Page 14 of High Season

TEN

SIX WEEKS BEFORE THE BIRTHDAY PARTY

Barnaby picked them up for the party in a bright red convertible that Hannah knew his parents had gifted him for passing his driving test, honking his horn, laughing as he pulled up outside the pink house.

Tamara raised her eyebrows when she came outside and saw Hannah and Josie waiting there.

She opened the car door and collapsed onto the front seat.

“You invited them,” she said to her brother. “You can cram into the back with them.”

Hannah felt Josie stiffen beside her. She expected her best friend to make a sharp comment, and was surprised when she simply clambered into the backseat, not looking at Tamara as she did.

Barnaby made a big performance of rolling down the roof before they set off.

Hannah slipped into the middle seat, between Blake and Josie, painfully conscious of the warmth of his body beside hers.

Keeping her leg still to preserve the half inch of space between them, until the muscles of her hip started to twitch.

In the muggy heat, Hannah’s thighs stuck to the leather seat.

She had chosen the kind of outfit that she saw the teenage girls who descended here every summer wear.

Gladiator sandals, as if Hannah wasn’t the kind of person who had to walk everywhere, trainers the only footwear that made any sense.

Small, gold earrings that she had sneaked out of her mother’s jewelry box.

Her parents had been fighting earlier. They often seemed to be fighting. The landlord wanted to increase the rent on the shop. They couldn’t afford it.

This summer, money—or specifically the lack thereof—had seemed to loom larger than ever before. A few months ago, her dad, exhausted and irritable after a long shift, had looked horrified when he had found Hannah at the kitchen table, university prospectuses spread out in front of her.

Most of the kids at the international school where Hannah had a scholarship were planning on going to universities in the UK or America, and Hannah had long had her heart set on England.

She had grown up reading Enid Blyton’s boarding school stories, had begged her mum to drive her to an English-language bookshop so that she could buy the latest Harry Potter.

She had spent a long time coming up with her shortlist, all for universities in the UK, a country she had never lived in but in some ways still considered her home.

Bath. York. Edinburgh. Oxford, an idea that still felt so crazy, so dizzying, that she could barely dare to think about it.

Her teacher said that she had a good chance, as long as she knuckled down a bit this year.

Cut down on the tutoring. Dedicated a bit more time to her own studies.

Hannah felt as though she had been waiting all her life to go to university in England.

To be shoulder to shoulder with people like Blake and Tamara and Barnaby, on a level with them for the first time in her life.

A place where her intellect would permit her into the parts of society that had been out of bounds to her all her life.

“Want a beer?” Barnaby said, taking one hand off the steering wheel to grope in the footwell beside Tamara’s bare legs.

They had been driving for almost an hour, far enough away for the roads to become unfamiliar, Barnaby navigating corners too quickly.

The car swerved as Tamara slapped Barnaby’s hand away and bent down herself, retrieving two bottles. She passed them back without looking over her shoulder.

Hannah handed a bottle to Blake and then hesitated before press ing the second into Josie’s hands.

She could feel her friend growing tense beside her, fidgeting against the creaking seats.

Hannah had promised that they could leave whenever she wanted to, but by now it was becoming clear that they’d have no way of getting back by themselves.

“How much farther?” Josie asked.

“Not far,” Blake said. He cracked the bottle of beer open with his teeth and held it out to Hannah. “We’re getting close.”

Hannah took the bottle from him.

“Whose party is it anyway?”

“It’s one of my friends,” said Tamara, her eyes still fixed on the road ahead, arms folded across her chest. “From school. Her parents are away. It’ll be cool.”

Just then, Barnaby jerked the steering wheel, pulled away from the main road onto a thin, single-lane track.

“Pretty sure it’s down here,” he said.

“Wait until you guys see this place,” said Tamara. For the first time the entire car ride there was a gleam of excitement in her voice. “You’re gonna freak.”

The house rose into view like the moon edging up into the night sky, pale and luminous. It was modern, built into a cliff face, with sharp, white edges, a spotlit facade. The kind of house that Hannah dreamed of living in, one day.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“It’s just like all the other houses round here?” Josie said, causing Hannah to kick her beneath the seat.

Blake laughed.

“I forgot that it’s completely impossible to impress Josie Jackson,” he said.

Barnaby pulled on the handbrake.

“I think I’d be a bit more impressed if I lived in basically a shack,” he said.

The air stiffened.

“What?” said Barnaby. “She can give it out, but she can’t take it?”

Josie unclipped her seatbelt.

“Oh,” she said. “I can take it. Believe me, I can take whatever you guys have to say about me.”

They stayed much later than Hannah had intended.

Late enough that people had begun to peel off, a drunken girl passed out on a sofa, kids clustered around a coffee table snorting coke through rolled-up bank notes, something that Hannah thought people only did in films. Outside, a group of boys cheered each other on as they took turns at climbing out of an upper-floor window and plummeting, meters below, into the glassy, illuminated stretch of the pool.

Somehow, between going down to the kitchen to get another drink and returning back to the upstairs window ledge where they had perched for the last hour, Hannah had lost Josie.

Somehow, she didn’t particularly mind. She drifted through the house, a vodka tonic clutched in one hand, feeling faintly as if she were watching herself from above.

She had drunk enough that, for the first time in a while, she wasn’t thinking about if anyone was looking at her, or whether she seemed out of place.

She was imagining that she lived here. That this was her party.

That all these people were here for her.

Blake must have seen her before she saw him.

When she caught his eye across the room, he was already staring.

Already watching her. He was in a group, a girl with long, highlighted hair, a boy whose body was angled hungrily in her direction.

He left them, wordlessly, and they didn’t seem to notice.

He was walking straight to Hannah with such purpose that she was briefly unsure of herself, briefly certain that he would pass her by, on to somebody else.

But, instead, he stopped right in front of her.

“I thought I’d lost you,” he said, and the idea that he might have been looking for her sent a shiver straight through Hannah’s core.

He took her hand.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get some air.”

They were only just outside when Barnaby leaped on them, wrapping his arms around Blake’s shoulders.

His face was pink, an alcohol-induced flush.

Hannah could tell he had taken something from his wide eyes and starry pupils, the way his body twitched.

His hair was soaking wet, and in the aquatic glow of the pool his teeth looked sharp and bone-white as he grinned.

“Mate,” he said, enunciating the vowel of the word, stretching it out long. “You’ve got to give it a go. Jumping off the roof. It’s crazy.”

Blake shook him off.

“Nah,” he said. “I’m alright.”

“Aw, come on,” Barnaby said. “Don’t be chicken.”

“Seriously, mate,” said Blake. “I’m good.”

Barnaby looked around, his eyes settling on Hannah as if he was seeing her for the first time.

“You’ll do it, Hannah, right?”

“I don’t—”

“Aw, come on,” he said again. “You went off the cliffs last year, right? You were the only one of the girls who’d do it. I remember.”

He slid away from Blake, wrapped his arm around Hannah. She could smell something chemical and metallic on his breath.

“None of the other girls would ever ,” he said conspiratorially, and Hannah knew exactly what he meant. None of the other girls with money, with parents with good jobs, with the kind of status that Hannah could only dream of would ever. The kind of girls who didn’t have to prove themselves.

She eased herself away from him.

“The cliffs are different,” she said. “I’ve been jumping off those cliffs since I was a kid.”

It was true. The things that Barnaby and Blake thought were daring, an escape from reality, the kind of adrenaline spike that their lives back in the UK denied them, were routine for her. The coastline had always been her playground.

“So?” said Barnaby, a slur encircling the edge of the word. “You should be able to show us how it’s done then, right?”

She knew that he was baiting her. It was the oldest trick in the book, after all, that appeal to her ego. But still, her eyes drifted up to the second-story ledge. Not a huge drop. Twelve or fifteen feet.

“Come on,” said Barnaby. “What are you scared of?”

“Give it a rest, mate,” Blake said. “She said she doesn’t want to.”

“Actually, I will,” said Hannah.

They both looked at her.

“You don’t have to,” said Blake.

“I want to,” Hannah said. “It isn’t that high.”

Barnaby whooped.

“Yes, Hannah!” he said. He turned toward the cluster of teenage boys at the edge of the water. “Hey! You guys! Hannah’s gonna jump.”

There was a flurry of cheers.

“I don’t have a swimming costume,” she said.

Barnaby grinned.

“You could always do a skinny dip.”

She ignored him. Turned to Blake. For once she felt bigger than everyone here. Stronger.

“You want to come, too?” she said, breezy, as if the thought had only just occurred to her.

She saw him swallow.

“You’re not going to make the lady do it alone, are you, Blake?” said Barnaby, taunting.

“Yeah,” said Blake. “Yeah. ’Course I’ll come.”

With more confidence than she felt, Hannah reached down and took his hand. There was another volley of whoops. A wolf whistle.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s do this.”

He knew the way upstairs, so he led. She could feel his pulse, fast and soft, like the beat of a butterfly’s wings against the inside of her wrist.

“You can back out, if you want,” he said, when they reached the first floor. “Barnaby’s drunk. And he’s an idiot. No one will care.”

“Do you want to back out?” she asked.

He looked right at her then.

“Not if you don’t,” he said.

She gave his hand the tiniest squeeze.

“I don’t,” she said.

She was sure that she wouldn’t back out either, until they reached the roof.

It was a flat plain above the patio. You had to climb out of a window to reach it, one leg and then the other, until they were back in the muggy night air.

That was the first time Hannah thought that maybe this was a bad idea.

That she understood how far the pool was from the house.

The stretch of ground that they would have to clear, the hard white stone below.

A primal, gut twist of something that told her not to jump. An ancient survival instinct.

Below them, someone started to clap slowly. Just one person at first, and then more, until a sea of hands moved back and forth, a rhythmic wave, a beat that drew them closer to the edge.

“Ready?”

Blake said the word so softly, so close to her, that Hannah was certain she could feel it vibrate in the air between them.

Beyond the pool, where earlier the sea had unfolded a dark and brilliant blue, there was now only darkness.

A vast stretch of nothing. Only the sound of waves far below them.

Only the feel of Hannah’s heart beating hard in her chest.

“Ready,” she said.

And then they jumped.

At first, it didn’t feel like they were falling at all. There was a second, after Hannah’s legs pushed away from the concrete beneath her feet, when she seemed to fly. Straight outward, toward the dark expanse of sea.

And then, that give of gravity, the catch of oxygen in her throat, the flail of her arms, her body’s last-ditch effort to stop the inevitability of the fall. In less than the stretch of a heartbeat, the slam of her body against the surface of the pool. The roar of sound as she was submerged.

She opened her eyes, the water white around her, stirred by the impact.

She held her breath as it cleared, and there he was.

Blake, illuminated by the pool lights, reaching his hands out toward her.

It reminded her of last year, when she saw him beneath the ocean after they jumped from the cliffs.

That fragile moment when it felt like they were the only people in the world.

This time, with the surface of the water too broken for anyone to see, he took her hand. Their lips met, as if they were exchanging oxygen.

As if he was breathing life into her lungs.