The Furies. Katie Lowe

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ so deep / That people can die of mere imagination.’

      ‘Hey, new girl,’ a sing-song voice rang behind me, startling in the silence.

      I spun around to find myself watched, warily, by a short – petite, I suppose, is the word – blonde girl, dressed head-to-toe in the school’s sports colours. She fingered the tape wrapped around her fingers. She was pretty, in a sleepy way, eyes heavy-lidded, like a doll’s. The kind you want to close with your thumb.

      ‘What are you doing?’ She looked at me with a half-smile, a mixture of sweetness and suspicion.

      ‘Just … Getting my bearings,’ I said, twisting my fingers, palms tight and sweating.

      ‘I saw you last week with the weird girls. Not that it’s any of my business, but … Well, you seem nice. If you want to make friends around here, you might want to avoid getting stuck with them.’

      ‘Why?’ I was less surprised at her opinion of the girls – though naturally, I was curious – than the very fact of having been noticed at all. I’d imagined myself invisible, disappearing into the crowd.

      ‘You really want to know?’

      I nodded. A soprano began singing halfway down the hall, a little off-key. The girl winced.

      ‘Okay, well,’ she said, shifting her backpack from one shoulder to the other. ‘You remember Emily Frost?’

      I wound the name around, picked at the threads. It had a familiar ring to it, but where I’d heard it, I couldn’t say. I shrugged.

      ‘Where’d you go to school again?’

      ‘Kirkwood.’

      ‘So you’re from round here. You must’ve seen it on the news. The one that did a Richey.’

      ‘A what?’

      ‘Richey. Manics Richey. Disappeared. Never seen again. Jesus, do you even read?’ Her tone was oddly sweet, gently chiding; I nodded. ‘Emily was all over the news last year. She looked like you, except …’ She trailed off. The image came back, and I knew what she was going to say. ‘Pretty. Prettier.’

      ‘Oh yeah. I remember. But—’

      ‘Right, good.’ She grew more animated, stepped towards me. I heard the rustle of tissue paper, smelled the chemical scent of Clearasil and body spray, a chemical musk. ‘So she was best friends with Robin, and the four of them did everything together. And then they had some kind of fight one day, didn’t speak for like a week, and then poof! Gone. Everyone says she killed herself, but they never found the body.

      ‘I mean, clearly there was more to it,’ she went on. ‘If you even mention her name near them, they just get up and leave.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I mean, if something like that happened to my best friend, I don’t think I’d be quite so cool about it, you know?’

      I tried to muster a half-smile, a non-committal response. ‘Why are you telling me this?’ I said, finally.

      She shrugged. ‘Care in the community, I guess. Do you want to get some lunch? I’m Nicky, by the way.’

      In the grim heat of the canteen, I found myself in a cloud of strange associations and artificial smells – coconut, lavender, lemon, all wrong – while girls with avian limbs and immaculate teeth giggled and clucked. The girl beside me had a laugh like a pony’s whinny, the dead eyes of a beetle.

      They talked quickly, the conversation bouncing easily from one topic to another in long, breathless sentences, all featuring people whose names I didn’t know, though I nodded along, trying to keep up. A girl opposite painted her nails, brush dripping slow rolls of indigo blue; another doodled incomprehensible lists in a sticker-covered notebook, and for a moment, I wondered if I might fit in.

      And then I saw them. Robin, Grace, and Alex, walking slowly across the grass, just as they had on that first day, the three of them smiling with quiet satisfaction, careless and somehow wild. I saw Robin’s hair burning fiery in the light, the moth-bitten chic of her coat; I saw Grace, preternaturally pale, large sunglasses covering the dark circles that seemed always to haunt her eyes; the crisp white of Alex’s pressed shirt, the sophisticated, sidelong glance across the Quad.

      ‘Ugh,’ Nicky said, her shoulder pressed against mine. ‘They’re so weird.’

      I made a vague murmur of agreement, felt a pang of envy, a bitter ache in my teeth. As I stood to leave – making my excuses, the girls nodding and smiling blankly before resuming their chatter – I felt Nicky squeeze my wrist between bony fingers.

      ‘We’re going to the pier later – want to come?’

      ‘I … I’ve got homework.’

      Nicky groaned. ‘We’ve all got homework. Come on. It’ll be fun.’

      I felt the sharp edge of her thumbnail in the soft swell of my wrist; a brief flash of irritation, first at her, then at the other girls, for leaving me here.

      ‘Okay, yeah. Maybe. I’ll meet you there?’ I said, striving for the non-committal. I felt a thud of guilt as she smiled; it dissipated as the girls rounded the corner, and disappeared from sight.

      Freed from Nicky’s vice-like grip, I did my best to slip away, squeezing between groups of girls who didn’t move as I passed (though on purpose, or simply because I’d so quickly disappeared into the invisible mass of average students, I couldn’t tell). In the cool air outside, there was no sign of them, the Quad empty but for a few pockets of girls in pairs, sharing secrets. Starlings hopped along the architraves above the open doors, swooping down to tug twitching worms from the dirt.

      Two hands pawed at my face from behind, clumsy fingers poking at eyes and cheeks, and I screamed; a cackle echoed across the Quad. As I turned, Robin grinned her lop-sided smile, eyes puppet-wide and gleaming. ‘Come with me,’ she said, turning on her heels and walking away.

      I stood, transfixed. ‘I still have classes,’ I called after her. She looked back, and I blushed, furiously, catching the eye of two girls, who’d turned to stare at the crack of nerves in my voice. My heart thudded with such force that I wondered if they could hear that, too; I smiled at them, willing them to look away.

      ‘Robin,’ I called again, as she loped away, headed towards the long school driveway. She didn’t look back; didn’t seem to care whether I followed, or not.

      And so, without thought – without question, or doubt, or even the briefest flicker of pride – I followed her, down the hill and through the school gates, the Campanile bell sounding a warning behind.

      ‘Come on, just take one. One.’ Robin’s shoulder pressed against mine, in the town’s only real fashion store, where pop music hissed through invisible speakers, and girls tripped giggling between changing rooms, making catwalks of the aisles.

      ‘I can’t,’ I whispered back, looking down at the candied rows of nail polish, names underneath seeming all wrong, the inverse of themselves: Buttercup for a grassy green, Seashell for baby-blue, Moonlight for black.

      ‘It’s not difficult,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll show you.’ I watched her hands glide above, like a magician practising a sleight-of-hand. She paused, hovering СКАЧАТЬ