At first, I'd thought moving to this town was punishment for what I'd done.
It was miles from where I'd grown up, and I'd never even heard of it before we came here. My mother had spent a couple of holidays here as a child and had somehow decided that this tiny, old coastal town caught between the sea and acres of wilds was exactly the right kind of place to move on with our lives after the last few awful months. Dunes, woods, and moors peppered with standing stones crawled across the landscape, surrounding the place like a barrier. I'd come from a cement suburb rammed with cornershops, furniture warehouses, and hairdressers. The closest thing to nature we'd had there was the council-maintained flowerbeds in the high street. Here, it was hard to forget what really birthed you. Nature was the thing you walked on and breathed in.
Before the Graces noticed me, I was the quiet one who stuck to the back corners of places and tried not to draw attention. A couple of other people had been friendly enough when I'd first arrived—we'd hung out a little and they'd given me a crash course in how things ran here. But they got tired of the way I wrapped myself up tight so no one could see inside me, and I got tired of the way they all talked about things I couldn't even muster up fake enthusiasm for, like getting laid and partying and TV shows about people getting laid and partying.
The Graces were different.
When I'd been told they were witches, I'd laughed in disbelief, thinking it was time for a round of "lie to the new girl, see if she'll swallow it." But although some people rolled their eyes, you could see that everyone, underneath the cynicism, thought it could be true. There was something about the Graces. They were one step removed from the rest of the school, minor celebrities with mystery wrapped around them like fur stoles, an ethereal air to their presence that whispered tantalizingly of magic.
But I needed to know for sure.
I'd spent some time trying to work out their angle, the one thing I could do that would get me on their radar. I could be unusually pretty, which I wasn't. I could be friends with their friends, which I wasn't—no one I'd met so far was in their inner circle. I could be into surfing, the top preoccupation of anyone remotely cool around here, but I'd never even tried it before and would likely be embarrassingly bad. I could be loud, but loud people burned out quickly—everyone got bored of them. So when I first arrived, I did nothing and tried to get by. My problem was that I tended to really think things through. Sometimes they'd paralyze me, the "what ifs" of action, and I didn't do anything at all because it was safer. I was afraid of what could happen if I let it.
But on the day they noticed me, I was acting on pure instinct, which was how I knew afterward that it was right. See, real witches would be tuned in to the secret rhythm of the universe. They wouldn't mathematically weigh and counterweigh every possible option because creatures of magic don't do that. They weren't afraid of surrendering themselves. They had the courage to be different, and they never cared what people thought. It just wasn't important to them.
I wanted so much to be like that.
It was lunch break, and a rare slice of spring warmth had driven everyone outdoors. The field was still wet from last night's rain, so we were all squeezed onto the hard courts. The boys played soccer. The girls sat on the low wall at one end, or stretched their bare legs out on the tarmac and leaned their backs against the chain-link fence, talking and squealing and texting.
Fenrin's current crowd was kicking a ball about, and he joined in halfheartedly, stopping every so often to talk to a girl who had run up to him, his grin wide and easy. He shone in the crowd like a beacon, among them all but separated, willingly. He played with them and hung out with them and laughed with them just fine, but something about his manner told me that he held the true part of himself back.
That was the part that interested me the most.
I got to the wall early and opened my book, hoping I looked self-sufficiently cool and reserved, rather than sad and alone. I didn't know if he'd seen me. I didn't look up. Looking up would make it obvious I was faking.
Twenty minutes in and one of the soccer guys, whose name was Danny but who everyone called Dannyboy like it was one name, was flirting with an especially loud, giggly girl called Niral by booting the ball at her section of the wall and making her scream every time it bounced past. The more he did it, the more I saw his friends roll their eyes behind his back.
Niral didn't like me. Which was strange because everyone else left me alone once they'd established that I was dull. But I'd caught her staring at me a few times, as if something about my face offended her. I wondered what it was she saw. We'd never even exchanged a word.
I'd looked up the meaning of her name once. It meant "calm." Life was full of little ironies. She wore big, fake, gold hoop earrings and tiny skirts, and her voice had a rattling screech to it, like a magpie's. I'd seen her with her parents in town before. Her plump little mother wore beautiful saris and wove her long hair in a plait. Niral cut her hair short and shaved it on one side. She didn't like what she was from.
Niral also didn't like this timid girl called Anna, who looked like a doll with her tight black curls and big dark eyes. Niral enjoyed teasing people, and her voice always got this vicious sneer to it when she did. Anna, her favorite target, sat on the wall a little way down from me. Niral had come out to the hard courts with a friend, looked around a moment, and then chose to sit right next to Anna, whose tiny child body had tensed up while she hunched even closer to her phone.
I had English and math with Niral, and she seemed pretty ordinary. Maybe she was loud because part of her knew this. She didn't seem to like people she couldn't immediately understand. Anna was quiet and childlike, a natural target. Niral liked to tell people that Anna was a lesbian. She never said "gay" but "lesbian" in a drawling voice that emphasized each syllable. Anna must have had skin made of glue because she couldn't take any little jibes. They didn't roll off her—they stuck to her in thick, glowing folds. Niral was whispering and pointing, and Anna was curling over as if she wanted to crawl into her own stomach.
Then Dannyboy joined in, hoping to impress Niral. He booted the soccer ball over to Anna with admirable precision, smacking into her hands and knocking her phone from them. It smashed to the ground with a flat crack sound.
Dannyboy ambled over. "Sorry," he said, offhand, but his eyes were on Niral.
Anna ducked her head down. Her black curls dangled next to her cheeks. She didn't know what to do. If she went for the phone, they might carry on at her. If she stayed there, they might take her phone and try to continue the game.
I watched all this over the top of my book.
I really hated that kind of casual bullying that people ignored because it was just easier—I'd been on the end of it before. I watched the ball as it rolled slowly to me, banging against my foot. I stood, clutching it, and instead of pitching it back to him, I threw it the opposite way, onto the field. It bounced off along the wet grass.
"What did you do that for?" said another boy, angrily. I didn't know his name—he didn't hang out with Fenrin. Dannyboy and Niral looked at me as one.
Fenrin was watching. I saw his golden silhouette stop out of the corner of my eye.
"God, I'm sorry," I said. "I kind of thought those two might want to be alone for a while instead of nauseating the rest of us."
There was a crushing silence.
Then the angry boy started to laugh. "Dannyboy, take your girlfriend and get the ball, man. And we'll see you in, like, a couple of hours."
Dannyboy shuffled uncomfortably.
"There's the thicket at the back of the field," I commented. "Nice and secluded."
"You stupid bitch," said Niral to me.
"Maybe don't give it out," I replied quietly, "if you can't take it."
"New girl's got a point," said the angry boy.
Niral sat still for a moment, trying to decide what to do. The tide had turned against her.
"Come on," she said to her friend. They gathered their bags and their makeup and their phones and walked off.
Dannyboy didn't dare look after her—the angry guy was still ribbing him. He went back to playing soccer. Anna retrieved her phone and pretended to text, her fingers tapping a nonsensical rhythm. I nearly missed her almost-whisper. "Thought the screen was cracked right through. Looked broke."
She didn't thank me or even look up. I was glad. I was at least as awkward as she was, and both of us awkwarding at each other would have been too much for me. I sat back down next to her, buried my face in my book, and waited for my pulse to stop its erratic drumming.
When the bell rang, I shouldered my bag, and then and there made my bold ploy. Without thinking about it I walked up to Fenrin, as if I were going to talk to him. I felt his eyes on me as I approached, his curiosity. Instead of following it up with words, though, I kept walking past. At the last moment my eyes lifted to his, and before my face could start its tragic burn, I gave him an eyebrow raise. It meant, what can you do? It meant, yeah I see you, and so? It meant, I'm not too bothered about talking to you, but I'm not ignoring you either because that would be just a little bit too studied.
I lowered my gaze and carried on.
"Hey," he called behind me.
I stopped. My heart beat its fists furiously against my ribs. He was a few feet away.
"Defender of the weak," he said with a grin. His first ever words to me.
"I just don't like bullies so much," I replied.
"You can be our resident superhero. Save the innocent. Wear a cape."
I offered him a smile, a wry twist of the mouth. "I'm not nice enough to be a superhero."
"No? Are you trying to tell me you're the villain?"
I paused, wondering how to answer. "I don't think anyone is as black and white as that. Including you."
His grin widened. "Me?"
"Yeah. I think sometimes you must get bored of how much everyone worships you, when maybe they don't even know the real you. Maybe the real you is darker than the one you show the world."
The set of his mouth froze. Another me from another time recoiled in horror at my recklessness. People didn't like it when I said things like this.
"Huh," he said, thoughtfully. "Not out to make friends, are you?"
Inside, I shriveled. I'd blown it. "I guess … I'm just looking for the right ones," I said. "The ones who feel like I do. That's all."
I'd told myself I wouldn't do this anymore. They didn't know me here—I could be a new me, the 2.0 version, now with improved social skills.
Stop talking. Stop talking. Walk away before you make it worse.
"And how do you feel?" he asked me. His voice wasn't teasing. He seemed curious.
Well, I might as well go out with a bang.
"Like I need to find the truth of the world," I said. "Like there's more than this." I raised a hand helplessly to the gray school building looming over us. "More than just … this, this life, every day, on and on, until I'm dead. There's got to be. I want to find it. I need to find it."
His eyes had clouded over. I thought I knew that look—it was the careful face you made around crazy people.
I sighed. "I have to go. Sorry if I offended you."
He said nothing as I walked away.
I'd just exposed my soul to the most popular boy in school, and in return he'd given me silence.
Maybe I could persuade my mother to move towns again.
It was raining the next day, so I ate my lunch in the library. I was alone—the friendly girls I'd hung out with when I'd first arrived never asked me to sit with them in the cafeteria anymore, and I was glad to have the time to read more of my book before class. It was too cold to go outside, and Mr. Jarvis, the librarian, was nowhere to be seen, so I put my bag on the table and opened my Tupperware behind it. Cold beans on toast with melted cheese on top. A bit slimy, but cheap to buy and easy to make, two important factors in my house. I took out my lunch fork, the only one in our cutlery drawer that didn't look as though it came from a plastic picnic set. It was a thick kind of creamy-colored silver and had this flattened plate of scrollwork on the handle bottom. I washed it every night and took it back to school with me every day. It made me feel a bit more special when I used it, like I wasn't just some scruff, and my mother never noticed it was missing.
I'd worried about my conversation with Fenrin that whole day and well into the night, turning my words over again and again, wondering what I could have done better. In my mind, my voice was even and measured, a beautiful cadence that positioned itself perfectly between drawling and musical. But in reality, I had an awkward town accent I couldn't quite shift, all hard edges and soft, dopey burrs. I wondered if he'd heard it. I wondered if he'd judged me because of it.
I ate and read my book, this particular kind of fantasy novel that I secretly loved. It was my favorite thing to do—eat and read. The world just shut up for a while. I'd just got to the bit where Princess Mar'a'tha had shot an arrow into one of the demon horde attacking the royal hunting camp, and then I felt it.
Him. I felt him.
I looked up into his face, which was tilted down at my shit, embarrassing book and my shit, embarrassing lunch.
"Am I interrupting?" said Fenrin. A long wave of his sun-gold-tipped hair had slipped from behind his ear and hung by his cheekbone. I actually caught a waft of him. He smelled like a thicker, manlier kind of vanilla. His skin was lightly tanned.
I hadn't lowered my fork; I just looked at him dumbly over it.
It worked. I told him the truth and it worked.
"Eating in the library again, when the rest of the school uses the cafeteria," he mused. "You must enjoy being alone."
"Yes," I said. But I had misjudged it because his eyebrow rose.
"Er, okay. Sorry for disturbing you," he said, and turned away. I lowered my fork.
NO, WAIT! I wanted to shout. You were supposed to say something self-deprecatingly witty at this point, weren't you, and get a laugh, and then you'd see it in his eyes—he'd think you were cool. And like that, you'd be in.
But nothing came out of my mouth, and my chance was slipping away.
The only other person in the library was this guy Marcus from Fenrin's year (always Marcus, never just Marc, I'd heard someone say with a sneer). He had the kind of presence that folded inward, as if he couldn't bear to be noticed. I understood that and gave him a wide berth.
So I found it interesting when Fenrin turned to Marcus and locked eyes with him instead of ignoring him. And instead of trying to be invisible, Marcus held his gaze. Fenrin's mouth drew into a thin, tight line. Marcus didn't move.
After a moment more of this strangeness that wasn't quite aggression and wasn't quite anything easy to read, Fenrin snorted, turned, and caught me watching. I tried to smile, giving him an opening.
It seemed to work. He folded his arms, rocked on his feet.
"So, at the risk of looking like an idiot coming back for another serving," he said to me, "why do you enjoy being alone?"
My mouth opened and shut and I gave him a truth, because truth had got me this far, and truth seemed like it would endear him to me more than anything else ever could.
I forced myself to look straight into his eyes. "I can stop pretending when I'm alone."
Fenrin smiled.
Bingo, as my mother often said.