they’re gone, though, and the hot-monkey-sex rumours will get going anyway. ‘Nah,’ she says.

‘I’ve got a naggin of whiskey out the back.’

‘I hate whiskey.’

‘So we’ll nick something else. There’s a whole offie out in those bushes. Take your pick.’

The coloured lights slide across Finn’s face, wide mouth laughing. It occurs to Julia, with a giddy rush, that she doesn’t have to give one single fuck about hot-monkey-sex rumours.

She glances over at the other three: still dancing. Becca has her arms out and is twirling around with her head back like a little kid, laughing. Any minute she’s going to get dizzy and fall over her own feet.

‘Stick beside me,’ Julia says to Finn, and starts sauntering casually towards the hall door. ‘When I say “Go”, go fast.’

Sister Cornelius is being cuboid and grim in front of the door; Miss Long is off down the other end of the hall, unsticking Marcus Wiley from Cliona, who looks like she’s not sure which of them she hates more. Sister Cornelius gives Julia and Finn a suspicious glare. Julia smiles back. ‘The punch is lovely,’ she shouts, raising her cup. Sister Cornelius looks even more suspicious.

Julia puts her cup down on a windowsill. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Finn, who apparently catches on fast, do the same thing.

Becca falls over. Sister Cornelius gets a wild missionary look and charges off down the hall, shoving dancers out of her way right and left, to interrogate Becca and breathalyse her and run tests for Young People’s Drugs. Holly will deal with her, no problem; grown-ups believe Holly, maybe because of her dad’s job, maybe just because of the total sincere commitment she puts into lying. ‘Go,’ Julia says, and zips out of the door, hearing the slam behind her a split second later but she doesn’t look round till she’s down the corridor and into the dark maths room and the footsteps echoing behind her turn into Finn swinging around the door frame.

Moonlight stripes the room, tangles confusingly in chair-backs and desk-legs. The music has turned into a distant hysterical pounding and shrieking, like someone has a tiny Rihanna locked in a box. ‘Nice,’ Julia says. ‘Shut the door.’

‘Fuck,’ Finn says, banging his shin off a chair.

‘Shh. Anyone see us go?’

‘Don’t think so.’

Julia is unscrewing the window-bolt, moonlight slipping over her fast-moving hands. ‘They’ll have someone patrolling the grounds,’ Finn says. ‘Or anyway they do at our dances.’

‘I know. Shut up. And get back; you want to get seen?’

They wait, backs against the wall, listening to the small tinny shrieking, keeping one eye on the empty sweep of grass and one on the classroom door. Someone’s forgotten a uniform jumper, squiggled down the back of a chair seat; Julia grabs it and pulls it on, over her polka-dot dress. It’s not exactly flattering – it’s too big and it has boob dents – but it’s warm, and they can feel the outdoors cold striking through the glass. Finn zips up his hoodie.

The shadows come first, sliding around the corner of the boarders’ wing, long on the ground. Sister Veronica and Father Niall from Colm’s, marching side by side, heads whipping back and forth while they scan every inch of cover.

When they stomp out of sight, Julia counts twenty to let them get around the corner of the nuns’ wing, ten more in case they stopped to look at something, ten more just in case. Then she shoves up the window, braces her back against the frame, swings her feet around and slides out to drop on the grass: one move, smooth enough that if Finn’s mind hadn’t been occupied he would have copped this wasn’t her first time. As she hears him land behind her she takes off, running fast and easy for the cover of the trees, her ears still ringing from the music, stars jingling overhead to the beat of her footsteps.

Red lights, pink, white, spinning strange crisscrossing patterns like coded signals gone too fast to catch. The beat in the floor and the walls and in all of their bones, pulsing through them like electric current, leaping from one lifting hand to the next all along the hall, never letting up for a second, go go go.

Selena’s been dancing too long. The weaving lights are starting to look like living things, giddy and desperately lost. Selena’s going watery at the edges, starting to lose hold of the boundary line where she leaves off and other things start. Over by the punch table Chris Harper tilts back his head to drink and Selena can taste it, someone bashes into her hip and she can’t tell whether the pain belongs to her or them, Becca’s arms rise and they feel like hers. She knows to stop dancing.

‘You OK?’ Holly yells, without breaking the beat.

‘Drink,’ Selena yells back, pointing at the punch table. Holly nods and goes back to trying out some complicated hip-and-footwork. Becca is jumping up and down. Julia’s gone, sneaked out somehow; Selena can feel the gap in the room where she should be. It throws things even more off balance. She puts her feet down carefully, trying to feel them. Reminds herself: Valentine’s dance.

The punch tastes all wrong, grassy-cool long-ago summer afternoons running barefoot in and out of open doors, not right for this sweaty thumping dark tangle. Selena leans back against the wall and thinks about things with lots of weight and no give. The periodic table. Irish verb conjugations. The music has gone a notch quieter, but it’s still getting in her way. She wishes she could put her fingers in her ears for a second, but her hands don’t feel like hers and getting them to her ears seems too complicated.

‘Hi,’ someone says, next to her.

It’s Chris Harper. A while back this would have surprised Selena – Chris Harper is super-cool and she’s not; she doesn’t think she’s ever had an actual conversation with him before. But the last few months have been their own place, lush and waving with startling things Selena knows she doesn’t need to understand. At this point she expects them.

‘Hi,’ she says.

Chris says, ‘I like your dress.’

‘Thanks,’ Selena says, looking down to remind herself. The dress is confusing. She tells herself: 2013.

‘Huh?’ Chris says.

Crap. ‘Nothing.’

Chris looks at her. ‘Are you OK?’ he asks. And, like he thinks she might be dizzy, before she can move away, he puts out a hand to cup her bare arm.

Everything slams into focus, bright colours inside sharp outlines. Selena can feel her feet again, tingling fiercely like they’ve been asleep. The prickle of her zipper down her back is a tiny precise line. She’s looking straight into Chris’s eyes, hazel even in the dimness, but somehow she can see the hall as well and the lights aren’t signals or lost things, they’re lights and she never knew anything could be so red and so pink and so white. The whole room is solid, it’s vivid and humming with its own clarity. Chris – light glossing his hair, warming his red shirt, catching the small puzzled furrow in between his eyebrows – is the realest thing she’s ever seen.

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Sure?’

‘Totally.’

Chris takes his hand off Selena’s arm. Instantly that clarity blinks out; the hall turns jerky and messy again. But she still feels solid and warm all over, and Chris still looks real.

He says, ‘I thought…’

He’s looking at her like he’s never seen her before; like some ghost of what just happened found its way into him, too. He says, ‘You looked…’

Selena smiles at him. She says, ‘I felt weird for a second. I’m OK now.’

‘Some girl fainted earlier, did you see? It’s boiling in here.’

‘Is that how come you’re not dancing?’

‘I was, before. I just felt like watching for a while.’ Chris takes a swallow of his punch and makes a face at the cup.

Selena doesn’t move away. The handprint on her arm is shining red-gold, floating in the dark air. She wants to keep talking to him.

‘You’re friends with her,’ Chris says. ‘Right?’

He’s pointing at Becca. Becca is dancing like an eight-year-old but the kind of eight-year-old who barely existed even back when they were eight, the kind who’s never even seen a music video: no booty-shake, no hip-wiggle, no chest-thrust, just dancing, like no one’s ever told her there’s a right way; like she’s doing it just for her own fun.

‘Yeah,’ Selena says. Seeing Becca makes her smile. Becca looks totally happy. Holly doesn’t; Marcus Wiley is dancing behind her, trying to rub up against her arse.

‘Why’s she wearing that?’

Becca is wearing jeans and a white camisole with lace at the edges, and she has her hair in a long plait. ‘She likes it,’ Selena explains. ‘She doesn’t really like dresses.’

‘What, is she a lesbian?’

Selena considers that. ‘I don’t think so,’ she says.

Marcus Wiley is still trying to rub up against Holly. Holly stops dancing, turns around, and spells something out in small words. Marcus’s mouth opens and he stands there, blinking, till Holly gives him an off-you-go finger-wave; then he half-dances off, trying to look like he just happens to be edging away, and manically checking whether anyone saw whatever just happened. Holly holds out her hands to Becca and they start spinning around. This time they both look happy. Selena almost laughs out loud.

‘You should’ve talked to her,’ Chris says. ‘Got her to wear something normal. Or even something like what you’re wearing.’

‘Why?’ Selena asks.

‘Because look.’ He nods at Joanne, who is wiggling to the music and gabbling something in Orla’s ear at the same time. Both of them are wearing smirks and staring over at Becca and Holly. ‘They’re slagging her off.’

Selena asks, ‘How come you care?’

She’s not being snippy, she just wonders – she wouldn’t have guessed that Chris even knew Becca existed – but Chris glances around sharply. ‘I’m not into her! Jesus.’

‘OK,’ Selena says.

Chris goes back to watching the dance floor. He says something, but the DJ is fading up a song loaded with bass, and Selena can’t hear. ‘What?’ she yells.

‘I said she reminds me of my sister.’ The DJ slides the volume up to earthquake level. ‘Jesus!’ Chris yells, a sudden rush of irritation jerking his head back. ‘This fucking noise!’

Joanne’s spotted them; her eyes snap away when she sees Selena looking, but the curl to her top lip says she’s not pleased. Selena shouts, ‘Let’s go outside.’

Chris stares, trying to work out if she means what most girls would mean. Selena can’t think of a good way to explain, so she doesn’t try. ‘How?’ he yells, eventually.

‘Let’s just ask.’

He looks at her like she’s mental, but not in a bad way. ‘Since we’re not going to be snogging,’ Selena explains, ‘we don’t need somewhere private, just somewhere quiet. We can sit right outside the doors. They might be OK with that.’

Chris looks taken aback about five different ways. Selena waits, but when he doesn’t come up with anything, she says, ‘Come on,’ and heads for the doors.

Most times people would be staring at them all the way, but Fergus Mahon just poured punch down Garret Neligan’s collar so Garret Neligan tackled him and they fell over on top of Barbara O’Malley who has spent the last couple of weeks telling everyone that her dress is by Roksanda Somebody and who is screaming at the top of her lungs. Chris and Selena are invisible.

Something is on their side, smoothing the way for them. Even at the doors: if Sister Cornelius was there, they’d have no chance – even if Sister Cornelius wasn’t crazy, this year the nuns take one look at Selena and get the urge to lock her up, for guys’ sake or hers or the sake of morality in general, probably even they don’t know – but it’s Miss Long standing guard, while Sister Cornelius is off shouting at Fergus and Garret.

‘Miss Long,’ Selena yells. ‘Can we go sit on the stairs?’

‘Of course not,’ Miss Long says, distracted by Annalise Fitzpatrick and Ken O’Reilly huddled together in a corner, with one of Ken’s hands out of view.

‘We’ll just be right out there. At the bottom of the steps, where you can see us. We just want to talk.’

‘You can talk here.’

‘We can’t. It’s too loud, and it’s…’ Selena spreads out her hands at the lights and the dancers and everything. She says, ‘We want to talk properly.’

Miss Long takes her eye off Annalise and Ken for a second. She examines Selena and Chris sceptically. ‘“Properly,”’ she says.

Something makes Selena smile at her, a burst of a smile, real and radiant. She doesn’t mean to; it happens by itself, out of nowhere, because there’s a pinwheel whirl deep in her chest telling her something amazing is happening.

For half a second, Miss Long almost smiles back. She presses her lips together and it’s gone. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘At the bottom of those stairs. I will be checking on you every thirty seconds, and if you’re not there, or if you’re so much as holding hands, you will both be in enormous trouble. More trouble than you can even imagine. Is that clear?’

Selena and Chris nod, putting in every drop of sincerity they can find. ‘It’d better be,’ Miss Long says, with one eye on Sister Cornelius. ‘Now go on. Go.’

As she turns away from them, her eyes sweep the hall like for that minute it’s turned different, it’s leaped up to meet her sparkling and strawberry-sweet and chiming with maybes. Selena, slipping out of the door, understands that she and Chris weren’t the ones who got the permission; that it was a decades-lost boy at some half-forgotten dance, his bright eager face, his laugh.