Two Wrongs

by Rebecca Reid

  ‘You don’t? Everyone runs around after her – she’s completely self-involved. She costs Max – Max’s parents – a fortune in cleaning bills for that house, let alone in booze. She’s a nightmare.’

  Chloe had finished putting her underwear back on and was brushing the evidence of her afternoon out of her hair. ‘She’s my best friend,’ she replied.

  Rav raised his eyebrows. ‘I know she is. But how much do you do for her? And how much does she do for you?’

  Chloe didn’t have a response for that. ‘I need to get ready,’ she said finally.

  When Chloe got to Max and Zadie’s bedroom she opened the door to see a scene of unbelievable perfection. Zadie facing away, looking into the dressing-table mirror, wearing a white silk robe and white silk underwear, a glass of champagne in one hand. Her hair was freshly washed and dried, shimmering in perfect curls, her lips bee-stung and pale pink. Her skin seemed to glitter and her huge green eyes were rimmed with the kind of lashes people paid for. Chloe hadn’t ever seen her like this. She was always beautiful – her amazing genes and seemingly limitless clothing budget made sure of that. But this was a different kind of beautiful. The last few weeks of slowing down, drinking wine with dinner instead of vodka at 4 a.m., had made a world of difference. She looked happy. Right. Max was bending to kiss her neck, wearing the trousers and shirt from his black tie, the bow tie draped around his neck. Sitting above Zadie’s collarbones was a diamond necklace so sparkly it could only be real.

  ‘Coco! Look what Max gave me!’

  ‘I thought you were supposed to get presents on your birthday, not give them?’

  Max shrugged. ‘I saw it and thought of her. Isn’t she a knockout?’ Zadie giggled, clearly aware that everything Max was saying was true. ‘You look lovely, too, Chloe.’

  Chloe had felt pretty when she’d left her room. Rav had kissed her neck and told her that she was gorgeous. Her hair had looked straight and sleek, and she’d ventured into the frightening territory of red lipstick, trying to contrast with the pretty green dress she’d spent a week of her student loan on. But now she felt silly. Frumpy. Like someone’s single older sister, allowed to tag along to a party out of sympathy.

  ‘What were you up to this afternoon?’ Max asked, filling up a glass and passing it to her. ‘I noticed Rav wasn’t on the walk either.’

  ‘I was reading,’ she lied. If Max noticed that she had gone dark pink, then he had the civility not to mention it.

  Zadie was still looking in the mirror, neatening her lip liner. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Max. Chloe knows Rav is horrid.’

  ‘Why is he horrid? I like him. That’s why I invited him.’

  ‘He is horrid. Everyone says it. You just like him because he’s good at rugby and he laughs at all your jokes.’

  ‘There are worse attributes for a bloke to have.’

  Zadie stood, spritzed herself liberally with a Chanel perfume then took down the white silk dress which was hanging from the four-poster. ‘Do me up,’ she said, with the silk pooled at her feet and halfway up her body. Chloe and Max moved at the same time. They laughed awkwardly.

  ‘Which of us?’ asked Max.

  ‘Chloe. She’s got smaller fingers. She’ll manage the little buttons better.’

  Max flopped on the bed, drinking another glass of champagne, watching as Chloe slid the zip up, the dress hugging every perfect inch of Zadie’s body. The zip was covered by dozens of tiny white buttons which went into tiny eyelets. Chloe knelt down to get closer, realizing that if she did one wrong, she would have to start the entire thing again.

  ‘You would make a wonderful lady’s maid,’ said Zadie.

  Max laughed. ‘What do you mean, “would”?’

  Chloe forced out a laugh. It was a joke. They were joking. But when she glanced sideways to the mirror and saw herself in her plain dress, on her knees, fixing the buttons of the girl in the designer dress holding the champagne, she couldn’t help the jolt of rage. She looked away – too quickly. Her lip brushed one of the folds of silk, leaving a tiny red smudge. She looked up to see whether Zadie had noticed, but she was too consumed with her own reflection. She could say something. In fact, because she was her mother’s daughter, she even had a little stain-remover pen in her bag upstairs.

  ‘All done,’ she said, looking at the red smudge. ‘You look perfect.’

  ‘You really do,’ said Max, leaning in for another kiss. ‘And you look beautiful, too, Chloe.’ He placed his hand on Chloe’s waist and leaned his head towards her. Her breath caught in her throat, thinking for a moment that he was going to kiss her on the lips. What would she do? What would she do if he suggested that they, all three of them, fell into bed together? A frisson hung in the air, just as it had back at Zadie’s parents’ place on New Year’s Eve. They had more of an excuse than ever, Chloe reasoned. They could claim it was a birthday one-off, that they had tried to be as daring as they always seemed to be. But his lips landed on her cheekbone before she could answer her own question.

  ‘Let’s go down,’ said Max. ‘Let’s get the party started.’

  Zadie

  While she wasn’t exactly pleased with Max’s choice to organize the party without her, Zadie had to admit he had done an amazing job. Their bedroom was divine. Earlier that evening they had bounced on the bed like children then pulled each other’s clothes off with an enthusiasm they hadn’t felt for months. Afterwards, they lay next to each other, staring up at the canopy of the four-poster. The feeling of worry and guilt had started to set in – that somehow she was going to screw the evening up for Max and that he wouldn’t love her any more if she did. These past few weeks of living a slower, quieter life had proven to her how much she needed him.

  Max had jumped up, keen to start getting ready, and Chloe had arrived, beautiful in a simple green dress, always so tasteful and understated. Zadie felt overdone, like she was compensating for something. She had asked Chloe to do up the buttons on her dress, trying to drink enough champagne to drown the nasty voice in her head telling her that she was trying too hard, that everyone was going to laugh at her for going over the top.

  On the way down to the dining room, he had called her back, leaving Chloe to go down by herself. ‘Come with me,’ he had smiled, taking her back to their bedroom, where he took out a square leather box.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ He laughed, clearly having caught her expression. ‘It’s not what you think.’

  He opened the box and on the velvet cushion was the ring from his bedroom. Even more rudely beautiful than she remembered.

  ‘It would be mad for me to propose now, I know that,’ he said, sliding it on to her finger. ‘But I thought maybe you might like to wear it tonight. Eventually, I’m hoping you’ll wear it for ever.’

  Zadie kissed him full on the lips, then held out her hand to admire the ring against her fingers. Her hand looked so grown-up. ‘I can’t wait,’ she said. And to her own surprise, she meant it. She really couldn’t wait. She wanted Max. Just Max. No one else.

  ‘Maybe twenty-one will be a fresh start,’ she said, watching Max shrug on his dinner jacket.

  ‘That sounds perfect. No more fighting. Just you and me, against the world. I love how you’ve been lately, how you’ve finally started to grow up. I’m proud of you. You’ve really changed.’

  A chill came over her. So that was what this was. A reward for changing. A gift given because she had been a ‘good girl’. All those evenings sitting on the sofa, watching TV, waiting for him to come home from practice so she could make him a chicken salad and listen to him talk about sport. He didn’t want her. At least, not any real version of her. He wanted the person she had been pretending to be for the last few weeks.

  ‘Shall we go down?’

  She followed him to the stairs before her resolve gave in.

  ‘I’ve forgotten my lipstick,’ she lied. ‘You go down. Don’t keep your audience waiting. I’ll be there in a moment.’

  She went back to the room, goi
ng through her bag, looking for the hip flask she had packed for emergencies. She couldn’t find it. Where the fuck had it gone? A noise by the door made her look up. Standing there was Rav, a vial in his hand.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Want to share?’

  Coke made her more fun. That was certainly true. She glanced down at the ring finger of her left hand. Max’s words repeated themselves, making her feel hot and claustrophobic.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, taking the vial from him and tipping the white powder on to the back of her hand. ‘I really do.’

  26

  Then

  There may not have been as many people as Zadie would have liked, but the party felt ten times its actual size. Everyone was so swollen with the excitement of it all they counted as two or three of themselves. Drinks were served in a pretty drawing room painted pale blue and filled with flowers. It had huge French windows that spilled out on to a terrace, and the remnants of the late-evening sun seeped through the glass. The chandelier chinked gently in the breeze and cast little rainbow lights all over the room. There was yet more champagne, and cocktails as well. Gentle music came from somewhere unseen, and everyone was laughing, talking, pretending to be a grown-up. After what felt like minutes but was actually an hour Max clinked his glass and a hush fell across the room. ‘I’m not going to make a big speech,’ he said, to much crowing and shouting from the room, Zadie loudest of all. ‘I just wanted to say thank you for coming, I love you all, and I will consider any sobriety a personal affront. To dinner!’

  They followed Max into a dining room, again predictably beautiful. A mahogany table was laid with more glasses and cutlery than Chloe could ever have imagined what to do with. She’d heard someone say once that you should start on the outside and work your way in, which she was grateful for. Though, she supposed, she could always copy Max if things got really bad. Each place had a little name card on it. Once again, Chloe found herself seated next to Rav; Wilbur was on her other side. Zadie was at the far end of the table, between two of Max’s other friends. The group around Zadie was riotous. They were laughing, shouting, talking over each other. At Chloe’s end, everyone was talking politely about rugby and whereabouts in the Home Counties their parents were from. Chloe watched Zadie as she filled wine glasses in between the top-ups from the waiting staff, asking wild questions which somehow seemed to make everyone laugh even harder. The strap of her dress was slipping down her shoulder and her eye make-up was starting to smudge under her eyes, which only served to make her look more dangerously beautiful. Rav was staring at Zadie across the table, a slight frown creasing his forehead.

  ‘I wish she would let it be about Max tonight,’ Chloe ventured. ‘It is his birthday, after all.’ Rav turned, as if Chloe had pulled him back from thousands of miles away. ‘What?’

  ‘Zadie. I know she doesn’t mean to do it, but she draws focus. Makes things about her.’

  Max was watching her from the other end of the table, clearly trying to seem as if he was fine with her behaviour, with hearing her voice cutting over every discussion, with how loud her laugh was. But he wasn’t. It was his birthday. It was fair that he didn’t want Zadie to be the centre of attention, wasn’t it? Every time there was a lull in the conversation Zadie’s voice would fill it. Louder than anyone else’s. Talking faster than anyone else. How could anyone talk that fast? Chloe watched as Max caught Zadie’s eye and discreetly put one finger to his lip, signalling her to be a little quieter. Zadie’s eyes flashed dark, a storm brewing. She mouthed ‘fuck off’ at him, still smiling, but obviously unamused. Chloe scanned the table to see whether anyone else had noticed. It seemed they had not.

  Max had seated himself between two of the prettiest plus ones, a girl named Cora on one side, and a girl named Lisbette on the other. He was laughing at something one of them had said, a hand on Cora’s arm, a hand on Lisbette’s leg. Her gaze flicked between Max and Zadie. Both were laughing, both seemingly happy. She caught sight of herself and Rav, reflected in one of the silver pitchers of water, untouched on the table. Perhaps neither of them was the problem.

  Dinner went on for hours, course after course of barely eaten food, all of which was delicious but got in the way of drinking, talking and laughing. Eventually, once an enormous cake had been brought out so Max could blow out the candles, a surprise organized by his parents, he stood up.

  ‘Not another speech, I promise,’ he said, laughing. He was especially handsome in the candlelight, ‘but a game.’

  There were cheers of approval. ‘It’s Hide and Seek, of sorts. Only a little more grown-up. The lights go off – all the lights – and the girls hide. The boys look for them. And whatever happens when you’re found is entirely up to you.’

  For a moment there was silence. Then a sort of rush of approval. The girlfriend contingent looked at each other, trying to assess whether they had the message right. Was this really going to turn into boyfriend-swapping? Max added, ‘You can of course hunt down your partner. But you’re not obliged to. Right. Ladies, you have ten minutes to hide. Let the game begin!’

  Someone had clearly been instructed to follow his cue, because the lights went out. The few candles still burning in the dining room stayed, but as soon as Chloe, along with the other girls, fled to find a hiding place, she realized just how dark ‘dark’ meant. She was used to suburban darkness, diluted by the lights through her window from passing cars or an orange glow on her ceiling from the streetlamps. This was the kind of darkness you could only experience if you were in the middle of nowhere. Chloe paused by a window, looking over the drive at the back of the house. The waitresses from the party were loading their things into a car, laughing and chatting. Finished for the evening, off home for a cup of tea and bed. A strange part of her wished she could join them, to go back to a normal house with normal people, the kind of people who would have found this game shocking.

  She heard footsteps behind her and realized that she couldn’t stay where she was. Who did she want to catch her? Rav, she supposed. So she should hide near his bedroom, on the far side of the house from hers. That way he would be more likely to stumble across her. She could go to her own bedroom, of course. Lock the door to her staircase, lock the door to her room. Let people assume she wasn’t alone in the locked room. Go to bed. Make elusive comments tomorrow about not wanting to kiss and tell. But something inside her, the same something that had kissed Rav in their first term and let him do delicious things to her body that afternoon wanted to know what might happen next. Zadie always said that they were too young not to be having an adventure or making memories. And she was right.

  The game had gone on for almost twenty minutes when Chloe was caught. Strong hands on her arms. Thick arms. A thrill ran through her as she recognized a hint of CK One. Max held his hand out to her and stroked her upper arm, clearly trying to work out which of the girls she was. ‘You smell delicious,’ he whispered in her ear. Did he know? Had he realized that it was her? His lips traced her neck. She allowed herself a moment, his lips sending signals from her neck all around her body like electricity. Then she stepped back. ‘It’s okay, Coco,’ he said in a low, hungry voice, ‘I’m allowed.’ He slipped his arms around her waist, gripping her tightly, and dipped his head to meet hers. She sank into the kiss, her heart soaring. She knew it was wrong, but it felt amazing.

  Then she felt his hands sneaking under her dress, tickling her thighs as he searched for her underwear, and came back down to earth. This was moving too fast. She pushed him away. ‘What are you doing?’ he said, sounding exasperated. ‘I told you, Zadie won’t care. It doesn’t matter.’ But Chloe couldn’t do this, even if that were true. Could it be true? Was she so insignificant that sleeping with her would mean nothing? ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, and slipped out from under his arm. He muttered, ‘For fuck’s sake,’ under his breath and turned away. She heard his footsteps go towards the master bedroom. Where should she go now? She gripped her way down the stairs, along the corridor. The dining room st
ill had a couple of candles burning, thankfully. She sat for a moment, listening to the noises of the house, the loud silence. She searched for a water glass then took a candle from the table. She’d take it with her upstairs so that she could manage the spiral stairs without tripping and breaking her neck. And tomorrow she would pretend that she had been just as debauched as the rest of them, keeping silent out of modesty.

  Afterwards, she tried very hard to remember what made her stop outside Max and Zadie’s room. She tried to find some internal excuse for it, something less perverse than wanting to see Max and Zadie together. Something less desperate than hoping they might ask her to join in. But both of those things were true, however hard she pretended to herself that they weren’t. The door was ajar and she paused when she heard soft groaning. Holding up the candle to see who it was, she almost dropped it.

  Lying on the floor, looking like a fallen angel, was Zadie. Her dress was torn. Chloe moved lightning quick, raising the candle, trying to assess the damage. Zadie’s lip was split and bleeding, dripping on to her ripped silk neckline. Her eye was turning purple, matching similar bruises on her arms. The ring on her finger was bloody from a cut on her knuckle, as if she had tried to fight back. Her eyes were moving under the lids and she was breathing, but she looked half dead. ‘Zadie,’ she whispered. ‘Zadie, what happened?’

  ‘Max,’ Zadie whispered.

  27

  Now

  Chloe’s blood was up. Should she turn around and run? Why was he here? And should she be scared? She knew Max could be nasty. Look what he had done to Zadie. Was he still like that? Did a person ever really stop being like that?

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked after what felt like an hour.

  ‘Very rude. Aren’t you going to come in?’

  ‘You’ve got some serious gall, inviting me into my own flat, Max.’ She pushed past him and put her bag down on the hall floor. ‘Why are you here? Get out before Rav sees you.’