What You Become
Authors: C. J. Flood
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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Copyright © 2016 Chelsey Flood
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Chelsey Flood to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.
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For Ursula Freewoman and all my friends.
Live True.
Contents
One
Mackerel fishermen found Ti’s things on a rock at Durgan Beach early Saturday morning. Black jeans, her beloved long-sleeved dolphin top, grey duffle coat, purse and, round the neck of an empty Bells bottle, the seahorse necklace I bought for her birthday, with its chain broken. Her twin sister’s things were there too, though I don’t remember what they were exactly.
Ti De Furia was my best friend in the world; Ophelia De Furia was something else completely.
News that the twins were missing tore through Flushing’s high street the next day, and the De Furia café shutters stayed down for the first time since they’d opened five years ago. Regulars milled about outside, despondent.
‘Beautiful girls, they were.’
‘So spirited!’
‘No match for Durgan rip tides in a storm.’
Charlie Fielding said she’d seen Ti with a bottle of whisky the night before when she was running to the Drama block for a forgotten prop. It was show night, so school was busy, and soon others were claiming to have seen Ti stumbling at the edges of the playing field or crying in the car park. Rumours spread fast in Flushing, and after everything that had happened theories developed.
Some kids said the twins had drowned themselves on purpose, to escape all the trouble they’d caused. Others guessed they’d been skinny-dipping drunk and got into danger by mistake. People claimed to have seen the girls hours, minutes, seconds before they disappeared.
It was an accident. A double suicide. A tragedy.
The fact that never changed was that both girls were dead.
I wouldn’t believe it, and neither would my little brother Joey. He refused to accept Ti was dead until her body turned up, which made perfect sense to me. We didn’t discuss Ophelia – she was unknowable, and capable of anything – but it was nice talking about Ti in the present and future tense.
‘She’s just hiding out,’ Joey told me, lying on my bed waving his feet in the air. He was wearing his dinosaur socks, and I watched the tiny T. rex swaying. ‘Waiting for all this to die down, and then – pow!’ He slammed his heels down suddenly.
‘Pow,’ I repeated, and he turned to me so I could see the freckle flecks on his nose.
‘She’ll emerge like a falcon from the ashes!’
‘Phoenix.’
‘What?’
‘Like a
phoenix
from the ashes.’
‘I think they changed it to falcon.’
‘They didn’t change it to falcon, Joe.’
‘They did, Rose, actually. Actually, they did.’
‘She’s punishing her parents, that’s what it is. Her dad’s the one that should have drowned.’
‘Nobody drowned, Rose. They didn’t!’
‘I know.’
‘And nobody should. Ever!’
‘No. I know.’
I put my arm out, and he burrowed into it. They were comforting, these conversations with my brother, even if he was only eight years old, and half convinced he had super powers.
Mum and Dad didn’t like it. They whispered to each other about denial and responsibility, and the importance of facing up to the truth, but I no longer listened to what they said.
Joey was the only one who had never given up on Ti, and I loved him for it.
Because if Ti was dead (
which she wasn’t
) it was all of our faults.
Two
It all started with a poo in a flower bed. A small act of revenge from Ti, towards our Drama teacher, Ms Chase, for the recent expulsion of Ophelia.
It was dark, with a quarter moon and lots of cloud cover as Ti dashed up the drive of a large semi-detached house, and I followed, adrenalin making the night seem to bounce. It was her turn to wear the purple balaclava we’d found in British Heart Foundation, and I felt strangely conspicuous with my face out in the breeze. A security light clicked on, turning the colours up for a second, and we kept running, past the house and into the depths of the garden. We knew the drill by now: aim for shadows.
Round here, the gardens were huge: five times the size of mine, ten times the size of Ti’s. We were on Castle Road where all the rich kids lived, as well as some of the teachers. Lawns and rockeries and netted ponds holding koi carp. Sheds and garages with cars, plural, and conservatories. Lots of trampolines.
The security light clicked off, and we stepped out from a hedge, half blind and clutching each other. Nerves made me need to wee, left laughter right at the top of my throat, and I was already giggling helplessly as Ti led the way across the first garden.
‘This way,’ she said, tearing over the neat grass. A stepladder helped us over the first fence, an apple tree the second, and the third had only a hedge, which we scrambled through no problem. Black windows loomed over us as we ran, and my guts squirmed because anybody could be looking out – murderers, paedophiles. With my thumping heart, even ghosts seemed possible.
Nightwandering was a hobby of ours, but usually it was aimless. Stealthily dressed we crept from our houses after midnight to explore the town in peace. We lay on the coast path to watch the stars; peed in the long jump sandpit. At night the hierarchies of school ceased to exist, and we were the queens of Flushing.
Nightwandering, my courage almost matched Ti’s. But she took risks needlessly.
Using a trampoline to mount a particularly high fence, for instance, when I’d found a perfectly quiet and safe alternative. I winced at the racket she made: creaking springs and stretching canvas, then
crash!
She bellyflopped on top, the whole fence wobbling, her feet scrabbling at the slats of wood as she hauled herself over, shaking with laughter.
I looked around with pathological frequency, pressed into the shadows, expecting lights to come on and our captors to emerge, and then finally Ti landed in the garden with a shaking thud, swearing because she’d bitten her tongue.
‘Careful how you go,’ she lisped. ‘The ground’th wonky.’
A little closer towards the house one of the fence panels was loose, a nail missing from the bottom, and pushing it aside now, I squeezed through, wood scraping the soft skin of my stomach.
‘I tried to tell you,’ I said, when Ti called me a show-off, and it was true. But Ti had an uncanny ability to turn her ears off when receiving instructions.
‘Just hurry up, okay,’ I said. ‘In, out, remember?’
Ti clutched my wrists, and pressed her forehead to mine. This was our power move, though she used it more often than me.
‘This is it,’ she whispered, and the wool of her balaclava was itchy against my skin. Her curly dark hair sprang out of the bottom, instantly recognizable to all who knew her. ‘Ms Chase’s abode.’
I felt like I was going to collapse. Ms Chase was the kind of teacher who prided herself on not giving second chances. I should have tried harder to talk Ti out of this, but she convinced me that surviving the escapade would make us brave and exciting, and I wanted to be those things so much.
A light came on in a frosted window upstairs, and my blood pumped so hard it made me dizzy.
‘Careful,’ I pleaded, as Ti crept towards the house, unshaken by the proof that Chase was inside. There was no way I was going any closer if I could help it. Upstairs, the light went out, and my stomach fizzed with nerves as Ti looked around for the perfect place to take her revenge. Stepping into a flower bed, she whipped down her black jeans, and I was confronted with a full view of her bum.