Page 35

THIRTY-FIVE

ROSE

I message Molly when Danni falls asleep. As quietly as I can, so I don’t wake her, I tiptoe out of the room and down the hallway to Molly’s bedroom, where she’s waiting for me.

“It was like that night,” she says as soon as we’re alone.

I nod and sit heavily on the edge of her bed. It’s unmade—I think she might have been trying to sleep when I messaged her. She sits at her desk and draws her knees to her chest.

“I wanted to kill her,” I say, and she doesn’t need me to clarify I mean Harriet.

“You were afraid,” she replies. “I know exactly how that fear feels.”

Only her fear ended in an outcome far worse. Unimaginably worse.

“The thing is…” she says, studying me. “I don’t think you’ve felt anything that strongly in a long time, have you?”

I swallow, and my breath quickens. “Every time I try to think of that night in Amsterdam, I can’t hold on to it,” I say finally. “It’s as though I know on an intellectual level what happened, but I can’t see any of it at will. It comes up in flashes when I don’t want it to, instead.”

“I get those flashes,” Molly says softly. “I’ll be fine, and then something reminds me of it, and it’s like I’m right back there.”

“What’s it like for you?”

She leans back on her elbows and looks at the lamp. “Like falling,” she says, the light reflecting in her eyes. “But I never hit the ground.”

“For me, it’s always been like stepping into an empty elevator shaft, but then the ground reappears beneath me straightaway.”

Molly huffs a breath through her nostrils. A humorless laugh. “But not tonight.”

“No,” I say. “Not tonight.” I lie down, flat on my back. “Molly? Do you think you could talk me through what happened that night? From the beginning?”

She surveys me in surprise. I can imagine why. How many times did she try to recount that night, months ago? How often did I interrupt, or suddenly become extraordinarily busy, or remind her in a terse voice that I was there, and I already knew?

Tonight, though, it feels different. Tonight, instead of the nothingness I’ve grown so used to, I locked eyes with fear. And, for the first time, it found me unflinching.

Although I was raised to believe that unflinching meant to remain stoic in the face of terror and despair, I’m starting to consider that perhaps it’s quite the opposite. To see fear approaching and avert one’s eyes is little more than hiding. To allow pain to engulf you when it arrives—to invite suffering now, rather than delegating it to a future version of yourself to grapple with—and still climb to your feet once the wave has washed past? That is what it truly means not to flinch.

So.

“We were at your lodge,” Molly says. “Florence had gone home early, and Harriet wanted everybody to go to that party your friend was throwing, and so you all had some pre-drinks before we left.”

Closing my eyes, I force myself to picture it.

I remember Oscar. His auburn hair cut a little shorter than he wanted it to be. The top he wore with the Renaissance art print, and the white-gold necklace with the cross on it. I remember him locking eyes with me when everyone was getting ready, and the way he cocked his head in a silent request for me to leave the room with him. And how we’d ended up walking down the street a little so we could be perfectly, completely sure we weren’t overheard.

I remember the moon that night. It hung low in the sky, a rich yellow so warm it was golden. A path light moon, Mum used to call it. She was superstitious about path light moons, always insisting they brought terrible things with them. I happen to think Mum is completely right to be superstitious about path light moons now, though that night I was only passingly aware.

“I know you’re upset with me, Rose,” he said.

“I’m not—”

“You are. We’ve been friends for long enough.”

Had we? We were childhood friends, certainly, but we hadn’t felt like friends recently. For at least the past year, Oscar had been far more Molly’s friend than mine. They spoke every day—often on the phone. They sat together at school games—and though I was usually with them, it was always on the outskirts. A couple of times, they’d even gone to see a movie or out on a coffee date without me.

“Why would you think I’m upset?” I asked him.

“You’ve been upset with me for months,” he declared. “I think you’re jealous I’m closer with Molly than with you.”

Not quite. Rather, I was unhappy with how much her friendship with Oscar seemed to be changing Molly, in a way that felt a lot like being left behind. Molly was growing less interested in having fun and breaking rules, and more preoccupied with filming herself and discussing online influencers I’d never heard of. My pride wouldn’t allow me to admit that, so, instead, I shrugged.

“I’m coming tonight,” he told me. “You and I are going to spend some time together, and we’re going to work through this weird tension. I’m not gonna let you go all ice queen on me, okay?”

“He didn’t want to come out that night,” I say out loud to Molly. “He did it because he thought he needed to appease me.”

He felt that way, because I had been diligently building a wall between him and me for months. I wasn’t giving him the silent treatment. It was more that there stopped being anything in me to give to him, other than resentment, or jealousy, or hurt. I didn’t want him near, chipping away at my friendship with Molly, or telling her that my lifestyle—our friends ’ lifestyle—was toxic. For the life of me, though, I didn’t know how to tell him that without simmering over and bursting out with rage and pain. Hence, the wall.

“I know, Rose,” Molly says softly. “He told me that.”

And I suppose she understands, better than anyone, how my coldness cost our friend his life. Because if I had simply found a way to manage my feelings, there wouldn’t have been tension to begin with. If I’d explained to the two of them that I felt abandoned, perhaps they would’ve found a way to draw me back in. If I had even assured Oscar in that moment that he didn’t need to attend a party he had no interest in to win my affection, he might have stayed home with Molly.

But I didn’t want him and Molly to stay home and talk about how glad they were they could enjoy themselves without drugs and alcohol, unlike me. I dearly wanted Molly to come out with us that night, and if Oscar came, Molly would come. And so—

“We all split off when we got to the party,” Molly says. “I think you, Eleanor, and Alfie went off first. I was with the others in the backyard for an hour or two, and Oscar was drinking like he wanted a hangover. Then at some point he went to the bathroom and he didn’t come back.”

My memories become blurrier around this point. I think, by then, it was just Eleanor and me. We’d taken something—I still don’t know what, exactly, because it never mattered to me what I experienced back then, as long as it wasn’t reality. Euphoria, hallucinations, relaxation, oblivion—it was all equally appealing.

I can see Oscar making his way through the crowd, and his eyes lighting up when he spied Eleanor and me on the couch. He sat between us and showed us several pills “some guy” had given to him. We pressed further until we established who he meant—Etienne.

“We’ve bought from him more than once,” I told him. “His stuff is trustworthy.”

He took a pill in front of us, and I remember hoping he would enjoy it, and want to come out with us more often. And that Molly would follow, and we might all become equally close, like Eleanor, Molly, and me were. Perhaps, I thought, nobody would be left behind after all.

“I think he found Eleanor and me after that,” I tell Molly now. “He had some pills with him. I told him I’d taken pills from Etienne before.”

Molly looks at me, unblinking. “Did you lie?”

“No.”

She shrugs, resigned and slow. A “what can you do?” sort of shrug. As though it were all unavoidable. As though I didn’t have opportunity after opportunity to stop things, and save him. As though I didn’t waste each one.

The memories are harder to grasp after that. The lights became blurry, dancing across my vision in a melting, warping effect. The people around me seemed to move in stop-motion. By my side. Then over there, ahead of me. Then gone altogether. I moved, too—sometimes of my own accord, sometimes when someone dragged me by the arm. Eleanor. Alfie. Harriet. I drank things as they were handed to me, and threw my arms around anyone close enough to reach, and I floated by the ceiling and I sank below the ground.

Molly fiddles with the cuff of her sock. “I noticed he didn’t come back, but I figured he was talking to you, or Alfie, or somebody. But eventually I got worried and I went to look for him.”

When Molly appeared and told me she couldn’t find Oscar, I had managed to focus. Even through the mist, I knew the tone of her voice was unusually urgent. I couldn’t quite steer myself, but with Molly leading me by the hand, I accompanied her on her search as the rooms spun and spun and became one with one another.

The room we found him in was dark, and quiet. There were no lights to blur together in there. Just a bed, with a boy, and a wall for me to lean on. I think, looking back, Molly was asking me for help for far too long before I remembered what the word meant. That was the first moment of clarity—the first moment I took Oscar in. Even in that state, I knew I was looking at something very, awfully wrong. His head was thrown back, exposing his neck, and his mouth and eyes were open as he took in a single rasping breath, but he wasn’t looking at Molly. Everything stopped, and I stared and stared, because I knew that the wrongness meant I had to do something, but I simply couldn’t remember what.

In my memories, I stared at him like that for perhaps an hour. Realistically, it couldn’t have been more than a second. I remember whispering, “Wait…” but I can’t be sure if Molly ever heard me. It wasn’t an instruction, anyway. More of a plea to the universe to undo whatever had been set in motion. Then Molly was grabbing at him, and shouting, and the room wasn’t empty anymore. My bodyguard, Elizabeth, rushed to the bed to examine Oscar. I found Eleanor by my side, speaking into her phone. That was when I remembered that one should call emergency services when one finds their friend in an empty, dark room looking like a corpse.

I wanted to go to Molly, but every time I pushed forward, I was dragged back by someone. I became surrounded by murmurs, and shouts, and the room filled further and further. Then someone attempted to empty everyone out, and that was when Eleanor had tugged on me and urged me to leave. I did not. Then Alfie had appeared, and his face was inches from mine, and he’d locked eyes with me. “Rosie,” he said. “We have to go. Now.”

I didn’t know, then, exactly what was going on. But my brain had formed one clear understanding. Molly was terrified, and Molly was almost within my reach, and I wasn’t leaving without her. So I grabbed the doorframe and gripped it with white knuckles until my friends stopped trying to pry me off. Alfie disappeared then. Eleanor did not.

The room wasn’t dark anymore by that point. I can remember walking toward the bed, and Molly grabbing me, using me to keep herself standing. I remember how badly her hand was shaking. And I remember Oscar’s eyes. They should’ve been looking at me, but there was nothing there.

“We watched him die,” I whisper to Molly.

She looks at me sharply. “Yeah.”

We watched it. He was alive, and then he wasn’t. And there was nothing we could do. Not by the time we found him. One moment he was everything, alive, and smiling, full of worries and hopes and a future. And then he was nothing. Like a lamp switch.

On, then off.

I wanted another chance. I wanted to do it differently, all of it, because it didn’t feel possible that the worst thing, the worst possible thing, could have happened in the span of only a few minutes. It didn’t seem fair, and therefore, it didn’t seem real.

Hasn’t seemed real.

But it is real.

Oscar doesn’t get a life anymore. He’s gone, and I will never speak to him again. Nor will Molly. We will never run into him at a gathering. We can’t send him a message and ask to see him.

There is no him.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t… I can’t… I’m sorry, Molly. I just didn’t… I couldn’t, but, I should have…”

It happened, didn’t it? I watched someone die. Not someone. Oscar. I watched as Molly screamed for him. I stared at his body, only flesh and bone, still warm from the blood that was pumping through it until it wasn’t.

And Molly. God, Molly.

“Then I left you,” I say. “I wouldn’t leave you while it was happening, then I left you after that night anyway.”

“Rose…”

“I just couldn’t think about it,” I say. “I know I needed to, but I couldn’t.”

“I know,” Molly says.

“No,” I insist. “I mean, I just… collapsed inward. You needed to talk about that night and I just… I—I couldn’t. It was like I was short-circuiting.”

“I understand.”

“It wasn’t normal . Every time I tried to think about it—and I mean every single time, Molly—the channel changed. I completely abandoned you, and you were in so much pain, and I felt nothing .”

Molly’s eyes are glassy, and she arches her neck to stare at the ceiling.

“You should still hate me,” I say with conviction. Molly climbs onto the bed, and I realize with a surge of revulsion at myself that she means to reassure me. “Don’t,” I gasp, sitting up with a start. “It’s not your job to comfort me.”

It was real.

The fact settles somewhere in my throat, and I have the sensation of being strangled from the inside. When I finally manage to force the breath from my lungs, it comes out in a thin sob—a sound I wasn’t expecting at all. I raise my hand as though to muffle myself, but it settles on my collarbone, and I hunch over as I gasp for another breath. For the first time, my mind allows me to understand that I watched my friend die, and he’s never coming back. I’m here in the moment, feeling all of it, and it weighs too much to stand under.

Molly touches my arm, but I shake her off. “No.”

“For me,” she insists. I drop my arm back to my side and allow her to wrap her own around me. We’re stiff for a moment, and then, together, we fold into our center, her fingers digging into my back like talons. I’m crying, I think, although it isn’t how I’ve seen others cry. Mine is more of a series of anguished, tearless breaths, punctuated by whines. Molly has tears—tears have always come easily enough to her—and they dampen my shoulder where she rests her head.

“I don’t want to feel this,” I whimper.

“I know,” she says.

Though tears do come easily to her, it’s been months since I’ve seen her cry over Oscar. She was healing, and now look at what I’ve done.

“I’m sorry,” I manage between breaths. “I’ve brought it all up again.”

Molly shakes her head and pulls me in tighter. I am enveloped, pinned in place. Anchored. “No,” she says. “It’s the first time I haven’t cried alone.”