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Authors: Moïra Fowley-Doyle

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BOOK: The Accident Season
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I am still standing right in front of him, the brush held in a shaky hand. Sam reaches up and takes it off me, gently, his hand meeting mine and lingering there. He licks his lips again and my face flushes with the memory of last night’s kiss. And then I remember the regret I saw in his eyes this morning, the way my mother looked at me when I stared at him a moment too long; I remember
If you say so, petite soeur,
and how everything is supposed to be back to normal now. My face burns hotter, but now it is mostly with shame.

I pull my hand away from Sam’s and take a couple of quick steps back, clearing my throat loudly.

“We should go help the others decorate,” I say in a rush.

Sam doesn’t move. His hand is still held up where mine was a moment ago. He drops it slowly. “Cara,” he says.

“I’ll just grab some of the stuff,” I say, my voice still high-pitched and slightly frantic. I busy myself picking up our normal clothes from the floor and shoving them into our bags.

Sam takes his mask back from on top of one of the bags before I can cover it with clothes. When he puts it on, his eyes darken and he becomes a train-robbing bandit, a highway pirate, a masked avenger. He also looks a little like a ghost. I can feel him watching me even though I’m trying not to look at him. When I have gathered all our things, I hurry to the door.

“Cara,” Sam calls again from behind me. “Can we just talk about this?”

My heart feels like it’s falling down the stairs. I force myself to turn around and look at him. “I know it was a mistake,” I say, and the words sound small. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing to talk about.”

13

W
hen the sun has fully set and we are all masked and costumed with wine-stained lips, Kim and Niamh, Martin, Joe, and Toby meet us at the gates of the ghost house to help set up the party. Toby touches the edge of my mask gently after he has climbed over the gates.

“I love your costume,” he says into my ear. “It’s beautiful.” I blush under my mask.

When we show everyone around, their mouths are like caverns. They use the word
perfect
so much, I’m not sure what it means anymore. The windows stare down on us, and behind the porch, the house seems like it’s laughing.

Inside, we decorate the place to look like a nightmare carnival. We hang bats on the rafters, peering down from the broken ceiling, we wind black and red ribbons and fake spiders’ webs up the dilapidated stairs, we put up signs saying
CAUTION
and
DANGER
—and the more I think about it, the more dangerous this party seems, so I stop thinking about it for a while and let Bea’s music and Alice’s instructions guide me through the night. Whenever I look at Sam, I stop thinking even more.

“What about the master bedroom?” Alice asks, when we have decorated all the other rooms upstairs.

The rest of us don’t answer right away. It’s the one place we are reluctant to share. We haven’t decorated it with bats or spiders’ webs, only flowing drapes and candles. At first we consider bolting the doors to the party, but we decide that the temptation to open Bluebeard’s chamber would be too great.

“And anyway,” I tell the others, “it’s not like it’s our house. We don’t own the place, we don’t get to decide.”

“If not us, then who?” Bea clearly also feels strongly about this particular room. “The ghosts?”

“Then let the ghosts bolt the doors,” I say.

We go out into the misty garden and Bea finds a huge rock in what used to be the flowerbeds before weeds strangled everything in sight. When she holds up the rock, I take a few steps back, but Alice’s eyes gleam. Niamh and Sam hold the enormous iron gates steady—the metal shrieking in the darkness—and Bea lifts up the rock and swings it down on the padlock hanging from the giant rusty chain. It barely leaves a dent. Sam takes the rock and tries. The padlock screams
against the gates but sways away whole after the rock hits it.

“Let me give it a try,” says Alice. She takes the rock from Sam—its weight drags her hands down when she takes it—and she swings it back and smashes it against the padlock and it springs open, broken, and falls to the ground. We cheer. Together we haul the gates open like the doorway to hell.

We split up and find more big rocks in the garden and carry them in increasingly muddy hands into the house. Toby and I open the doors to all the rooms and prop them open with the rocks so that the whole house is wide and inviting.

“This may well end up being the best party this year,” says Toby.

“Oh yeah?” To hear that from someone like Toby is high praise.

His cheeks dimple a bit when he smiles. “Yeah.”

As we work, Toby tells me about some of the best parties he’s been to. The few parties we’ve been to with Alice got pretty drunk and disorderly, but some of Toby’s stories are wild. I’m not sure I believe them all, but I’m secretly kind of impressed.

“And your parents let you go out that much?” I ask in disbelief. “How do you get away with it?”

Toby laughs. “My parents are pretty cool, actually,” he tells me. “They understand that I’m eighteen and want to go out and party. Once I get the marks they expect, they let me do pretty much anything.”

“But how
do
you get good marks if you’re out partying every weekend?”

Toby shrugs. “I don’t want to waste my teenage years,” he says. “Study isn’t everything. I mean, I’ve applied to do medicine in Trinity next year. I’ve got the points in every practice test I’ve tried so far. I study hard, but that’s not all there is to me.”

I don’t know what to say to that. Toby’s lips are full and his smile is easy. Energy shines out of him like glitter. “You’re not who I thought you’d be,” I say finally.

“You either.”

“Oh yeah? Who did you think I was?”

Toby blushes in the light of the flashlight beams. It makes him seem less like an unattainable popular guy and more like a real person. He hands me an armful of decorations and we make our careful way down the staircase to put things up in the kitchen. Our shadows are long in the hall, but the kitchen is well-lit with brighter flashlights so people will be able to see their drinks. Martin has already brought over several cases of beer. I know better than to ask where he got them from.

“I dunno,” says Toby. “More like Bea, I guess. But you aren’t like her at all.”

I prickle a little at that. “I think I’m a lot like Bea, actually. I think it’s a great way to be.”

Toby sees my expression and puts out his hands. “I
don’t mean that in a bad way,” he says quickly. “Just—I thought you’d be kind of . . . I don’t know, weird or fake or something. You’d think people like you or Bea are posers, you know? But you’re just totally genuine. Carl was right about that.”

I kind of want to tell him that Carl the poser is not exactly one to talk about authenticity, but then I realize he’s paying me a compliment. I reach up and readjust my mask a little nervously. “Carl?” I ask, because I’m not sure what else to say.

He turns away from me to hang some fake spiders over the shelves that are already covered in real spiders’ webs. “Yeah. He’s been kind of interested in Bea since Joe’s party this summer, and after we heard about this party, he kept talking to me about you guys, and I didn’t know anything about you, I didn’t know I’d like you, but now I really do.” He turns back around and looks straight at me.

“Yeah?”

Toby leans on the kitchen counter and angles himself toward me. I wonder if he ever stops smiling, then I think,
I hope he doesn’t, because he has a lovely smile
. Then I wonder why I thought that. “Yeah,” he says, and the littlest fingers of our hands almost touch on the counter. “You’re a very interesting person, Cara Morris. A bit of a mystery.”

“A mystery?” I like that. “You’re pretty interesting too,” I say. “I mean, I thought you were just this perfectionist
overachiever who thought he could get anything he wanted because he’s good-looking.”

“You think I’m good-looking?”

Now it’s my turn to blush. “That’s not what I meant.”

Martin comes into the kitchen with some more beers. “Cara, are you insulting people again?” he says playfully. I aim a swat at his head and he mimes tripping over and dropping all the beer. He straightens up and puts the crates carefully on the floor instead. He looks around the kitchen for a moment and says, “I understand why you guys are so obsessed with this place.” He cocks his head to one side. “It’s like you can almost hear something . . .”

Toby and I turn our heads to be able to hear it too. There is music coming softly from upstairs still; there are voices—Alice’s and Kim’s—coming from another of the rooms. Someone is sliding a mattress across the floor in one of the bedrooms. Bea is singing to herself in the hall. Underneath that, though, I can hear the faintest whispering. I get down on my hands and knees and put my ear to the floor. Toby and Martin exchange a look, but then they crouch down with me. Our ears are cold against the dirty tiles.

“Listen,” I whisper. We listen. Underneath us, the river is talking. I close my eyes. It’s calling my name. It sounds like footsteps coming toward me, about to take me away. The footsteps get louder. I look up and Sam is standing at
the door to the kitchen, a bunch of blankets in his hands.

“In case people get cold or need to crash,” he explains. He doesn’t ask why we’re all on the floor. Something tells me he knows already. I wonder what the river says to Sam. He looks at me lying on the floor beside Toby and his face is hard, his expression closed off. Something twists in my tummy like a knife, but I don’t move away. Toby’s smile is uncomplicated and his eyes aren’t sad, but mostly he isn’t my brother. Sam turns slowly and leaves us on the dusty kitchen floor.

***

When the first people start arriving and the music gets cranked up—Bea’s mixes filling the house like air in a balloon—I slip upstairs and take the rocks away from the bottoms of the doors to the master bedroom. I close the double doors and press my forehead to the peeling paint of the wood panels. I tighten my grip on the door handles. I whisper into the cracks. “Please be closed, please close, close.”

I imagine the sound of a key in the lock, or of a bolt sliding into place, but I know that there is neither a bolt nor a key for this bedroom (or, indeed, for any other). The noise from downstairs is getting louder. More people have come. I take a deep gulp from somebody’s bottle of whiskey I sneaked upstairs with me. It burns all the way down to my knees. It makes it easier to forget things.

Downstairs, the flashlights are lit. The darkness retreats
into the corners but it stays there crouching like a wolf about to strike. The music lilts and whistles like the deer the wolves are hunting. It dances about the place and no one can help but dance with it.

Toby catches me at the door to the kitchen. He has changed into his costume. His is a harlequin mask, half red, half white. The bells on the top of it jingle. He takes my hands and leads me in a dance around the room and out into the hall. We catch up with Kim and Niamh, who are drinking out of jam jars. Niamh’s mask makes her look like an acrobat. It is delicate and made of something like porcelain. Kim’s is a black cat. They join us and we all dance in a line—cats, acrobats, harlequins, and fairies—and pick up more creatures on the way: pigs and wolves and pandas, Victorian doll children and Venetian revelers, blank white masks like ghost faces.

The people keep coming. All those we invited and more; they come through the iron curlicued gates like a flood. They drink in the kitchen, they dance in the hall, they climb the rotting staircase, gingerly at first and then more and more fearlessly as the night progresses and the beer bottles empty. When I pass by some time later, I see somebody sliding down the banister rail.

The house likes this. All the wild dancing, the pulsing music, the slamming of so many shoes on the floor, so many drunken bodies against the walls and against each other, so
many lips meeting and hands meeting other places in shadowy corners and on the dusty mattresses of the smaller bedrooms upstairs. The house revels in it. The walls beat like hearts, the floorboards groan, the staircase moans, and upstairs, the bedrooms whisper sweet nothings.

I am drunk. One minute I am with Bea in the old living room and we are telling a bunch of Niamh’s friends about the ghosts, about the ceiling, about the faces in the windows, and the next I am upstairs with Joe and Carl with Toby and Martin and I am trying to steer the tipsy conversation away from sports. Then Martin and I are in one of the bedrooms and Bea is pushing Carl away from her because he’s swaying too close, and then Toby and I are out on the landing talking about our families, and then I am with Kim and some of her friends on the landing and we are dancing like there’s nothing else in the world but the dance, and in the hall below I think I see a girl with mousy brown hair and a Peter Pan collar peeking over the top of a shapeless sweater but when I hurry downstairs, there is no one like that around. I call out to Elsie, but no one answers except the music. Faces swim by under masks. I wander through the house looking for Elsie, but I find my friends instead. Only Sam never seems to be in the same room I’m in. That makes the forgetting easier too.

In the back of my mind I think about the changeling siblings who keep showing up in my dreams. I imagine them
arriving at their party, which is very like our party, only wilder and more dangerous. There are no humans there. If I close my eyes I can almost see them, their human masks nearly gone, walking into a room full of strange, dark creatures. They see ghosts and elves and fairies and giants, they see huge half-human things, and creatures more like cats and horses and tiny dancing dogs, they see small kids with sharp teeth and red eyes. What they don’t see, though, is that they are being followed. Just behind them, silhouetted in the dark door frame, is their stepfather.

After that things get blurry. Masks shift and shimmer. I can’t always tell who’s underneath. I sling my arm around the waist of a boy I think is Toby, but when he turns to look at me properly, I see that it’s a boy in the year below me. I walk past Bea in the sitting room, but then she is standing out in the hall. I think I catch sight of a tartan skirt swishing around the corner, but when I run into the room, I see only strangers. Sometimes the music sounds like screaming. Alice is hugging me and apologizing for keeping secrets, and then there it is, the secrets booth, sitting in the front room that was probably once a study, or a library. Kim is sitting at it like she’s Elsie at school and people are typing tipsy and slotting secrets into the box.

Bea sits down and types, and when she’s done she takes the paper and shows it to us instead of putting it in the box. It says:
Sometimes I think my mother wishes I’d never been born.
She throws the paper into the air and it flutters down onto the dusty floor.

“Never,” Alice says. She takes Bea in her arms. “Nobody could ever think that.” She kisses her cheek and the gesture is so intimate it makes me want to cry. I think about Sam’s lips (I think about Sam’s lips far more than any girl has a right to think about her ex-stepbrother’s lips) and my heart hurts like a sprain. Can you break your heart by accident, I wonder, like you can break a wrist? If so, the accident season has me bruised and broken inside and out.

I leave my best friend with my sister and their secrets and I wander through the crowded rooms. I am still hoping to find Elsie, but I’m finding it harder and harder to remember why. There is more whiskey in the kitchen. When I get to the bottle, I find Martin and Joe. Martin’s mask is half fire, half ice. Joe’s is the diamond pattern of juggling balls. Toby joins us and we drink whiskey. It does nothing to help my sprained heart.

BOOK: The Accident Season
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