The Accident Season (17 page)

“Don’t look so sad,” Toby says with his ever-present smile. “You’ve just thrown the best party I’ve ever been to, and it’s not even midnight. People’ll be talking about this one for years.”

I drink straight out of the bottle. “I’m not sad,” I tell him. “I’m melancholy.” Then I think of a cigarette like a shared kiss, secrets slotted into a wooden box, a heart full of the wrong kind of love. What even is love, anyway? I say, “Tonight I drink whiskey to forget.”

“To forget what?” says Martin.

I giggle. “To forget my melancholy!” I shout it out and spread my arms wide, and some whiskey sloshes over the side of the bottle and onto my arm and Toby licks it off. His tongue tickles and his lips make it sound like a kiss. I block out the thoughts of pizza sauce and river eyes. Toby’s eyes are an uncomplicated brown. I can see them clearly through the holes in his mask. Toby is always smiling. I smile with him.

For a while things blur again. I see Sam every so often, and once or twice we are in the same room, but mostly we are blown around like the rest of the masked dancers. The whiskey warms my tummy and the cockles of my heart. I think:
This is the best party
. Upstairs, some people are playing spin the bottle. There are clothes discarded on the floor. Skin and more skin. I turn away and dance back downstairs.

At the bottom of the stairs Toby stops me and we crowd into the hall with the rest of the dancers and he holds me close so I don’t get stepped on. My wings heave in time to the music; the hot air in the hallway is blasted with cold wind every time the door opens and it lifts them like I’m flying.

Joe and Martin and Niamh and Sam are moshing in a corner. They look up and wave, but Toby and I are spinning past like music-box dancers. Under the arch of the staircase he kisses me. It tastes of whiskey, but we’ve drunk so much
of it at this point, it’s unsurprising. I want to spin and dance away, but I kiss him again instead. We stay locked at the lips for what feels like a long time. It’s not unpleasant (I suspect Toby has had plenty of practice), but I know deep down that it’s not the kiss I want.

I pull away finally and ask Toby to get me a drink, pretend I’m going to the loo, but instead I duck into the dusty study, where Kim is still sitting at the secrets booth and people are dancing and typing and talking, and on the other side of the room Sam is punching his fist through the wall. Joe and Martin take his arms and drag him outside and I hide until they’re gone.

I feel a hand on my shoulder and I think
Sam?
but when I turn around, it’s Bea. She asks if I’m okay and I make myself grin wide, but she touches my cheek under my mask and her finger comes away glistening with tears. I think my grin must look strange, all tear-streaked and glittery.

“Too much whiskey,” I say to her by way of explanation. Alice, who is just behind her, gives a little laugh.

“I know what you mean,” she says. We are almost shouting to be heard over the music. It’s pounding at my temples. It sounds like my heart. It sounds like a hundred fists punching through old plaster walls. Alice and Bea are waltzing in a slow circle around me. I look over at Kim. I want to type up a secret, but I don’t think I have the words. I remember Alice apologizing for keeping secrets earlier and I want to tell
her that I keep secrets too, but when I turn around, I see the wolf at the door.

“Alice,” he says.

Alice turns, startled. She drops her hands from Bea’s waist. “Nick?”

Nick has come dressed for the masquerade. His face is a wolf face, his leather jacket covered in tufts of hair. His teeth are sharp and I think I can see a tail swishing behind his jeans. “Alice,” he says again. His voice is hoarse like he’s been singing all night. Singing for Alice. Maybe he is the siren after all.

Bea moves back toward Alice and says in an urgent undertone, “I thought you said you were going to—” but Alice cuts her off.

“What are you doing here, Nick?” she says in that slightly lower, older voice. Her mask makes her gaze look dark. She lowers her voice even more. “I thought we talked last night,” she says.

“I just want to be with you, love.” Nick’s teeth are very sharp and white in the dim room. He holds his hand out to Alice as if to dance.

“Don’t worry,” she whispers to Bea, her hand at the small of her scaly back. Nick’s eyes narrow behind his wolf mask. His hand is out, palm up. Alice steps forward and takes it.

Bea makes a move toward Alice. “Don’t,” she says, but she says it too low.

“Don’t,” I say, but Alice is already gone.

Bea’s face is unreadable. She looks pale blue in the candlelight. Or green, maybe, like the ocean. She sits down at the little desk and Kim, who has witnessed the whole scene, tries to comfort her in a way I just can’t seem to do. She tells Bea that Alice is just going to talk to him, that if she hasn’t ended it yet, she will tonight, that this is why she wants them to have some privacy. Bea ignores her. I think about Nick’s siren voice and I wonder who is right. I think about Alice talking about his darkness. The room spins.

Bea types fast. She rips the paper out of the typewriter. Kim starts to tell her to be careful, but then she bites her lip. Bea holds out the secret so we can read it. It’s all in block capitals. It says:
LOVE IS NEVER WORTH IT.
She lets the paper fall to the ground. Then she takes the box and throws its contents into the air so that all the secrets free themselves and fly around the room like big paper bats. Words come at us in the darkness.

Sometimes I think I’m losing my mind, I am a virgin, I am not a virgin, I am a liar, I don’t like girls (I am a boy), I don’t know if I am a boy or a girl, There is no God, There are ghosts all around us, LOVE IS NEVER WORTH IT, The wolves are real, I am in love with the wrong person, I am afraid that I am incapable of love, I haven’t eaten a full meal in two years, I cut myself (no one knows), My ex-stepfather is a monster.

I trip over my feet through the flying secrets, out of the room and toward the front door. It is black as the night outside. Outside (or is it the reflection of the hall in the glass of the porch?) I think I can see the changeling siblings, watery as the rain.

They wander through the crowds, trying to find their evil stepfather before he has the chance to recognize them. They know that this may be their only chance to find him; they will only recognize him without his human mask, and this is the one night of the year in which their kind can be themselves. But their powers have weakened with every day they spend away from their home. They worry that they will not be strong enough to defeat him.

Slowly, surrounded by other changelings like them, they are becoming more themselves. The woodsprite’s hair knots together like vines, the mermaid’s gills pulse at the sides of her neck, the ghost boy begins to fade to black and white, and the fairy girl starts to be able to move her wings. They search through the rooms of the huge house—there are hundreds of them, some big, some small, some so well hidden, no human could ever see them. It is in one of those rooms that they find the wolf.

The woodsprite screams. “What’s the matter?” the wolf boy says. “Don’t you love me anymore?”

I feel a stinging slap on my skin, and my eyes open and my head snaps up and the metal man is standing right in
front of me. He must have hit my cheek accidentally. When I look at his eyes, they are as hollow as an empty wolf mask. I remember that iron is supposed to be poisonous to fairies.

“You’re the evil stepfather,” I say to the metal man, but it comes out as a whisper.

He smacks my cheek again. He says, “It was just your imagination, do you hear me? Don’t ever let me catch you saying anything like that again. You don’t want to be a little liar like your sister, now, do you? Don’t make me tell you again.”

I nod and nod my little head. “Sure,” I say, uncertain but with a smile. It’s true I do have a big imagination. “Of course, Christopher.”

Someone jostles my shoulder, clamoring down the stairs, and I wake up with a start. There is no one in front of me. There is no metal man. My eyes are blurry and my head is so confused.
Too much whiskey
, I think. I think,
I wonder where Elsie is.
I wonder if she’s really here, in all this mess. I go upstairs, but I’m not sure if it is to look for her or to lie down. I feel like I’m sleepwalking. I don’t know what’s real anymore.

In one of the bedrooms a bunch of fourth years are clustered around a Ouija board. The candles flicker. I think I hear somebody scream downstairs. There are throwing-up sounds coming from the bathroom. In another bedroom a game of truth or dare is being played loudly. In a corner, on
a mattress dragged off a bedframe, two people are kissing, wrapped around each other like seaweed. I think I see Carl’s plastic Guy Fawkes mask dangling from a green-and-blue scaled hand, but then I tell myself that I must be mistaken. At the far end of the landing Toby and some of his friends are smoking and laughing. Toby gestures at me to join them, but I slip into the last of the small bedrooms. At this point I don’t know who I’m looking for. I think of Elsie. I think of Sam. I think of Alice—and suddenly she’s there, between Nick and the far wall.

Nick’s head is buried in Alice’s hair and his hands are all over her. The straps of her dress are torn and her chest and shoulders look too bare, too cold for this dark room. She is trapped between Nick’s body and the peeling gray wallpaper, and I can tell that her arms are pinned to her sides because she is all elbows. Her mask is askew. Nick’s wolf face is on the ground in front of me. Its eyes are empty sockets. It has no mouth but it is still whispering:
If you’re going to do this just give me one last chance you know you want to come on if you really want to end it you owe it to me just give me one last—

In the big black window in front of me I can see blurred reflections of the world outside. I half close my eyes and I can almost see the changelings at their own party.

They look at each other and they can see that they are weak. Back home, their powers were bright and constant like good summer sun, but here in the human world everything
they feel and do is watered down. The three remaining siblings don’t know if they have the strength to help their leafy sister. But they know they must try. They come up beside her; they circle her with their arms; they make themselves one creature, all together.

Alice says, “It’s over, Nick, I said it’s over,” like she’s said it fifty times before. Alice says, “Come on, Nick, stop it, please,” and I run right up to him and scream straight in his ear.

The woodsprite’s siblings have given her strength. She gathers up all her powers, casts off the last of her human disguise, and extends her sharpest branch and spears it straight through her wolf lover’s heart. He falls bleeding to the floor.

Nick shouts at my scream and covers his ears with his hands. I grab his wrists and scream again, and he turns and runs off into the night. Alice turns to run after him, down the stairs and into the crowd. I try to catch her, to hold on to her, to hug her, but she jumps up and runs away. She runs in the same direction as Nick and I wonder if I made a mistake, if it’s all my imagination (it’s true I do have a big imagination). I wonder if maybe Bea is right. I think about Bea’s bare, blue-painted legs entangled with another pair of legs on a mattress and a Guy Fawkes mask hanging from her hand. Then I remember that there is only one way out of the house, so of course Alice followed Nick; there’s no other way to leave. You have to go down the stairs to get to the ground floor. And the girl on the mattress looks too much like the sea. She must be
the changeling mermaid girl from my dream.
Love is never worth it
. She could never be Bea. My mind is a thick strange soup.

Everyone has run away and I have nowhere to go. I try the doors to the master bedroom (I remember vaguely that I haven’t been in there since I closed them), but they are stuck. I push at them with my shoulder; they don’t budge. I shrug and make my way back down to the ground floor, to the floor that I end up sitting on when I miss a step and fall
bump-bump-bump
down the rest of the stairs on my backside. I laugh. I laugh at my fall. I laugh at the accident season, at the accident of Alice hitting her head on Nick’s mantelpiece, at the accident of the bruises on her legs, at the accident of the cuts on her arms. I laugh at the accident of the broken glass a few years ago that somehow managed to slice her wrist in a perfectly straight line. I laugh at the accident of Sam punching the wall in the secrets room. I laugh at the accident of the day I almost drowned. I laugh at the accident of my uncle’s death.
Seth knew too,
I think.
That’s why he pushed him in
. Then I wonder where that thought came from. I stop laughing.

I stumble into the garden, where the river runs away like I run away. The music is still loud. There are flashlights in the grass, and even though it’s freezing, people are lying in the weeds. I walk unsteadily around to the back of the house, where the garden is even more wild and overgrown, and I go to the very edge of the property where the river resurfaces
from underground. I crash through brambles and bushes and over to the water and he welcomes me like my only friend.

I sit on the bank and dip my fingers in the water and I remember swimming in a lake on a summer vacation, Sam and my mother back on the man-made beach, Christopher teaching us how to swim, Alice uncomfortable in her bathing suit, keeping her chin below the water. I remember asking an innocent question about something I’d seen and Christopher slapping my cheek (or maybe that is a different memory). Water filling my lungs and the hands holding me shaking. A hundred apologies afterward, and ice cream. Three big scoops in a double cone.

Then, across the water, I see Elsie.

She is holding a butterfly net and she’s staring right at me. I know I need to go to her. The river is shallow here, not much more than a stream, and I splash over to the other side. When I walk out, I imagine that I look like some lost alien thing: wet and winged, masked and melancholy.

Elsie looks at me like she’s not sure what to make of me. I look down at myself. My tights are muddy and my shoes squelch as I shift my weight. I am still covered in bruises. I can feel that my makeup has run from the sweat. I wouldn’t know what to make of myself. I look at Elsie—her worried face, her sensible brown boots, her tartan skirt, her misshapen sweater, her hands holding a butterfly net.