Bet Your Life
Authors: Jane Casey
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For Emma Young, queen of the one-liner
CONTENTS
It was like a nightmare.
The girl opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling. Just the ceiling. That was all she could see.
She lay completely still, because she couldn’t do anything else. She couldn’t sit up. She couldn’t move her feet. She couldn’t wiggle her fingers or her toes. She was completely paralyzed. Helpless.
Maybe it
was
a nightmare.
Or maybe she was in hospital. If there’d been an accident, and she’d been hurt, she could actually be paralyzed. Stuck like this forever. Locked in her own body. Communicating by blinking.
A tear slid down the side of her face, running into her hair. She didn’t want to be paralyzed for life. And she couldn’t remember an accident.
She couldn’t remember anything.
Except … she remembered dancing, her hands over her head, her body moving as the music filled her brain. She remembered the sudden silence when she’d locked herself in the bathroom, her heart still pounding as if she was running when she’d been standing completely still. She remembered seeing her own face reflected in the mirror, flushed and smudgy with smeared makeup. She remembered walking down the hall, or trying to, and bouncing off the walls.
And someone laughing at her.
Someone helping her.
Someone making her lie down on a bed. To rest. To recover. To sleep.
She had been sleeping. Maybe she just hadn’t woken up properly yet.
The girl closed her eyes again, and thought about waking up. She willed herself to move. Nothing had ever been as difficult. She imagined sitting up, swinging her legs off the bed, walking to the door.
It was as impossible as flying to the moon.
She would raise her hand, she decided. That was enough of a challenge. Her brain sent the message to her right hand and she waited. And waited. And waited.
Not a twitch.
She couldn’t even lift one finger.
She opened her eyes again.
The ceiling didn’t look like a hospital ceiling. The room was dark but there was some light from the window. Even though she couldn’t see much, she could see enough to know it was a bedroom in a house.
Not her bedroom. Not her house.
I want to go home.
She tried to say it, but all that came out of her mouth was a low moan.
And
something
moved in the corner of the room.
She would have screamed if she’d been able to. She would have jumped off the bed and run away.
All she could do was make the stupid moaning noise again.
“It’s all right.” His voice was deep and reassuring. “It’s fine.”
What’s fine? Where am I? What’s happened to me? Why can’t I move?
None of those questions actually made it out of her mouth. This time, the sound she made was more of a whimper.
The bed dipped under his weight as he lay down beside her and ran a finger down her cheek.
“Go back to sleep, princess. It’s not time to wake up yet.”
Another tear slipped out of the corner of her eye and he caught it on his fingertip before it could reach her hair. He put his finger in his mouth and tasted it.
“Sweet.”
She couldn’t respond. His hand came down over her eyes and she closed them, obedient.
It wasn’t time to wake up, that was all. She’d be fine when she
did
wake up.
“You won’t remember any of this,” he murmured tenderly. “Which is a shame.”
Everything was receding. The fear was still there, but it was so far away. And her body was drifting off too, spinning away from her into star-dappled space. She let it go. She let everything go.
“
You
won’t remember,” he said again, and this time he sounded as if he was laughing. “But don’t worry. I will.”
It was the last thing she heard before she slipped away.
Most people go out for the night and expect to have fun. I hadn’t counted on it, and I’d been right.
That was a very tiny consolation.
Surrounded by people laughing and joking and enjoying life, I felt like the saddest, loneliest person on earth. As if that wasn’t enough to deal with, it was the coldest night of the year so far, and I had no coat. I wrapped my arms around myself and tried to stop my teeth from chattering as my breath misted in front of my face. Luckily, there was something to distract me. Just like everyone around me, I tilted my head back and stared at the sky. It was pure black, with more pinprick stars scattered across it than I had ever seen in light-polluted London. The sky was spectacular enough on its own, but when the first fireworks streaked up and flowered into brief glory, I almost forgot I was freezing.
Almost.
I had started out the night with a coat, obviously, because a Halloween fireworks party meant a lot of standing around on Port Sentinel’s muddy recreation ground, waiting for the fun to start. I’d worn my favorite coat of all time, my new but old coat, found in the backroom clutter of the charity shop where I worked part-time. Fine Feathers was wall-to-wall designer cast-offs, thanks to the rich, fashion-conscious residents of Port Sentinel, but this coat had no label, just a couple of threads that showed where one had been. Narrow across the shoulders and waist, it swirled out before it ended just below my knees. It was made from ultra-black woven tweed and had tiny black roses embroidered around the
inside
of the hem, as if it wanted to keep them a secret. It made me walk taller and I adored it. And when I had gone to retrieve it from the cloakroom after a good two hours of not-totally-ironic dancing at the disco in the recreation center, it had disappeared. Now the heat of dancing had completely worn off and my thin cotton dress was keeping out precisely none of the cold. I had tights on, and boots, but I was still shaking with cold.
A skinny black cat elbowed me in the ribs as she sashayed past, waving her tail, her ears set at a jaunty angle. I tried to work out if I knew her but she disappeared into the crowd before I could see her face, and there were a lot of cats at the party. I’d been in Port Sentinel for four months and it didn’t surprise me that the local girls had gone for tight-fitting costumes, preferably with plenty of cleavage on display. Any excuse, quite frankly. Top choice: ghost, featuring pale-blue lipstick and ashy foundation, because ghosts apparently wore almost nothing—sheer dresses rather than the traditional white sheet. Second: vampire. Leather and red lipstick appealed to a certain kind of girl and, more importantly, a certain kind of boy. There were a lot of bitten necks on display along with the fireworks. Third: witches in short black dresses, high boots and fishnet tights. Port Sentinel was full of witches, in my experience, but they usually didn’t bother with the costume. Finally, there were the pirates, a nod to Port Sentinel’s smuggling past. These pirates wore tiny skirts, half-buttoned shirts, knee boots, and cheeky grins along with their eye patches. And all of them, but all of them, had got their coats before they came to stand outside.
It was notable—and typical—that if any of the boys were wearing a costume, they had made a token effort at best. I wasn’t really in a position to criticize. I hadn’t spent a huge amount of time on my own outfit. I’d only decided to go at the last minute, having resisted every effort my cousin Petra had made to persuade me.
“You don’t understand.
Everybody
goes. It’s always the Saturday closest to Halloween, which in this case is the first of November, and it’s really the start of half-term. Everyone who’s away at boarding school comes back, and all the holiday-home kids turn up. It’s like summer all over again,” she had said, sounding wistful. Almost fourteen, she was still too young to go to the over-sixteens disco, though she’d promised me she’d be there for the fireworks.
“Saying it’s like summer is not the way to sell it to me,” I’d pointed out.
“You know what I mean. It’s not like nearly dying and everything,” Petra said impatiently. “There’s a buzz. It’s fun. You see people you haven’t seen for ages.”
“That sounds great.” I didn’t manage to sound enthusiastic, because I wasn’t. I was determined to keep my distance from anything that might remind me of the summer. The
everything
Petra mentioned in passing had been a whole world of pain. Nearly dying had been the easy part.
Mind-reading as usual, my cousin Hugo looked up from his book and smirked. “Don’t worry. He won’t be there. Halloween parties and fireworks are not his thing.”
He
. Hugo meant his friend, my ex, Will Henderson. Will, who had been sent away to boarding school at the start of September, mainly because he’d been going out with me. I longed to see him and I hoped to avoid him. It was the sort of confused thinking that made my head hurt.
“I wouldn’t have thought Halloween parties would have been your thing, either,” I said.
The smirk had widened to a wicked grin. “I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”
Now that I was surrounded by so many scantily clad girls, I understood the appeal.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Hugo for a while, or Petra at all. I stopped watching the fireworks bloom and fade so that I could scan the crowd. Everyone was packed tightly together and I wasn’t tall enough to see very far, what with all the rugby players and surfers who were standing shoulder to broad shoulder in front of me. I saw plenty of people I recognized, but no one I would call a friend. That wasn’t altogether surprising. In any Port Sentinel gathering, I was likely to find more enemies than friends. It was no wonder I was looking forward to the following day, when one of my best friends from London was coming for a visit. I had missed Ella more than I’d even realized.
In the meantime, Hugo. I moved to my left, trying not to step on any toes, and worked my way toward the front. A skeleton swore in my ear as I moved past her. Her face was a glowing skull that floated against the dark night and I couldn’t tell who she really was, but I was absolutely sure I should keep my distance from her. Skirting a kissing couple, looking back over my shoulder, I skidded on the slick mud and almost fell. I put a hand out to stop myself and grabbed the nearest thing, which turned out to be Ryan Denton’s arm.
Oh no.
“Hey, Jess. How’s it going?” Because of the fireworks exploding above our heads he said it loudly enough that the guys standing nearest to us heard, and turned, and I saw the same look spread across their faces: amusement and anticipation. I could have done without turning into a running joke, but I hadn’t been given much of a choice about it.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just falling over. Thanks for lending me your arm.”
“Any time. Hey!” I’d already started to walk away, but he caught hold of my wrist and pulled me back. “Don’t go. Watch the fireworks with me.”
“I’m looking for someone.”
His eyebrows drew together. “Who?”
“Just Hugo.”
“Oh.” A smile, like the sun coming out from behind clouds. Cousin, not competition. “It’ll be easier to find him when the fireworks are over.”
He was right. Everyone was packed together on the recreation ground, kept a safe distance away from the pyrotechnics behind a semicircle of barriers. Once the display was over I would be able to move around without colliding with people.
“OK. Good idea.”
“Come here,” he said, and drew me toward him. A small gold dot shot into the sky and transformed itself into a huge shimmering orb that hung for a few seconds before fading. The light slanted across Ryan’s face, highlighting the line of his cheek, the edge of his jaw, the full curve of his lower lip. It struck sparks in his sea-blue eyes. God, he was cute.
So off-limits it was untrue, but cute.
While I’d been gazing at him and his perfect mouth, he’d been checking out my costume. “I like the ringlets. What are you supposed to be?”