🎖 Featured on Teen Fiction Reading List #YA Ambassadors🎖Love or Music... Which should they choose and what price do they have to pay? Love will give Kit and Tully a future together, but music can make Tully's dream come true.
Sixteen-year-old Kit...
Maybe it's not bad news. Most likely Spike has had enough of the school crowd by now, and wants to come out and join us.
"I'll get it," Felice moves towards the door. "I want to tell Spike to piss off."
"Don't, he's really looking forward to seeing you."
"Well, why wasn't he here then?" There's no reasoning with Felice when she's being like this.
"Yeah." Her voice carries from the hall as she picks up the phone. In the end she'll relent and let him come over, but she'll make him sweat first. I know what she's like.
"What?" Her tone changes abruptly. "Who is this?"
She listens for a bit, making a face at me, but then she gets serious.
"Jesus, yeah, sure. We'll be right there."
Alarmed, I go out to the hall to join her. She puts the phone down and stares at me, wide-eyed. "Spike has been attacked."
Axel Carr emerges blearily from his office, tumbler of whisky in hand. "What the hell is going on?"
"Dad, can you give us a lift to the hospital?"
"Get a taxi," he mumbles. "I'm over the limit."
"Thanks, Dad," Felice keeps the sarcasm out of her voice and murmurs in an undertone, "for not giving a shit as usual."
"How bad is it?" I ask when she's phoned the taxi.
"He got beaten up. I bet it was a bunch of homophobic assholes. Apparently nothing is broken and he's been asking for us."
"Jesus, it's getting worse." This is the third time Spike has ended up in hospital in the last year. His mouth is too big, especially when he's been drinking. Trouble is always brewing in Drimshanra. There's nothing else to do here, except fight.
Sometimes it feels like something malevolent is lurking in the deepest part of this place, something corrupt that turns everything sour and rancid, a sickness, a disease. Nothing good ever comes out of here, that much is true.
Success stories like Axel Carr's are rare. And since he's done well, everything else in his life has gone wrong. When I was small, his messy divorce was the talk of the county. The locals said that's all you can expect when you marry an Englishwoman. Of course she'd go straight back to London, first chance she got.
My mother didn't speak about it, but she once told me she met Helen Carr at a lunch party and thought she was a very nice woman who put up with a lot from Axel. Mum is a master of understatement but I know her well enough to understand that by 'a lot' she meant 'too much'.
Felice has never told me why she lives in Ireland with her dad, instead of London with the rest of her family, and, even though I'd love to know, I haven't asked.
That's how it works. We let each other be who they want to be. No questions. It's an unwritten rule. We don't judge each other, just everyone else.
A shiver runs down my spine as the rain drives relentlessly against the window pane.
Is that the deal around here? Does everyone have to sell their soul?
The impenetrable darkness of the night hides the answer to my question. Anything could be out there and we would never know.
"We need to hurry." Upstairs in her bedroom, Felice throws a couple of books, a packet of squashed jelly babies and some tape cassettes into a bag. "Ok, something for him to read, eat and listen to. Shit! Clothes, he needs clothes."
"Black t-shirt?' I suggest. "And how about this?" I pick up an issue of NME from her London stash.
" No, I've hardly a chance to look at it myself yet. I'm going to raid Dad's wardrobe."
"Good luck with that!" I suppress a grin as I try to imagine anything in Axel Carr's wardrobe of expensive suits, shirts and ties that Spike might wear.
"Keep an eye out for the taxi. It should be here any minute."
When she's gone, I shove the NME into the bag and rummage through the rest of the London cache, adding a copy of the Face, and an oversized t-shirt. It's white so I'm not sure if Spike will wear it, but it's better than nothing.
"I found these." She reappears in the doorway, holding up a pair of striped pyjamas, the window behind her illuminated by an approaching set of headlights.
"They'll have to do. Taxi's here."
"Your parents would drive us to the hospital wouldn't they?" She mutters as we dash through the rain into the cocooning warmth of the taxi.
"What do you think?" The wind snatches away my answer and she doesn't hear me. Sometimes she's so naive she takes my breath away. She seriously has no idea how good she has it with Axel, who basically lets her do whatever she wants.
Not only would my parents not drive us, they wouldn't let us go. Tearing off to the hospital in the middle of a dark, rainy night to be with our friend? To them, that would be the height of folly, such unnecessary drama. My parents would think Spike's family should be dealing with this.
But Spike is eighteen, not a minor any more. He can ask for whoever he wants. And that's us, Felice and I.
Deep down, I hug that thought and let its warmth spread through me.
We're the ones he wants.
The taxi takes us into the night, headlights cutting a blurred swathe through the darkness, bathing us in an eerie purple light. We pass the passage grave on the left, invisible through the rain pelting the windshield.
Yet, I feel its ancient presence tug at my core, almost as though the spirit of Aonghus is calling out to me, and I have a sudden premonition. This is the end. Our old life is over. We are speeding towards danger, into a vortex of change.
Spike, Felice and I.
The three of us will never be the same again.
Author's Note
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