Chapter 17
FINN
BACK IN THE JEEP, MY mind shuffles through everything Violet has told me.
I don’t like her former boss, at fucking all, that much is clear. I have a lot of questions about what happened there, but this is clearly a sensitive subject, so I don’t want to push it.
I think about her feeling lost after returning home when she finished school. Without Billie, I’m not sure I ever would have found my path forward.
I get it, I tell her, looking over to her across the Jeep. The feeling of being frozen. Like you’re not even sure where to start.
You do? She asks and her eyes are so hopeful I feel almost a little sick. I get the sense life has tested Violet a time or two, especially recently.
During a game in my second year of uni, I got knocked around hard. Bashed up my knee, but even worse, I got a severe concussion, hitting my head. I had memory loss, brain fog, even exhaustion from it. I wasn’t myself for about six months.
I think about Billie, who basically made it their full-time job to dig me out of the hole I was in.
I had worked towards coming to uni to play football.
Didn’t have any real plans after that. What was I supposed to do?
Any choice I made, forward or back, was still going to take me farther from that goal.
I was stuck like that for quite some time.
I try to laugh this off, but I can see Violet out of the corner of my eye, biting on the inside of her cheek like she’s worrying.
Not keen to ever see that look on her face again, I go on.
I was lucky though. When I came out of the fog, I had Billie telling me to get my head out of my arse.
And while I was recovering, I had a physiotherapist who was fantastic.
Billie came with me once a few weeks in, and told me that’s what I should be doing.
Billie sounds like a good friend, Violet says, smiling.
The best, I tell her with a nod. I’d accepted that I couldn’t play football anymore, not seriously anyway, and this felt like the next best thing—being around the sport, helping others. Been a good fit from the start.
She mulls this over, but doesn’t get a chance to reply, as the gravel road we’ve been driving along finally opens up to a parking lot, the ocean visible to our left. Violet lets out a little gasp that makes me smirk.
Come on Violet, you’ve seen the ocean before.
She shakes her head, laughing. It doesn’t matter, it’s always a delight.
Her comment sparks something in me, and for a second I find myself wishing that we didn’t live so far apart.
We pull into the car park and I park the Jeep in a made-up spot, since there are no lines or pylons, only a wide expanse of empty gravel.
We’re overlooking the rolling cliffside, the beach now fully visible at the bottom of the hill.
Once you get past some initial rocks, it looks like there’s bright, white sand along the shoreline.
I get out of the car and take in the view.
Well, this is far better than pretending to go back in time, I say to Violet, grinning, as I reach in to grab the towels we brought out of the back seat.
So gentlemanly of you, she says, gesturing to my armload of towels. I bow and she snorts in reply. See, I think to myself, but directed at the universe in general and maybe also at Gemma. I can be a good boyfriend.
Not a good fit. Fuck, it still stings, but I’m dead set on proving her wrong.
We make our way down to the shoreline. The wind whips at us as we get closer to the water. It definitely wasn’t this windy at the fortress.
On the left of the beach, a group of kids are playing in what looks like an adjoining river of some kind, the water running down a hill and meeting with the ocean.
There’s a smattering of families littered across the sandy beach, which is even more gorgeous from down here.
I breathe in deeply, inhaling the smell of the sea.
Violet and I walk until we find an empty patch of white sand, agreeing this is the spot to claim our territory.
We lay out our towels down, Violet peeling off her dress in one fluid movement.
All morning, the straps of her yellow swimming costume were visible underneath the straps of her dress, and seeing it fully, I notice that it’s covered in polka dots. Lovely, lovely Violet.
I’m counting the patchwork of tiny tattoos across her arms when she catches me, a little deer in headlights. I give her my most wolfish grin.
Tell me about your tattoos, I say, my eyes darting to her arms and back to her eyes.
I’ve been admiring them since we met, not wanting to ogle her at every opportunity, but wanting to put them all in my memory: a hummingbird, a clothespin, an oyster with a pearl, a fancy drinking glass, a girl whose head is literally a cloud.
Do you have any?
Aye, just the one. I pull up the black pair of swimming trunks on my left thigh, to reveal the small sword hidden there. Had to get it somewhere discreet, Mum still doesn’t know about that. Billie and I got those during our first year of uni.
She blinks up at me, tearing her eyes away from my leg. I smirk, rolling the shorts back down.
Why a sword? Is it just me or does she sound a little breathless? I try not to let it go straight to my head.
I think of all the films we used to watch as kids, and the make-believe games we would play pretending to save Scotland from some foe or another.
I guess it was just about acknowledging our kinship, I shrug, then press her again. Your turn, Violet.
Still blinking, she shakes her head before she gestures down to a butterfly near her elbow. This was the first one, I got that when I was fifteen.
Fifteen? I ask, a little taken aback. Violet only laughs.
My parents are… she pauses, mulling over how to describe them. Very encouraging of me expressing myself creatively. My mom came with me, signed the form and was probably more excited than I was that I was showing some bodily autonomy.
And why a butterfly? I chuckle, wondering if it was simply because she was so young. She gets almost shy at this, smiling down at her arm.
During recess, I used to run around the field behind our school trying to find them.
Butterflies I mean, real ones. And I’d be so lost in my own little world that I wouldn’t hear the bell, wouldn’t go inside, and some teacher or even the principal would have to come and drag me back to class.
She looks up at me again, her big eyes heavy with something else I can’t quite place.
I didn’t really have a lot of friends as a kid, but I was good at distracting myself. Too good.
She laughs, but it’s not really a happy laugh, and then gestures to a four-leaf clover on her wrist. This one was next, when I needed some luck.
I can’t help myself, I reach forward and take her wrist in my hand, running my thumb once across the black outline of a four-leaf clover. All of her tattoos are black and white, no colour anywhere.
Did it work?
She looks at me a little bit dazed. Did what work?
I smirk and rub my thumb over the spot again and ask quietly, Did it bring you luck?
She snaps out of the daze. Oh, yes. It did. She clears her throat, moving through some of the others: the letter R for her family’s last name, a wave for the ocean waters of the West coast, a crescent moon for no reason at all.
This one, she says, pointing to a small wolf, I got with my sister.
Any particular reason for that one?
Well, she is a wolf, and I desperately want to be one.
I’m not sure what to say to that, so instead I force myself to move away from her and lay down on the towel. Do you only have the one sister?
Violet snorts at this. God no, I have four younger siblings. I’m the oldest of five.
Four younger siblings? I try not to have a reaction to this, but fuck that’s a lot.
Ace, well, Mason is his full name but no one calls him that, is twenty-seven, so he’s six years younger than me.
I do the mental math, that would make her thirty-three, the same age as me.
She goes on, He’s sort of the golden boy in our family, but I think of him more like Peter Pan. Then there’s Leo, my wolfish sister.
Leo?
Leonora, but I’d advise only calling her that if you have a death wish.
She’s always been just Leo. She’s twenty-six now.
And then the twins, Reid and Robin, are twenty-four.
Those two are the most like our parents, very free-spirited, very flighty.
They just sort of do whatever feels right to them in the moment.
So you’re nine years older than them?
Yes. My parents had me when they were really young, not on purpose, I think. So they waited a while, until they were more settled—or as settled as those two can possibly be—until they had any more kids. And then they had four back-to-back. She sighs, the sound of the long-suffering.
You talk about your parents as if they’re nomads, I tease her. But I suspect a lot of the responsibility that should have been theirs fell to Violet instead.
They sort of are. We lived all over the island when I was little, especially before my siblings were born. We moved around a lot, we even lived on a houseboat for a year.
That sounds exciting, I say, but she doesn’t answer for a while.
I found it pretty stressful, honestly. I never knew how long we were going to be anywhere. I’m sure that’s why I’m a bit of a control freak now, she says this like it’s a joke, but I can tell there’s something deeper here.
I can understand that, I tell her, but I hold myself back from saying more.
I can relate to feeling on edge like that all the time.
Growing up with a volatile parent can make you feel like you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It’s fucking stressful. And I hate to think of Violet enduring anything remotely like what my family went through.
But here on the beach, with the warm sun, and the water lapping in the distance, I can’t bring myself to dredge all of that up.
Violet doesn’t say anything else for a while, clearly lost in her own thoughts as well.
I turn and prop myself up on my side, facing her. Her eyes are closed, but after a few seconds of me grinning at her, she finally takes a wee peek in my direction.
I nod my head towards the ocean.
Swim?