Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil — Chapter no 28

I

The bottle shatters into stardust.

Catty is thirteen, and Alice is ten, and they’re in the gravel lot behind their granddad’s pub, the baseball bat resting on Catty’s shoulder as she sets another empty on the wooden stump that no one could be bothered to haul up when they made the parking lot. (Not that it stopped them from cutting down the rest of the tree, and Alice has never understood why they didn’t finish the job, or leave it alone. It makes her sad every time she sees it.) Alice sits cross-legged on the hood of someone’s car and watches as her sister winds up again. She swings, and the bottle shatters on impact, the sound as high and bright as bells, and Alice winces, even though she saw it coming, a kind of automatic flinch, because it’s one of those sounds that means trouble. It’s a rock pitched through a kitchen window, a pint knocked off a counter, a pair of glasses crunched under a clumsy foot, a girl taking out her heartbreak with a bat.

Catty lines up another bottle on the wooden stump.

A swing. A crack. For one brief, beautiful second, the glass dust hangs suspended in the glow from the streetlight, glittering like mist before it falls. Alice looks back over her shoulder, ready for the door to swing open, for someone to come out and tell them off, but the game is on— (which game doesn’t matter, it’s usually rugby or football, but she’s seen snooker, darts, cricket, just so long as it’s tuned to something that gives them an excuse to lift a pint in the general direction of the screen

and shout cheers or mutter disapproval) —so no one shows.

Catty fetches up another bottle from the crate by the pub’s back door.

And even if they were doing something wrong, no one would stop them because they’re “Harry’s girls”—Harry being short for Harold Moore, who owns the Port of Call. (She’s always thought it’s a silly name for a pub, seeing as Hoxburn is nowhere near the sea, and the only vessels rolling in, their granddad likes to say, are the men who stay docked at the bar, and the tourists floating by. Even though tourist is a pretty generous word, since Hoxburn is the kind of place people drive through on the way to somewhere else. Somewhere better.) Before their gran up and left, Alice heard her saying that towns could die as sure as people. Only sometimes people die fast, and places usually die slow. But Alice figures that if Hoxburn does die, the pubs

will be the last to go.

Pubs, plural, because there’s two. (Funny, how Hoxburn has only one petrol station, and one grocery, and one laundromat, but two pubs, the Port and the Maudlin. They have the decency to be at opposite ends of the main street, not facing down like duelers, and on days when one is closed, you’ll find the owner drinking in the other, to show there’s no bad blood.) Catty winds up again, curses sliding through her teeth like steam.

“Fucking numpty eejit bawbag,” she seethes, a string of words collected like fine stones, her accent going thicker, the way Granddad’s does whenever the tourists in the pub are English.

She swings, and the bottle shatters into light.

Alice is honestly surprised Catty and her first boyfriend made it a month, let alone three. Will was two years older, fifteen to her thirteen, which carried its own glow, but otherwise he was . . . dull. A weak candlelight against her sister’s glaring torch, so she just kind of assumed Catty would be the one to break his heart—but then he went and kissed some fifth year and word got back, it always does, and here they are, her sister furiously shattering bottles while Alice stares at the glitter they leave in the gravel.

Catty lines up another bottle. Alice’s butt is falling asleep, so she hops down from the car’s hood, the lot crunching beneath her shoes, and Catty mistakes the motion for a want and offers up the bat.

“Go on,” she says. “Give it a go.”

Alice’s hand responds before her brain, reaching to take the thing just

because Catty held it toward her. Because that is the power of big sisters, the urge to take anything they offer.

The bottle stands waiting on the stump, a finger of backwashed beer at the bottom. She flexes her fingers on the wooden bat, tries to summon a shadow of her sister’s passion, but feels no urge to swing.

“Picture someone you hate,” offers Catty, and Alice can see her pulling up the mental list, from the girls at school to poor dumb Will to Eloise, always Eloise— (Eloise, who finally moved in six months ago, who didn’t change a single thing about the house for weeks, and even then, made sure to ask them both about each and every item to see if it held meaning, and Catty stood there saying yes, yes, yes, about the potholders and the pillows and the kitchen plates out of spite.) But the truth is, Alice has never felt an anger strong enough to be called hate. Oh, she feels plenty of other emotions—worry, and panic, sadness, and fear—but they make her want to hold on to things as tight as she can, keep them together. She doesn’t understand the urge Catty has to break them instead.

Her sister watches, arms crossed, and waiting, and even though she seems more annoyed than wounded now, Alice remembers the look on her face when she first got home, before Catty realized Alice was there, on the couch, before she knew she was being watched, before she saw Alice, and wrestled the pain into anger.

When she thought she was alone, she just sat there, looking small, and sad, and hurt, and the thought of Catty hurting—of someone hurting her —that makes Alice angry. It lights a fire in her heart, a burning heat that spreads across her ribs, over her shoulders, and down her limbs and she winds up, and swings at the bottle, the impact sending a jolt through her wrists as the glass explodes. Her heart skips, a thrill when it breaks, a rush when it shatters, a nervous laugh escaping like steam from the kettle.

Shards rain down onto the gravel, and Catty whoops, and grabs her shoulders.

“Sláinte!” she says, her anger dissolving into pride. They are in this together now. The distance between them collapsed, lives folded like

paper.

And Alice wants to go again.

She reaches down into the crate, hand closing around another bottle, realizes too late the lip is broken, sharp. Pain flashes, shallow and bright, and she gasps, recoils as if bitten, the blood welling up across her palm. A sound escapes, part yelp, part cry, and she knows the cut isn’t deep, knows that hands and heads bleed badly, but she can feel her pulse in the meat of her palm, and the spreading ache and the sight of the blood still make tears spring to her eyes.

And then Catty is there, grabbing her wrist, twisting the cut to the light the way Eloise does when studying a splinter, and Alice knows she’s looking for glass. There isn’t any—no glint, no glitter.

Catty pulls her hand right up to her face.

And runs her tongue through the blood.

And just like that, the pain’s forgotten, replaced in an instant by

disgust.

“Ewwww!” shrieks Alice.

But Catty only laughs and licks her lips. “Yum.”

Alice shakes her head. “Disgusting.”

Catty shrugs. “It’s just you,” she says. “And whatever’s in you is in me. We’re made of the same stuff.”

She passes Alice’s hand back the way she passed the bat, as if it is an offering, a secret, something to be shared, and Alice stares down at it, watching as a fresh line wells from the cut. The blood is smooth and black as oil in the dark. She can smell the iron in it as she lifts her palm to her face, that rusted penny tang.

And this is a memory, so Alice knows what happens next.

Knows that, for just a second, she thinks of licking her hand but doesn’t, scrunches up her nose and wipes the blood on her jeans instead, and Catty leans the bat on the stump and tugs the headband from her hair and ties it round the cut, and they go home.

That’s how it happened.

But that’s not how it happens now.

Now, Alice doesn’t move. She just stands there, hand halfway to her mouth, as Catty watches, her eyes dark and lips stained red, and the night around them sharpens and blurs at the same time, till the pub is nothing but a smudge, but the blood on her hand is so vivid she can see the light from the streetlamp bouncing off. The bead becomes a ribbon

that rolls down her wrist, glitters like the glass on the gravel, and the sight of it doesn’t repulse her anymore.

It looks wonderful, candy bright.

She wants to know what it tastes like.

And Catty says, “Go on,” and her mouth begins to water, and her teeth begin to ache, and there is a hungry coil in her stomach, and Alice wants

to bring it to her lips, But she can’t— It’s like the air has turned to stone, or she has— And she can’t move— Can’t close the small distance between her hand and her mouth—

Tries so hard her whole body shakes— And feels like it will shatter until—

“Son of a bitch!”

Rachel’s voice tears her out of sleep.

And just like that, Catty’s gone, and the pub and the lot and the bat and the blood are gone, and all that’s left is the hunger, Alice’s whole jaw hurting, and her stomach clenched tight.

Rachel swears again, so loud Alice thinks she must be standing right beside her head, only she’s not, she’s at the other end of the suite. And yet, somehow, Alice can hear her ripping the sheets from the bed two rooms away, shoving them into the laundry bag and bitching to herself.

Alice puts a pillow over her head, pushes down as hard as she can to block out the sound, would worry about accidentally smothering herself but that doesn’t seem to be a problem right now.

The curtains are drawn, but light still pries at the edges, and Alice wants to burrow deeper, find her way back to Hoxburn, but it’s Monday morning and she has class and Rachel is still cursing. She forces herself up, opens the door in time to see her suitemate dragging the laundry sack into the

common room.

“What’s wrong?” she asks hoarsely.

Rachel kicks the laundry bag and mutters, “Hate it when I’m early,” and Alice should have stayed put, because she can smell it now, the blood on the sheets, and everything inside her gives a vicious twist, teeth sharpening in her mouth, and she has just enough time to close the door before Rachel glances up.

Alice shudders slightly, slumps back against the door, but the thin boundary of wood is not enough, and the blood is still there and the dream is still there and before she knows it, she’s biting into her own hand. The blood slicking her tongue tastes sweet and wrong, like rancid honey, but it steadies her, at least.

“Are you feeling better?” Rachel calls through the door, and Alice forces her jaw to loosen, watches the puncture marks heal like a time lapse in reverse as she swallows her own blood and lies through her clenched teeth.

“Yeah,” she manages, “a bit.”

“Want me to grab you anything?” Rachel must be leaning against the door because Alice swears she can hear the other girl’s heart rapping like knuckles on the wood before she tells her no.

Mercifully, Rachel and her soiled laundry leave, and Alice slides down until she’s sitting on the floor. Her laptop lies discarded at the foot of her

bed, the Post-it stuck on top.

She digs her palms into her eyes.

Last night, Alice found exactly zero Lotties in the school directory, but back home, Lottie is a common nickname for Charlotte, and she found twelve of those spread across four years in the record. Each one had a photo, and none of them were her. (Of course, it never occurred to Alice to ask Lottie if she was even a student, because by that point, her mind was blank, and her mouth was busy.) After hitting that dead end, she spent the next few hours scouring social media, trawling for any pictures from the party. There were plenty of those, though most were either tilted shots of bodies in neon light, close-up selfies, or artful pics of disembodied limbs, and she was just beginning to suspect that Lottie wasn’t there, wasn’t real, that Alice might simply be losing her mind, when she saw her.

It was almost dawn when she found the photo. One and only one, and in it, Lottie’s face is caught mid-turn, violet curls lifting off her cheeks as she flashes the corner of a dimpled smile, the edge of a brown eye. But it’s her.

Alice knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, because even through the screen, she found herself tipping forward toward the other girl’s gaze, had to look away before she fell in.

Alice saved the candid to her phone, and after that, went crashing into sleep.

But now she’s awake, and it seems like such a narrow lead. She still has

no idea what to do, how to turn a single out-of-focus picture into a flesh- and-blood girl who can explain what’s happening to her, who can tell her why, and there’s a voice in her head saying that it won’t make a difference, that it’s already done, that no matter how far she goes, how far she’s come,

there’s no escaping—

Class.

That’s it. Alice needs to go to class.

Sure, it feels a bit ridiculous, given what’s going on, but she knows how easy it is to fall behind, and then how hard to catch up. She gets back to her feet, pulls on a top and a fresh pair of jeans, and as she does, she tastes Lizbeth’s detergent wafting from her drawers, smells the dregs of Jana’s perfume, which she dabbed behind her ears before the party, feels the scrape of her own hair against her face, the whisper of cotton as it shifts against her skin, and the warmth of her gold pendant where it rests against her sternum, all of it so sharp it’s overwhelming.

A heartbeat quickens in her ears, and Alice gasps and presses a hand flat against her chest, relief welling up like tears until she realizes the pulse isn’t coming from behind her ribs. It’s that familiar eight-count beat, and soon the voice kicks in.

“When I was a child / I got lost in the woods . . .”

Alice digs the phone out from under the covers and silences the song, and the pulse, plunging herself back into that uncanny silence. Only it’s not really silent, is it, because if she listens, she can hear the footsteps in the hall and the groan of the pipes inside the walls and the tinny ghost of speakers playing somewhere on the Yard.

So many noises stacking, overlapping, tangling inside her head.

Alice drifts to the window, studying the blade of light between the curtains. She chews the inside of her cheek and reaches out, letting the sun graze her fingertips, bracing as she does for the sear of a hand on a hot stove, ready to recoil as her flesh begins to burn.

But it doesn’t.

There’s a strange sensation, sure, like ants crawling across her knuckles, a dizzy wrongness, like vertigo. She steels herself and pulls the curtain back, wincing as the too-bright light sends a lance of pain behind her eyes, like

the onset of a migraine.

But she doesn’t go up in flames.

Alice: 1, common lore: 0, she thinks, even as she hauls the curtain shut,

plunging the room back into relative shade.

Relative, because even with the blinds drawn, she can see everything in sharp relief, from the lines of tight script in the open textbook on her desk, to the wrinkles in her sheets, to the silver rings and bracelets adorning Lizbeth’s jewelry tree. (All of it real and not sterling, Alice knows, because her roommate made a point of telling her as she was unpacking that her skin rejected alloys, so she simply couldn’t wear anything unless it was pure silver or real gold, even made a joke about her body having expensive taste.) Now Alice reaches out and lays a questing finger on the nearest bangle, waits to see if it will singe her. This time, she doesn’t feel the wrongness of

it, doesn’t feel anything at all.

Alice: 2.

And maybe she’s feeling bolstered by those two points stacked in her favor, or maybe it’s the fact that her first class is econ and one of the students in her section lives at the Co-op (which means he might recognize the girl in the photo on her phone) but Alice shoves on her shoes, nicks a pair of shades from Lizbeth’s desk, and sets off.

Halfway across the Yard, she has regrets.

Even with the shades, the sun is piercing, and though the daylight doesn’t burn her, it plants itself like a hot wet hand on the back of her neck, reminding Alice of the time her family went out on the open water. The waves were rough, and she spent an hour retching over the side, and that’s how she feels now, off-balance, her stomach rising in her throat, only this time she is the ship and the girl and the rolling sea all at once.

By the time she reaches the nearest gate, her limbs are shaking, and when she finally stumbles into the safety of the building, she sags against the wall, waiting for the sickness to retreat.

A steady current of students fills the hall, headphones on, heads bowed, one of those grim reminders that your life is small and the world is big, and even when it feels like it’s falling down, it’s only falling down on you. To everyone else, it’s just going on as usual.

The scent of coffee reaches Alice from a kiosk. Her throat feels like it’s made of sandpaper, and she pushes off the wall and orders a straight coffee, simple, black, hoping to rack a third point in the game of Alice versus common lore. She takes a cautious sip, and shudders in relief when it doesn’t come back up.

But it doesn’t taste right, either.

She adds one sugar, two, three, but it’s like spraying air freshener over rot —all it does is add a second, noxious layer, a film on her tongue, and after that she gives up, dumps the contents from the cup, thirstier than ever as she heads for the econ auditorium.

The room is filling up, and she scans the growing crowd, until she finally spots the guy from the Co-op, manages to dredge up his name (Sam) right before she reaches his seat.

“Hey,” she says, and he looks up at her, starts to smile, and Alice swears she can feel his interest piquing, before she shoves the phone into his face.

“I’m looking for this girl,” she says, and his shoulders slump, before he even glances at the screen.

He shakes his head and mumbles, “Sorry, never seen her.”

“She was at the party.”

He shrugs. “So was half the class.” His mouth twitches. “Didn’t get her number?”

Annoyance prickles in her chest, but then the professor is clearing his throat, and everyone is taking their seat. Alice sinks into an open desk, stares down at the face on the screen, wonders if she should actually paper campus with flyers asking, Have you seen this girl?

She shoves the phone in her pocket, pulls the notebook from her bag, and tries to focus on the teacher’s voice— (so loud she can hear the echoes trailing in its wake) —his notes as they appear on the glaringly white screen— (Has it always been that bright?) —as the sights and smells and sounds around her mount— (the scratching of pens, the typing of keys, the girl chewing gum two rows ahead, and the guy, four seats over, jiggling his knee, or the cell phones buzzing in backpacks on the floor, or the sweat and sweetness hanging in the air, thickened by stress, and sleeplessness, and strong caffeine) —until it gets to be too much, and she puts her earbuds in, plays white noise as soft as it will go, hoping to muffle the people, the room, but it’s just like the coffee from the kiosk— (one thing atop the other, coating it instead of canceling) —and she’s trying to focus on the class, but she can’t because there are six bodies in her immediate vicinity, one to either side, two in front and two behind, and she can hear six hearts beating in six chests—

(can smell—taste? feel?—the blood inside those organs) —and then the guy beside her rolls his head atop his neck, the muscles cording, and her mouth goes dry, and her vision tunnels and her teeth begin to ache, and she doesn’t realize she’s digging her fingers into the desk until she hears the crack, looks down expecting to see broken nails and finds

splintered wood instead.

Alice shoves up to her feet.

A dozen heads turn, but for once in her life she doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. She escapes into the hall, and then, into the nearest bathroom, bracing herself against the sink.

Her reflection stares back from the mirror, and it has the gall to look like nothing’s changed, and fuck the two points in her favor, fuck the whole game of Alice versus common lore, because isn’t she entitled to some kind of cosmetic recompense? Where is the beauty meant to offset the horror of what’s happening? The suddenly clear skin, the perfect hair, the glamour and the grace?

The only thing Alice sees are the hollows beneath her eyes. Her eyes, which are still neither blue nor green nor gray but that same old muddy in- between, and if there is a fevered light behind them now, that’s hardly enough to make up for the rest of this.

For the fact that even in this tiled room she can hear the crush of bodies through the walls, living breathing eating laughing bodies, and hers isn’t making any fucking sound, and how ridiculous and wrong that her chest is tight and she still feels like she can’t breathe, even though she doesn’t seem to need the air, and her heart still feels like it’s trying to claw its way out of her chest, even though it isn’t even beating, and Alice wants to scream, but she can’t bring herself to do it, even now, doesn’t want to make a scene, so instead she bends her head and splashes water on her face, and tells herself everything will be all right, even though she knows she’s lying.

And she’s still slumped forward at the sink when she hears the door swing open, the smack of bootheels on the tile, the twang of Hannah’s voice.

“Don’t tell me you’re still wrecked,” she drawls.

Alice drags her head up to the mirror, looks at herself instead of Hannah, focuses on the narrow streams of water running down her face, her jaw, her throat.

Hannah folds her arms across her chest. “How hard did you party at the Co-op?”

“Too hard,” says Alice, aiming for a wan smile and falling short into a grimace.

She tries to straighten, but feels her body clench around that dull, pervading hunger. “Cramps,” she adds, folding over again.

Hannah digs around in her purse, pulls out a bottle of pills. “You need some ibuprofen?”

She takes a step toward Alice as she says it, and her perfume is overwhelming, a vanilla-and-peach-scented cloud that hangs in the air and tastes like soap on Alice’s tongue. But beyond it, behind it, beneath it, she hears that steady pulse. Picks up the iron scent of blood.

Her throat tightens. She doesn’t move.

Hannah rattles the bottle. “Well?” she snaps impatiently.

Alice pushes off the counter, turns, and reaches for the pills—or at least, that’s what she means to do, but as she starts moving toward the other girl, she can’t seem to stop, the distance between them collapsing, until Hannah is pressing the bottle into Alice’s chest. She looks down, watches her fingers curl around Hannah’s, the pills nested like a doll inside their hands.

“Thanks,” she says, and this is the part where she’s supposed to let go, but she can’t seem to find the will to pull away. She can feel the pulse through the other girl’s skin, the heat of her body, imagines warming herself on this little fire of a life.

“Um, yeah, you can keep them,” says the other girl, trying to drag her hand free.

But Alice doesn’t let her. Her body doesn’t let her. She doesn’t blame it— her skeleton hurts, her muscles and tendons hurt, her skull hurts, all the way down to her teeth, the kind of pain these pills can’t touch, but maybe Hannah can. Like Colin, in the Yard last night. Alice remembers how much better she felt afterward.

She looks up into Hannah’s face, her dark eyes narrowed in a confusion that Alice swears she can taste. The thin flick of eyeliner over each, eyebrows raised, her lips pressed into a line, a combined force that would have once made Alice shrink back, embarrassed.

Alice, who sits at the back of the lecture halls because she hates feeling like she’s being watched, or seen.

Alice, who’s the barnacle on the party wall, not the center of attention.

Alice, who doesn’t know how to take up space without apologizing for it.

That same Alice meets Hannah’s eyes and holds her gaze, trapped like the

hand beneath her own. And she’s pretty sure she’s seen something about compulsion in those TV shows, and Alice has no idea if it’s real, but Hannah is still standing there, a new flush of color in her cheeks.

Stay, thinks Alice. Stay right there.

She closes the last sliver of space between them, their hands knotted between their bodies, her teeth sharpening, her mouth starting to ache, and Hannah is just staring at her, lips parted and eyes wide, and it’s working, Alice honestly can’t believe it’s working— Which is exactly when it stops.

Hannah blinks, and recoils, the air around her suddenly heavy with disgust.

“Ew, no,” she snaps, wrenching backward. Alice lets go, and the pill bottle drops, rolls, forgotten, beneath a stall, as Hannah scrunches up her

nose and says, “I’m not a dyke.”

The word bounces off the tile walls.

A single vicious syllable. (Alice remembers the first time a boy called her that name, the sting of it like a slap, the way it made her cheeks burn hot and her eyes sting, the way Catty walked straight past her and broke his nose, and somehow that was worse, and afterward they walked home in silence, Alice brushing away tears, until she finally asked, “Why did you hit him?” and Catty shot back, “Why didn’t you?” Said nothing else till they reached the steps outside their house, and then she turned and took her by the shoulders and said, “When

the world pushes you, push back.”) The word echoes through the bathroom.

Alice feels her face go hot again, but this time, it isn’t shame.

It’s rage.

Rage, at all the Hannahs of the world, convinced the worst thing a girl like Alice can feel is want, and at this particular Hannah, for looking at Alice and seeing a monster, just not the one she thinks.

The kind of rage that made Catty take a bat to the bottles in the parking lot.

Alice gets it now. Why her sister was always breaking things.

Because rage shatters out, not in.

She looks at Hannah, a tight smile tugging at her lips. “What did you just call me?” she hears herself ask, but doesn’t recognize the edges in her voice.

Those are new.

Sharp.

And maybe Hannah couldn’t feel her sorry attempt at compulsion, but she does feel this, Alice is sure, watches the girl’s face crumple as she backs away, one step, then two, until her shoulders hit the dryer on the wall, and Alice can taste her fear, the way she tasted the menace on the guy last night, his violence surrounding them like smoke. She can hear Hannah’s racing heart, and it makes her teeth hurt, and in that moment, she wants Hannah to

turn and run.

Not so she will get away.

So Alice can go after her.

But Hannah doesn’t move, and after a second—a minute, an hour—the world steadies, and Alice feels her senses steady, too, reality rushing back, and she shoves past the girl and out of the bathroom before she loses herself again.

OceanofPDF.com