9. Sexy, Scary, Library #2
Alistair reaches down, grabs Seb by the collar and kisses him roughly. It’s over in a second, and then everything is back just how it was, except for the pink spots of heat in Seb’s cheeks. He doesn’t look surprised. This, apparently, is business as usual between them.
Briar feels seasick and strange. They clumsily reshelve Tennyson, then go back to Westby’s last known location.
They want to leave right away, but Westby really does need help with his books; luckily, he’s back in under a minute, struggling with two mammoth hardbacks that Briar takes from him at once.
‘Jones, you are a gentleman,’ Westby coos. ‘I’ll wear your letterman to chambers, if you want to make it official.’
‘Let’s go,’ Briar says, and Westby frowns.
‘You look like you’re having a personal emotion.’
‘I’m fine.’
Westby can’t be discouraged. Trying to do so only makes him more annoying. ‘What’s wrong, Lassie? Pip fallen down a well? Shortage at the muscle T-shirt factory?’
Briar says nothing, and eventually Westby decides to bitch about the pros and cons of the Dewey decimal system instead.
That evening, Briar is eating a Pot Noodle on their bed and watching A Streetcar Named Desire for the twentieth time out of the Piracy folder on their ancient laptop when someone knocks urgently on the door.
Confused, noodles still dangling from their mouth and Marlon Brando posing in his slutty little outfit frozen on their screen, they hop down the stairs to answer it.
A boy of about twelve is standing there, wearing a Temple rugby shirt that’s too big for him, looking irritable. ‘Phone for you.’
Briar slurps up the noodles. ‘What?’
‘Phone. For. You.’
‘Where?’
‘Are you stupid?’
Briar considers this. ‘No?’
The boy throws his hands up in the air, backing away. ‘Well I’ve told you, and that’s all I can do.’
There are raindrops pattering against the windows in the stairwell as Briar descends, the summer simmer finally coming to a boil.
The phone turns out to be all the way on the ground floor, tucked behind the staircase, affixed to the wall.
It’s at least as old as Briar, maybe even as old as Briar’s mum.
Stickers advertising taxi companies that have probably long gone out of business are fading away next to the dial pad.
The plastic receiver has been left dangling, and Briar picks it up and cautiously lifts it to their ear.
‘Hello?’
‘Briar!’ Tate says, sounding pleased. ‘We found you. Sorry to call, but we need a favour.’
The last favour Briar did for these people is still giving them nightmares. They’re in no mood. ‘What is it?’
‘Watson’s in a spot of bother,’ Westby says, sounding like he’s wrestled the phone away from Tate. ‘And you’ve got that truck.’
‘I don’t have a truck. Eugenia has a truck.’
‘Semantics. Look, will you help us?’
Briar sighs. Eugenia seems reasonable, if scary, but joyriding in her work vehicle after three days on the job isn’t going to score them any points. ‘No.’
‘See,’ says Westby, muffled, talking to Tate. ‘But - now, tell them.’
Tate regains the mouthpiece. ‘Hadley sneaked out before they locked the gates, but her boyfriend was supposed to drive her back and let her out in the woods so she could break back in that way, and instead he left her at the pub. It’s seven miles.’
The first streak of lightning illuminates all the fire safety signage on the wall opposite in regulation blues and reds, and Briar sighs again. ‘Which pub?’
‘Knew it,’ Westby crows in the background.
‘Fox and Grapes. Thanks, Briar, really.’
‘Where are you even calling me from?’
‘Wouldn’t you like to know,’ says Westby.
‘Literally just my dorm,’ says Tate. ‘I’m in Griffin. West could have come and asked you in person, but he doesn’t want to get wet.’
‘Need I remind you that I have been shot with a gun.’
They’re still bickering when Briar hangs up.
It doesn’t feel good, using the key to Eugenia’s office when the staff quarters have been shut up for the night, lights off, computers humming in standby - or taking the keys from her drawer, even though they’ve been left there for Briar specifically.
Briar wonders if the truck just won’t be there, but when they eventually find the staff car park, it’s sitting in Eugenia’s reserved bay, white and spotless.
They’d imagined something like Sean’s banger, beaten-up and old enough to vote, but of course Eugenia’s lip would curl with disgust while describing a gleaming Ford Ranger.
Inside, it smells like spearmint and leather shampoo, with a trace of Eugenia’s sweet perfume when Briar eases into the driver’s seat. They’re waylaid at the gate as security searches the car, quick and perfunctory and with a few questions that Briar can answer honestly, and then they’re away.
It’s only a fifteen-minute drive to the pub, but the rain has picked up, so Briar slows to a tourist’s crawl around the deadly country corners, the world ahead ending precisely where their headlights do, the beams illuminating dumbstruck pheasants in the bushes and the white tails of rabbits dashing across the road with seconds to spare.
Phone signal kicks back in as Briar approaches the pub, and the glitchy offline map on their screen is blotted out by a dizzying amount of text notifications.
Briar ignores them for now; the very literal sign for the Fox and Grapes looms out of the darkness, and they pull over, looking for Hadley.
Warm light spills from the pub windows, eight perfectly symmetrical squares of orange, and Briar weighs up getting out into the rising storm to find her.
They don’t have to. The passenger door opens so suddenly that Briar jumps, and Hadley throws herself inside, slamming it behind her.
She’s still wearing her grey chequered uniform skirt and knee socks, but she’s swapped her dress shirt for something black and cropped, her school tie knotted around her wrist. She’s absolutely soaked through, her hair plastered to her face and neck in ashy tendrils, dripping all over Eugenia’s shampooed seats.
‘Christ,’ Briar says conversationally.
‘Just drive.’
Briar starts the car. The rain is even heavier now, blurring the road and drumming heavily on the roof, punctuated by the steady squeak and swish of the windscreen wipers. It helps make the silence a little less painful.
‘I’m not going to tell you,’ Hadley says eventually. Briar’s eyes are trained on the road.
‘Didn’t ask.’
‘What did the others say?’
‘That you needed a lift.’
‘Oh,’ Hadley says. In Briar’s peripheral vision, she sits back in her seat, her arms crossed. ‘Okay.’
Briar settles into the quiet, focusing hard on not obliterating any nocturnal wildlife, but a few minutes later when they swerve slightly to avoid a pothole, Hadley grabs the door handle.
‘Where the hell did you learn to drive? Legoland?’
‘Tractors.’
‘Tractors. Of course.’
‘Yep.’
Briar’s not expecting anything else, but then Hadley says, ‘I broke up with him. He hates that. I know he’s a prick, but this time he’s out-pricked himself. It’s raining. What the fuck. Arsehole.’
‘Arsehole,’ Briar agrees.
‘I bet West told you we break up all the time.’
‘He didn’t tell me anything.’
‘Oh,’ Hadley says again. ‘Well. We do break up all the time, I guess.’ Black road and black rain, Hadley’s fingers tapping one after the other on the door handle, the sound of her fingernails on the metal rhythmic and relaxing.
‘I don’t even know if he’s nice. I thought he was, at first. Whole fucking thing falls apart when I look directly at it. ’
This all comes out in a rush, her voice cracked around the edges, and the silence afterwards is considerably more horrible than the one before, because Briar can tell that she’s furious with herself for saying anything at all.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Oh, fuck off. I told you I don’t want to talk about it. And it’s not like it matters, anyway. Nothing that happens here matters.’
More silence.
‘Is Sebastian Wolfe seeing someone at school?’ Briar asks.
‘What?’ Hadley says, her voice sharp. ‘Why? What did you hear?’
‘Nothing,’ says Briar. ‘I mean, I was in the library, and I thought I saw - but, no. Nothing.’
Seb might not be out; Alistair might not be out.
The former concerns Briar slightly more than the latter - some leftover sense of allegiance - but still.
You keep to the code. You don’t out people, even if they might be sociopaths.
Especially not at a school like this, which is probably about fifty years behind even Dunton and Heaverham.
People there were unrelenting dickheads to Briar before they’d even worked out why they were different, until they got strong enough to square up, and dickheads to Connor and Rhys no matter how hard they tried to be respectable.
Briar just wishes they could get that image out of their mind: Seb looking heavenwards, Alistair swooping down with that fierce, proprietary kiss. It’s not any worse than Seb being friends with these people, not really. But it hurts in a different way.
‘If you think you saw something,’ Hadley says, ‘you’re probably right. But I’m . . . surprised. If you did. Not really how things are done here.’
‘Right. Westby said something about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’
‘And I don’t ask, and yet he does tell me.
Everything. In excruciating detail.’ Briar laughs, and sees Hadley turn towards them, maybe a little surprised.
‘It’s shit here. He’s out, people are shit to him about it, he doesn’t care.
I mean, he does, but he says he doesn’t.
Tate could be straight for all I know, but people assume he’s not because he knows what a trench coat is, and they’re shit to him anyway.
I’m a bisexual with a boyfriend, so obviously nobody gives a fuck about that, because I don’t count. ’
‘Actually, you’re a bisexual without a boyfriend,’ Briar says, taking a risk, ‘so you count again now. Schr?dinger’s Sapphic.’
Hadley snorts, happy in her outrage. ‘Fuck you, Jones.’
The silence on the rest of the drive is almost companionable.