The Accident Season (9 page)

Slightly frustrated, but still laughing, Alice ran the last few meters to the fence at the same time as the others. The problem, Alice thought afterward, was that they hadn’t realized a new fence had been put in. If they had, they would’ve seen that the
grass sloped steeply downward just before it. If they’d known that, they wouldn’t have fallen those last few meters, right into the new electric fence.

Alice shot backward so fast that she landed on her back in the grass. The impact knocked all the air out of her lungs and for several long, long seconds she couldn’t breathe. When she turned her head she saw that Cara’s eyes were closed. As if from very far away, she could hear Bea screaming for Mom and Christopher. Bea, who hadn’t slipped down the slope. Bea, who hadn’t run into an electric fence. Bea, who wasn’t affected by the accident season.

Alice pushed herself up on her elbows. Cara was opening her eyes. On Alice’s other side, Sam was lying on the grass like she was, his face pale, clutching his ankle with both hands.

Alice could see the panic in Mom’s face as she ran up. When she saw that Sam was hurt too her hands flew to her mouth and she looked horrified. Christopher bent down and picked Sam up like he weighed nothing at all. Mom hurried over to Alice and Cara, but she kept looking back over at Sam, and Alice knew they were both thinking the same thing.

Sometimes having a stepbrother meant having one more person to be afraid for during the accident season.

***

At lunchtime Kim closes up the secrets booth early, but before she does, I sit behind the privacy screen and type up another secret to slip into the box. I write it quickly, and
some of the letters stick and some of them don’t come out at all, so that what ends up typed on the piece of paper is this:
It’s neever theones i kiss that I’m inlove wth.
I don’t expect it to get put up at the end-of-term installation, and that’s partly why I decide to put it in the box.

Kim follows me back to the cafeteria. She tells me that this year Ms. Byrne wants to do something different with the secrets booth installation; she wants students to illustrate the secrets, make up a whole secrets room in one of the classrooms, with the secrets typed out and hung up but also with paintings and sculptures made up to represent them. I tell her I’m not sure about this. I kind of like the secrets installation every term, the way they’re all hung up on clotheslines throughout the school hallways, just above our heads, like they’re the words we’re silently saying. Like little thought bubbles that we can read but can’t reach. It’s equal parts eerie and reassuring.

Kim looks at me appraisingly. “Your mother’s the artist, isn’t she?” The Artist, as if my mother’s the only artist in the world.

“Yeah. One of them, anyway.”

“Figures.” Kim pushes open the cafeteria door and lets me through. The sound inside is like a fog. “Hey.” She stops, and holds me back. “Why don’t you take it?”

“Take what?”

“The secrets booth.” I open my mouth to say no
immediately but Kim cuts me off. “I only did it because Ms. Byrne asked me to, but I’m thinking of dropping art anyway—I’m doing eight subjects as it is.” I shake my head and try to speak, but she cuts me off again.

“You
get
it,” she says, and that stops me. “That stuff about the pages being the stuff we’re saying, like thought bubbles? I’d never have thought that up.”

I glance over at a group of fourth years in the cafeteria. Two of them are soldered together at the lips, their tongues working with grim determination. Beside me, the heels of Kim’s shoes click on the floor. “I’ll think about it,” I tell her.

At a table by the window, Sam and Bea are sitting with Niamh, Joe, and, to my great surprise, Toby. Sam’s mouth is no longer bleeding. After spending the rest of PE as well as our Irish class in the nurse’s office with a bag of ice held to his face, he looks positively cheerful. Possibly because Ms. O’Shaughnessy now has no idea he didn’t do his Irish homework last night.

Alice is just outside the window, talking on the phone. Her face is stormy. Toby makes room for me to sit up on a table with him. Bea gives me a not-very-subtle wink as I climb up beside him. She has been writing lines of a poem out on a sheet of paper. When I sit down, she folds the paper over her words and hands it to Kim.

“Exquisite corpse,” says Bea.

“I’m sorry,
what
corpse?” Kim asks with one eyebrow
raised. Sam laughs at Kim’s perplexed look. I’m guessing Kim and her friends don’t usually spend their break times writing poetry together. I chance a glance at Toby beside me, wondering what he’ll make of this. He grins at me.

“Exquisite,” says Bea.

“That doesn’t really answer her question, Bea,” I say. Kim tries to unfold the paper, but Bea snatches it back off her.

“An exquisite corpse is a type of poem,” she says.

“As well as being a type of dead body,” says Sam.

Bea smacks his leg. “A type of poem,” she continues, “that’s written by more than one person.” She takes a notepad out of her bag and tears out another page.

“The first person writes three lines, then folds the paper over the first two lines and passes it to the next person, who takes the first person’s last line as reference for their own three lines,” Bea says. “Et cetera.”

“It’s mostly used with drawings,” I try to explain, noticing Kim and Niamh giving each other loaded looks. “One person draws a head, folds the paper, someone else draws the torso and so on, so that the finished drawing usually looks like some kind of Frankenstein’s monster.” Kim and Niamh still look bemused. “Hence the term exquisite corpse?” I kind of mumble, running out of steam. Maybe there is no hope for us; maybe we will always be too weird for the popular crowd.

Bea hands the sheet of paper back to Kim, who takes
it with some reluctance. She looks toward Alice, who is still on the phone outside, gesticulating angrily. Niamh giggles nervously.

“Go on, then,” Joe goads. “Write us a poem.”

Kim scowls, but for some reason decides to humor us. She bends her hair over the paper. Beside me, Toby drapes an arm over my shoulders. I blush at having him so near, but I don’t move away. I don’t know what I did to make him notice me, but I’m kind of glad he has. I am also glad he seems less fazed by the exquisite corpse than Kim and Niamh. I am pretty sure that the girls and Joe are only sitting with us because Alice was; I don’t know what Toby is doing here at all.

“So, Cara,” he says. “Bea was telling us all about the abandoned house you guys found.”

“Yeah,” I say. “It’s amazing. It’s spooky and beautiful.”

“It’s the perfect place for our masquerade,” Bea agrees.

“So what’s your costume, then?” Toby asks me. “How will I recognize you under your mask?”

“I’ll be a fairy. And you’ll recognize me because I’ll look like me, but with a fairy costume.” Toby’s arm is casual and warm around me, and a little reassuring sitting on the fake-wood cafeteria table that’s probably thirty-five years old and wobbly on its legs. Outside, Alice looks like she’s shouting. “But not a little buzzy kid’s-toy fairy. Not a fairy like . . .” I struggle to think of a fairy.

“Tinker Bell?” Niamh suggests.

“Actually no.” I think about it for a second. “Tinker Bell’s kind of like the type of fairy I’m thinking of. She tries to kill Wendy—she’s got this mean streak, this vindictiveness. She doesn’t quite follow human rules, and that makes her unpredictable, and a little dangerous.”

“Like the mermaids in Peter Pan too,” says Bea. “They try to drown Wendy.”

“Poor Wendy—all these mythical creatures trying to do away with her,” says Sam, and we all laugh.

“I’m going as the type of fairy who’s a little bit dangerous,” I say. “Who you wouldn’t want to lower your guard in front of ’cause you’d never be too sure what she’d do.”

“I like that,” says Toby. He leans in even closer to me, conspiratorially. “Sounds . . . unpredictable.” I don’t know why, but I blush again. I know that his sudden interest in me is fleeting; that he has probably already been out with all the pretty, popular girls and I am what’s left over, now that he has noticed I exist. But he has noticed I exist. And maybe that’s enough for now.

“How about you?” I say quickly, noticing Sam and Bea stare. “What will you be?”

“You’ll just have to wait and see.”

“But then how will we recognize you?” I say, teasing.

Toby raises an eyebrow. “Maybe I’ll let you peek in under my mask.”

Niamh splutters. Joe pats her on the back. My face
flushes (again), but thankfully Bea distracts everybody from me by shaking her head sagely and saying, “No no no, you don’t want to do that.” Toby looks up at her.

“The masks are important,” Bea says. “So the ghosts won’t recognize us and try to follow us home. Because if any one of us slips up, you know that’s what they’ll do. All the ghosts hanging out on the ceiling, watching us dancing beneath them, just waiting for one of us to take off our mask.”

Toby is giving Bea that look that a lot of people give her when she spins her stories. Sam, who seems to have noticed, is frowning at Toby. He turns and tugs on Bea’s hair playfully.

“We’ll just have to make sure to tie the masks on tight,” he says.

Bea purses her lips and pats Sam’s cheek. “At least you understand me, Sammy,” she says. I don’t know why, but my heart gives a little jump. It might be my imagination, but when Sam looks over at Toby’s arm around me, I think I notice a mean glint in his eyes that is as blue as the streak in his hair. Heart beating ever so slightly faster, I lean more comfortably against Toby.

Kim hands me the sheet of paper with a line written on it about a midnight masquerade. Alice is finally coming inside again and I’m thinking about my own mask—swirls and sequins the same color as my wings—but in the back of my mind, there is still that pointed, worried face staring out from behind the curtains in the ghost house. It occurs to me that
Kim asking me to take on the secrets booth earlier suggests that she doesn’t think Elsie’s coming back to school at all.

“Hey, Kim,” I say after the bell rings and Toby takes his arm (and the rest of his body) away from me with an inexplicable peck on the cheek that I quickly file away to think about later. Kim fastens her bag closed. “Why do you want me to take on the secrets booth? I mean, instead of Elsie.”

“Elsie?”

“Yeah, Elsie.” I walk out of the cafeteria with her, holding back slightly from the others. “It’s always been her project, ever since second year. I think she’s even the one who invented it. Pioneered it. Whatever.”

Kim makes a puzzled little pout. “Well,” she says, “I don’t really know about that.”

“But”—I take hold of Kim’s elbow and pull her closer toward me—“did Ms. Byrne say something to you about Elsie not coming back?”

“No, nothing like that,” Kim says, but she still seems puzzled.

“Did Ms. Byrne say anything about Elsie to you at all?”

“You know, I don’t think she did.” Kim just sort of shrugs and leaves me out in the crowded corridor with a sinking feeling in my heart.

***

By the end of the day, this is what I’ve learned about Elsie: She doesn’t have any friends, she stays at the secrets booth
between classes, nobody really knows her. None of the teachers or students I’ve asked know where she is or where she lives or even what subjects she’s doing. She keeps quiet in class; nobody notices her. It seems like she lives her life just at the corner of the frame. She is forgotten once you’ve turned the page.

W
e want to go to Bea’s house to make our masks for the Halloween ball, but when we come out of our last class, Nick is standing by the doors to the main building. He is wearing a brown leather jacket and skinny jeans and his hair is perfectly tousled and he’s too gorgeous to possibly belong by the big glass doors of an ugly building that gives onto a school parking lot. A small group of girls walking behind us slow down and whisper to each other as they walk by. A bunch of boys in Alice’s year throw back their shoulders and stand a little straighter when they see him. Alice herself stands on her tiptoes to kiss him.

“To what do I owe the surprise?” she says in a voice that is not entirely her own. It’s lower, like it’s trying to be more grown-up, huskier, like she’s not really Alice at all. It makes me feel strange to hear it.

Sam and Bea and I don’t see Nick all that much; he doesn’t really hang out with Alice’s friends (which I suppose makes sense because he’s twenty-two and therefore both older and wiser, and he’s a musician, which makes him infinitely cooler). He and Alice mostly just spend time alone together or with his band mates. If I were Alice, I wouldn’t be too happy—hanging out with Nick’s band also means hanging out with the flocks of girls who stick around after his shows—but Alice says that is all part of the lifestyle and if Nick is going to make it as a musician, she has to get used to these kinds of things. She sometimes jokes that he hardly has time for her with all his hordes of adoring fans, and when she says it, it’s like there are two Alices looking out at me: the one who is laughing but a little bit jealous that her boyfriend’s so popular, and the one who is almost relieved.

Dating a musician sounds like a lot of work to me, but what do I know? I’ve never properly dated anyone. And when I see the way Nick looks at Alice like she’s the only person on the planet he can see in full color, I think the work must be worth it.

Nick places his hand gently on the small of Alice’s back and he nods at the three of us in greeting. He bends to whisper in her ear, but the sound carries. He says, “I have rehearsal in a half hour, so I can’t stay long.” He kisses her hair. “But I had to see you.” Alice’s face softens.

I think about her shouting on the phone this afternoon
and wonder if she and Nick were arguing earlier and making up now. I try to pull Sam and Bea away to give them some privacy, but Bea is standing like stone with her arms crossed and won’t budge. I raise my eyebrows at her in question.

“Are you coming, Alice?” Bea asks.

“Two seconds,” Alice says, and she leads Nick away across the parking lot so that they can speak in private. I can’t help but watch them. It can’t have been Nick she was arguing with on the phone, I think, because of the way they stand so close to each other, and the way Nick makes sure he’s touching her every second. I wonder if I’ll ever find someone who touches me that way. Sam clears his throat beside me. I drop my eyes and fuss with my hair under my hat to hide the blush I can feel creeping over my cheeks.

After about ten minutes, Nick leaves (but not before kissing Alice so deeply that most of the kids in the parking lot stop and stare) and Alice, looking a little dazed, comes back to us.

“Everything okay with lover boy?” I ask her playfully.

“Why wouldn’t it be?” she says lightly, and we cross the parking lot to start walking to Bea’s.

After a few steps we stop, though, because my mother’s car is parked by the school gates. For a fleeting moment we consider evading her—doubling back over the soccer field and around the school so she won’t see us leave—but the fact that she is here at all when she should still be at the studio
already doesn’t bode well for us, so we all slowly walk over to the car.

My mother is not in the driver’s seat. We all clamber into the back, my hips bumping with Bea’s and Sam’s, Alice pressed against the other window like a squashed fly. Gracie waves backward at us from the driver’s seat and pulls away. In the passenger seat, my mother is sitting cradling one arm—wrapped in a cast and a sling, clearly broken—in the other. She and Gracie explain together as Gracie drives.

We’re coming up to the last days of the accident season. Things almost always get worse now, before it ends. Last year at this point, Alice broke two fingers; they got caught in a car door when Nick was driving her home from a party. Two years before that was when Sam broke his nose playing soccer. (The bone set almost right; you can only see the slightest deviation to the line of his profile when he looks at you a certain way. I tell him it makes him look daring, like a pirate.) A few years before that, I broke my leg and Alice put her arm through a glass door. One year my mother fractured her collarbone; another I ran barefoot into the base of the sink and lost an entire toenail to the bathroom floor.

And that’s not counting the hundreds of cuts and scrapes and bruises, the knocks and frights for our lives. The could-have-beens, the almosts, the heads that didn’t quite crack on the marble tiles at that particular angle, the jagged glass that didn’t quite hit that particular vein, the water that didn’t
quite fill the lungs before being expelled again. But we never talk about those.

Today my mother got hit by a car. She is shaken up and bruised and her arm is broken in two places, but, Gracie says, she is lucky to be alive. Every time she says it (and she’s said it three times already), my mother winces. We pretend not to notice. At home, we all fuss over her and she tries to shoo us away.

“I’m all right,” she says. “I’m fine—just leave me alone with a glass of wine and a shitty film.”

We bring her pillows and more pillows, painkillers, chocolate; we bring her and Gracie wine and we sneak another bottle upstairs for us for later. We pick out shitty films where no one ever gets hurt, except maybe their feelings, but only because of a misunderstanding that turns out all right in the end. We leave her and Gracie in the front room and go out into the back garden, where the trees are swaying but we can’t feel the breeze from the grass.

The sky is getting dark already; autumn light always catches me by surprise—the evening seems later than the time tells me it is. We huddle together in a protective circle and Bea rolls a joint with some of the weed Martin’s dad grows in his shed. It takes her a long time, even though she often smokes her own rolled-tobacco cigarettes. While we wait, shoulder to shoulder to keep out the wind that is picking up and skipping around the garden, gathering the
darkish clouds around above us, threatening rain, I take out the sheet of paper from lunchtime and we finish the exquisite corpse.

I can identify everyone’s lines immediately. Bea’s are the brutal ones, the ones that’ll stay with you. Sam’s are spit-quick and playful. Kim’s are simple, like song lyrics. Niamh’s make references to other poems we’re studying in class. Alice’s must be the metaphor-laden ones that never really say what they mean. Mine are just mine; just there, hiding in among everyone else’s.

The poem is a chimera, multi-headed, multi-tongued. It’s all over the place and confusing, and all the more beautiful for that. Bea says she’ll scan it and print us all a copy to keep.

“Typing it out wouldn’t be the same,” she says. “The different handwritings are part of the poem.”

I think about the typed-up secrets and Elsie’s disappearance and I ask Alice if there’s anyone in her year Elsie actually talks to. “I mean, outside the secrets booth,” I say. Bea licks the rolling papers one last time to seal everything together and sparks the joint to life with an old Zippo lighter that used to be her dad’s.

Alice thinks about it for a while. “No,” she says. “I guess she’s never really had any friends.”

“Not since you, anyway,” Sam says to me.

In the gloom of the garden lit by papery embers and the
glow of the kitchen behind the apple tree, I think about how Elsie and I just drifted apart as children; or rather, I drifted and Elsie just stayed exactly the same. The thought makes me strangely sad. I wonder why I’d never really thought of Elsie until that day last week when I noticed her in the first photo.

Sam is saying, “But there must be someone she at least talks to more than, I don’t know, nothing?”

We all think about it for a bit. “Not in my year,” Alice says finally. “But Elsie’s in your year anyway—you guys would know more than me.”

“No,” I say slowly. On either side of me, Sam and Bea shake their heads. “I always thought Elsie was in your year.”

“She’s not in my year, Cara.”

“But she’s been here ever since we were . . .” Bea says slowly. Smoke swirls around our faces. The ground is very firm beneath my palms. I lick my lips.

“Yeah, but she was with us the whole time in elementary school too.” Sam leans forward and pulls up some grass in the middle of our little circle. “Like, she was around when we were in fifth grade.”

I rub my arms. “I guess she must be in our year and we just didn’t notice,” I say. My voice sounds a little wobbly. I wonder how it’s possible to so completely overlook someone you once considered your friend. I feel horrible.

Sam takes a long drag of the joint. When he exhales, he makes the smoke into circles. Bea giggles softly and pokes her
tongue into one. Then we all crack up. We roll around on the grass with laughter, and I pretend that I’ve forgotten about forgetting Elsie. Sam puffs out some more circles and we all join in tonguing them. He tries to teach us to breathe them out like that, but only Alice even comes close, and her smoke signals are more like fat snakes. When I say this, we all laugh some more.

“But there are no snakes in Ireland!” Bea giggles, spreading her arms wide. She loses her balance and knocks into Alice. Now we are mostly laughing at her. Slightly cowed, Bea stays propped up by Alice’s shoulder and unfolds our exquisite corpse again and reads it out loud.

It is like a ghost story written in verse form. Stanzas. Meter and rhyme, although none of it rhymes. Just meter, then. She takes one line from each of us and strings them together to make a sort of chorus that she repeats throughout the poem like a song:
So let’s raise our glasses to the accident season,/ To the river beneath us where we sink our souls,/ To the bruises and secrets, to the ghosts in the ceiling,/ One more drink for the watery road.

In the dusky light of the garden the world does look watery. Beside me, Sam slips in and out of sight, black and white, and Alice’s skin has taken on a greenish hue from the bushes beside her. Bea’s hair—curls tangled by the wind—sticks out from her head like she’s in water. My own head feels light and airy and strange.

When it gets too cold and there are no more smoke circles to blow, we go inside. My mother is still in the living room with Gracie; they are laughing about something and their voices from down the hall sound very far away. We tiptoe up the stairs anyway.

We decide to all sleep in the same room. Since Alice’s is the biggest, we haul my mattress and then Sam’s mattress across the landing and (not without some difficulty) through the door to her bedroom. We are trying to be quiet so my mother won’t suspect anything, but it’s probably a lot more likely that she just doesn’t care what we’re up to, if we aren’t splitting skin or breaking bones. Which really leaves room for a good bit of mischief.

Finally, when our mattresses and duvets and pillows are in Alice’s room, we take Alice’s mattress down from her bedframe too, so that the floor is carpeted in mattresses. We all put on our pajamas and sit bunched up in duvets and propped up by pillows and we stay up most of the night talking and drinking, gossiping and giggling, and hiding from half-remembered things.

When we finally fall asleep we are like puppies in a litter. I dream about the changelings again. In my dream they are weak; they have been in the human world for far too long. The woodsprite, the girl who looks like a forest, was once able to make trees grow and flowers bloom. She was in love with a boy she thought was human, but he was really a wolf
in disguise. Now her leafy heart is broken and she is forgetting the language of the trees.

The mermaid, the girl who looks like the sea, used to be able to make the rain come, to call up water from the ground, to stop tears. But now her eyes are dried up and her throat is like a desert. The ghost boy, the boy who flickers like a silent-film reel, used to be able to fade in and out of sight, in and out of reality. He was able to slip seamlessly into stories, music, dreams. But now it’s his heart that feels like it is fading away. The fairy girl, the girl with wings growing out of her back, used to be able to fly. But now she is stuck to the ground, dancing in her silver Converse and wishing for the sky.

I wake up thinking I’ve fallen after trying to fly. I have ended up in the crack between two mattresses. Alice and Bea are sharing the same duvet, and when I look over at Sam, he is awake beside me.

“I can’t sleep,” he whispers. “Come for a walk with me?” He puts a finger to his lips and motions toward the door.

We put our boots and coats on over our pajamas and go outside. I stop in the hall for a moment and open the door to the living room just a crack. My mother and Gracie are both fast asleep, my mother lying on the couch and Gracie curled up in an armchair. There are several empty bottles of wine on the coffee table and discarded chocolate wrappers all over the floor. I smile and quietly shut the door.

Sam and I walk down to the river. We don’t really say anything, and halfway down the road, when the light of our front porch has been hidden by trees, Sam takes my hand. We haven’t brought a flashlight and the sky is full of clouds, but we can still somehow see where we are going. The night is so warm it seems like summer, but there are clouds gathering overhead, threatening to bring us all back to autumn. Still, there’s something eerie about the weather this October, but it’s dry and mild and the leaves crinkle underfoot, and in this dreamlike state I think it’s kind of perfect.

When we reach the river, we take off our boots before the grass steeps downward to the bank, and we carry them in our hands and clamber down barefoot. Across the water the trees are whispering leafy secrets to each other, or maybe to us, but we don’t have the right language to understand. Even the wind is warm.