The Secret Place

With a vast silent roar the sky bursts open, the clouds explode to fragments that dissolve before they hit the ground. Out of the white and enormous blaze it drops into her open palms:

Him.

She was thinking like a stupid little kid. Booze nicked from Mum’s wine rack, chicken blood; baby stuff, for eyelinered idiots playing witch games they don’t understand.

In old times, there were punishments for forcing a girl who had made a vow. Becca’s read about them: buried alive, flayed, clubbed to death-

Him.

No other sacrifice could ever be enough, not to purify this.

Becca almost gets up and runs, back to the common room and French homework. She knows she could, if she wanted. Nothing would stop her.

Selena staring into her palmful of hair, the hunch of Julia’s shoulders when she came back in from the seething dark, the fast desperate beat of Holly’s voice. The moments, over the last few weeks, when Becca’s hated all three of them. Any day now it’ll be too late for them to find their way back, ever again.

Yes. Yes I’ll do it. Yes I’ll find a way.

The ferocity of celebration that rises to meet that, outside her and inside, almost throws her across the room. The dots across her belly drum wild rhythms.

But I don’t know who I need to

Not Chris Harper. Chris didn’t need to be kind to Becca, he didn’t do it to get something – Becca knows perfectly well that a guy like Chris isn’t after someone like her – and free kindness doesn’t go with evil. But that leaves Finn Andrew Seamus François everyone, how can she-

It comes to her like the curve of a great smile: she doesn’t have to know who. All she has to know is where and when. And she can choose those for herself, because she’s a girl, and girls have the power to call guys running any time they want.

Becca knows how to be super-careful. Nothing is going to crack open her secret.

All the sky streams with white, great joyous cool sheets of it pouring down over her hands and her upturned face and her whole body, filling her open mouth.

On Thursday morning Becca wears her outgrown kilt again, and this time Sister Cornelius loses the head and bangs her desk with the ruler and gives the whole class a hundred lines of I will pray to the Blessed Virgin to grant me modesty. And then she sends Becca back to her room to change.

There’s no way to know what time this guy and Selena were meeting, but at least Becca knows one place where they met. Tonight in that clearing place? one text said, way back in March. Same time?

In the last place in the world where she should have brought him. For a second, zipping up her too-long new kilt, Becca’s afraid this guy must have power of his own behind him, to turn Selena into such a total lobotomised idiot. She spots a dropped scrap of paper on the carpet, launches it spinning like a moth around the light fixture to remind herself: she has power too.

The phone doesn’t feel black and hot any more; it’s turned foam-light and nimble, buttons pressing themselves almost before Becca’s thumb can find them. She redoes the text four times before she’s positive it’s OK. Can you meet tonight? 1 in the cypress clearing?

She might not get the chance to check for an answer, but it doesn’t matter: he’ll be there. Maybe Julia’s already set up a meeting for tonight – Becca doesn’t know how she contacts him – but he’ll blow Julia off, if he thinks Selena’s beckoning. It rises off his texts like heat: what he really wants is Selena.

He can’t have her.

Becca leaves soon after midnight, to give herself time to prepare. In the mirror on their wardrobe door, she looks like a burglar: dark-blue jeans and her dark-blue hoodie, and her designer black leather gloves that Mum gave her for Christmas and she’s never worn before. Her hood strings are pulled so tight that just her eyes and nose stick out. It makes her grin – You look like the world’s fattest bank robber – but the grin doesn’t show; she looks solemn, almost stern, balanced on the balls of her feet ready for battle. Around her the others breathe slow and deep as enchanted princesses in a fairy tale.

The night glows like some strange daytime, under a huge low half-moon packed tight in stars. Over the wall and far away music is playing, just a tantalising thread of it, a sweet voice and a beat like running feet. Becca freezes in a shadow and listens. Never thought that everything we lost could feel so near, found you on a- and it’s gone, faded on a change of wind. After a long time she starts moving again.