Authors: Lauren Henderson
“I hate to say this,” Taylor announces, “but it’s, like, nine-thirty, and I have to allow for getting us a little bit lost walking home.”
“You have to go?” Ewan says, looking so dejected that I hope Taylor is over the moon at how obviously keen he is on her. “Oh, no! We were hoping you could hang out for Nuala’s set—she’s amazing.”
“We could walk you back to your school afterwards,” Callum says hopefully. “It’s Fetters, right? We know the way.”
“We have a ten o’clock curfew,” I say regretfully.
“Really?” Ewan’s eyes widen. He has incredibly long, curling eyelashes, I notice. Like his long, curly red hair, but darker. “Can’t you, I dunno, sneak in later or something?”
“The Wakefield Hall teachers are really strict,” Luce pipes up, determined to be part of the conversation. She’s as tenacious as a Chihuahua. And wow—now I look at her, standing next to Callum, she’s noticeably taller. Surreptitiously, I tilt my head sideways and down; yup, Luce’s must-have, this-year-everyone-at-St.-Tabby’s-is-wearing suede slouchy boots end in what must be four-inch stiletto heels. Blimey. Luckily, Luce is skinny enough that they look nicely in proportion to her body; her legs are pin-thin. I’m always worried that I’ll look a bit like a pig on stilts if I wear stilettos at all, let alone ones that high.
“Yeah, our gym teacher and Scarlett’s aunt are waiting by the front door of the school with a big clipboard and a horsewhip,” Taylor drawls.
“Your
aunt
?” Callum says to me.
“She’s a teacher at my school,” I say glumly. “Geography. I have to live with her, too.”
“Man,”
Callum says respectfully. “I thought
my
life was bad.”
This is really black humor, because, more than anyone, I know a lot of pretty bad things that have happened in Callum’s life; but somehow, it makes both of us smile, and in that moment, it’s as if the whole room fades away, and it’s just Callum and me, smiling at each other.
“Right!” Taylor says a bit too loudly. “Time to go!”
It’s cold outside, and very dark. As the door of the Shore closes behind us, we all involuntarily turn to look back at the bar with a sigh of regret. Nuala Kennedy’s started to play, and the sound of her flute is so beautiful and haunting that it’s like a spell to pull us all back inside, into the warmth and the light, the clinking of glasses, the music—and, to be perfectly honest, the boys. Everything we want right now is inside the Shore, and as we start to walk away down the riverside, hugging our coats and jackets tight around us against the wind from the sea, we’re all silent and gloomy for a while; it’s pretty miserable to be leaving a place where several handsome boys want you to stay.
The pavement’s too narrow for us all to walk together. Luce and Taylor, both natural organizers, have pulled a little ahead, consulting Taylor’s iPhone, Luce’s piping voice describing the route she and Alison took coming to the Shore. I shove my hands in my pockets and glance at Alison, who’s tugging her beret down to cover her ears.
Sensing my eyes on her, she looks over at me.
“I didn’t know you knew Callum that well,” she says. “I mean, I saw you talking to him at the concert, but I thought he was more a friend of Plum’s.”
I huff out a laugh.
“No, he’s definitely not a friend of Plum’s,” I say. “I know him because of—well, because of his brother. Dan.”
Alison nods; she remembers Dan very well, from all those times we used to stare longingly at him, the best-looking boy in Plum and Nadia’s whole carefully selected group of beautiful people, with his floppy fringe and his easy smile. It’s true, as Callum says, that Dan could charm the birds from the trees. But, as their sister Catriona once said, Callum’s worth twice of Dan.
I hope Callum comes out from Dan’s shadow one day.
“He’s really cool,” Alison says wistfully. “And I do think he’s got a good voice. He should definitely sing more.”
“You should post that to his MySpace page,” I suggest. “I’m sure he’d love to read that.”
“Yeah, I could!” Alison perks up at having found a way to contact Callum, on whom she clearly has a massive crush. “That’s a great idea!” She smiles at me. “He’s got his own page as well as the band’s one. I friended him on both of them.”
I can’t help feeling smug that I knew Callum before he and Mac Attack started to take off. It means that he’ll never think of me as a fan, but as a friend, which is a huge difference. It wasn’t exactly news to me that a good-looking boy who gets up onstage and plays in a band, let alone one who sings songs about beautiful maidens he’s madly in love with, is like catnip to girls. But knowing it and seeing it in action are very different things. I remember the girls surrounding Mac Attack at Celtic Connections, how frenzied they were, and I’m really glad that Callum will never see me as one of them.
We’re just passing the little bridge again. I turn my head, wanting a last glance at the Waters of Leith before we branch away from them; I’m hypnotized by how calm and beautiful the dark water is by night, with just a faint reflection of the moon through clouds.
And then I jump in shock and stumble on the pavement. Because I think I see a figure slipping over the road across the bridge, into the shadows cast by the building on the far side. I’m not surprised that someone else is out at this time of night; there are a few other people on the street, coming out of restaurants or bars, commenting on the cold to each other in quiet voices, waiting at the bus stop. But there was something surreptitious about the way that person moved that raised all the hairs on the back of my neck.
“Did you see that?” I ask Alison, my voice sounding higher and more panicked than I mean it to.
“What?” she says blankly.
“Oh … nothing …”
I don’t want to seem like a paranoid idiot, seeing menace everywhere. I may be out late, or late-ish, but I’ve got three other girls with me; nothing bad’s going to happen to me in this much company.
As we turn up a dark street, Taylor looks back to check we’re following.
“What’s up?” she asks.
“Scarlett thought she saw something,” Alison says, which makes me sound like a total idiot.
“It was probably a seagull,” I say quickly—there are a couple of gulls hopping round some rubbish bins farther down the street, looking for food to scavenge.
But I know it wasn’t.
“You okay?” Taylor asks, dropping back and slinging an arm over my shoulder. This is so unlike her that she must feel that I’m really in need of reassurance. And it’s definitely comforting to have an arm around me; but that immediately makes me think of Jase, how well we fit together when we walk, my arm round his waist, his round my shoulders, and I feel incredibly confused. All the feelings of missing him, of anger that he’s not here, roar back into my mind, filling it up so much that I forget to answer Taylor.
Alison’s caught up with Luce, and they’ve just turned a corner down another narrow, cobbled street. As they disappear momentarily from view, straight ahead of Taylor and me I spot the figure again, pressed back against the shuttered doorway of a shop front. As if he’s trying not to be seen.
It’s only because my senses are hyperalert that I see him at all. I’m sure it’s a him now—the height and the width of the shoulders make it very unlikely that it’s a woman. He’s medium height for a man, not as tall as Jase. Stockier, with a build like Callum’s.
“Taylor!” I grab at the hand she’s clasped on my shoulder. “Look—there
is
someone! Over there!”
“We go down here,” Taylor says a split second after I start to talk, the pressure of her arm turning me down the side street.
“No! Back there!” I pull at her, trying to make her go back. “Didn’t you see someone standing in that doorway?”
It seems to take ages to turn Taylor around, and by the time we swivel back the shape in the shop front is long gone.
“Nothing there,” Taylor says unnecessarily. “Come on, we need to hurry to make it back to the school before ten.”
Our feet sound very loud on the cobbles as we walk faster to catch up with Alison and Luce.
“I can’t be seeing things,” I say, “not after half a pint of cider.…”
“You’re just wound up,” Taylor says reassuringly, her arm still pulling me along. “You’ve had a really weird day.”
“Yes, but …” I pause. “I’m sure I saw someone. A guy. I mean, I could tell you what his build was like, even.”
“Scarlett, there are shadows
everywhere
,” Taylor says firmly. “I mean, look around you! Plus, Edinburgh’s a really creepy city. There’s a reason
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
and tons of ghost stories were set here, you know.”
“I suppose so,” I say doubtfully, because it’s beginning to seem like Taylor’s trying to talk me out of what I’m pretty sure I saw with my own eyes. Which isn’t like Taylor. One of the crucial things about our friendship is that we trust each other’s instincts; I couldn’t imagine telling Taylor she hadn’t seen something she was sure she had.
“I just—” I start, and then I’m sure I hear something off to our right. There’s another street running parallel to the one we’re hurrying down, quite close, as this part of Leith is a warren of little alleys, and I could have sworn I heard light, muffled footsteps tracking ours. “Did you hear that?” I ask, my voice rising nervously again.
“Scarlett! You’re freaking me out!” Taylor snaps. “That’s leaves blowing on the pavement! We’re not suddenly in a horror film, okay? ’Cause that’s exactly what you’re sounding like!”
I snuffle a laugh at this, because I do sound exactly like the whiny heroine of one of those endless
Scream
or
Final Destination
films, running around insisting she hears a monster while all her friends tell her she’s being an idiot.
“Nearly there!” Luce calls from up ahead, and she’s right; we emerge suddenly onto a wide road, the stone wall that borders Fetters’s grounds right opposite us.
“Nice work,” Taylor calls back approvingly.
“We should step it up—it’s nearly ten,” Luce says, and we start to jog as a taxi ticks past us, turning in to the drive. We reach the main door on the dot of ten, Plum, Nadia, Susan, and Lizzie tumbling out of the taxi, giggling at having just made curfew.
“Here you go,” Plum says, throwing some notes through the window at the cab driver. “And an extra twenty for getting us here on time.”
I’m ridiculously relieved to be out of that shadowy maze of streets and back in the brightly lit hallway of Fetters, even with Aunt Gwen glowering at me as she crosses my name off her list, even with Plum and Nadia showing off by talking loudly, once the teachers are out of earshot, about the
divine
cocktails they just sank at the bar on the fourth floor of Harvey Nichols’s department store—“
and
they have a wraparound terrace you can smoke on, it’s
fabulous
, and the views are really quite nice, considering we’re in bloody
Scotland
.…”
Back in our room, Taylor and I shove the chest of drawers in front of the door.
“Just to be safe,” Taylor says, with such elaborate casualness that I know she’s actually taking this quite seriously.
Having the door blocked should make me feel absolutely secure. Still, when we turn out the light and curl up in the narrow twin beds, I lie in the dark room, listening to Taylor’s slow, steady breathing, unable to turn my brain off. Maybe it’s because I had an extra nap when I passed out this afternoon that I can’t fall asleep as easily as Taylor. But one unpleasant thought after another is cascading through my mind.
Am I making too much of my impression that Taylor seemed to be dragging me along just now, stopping me from seeing the guy who might have been there, might have been following us? Is it just a weird coincidence that he looked a bit like Callum—who must, surely, have been back at the Shore, listening to Nuala Kennedy’s set? And why would someone want to follow me at all? Is there
anyone
I can trust a hundred percent?
Tonight, pulling me along the cobbled street, Taylor mocked me out of my panic, telling me I sounded like some nervy victim from a horror film.
But,
it occurs to me now,
the girl in horror films who no one takes seriously is usually right. There
is
a monster out there that wants to kill her.
I take deep breaths to calm myself down.
The heroine always survives,
I tell myself.
Even if she has to run around for hours making an idiot of herself and screaming her head off, she fights back in the end. She always survives.
But then I have an even worse thought.
What if I’m not the heroine?
thirteen
I MIGHT AS WELL JUST FALL
“Oh, come on, Scarlett! What else are we going to do tonight? Sit around here and play Ping-Pong in the rec room?”
“I do like table tennis,” I say a little feebly.
“We already played it for
two hours
before dinner!” Taylor points out. She’s striding up and down our room between the beds, her shaggy fringe flopping over her face, her voice raised vehemently. “I’m
so
bored!”
After yesterday, which was packed with excursions, the coach drivers are having a day off; today, our schedule consisted of a series of historical and literary lectures focusing on Scotland (
Macbeth
and
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
being A-level set texts), punctuated by a revolting lunch and an even nastier tea with dry biscuits. The table tennis was a much-needed release from all that sitting down being talked at, but Taylor’s still popping with energy.
“I want to go
out
!” she exclaims, so loudly now that I hold my finger up to my mouth, shushing her; what she’s proposing is definitely not allowed under the rules of our curfew.
Callum and Ewan have been texting us a lot today, disappointed that we had to head off early last night from the Shore. Tonight is Saturday, and apparently there’s what they call a quarry party in the country outside Edinburgh, a huge group of teenagers who get together every weekend to play music, hang out, dance … it sounds amazing, and I’d really, really like to go.
Taylor is even keener than me; she’s got it all worked out—how we’ll sneak out of Fetters, where Callum and Ewan can meet us. I’m embarrassed that I’m holding back, being the boring one in the friendship.
I’m just remembering last night, and how spooky that figure was, slipping along the dark streets, following me. It’s a totally cowardly reaction, and nothing’s happened today at all to scare me or make me feel unsafe. But maybe that’s why a warm, if not very cozy, bedroom with a door we can shove a chest of drawers in front of seems, right now, much more appealing than going out into the night, where that figure might be waiting for me again.…
Oh my God! I’m being utterly and completely pathetic!
“Are you freaking about someone being out to get you?” Taylor asks in a quieter tone, sitting down next to me on the bed. “ ’Cause I’m sure you’ll be totally safe tonight, okay? I mean, you’ll be with Callum and Ewan. And me, of course,” she adds, doing a comedy flex of her arm muscles that has me giggling. “I’m tougher than two boys put together.”
“I know you are,” I agree.
Taylor didn’t believe me about seeing the guy following us last night. So there’s no point telling her that his shape looked very much like Callum’s, or that, in my more paranoid moments, I can imagine why Callum might conceivably have a grudge against me. On the plus side, I did save his life. On the minus side, he might have brooded over the awful sequence of events that happened when I visited Castle Airlie, his home, and ended up blaming me for them. Callum’s certainly capable of brooding more deeply than anyone else I know.
And no, it wouldn’t be fair of him to come to the conclusion that it was all my fault. But one thing I’ve learned, as I get older, is that people are capable of making you a scapegoat for all sorts of things. Look at Plum with Alison and Luce, for instance.
I set my jaw. What kind of a person would I be if I turned down what sounded like a really cool invitation just because I was scared by the possibility that someone who looked very much like Callum was following us last night? Taylor was probably right all along: there wasn’t anyone trailing us through Leith, and I let myself get idiotically worked into a freak-out for nothing at all.
Besides, I still haven’t heard from Jase. And maybe I never will. If I stay here tonight, I’ll start thinking about that even more than I am now, and that’ll plunge me into a pit of depression as dark and deep as a well. Better to go out and find whatever distraction I can; and if there’s some risk involved—well, I’m used to that by now.
And at least when I’m freaking out about being followed, I don’t have time to remember how sad I am that Jase hasn’t rung me. The expression
out of the frying pan into the fire
is beginning to sum up my entire life.
But I should be careful not to find myself alone with Callum,
I resolve.
Just in case it was him last night.
“Right,” I say, jumping up from the bed, whose horsehair mattress is so old that it promptly sags around Taylor, dropping her into a deep V. “We should put on lots of clothes, because it’ll be cold out there, but not so many that we’ll be so padded up we can’t climb out the window.”
“Or look like we weigh two tons,” Taylor adds, levering herself out of the saggy mattress. “My shoulders already make me look big. I don’t like wearing stuff that bulks me out too much.”
My eyebrows shoot up to my hairline, but I turn away quickly so that Taylor can’t see my expression. I whine about my boobs and hips all the time, and how I have to pick clothes that don’t make them look too big; but this is the first time I’ve heard Taylor mention similar concerns. More than ever, I’m getting convinced that she and Ewan have something going. No wonder she’s so determined to drag me out with her tonight.
Curfew comes and goes; Ms. Burton-Race, who’s on duty this evening, pops her head into our room, finds us lying on our beds reading, and wishes us goodnight. Lights-out isn’t till eleven, but we both answer her sleepily, and she closes the door again, satisfied that we’re accounted for and ready to settle down for the night.
We give it ten minutes, to be sure, and then spring off our beds and into action. We’ve both got tights on under our jeans, and now we pull on the sweaters and jackets we picked out before, zipping and buttoning everything up snugly, hoods over our heads.
Then Taylor looks at me, flashes a huge grin, and bends down to heave up the sash of the old frame window.
I go through first, one leg after the other till I’m sitting on the windowsill, shifting along with my bum to the far edge. I reach out in the dark, letting my eyes accustom themselves to the darkness, my fingers closing around the metal top handrail of the fire escape, stretching out the closer leg to find the fire escape with my booted foot. Easy—for Taylor and me, anyway. We tested the heavy window first, and realized that it would be too dangerous to try to close it behind us, let alone open it again; the force we’d need might send us slipping off the windowsill and down three stories to the pavement below. So Taylor’s opened it the minimum necessary for us to squeeze out, and I just stuffed a rolled-up towel along the bottom of the bedroom door so the cold night air won’t blow under and cause a draft in the corridor that might seem suspicious to a teacher walking past.
“Okay?” Taylor whispers.
“No prob,” I hiss back. Gripping the rail with both hands, digging both feet into the fire escape, I boost my bottom off the safety of the windowsill, swinging myself through the air for one dizzying moment until I’m standing flat against the outside of the fire escape. I lift my right leg in a wide semicircle—it’s the leg I always lead with, plus it’s my more flexible hip—straddling the top rail for a second before touching my foot to the iron floor of the fire escape.
Safety. And now the other leg can follow. I prop my hips against the rail and lean over it, stretching out my hands so that Taylor, now on the windowsill herself, can grab them and shorten the distance she has to cross. We’ve planned the whole maneuver beforehand, in detail, so we didn’t have to exchange a word, and I’m proud of us; it goes as smoothly as if we’ve executed it hundreds of times before. Once Taylor’s scissored her own legs over the rail, we exchange a swift high five, our palms barely meeting to avoid making noise, before making our way down the open stairs, wincing at every tiny creak and whine of tired old metal that could potentially give us away.
There’s a lighted window up ahead, giving out onto the fire escape.
If ours did that, it would have been even easier to sneak out,
I think ruefully as I realize it’s the room that Plum and Susan are sharing. I squint sideways, and see them, plus Nadia, Lizzie, and Sophia, a positive gaggle of long, shiny hair and long, skinny legs. Plum’s got a bottle of white wine and she’s filling plastic glasses from it, handing them round, giggling naughtily. They’re all tipsy already, from what I can see—the result of another evening out at the Harvey Nichols bar drinking chocolate-strawberry martinis, no doubt.
And then Nadia comes toward the window, and I lurch back in panic, thinking she’s spotted me. I gesture frantically at Taylor, who freezes on the steps above me as if we’re playing a game of Musical Statues, while I press myself against the brickwork of the building, back flat to the wall, trying not to breathe. Nadia’s shadow is cast onto the section of the fire escape directly outside the window lit up by the light from the bedroom; she leans forward and starts to lift the window sash.
Oh no … she’s spotted me, and now we’re totally in their power.… If they think fast, they could race up to our room and shut the window, so we’d be trapped out here to be caught by a teacher—by Aunt Gwen—oh God, we’re in such trouble.…
I’m rigid, as stiff as a board. Nadia fumbles with the window.
“God, it’s bloody
stuck
! And I’m dying for a fag!” she complains. “Sophia, you have a go. You’re the biggest. And your nails aren’t as nice as mine.”
Her shadow retreats, and I signal Taylor with a big loop of my arm to make a move; ducking even more, we scuttle under the windowsill and down the next flight of stairs, just in time. As we make it round the corner, Sophia has dragged the window up, and Nadia is propping herself on the sill. I hear the click of her lighter as she fires up a cigarette.
Taylor and I exchange a speaking glance, hugely relieved. This fire escape is our only safe exit route, and with Nadia sitting in the window frame, smoking, there was no way we’d have been able to get past without being observed. Five minutes later and we wouldn’t have been able to leave Fetters, wouldn’t have been able to drop to the ground from the last rung of the fire escape and tear across the lawn, to vault over the stone wall and land on the pavement on the other side, breathless, excited, looking around for Ewan’s car.
Headlights flash from a parked car across the street, and we run over, our hearts pounding.
“That was so lucky!” Taylor gasps as we drag open the back doors of the car—after checking that Ewan and Callum are in the front, of course; we’re not complete idiots—and fall in. The boys swivel round to greet us, and in their eagerness, they bump heads; it’s like a comedy double act. We both giggle, and Callum pantomimes rubbing his shaved skull.
“It’s all right for him,” he complains. “His hair’s like a thatch of pubes—you could hit him with a sledgehammer and he wouldn’t feel a thing.”
“Dude,”
Ewan mutters, shocked. “Mixed company, as my mum would say.”
“Oh—sorry!”
Callum sounds mortified at having blurted out what’s probably a private boys’ joke in front of a couple of girls. Taylor leans forward and says:
“My brother knows this guy he’s at college with who has a double skull. It’s like a throwback to the Neanderthals or something. This guy can head-butt a brick wall and not feel anything. Well, apart from getting a bruise, I suppose,” she adds, scrupulously fair.
“You’re joking!” Callum says as Ewan starts up the car and pulls away.
“No, it’s true!” She’s laughing. “I couldn’t make that up! He only found out when he bumped heads with this other guy at basketball practice, and the second guy went flying across the court. Neanderthal Guy didn’t feel a thing. So the coach thought that was weird and sent him for tests.”
“That’s like having a superpower,” Ewan marvels as Callum says to her:
“But is his head bigger than normal?”
“Hah!” Taylor’s really laughing now. “That’s exactly what my brother said! No, it isn’t! So he has—”
“A smaller brain,” Callum finishes.
“But they can’t mess with him about it,” she says, “ ’cause he threatens to head-butt them.”
“Does he have, like, a really low forehead, and eyebrows that stick out, and tiny little eyes?” Callum asks.
We’re all laughing now, partly because it’s funny, and partly out of relief that Taylor has rescued us from the embarrassment of Callum’s having said “pubes” in front of us. I must say, she’s very lucky to have grown up with an older brother; she knows just how to talk to boys. The ice is broken. We chatter away for the whole of the drive. Ewan heads out of Edinburgh; used to the size of London, I’m surprised at how soon the city falls away and we’re surrounded by fields rising away on either side of the road. It would probably be very beautiful by daylight, but I can’t see much at all now, just lines of hedgerows marching away over the fields. Ewan turns off the main highway and onto a couple of side roads with the ease of someone who’s done this drive very often; soon the car wheels are crunching over an uneven, gravelly surface as tarmac gives way to something a lot more rural, and, as he turns a corner, we see that the narrow lane is suddenly lined with tightly parked cars.
Ewan whistles.
“Busy tonight, eh?” he says, slowing down to a crawl and driving past them, down a long stretch, till we come to the gated driveway to a farm. The gates are hung with placards advertising
PICK YOUR OWN FRUIT
and
FARM PRODUCE SHOP
, but the gates are padlocked shut, the farm buildings dark and silent. Ewan reverses the car in the short driveway and turns back the way we’ve come.
“Always turn the car
before
the party,” he says cheerfully. “My dad told me that. Best advice he ever gave me.”
He manages to maneuver the car up a bank, its right two wheels half a foot higher than the left, then cranks up the hand brake with an audible ratcheting sound and leaves the car in gear.
“Should be okay,” he says with the ease of a boy used to country driving. “Climb out on the high side so it doesn’t tip.”