The Accident Season (2 page)

F
or the rest of the morning I am careful, holding tight to banister rails, watching where I put my feet, avoiding corners and sharp edges. At lunchtime Alice follows me, Bea, and Sam down past the soccer fields to the train tracks behind the school. We like to come here and smoke sometimes (the teachers rarely walk by, and if we sit close to the tracks, we are hidden from the school’s windows), but Alice, who is in the year above the three of us, usually spends her lunch hour in the cafeteria with her friends.

“I just can’t take any more questions,” Alice says when I ask why she has joined us today. “Or staring.” I look away from her bruised face. Sam and I like to invent elaborate, nonsensical backstories for our injuries at this time of year. Nobody believes us, of course: The teachers wearily tell us to stop exaggerating and some of our classmates call us crazy under
their breaths, but at least nobody asks us too many questions.

Alice prefers never to talk about the accidents, even with her friends. It bothers her a lot more than it does us when people in school whisper about us behind our backs. A lot of things bother Alice.

“Also,” she says as an afterthought, “I could use a smoke.”

Bea doesn’t mention the fact that Alice doesn’t smoke. She also doesn’t mention Alice’s bruises or the bandage peeking out from underneath her scarf. Instead, she sits down on the edge of the ditch with the train tracks at her feet and takes out her ukulele and a pack of cigarettes. She takes a drag on one and hands it to Alice. She exhales as she strums her ukulele, and her face is wreathed in smoke. With her bright-dyed halo of curly red hair, it looks like she’s on fire. Beside her, blond, pale Alice looks like Snow White to Bea’s Rose Red. Although Alice would never describe herself as a fairy-tale girl.

Bea likes to say that Alice is like a looking-glass version of us: practical rather than poetic. I’ve always thought Alice’s namesake would make more sense for Bea, but then, we don’t get to choose our names. Bea was named for a Shakespearean heroine, Alice for a children’s book. They could never swap now. Sam doesn’t know why his mother chose his name, because she died just after he was born. As for me, my mother’s always sworn that my full name is Caramel. Sometimes I don’t even think she’s joking.

Alice hands the cigarette back to Bea, who takes a couple of drags. Her lipstick leaves bright red stains on the filter.

“Some people say that sharing a cigarette is like sharing a kiss,” Bea tells us as she hands me the cigarette. I grin and close my lips around the filter.

“What people?” Alice asks. Alice questions Bea more than the rest of us do. Maybe because Alice’s life is anchored in the real world a little more than ours are, or so she likes to think. She tells herself (and she tells us, loudly and often) that she doesn’t believe in the accident season or in tarot cards, but sometimes I wonder if she’s telling the truth. She ignores my mother’s pleas to dress in protective layers, but I often think that’s just so the kids in school won’t stare.

“All kinds of people.” Bea is used to Alice’s cynicism. Sometimes I think she says even more outrageous things around her because she enjoys the challenge. “There’s something so intimate about putting your lips where someone else’s were just a moment before, inhaling the same air.”

Sam reaches across me and takes the cigarette. His fingers brush against mine.

“It’s not air.” Alice pulls up tufts of grass. She has one eyebrow raised as if in disapproval, but she is smiling. “It’s tobacco and tar.”

“Same difference,” Bea says. “You inhale it anyway.”

I take out my book and look across the train tracks. The day is still bright, but fading, like it’s tired of holding on to
the sun and the birdsong and the green smells of the fields just outside town. Like this weird warm October weather is finally tired of pretending it’s still summer and is just waiting for the rains and winds of autumn to start, to make it feel real again.

Sam leans against me and we swing our legs out over the tracks. My feet dangle over the iron and weeds: big red Docs over thick socks over small feet that could break too easily. I try to concentrate on my dog-eared copy of
Wuthering Heights,
but I keep having visions of the train arriving suddenly and crushing our fragile limbs. I try to convince myself I don’t believe that for one month of every year a family can become suddenly and inexplicably accident-prone. I try to pretend I don’t remember the accidents of the past—the bad ones, the big ones, the tragedies.

Involuntarily, I look over at Alice. Bea’s cards said this would be one of the worst. When the worst ones happen, people die.

My heart jumps into my mouth and beats there instead of in my chest. There are too many things I’m trying not to remember and sometimes there’s just no use pretending. I fold my legs underneath me and pull Sam and Alice up onto the bank of the ditch, away from the tracks. They don’t ask why, only sit with me, cross-legged in the middle of the dirty grass, and Bea joins us, strumming her ukulele softly.

I put my book back in my bag and we all take out our
lunches and the cardboard cups of tea we got at the cafeteria. The tea has gone cold, but at least that means we won’t scald ourselves.

Sam takes a sip of his and makes a face. “Tepid,” he says. “Delicious.” He looks over at Alice with a crooked smile. “So, how’s your head feeling, honey?” he says in a passable imitation of my mother’s voice.

“Ugh, don’t.” Alice tilts her head back and rolls her eyes. “She really needs to learn that sometimes
I’m fine
means
I’m fine
.”

I watch Alice tear her sandwich into tiny pieces and eat them slowly, the butt of the cigarette she just smoked smoldering at her feet. I’m not sure I believe her
I’m fine
any more than my mother did.

“She’s just worried about you,” Bea says.

Alice brushes sandwich crumbs off her skirt. “My friends’ parents worry about them applying to the right college and not getting too drunk on nights out,” she says. “My mother worries when I’m not wearing more than one pair of gloves. That’s not worry, that’s pathological.”

“No, you’re right,” Sam says to her with mock sincerity. “It’s not like you have a serious head injury and were in the hospital last night or anything.”

Alice opens her mouth to retort, but before she can, I jump in quick and change the subject. “So what kind of schools
are
your friends applying to?” I ask.

Alice is one of those people who has a fairly large group of casual friends. She usually hangs out with the popular crowd at school, without being particularly close to any of them. They have lunch together and she gets invited to all their parties, but after class she mostly spends time with her boyfriend, Nick, who is more popular than any of them.

Nick is a musician with wicked finger-picking skills and a voice like a fiery god’s. His talent comes off him like a scent that every girl can smell half a mile away. I suppose that when your boyfriend writes epic love songs to you at three in the morning and pulls you up on stage after every show, you don’t really need too many more close friends.

I, on the other hand, am one of those people who has a small group of very close friends. Those friends are Bea and Sam. It is, I have to admit, a rather tiny group.

Alice pops a little piece of sandwich into her mouth. “Kim wants to do nursing,” she says. “And Niamh’s first choice is business and French. So if I don’t get into computer science in Trinity, I’ll be in DCU with her. It’s, like, fourth on my list, though.”

Alice will end up being the only person in our family not doing something arty or literary, but I think for her that’s part of the appeal. “I’m sure you’ll get your first choice,” I tell her.

“If I don’t die of overwork first,” Alice says. “Do you know Mr. Murray has us doing two hours of study a night? As well as homework?”

“It’s only October,” says Sam. “No wonder you’re so crabby.”

Alice reaches out and shoves his shoulder.

“What you need,” Bea muses, taking an apple out of her bag, “is a big, crazy party to get everybody’s priorities straight.”

“You’re right,” Alice laughs. “Homework should never be a priority.”

“Homework!” Sam suddenly exclaims with dismay. He starts to root through his bag for his schedule. “Please tell me that essay on the First World War wasn’t due today.”

“I would,” Bea says, amused, taking a bite out of her apple, “but I’d be lying.”

“
Shit
.” Sam pulls his history book out of his bag and opens it on his lap. “Have you done this?” he asks me and Bea.

“We won’t be able to copy each other’s homework next year, you know,” I say sadly. “Not if we want to do well in the exams. And we’ll probably have to hand it in on time too.”

“Never,” Bea says solemnly.

“Well, I can tell you that most of my class definitely
doesn’t
give their homework in on time,” Alice says as Bea takes her history folder out of her bag and hands it to Sam. “Except for Toby Healy, of course.”

Toby is one of the most popular boys in school. He has sandy blond hair and an inexplicable tan and small dimples when he smiles. He’s one of the best players on the soccer
team and top of his year, and still spends almost every evening in supervised study. Not that I’ve noticed.

Bea gives me a mischievous look. “Cara thinks Toby’s cute.”

“Everybody thinks Toby’s cute,” I say.

“I don’t,” says Sam.

“Everybody except Sam thinks Toby’s cute.”

“You don’t actually, though, do you?” Sam asks me.

Alice’s phone buzzes. She checks her messages but puts her phone down without replying.

“Cute or not, it would never work out,” Bea says blithely. I am about to protest—despite only being very vaguely interested in Toby Healy, I feel I should stand up for myself—but Bea goes on: “For one thing, there’s only room for three in our Parisian loft apartment.”

Sam, Bea, and I have a carefully constructed and oft-daydreamed-about plan for when we leave school. We will move to Dublin together to study literature and philosophy, which will give us the education we need to run away to Paris, where Sam will direct French art house films, I will spend my days in dusty bookshops, and Bea will pay the rent by working as an artist’s model (nude, of course).

I give Bea a playful smack and correct a few lines of Sam’s history essay from the notes in my own notebook. Alice’s phone buzzes again.

“Doesn’t that boyfriend of yours know you’re in school
right now?” Bea asks as the phone starts to ring in earnest.

“Back in a sec,” Alice says, getting to her feet and moving a few feet away from us to answer. Nick finished high school four years ago; who knows what you forget when you’ve been away that long.

Bea starts picking out a tune on her ukulele. I recognize it as one of the particularly depressing folksongs she likes to play. Ms. O’Shaughnessy, the Irish teacher, had Bea play the song in the original Irish a few weeks ago in class. Since then she and the music teacher, Mr. Duffy, won’t stop raving about Bea’s “new spin on traditional music,” but no one in the school folk group wants a ukulele in the band. Or maybe they just don’t want a Bea.

Alice returns to us with a smile on her face. “He sent me flowers,” she says, sitting down to gather her things into her bag. “To the school cafeteria. He thought I’d be there now. Kim says there are a dozen roses in a big glass vase. Everybody’s talking about it.”

I’m about to ask Alice what the occasion is or if Nick is just being romantic and spontaneous, when the ground beneath us begins to shake. The tracks sing. We turn to face the train. It flies past us like a snaky bird, screeching and screaming. There are faces in the windows all streaming by. The station is just down the road from the school, and the train slows to let another train by, and in one of the cars I think I see a reflection of the four of us, but different,
distorted by the light and sky on the other side of the window.

They look like they are dressed up for a costume party. The redhead who looks like Bea could be dressed as a mermaid, scaly skin and all. I imagine there is a starfish stuck to her face and that her sequined dress ends in fins. Another girl with light brown hair as short as mine is sitting with her legs up on the table between her and the mermaid. She almost looks like she’s wearing a strange, fluid dress the color of oil puddles, and silver Converse, with blue-green fairy wings attached to her shoulders. They are squashed up against the seat back behind her. The girl sitting beside the mermaid—in the same position as Alice, who’s beside Bea on the grass—seems to be dressed as a forest, with leaves stuck to her face and to her mossy dress, and twigs and little flowers twined through her long blond hair. The boy of the group, sitting beside the fairy girl, looks like he’s just walked out of a silent film. His skin is gray and he could be wearing a sort of vaudeville-circus-ringmaster top hat on his black hair. I’m a little disappointed when the train pulls away, because he’s really quite beautiful.

“I wonder where they’re off to,” I say to Bea, who is also watching the train move away.

Alice, texting one-handed, stands up, slings her bag onto one shoulder, and hurries back toward the main school building.

“Where who are off to?” Bea asks distractedly, turning to
look after Alice. She starts to retune her ukulele with a series of loud twangs.

“The kids in the car right there,” I say. She and Sam look after the departing train, but of course the car with the dressed-up kids in it has moved away.

“What kids?” says Sam.

Bea shrugs. “I didn’t realize there was anyone in the window.” She strums a couple of chords experimentally. “I just saw the four of us reflected in the glass.”

I snap my head back up to look after the train, but by now it’s gone. Maybe I’m just hallucinating from lack of sleep. I think of the hospital last night; the nurses who know us by name at this point, the way we had to walk Alice around and around, ask her questions, keep her awake. My knee itches around the little cut from earlier where the blood has stuck the tights to my skin.