Toxic

by Nicci Cloke

I shook my head. ‘Not at all, mate. I think it’s great.’

  JB smiled. ‘It feels good now I’ve said it. It was, like, you guys are my oldest friends – why aren’t I telling you something so important about myself? Why am I even scared?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I gave him a hug. ‘I’m glad you did. You shouldn’t have been scared.’

  ‘Next?’

  The people in front had collected their envelopes and my business-studies teacher, Mr Langdon, was looking at us. ‘Oh, Logan. Hold on –’ He rifled through a pile of envelopes in front of him. ‘Here we are.’

  ‘Thanks, Mr L.’

  ‘Good luck.’

  I stepped away from the table and waited while Daisy and JB collected theirs. Dev came over and nudged me.

  ‘Logan, we’re cool, right?’ he said.

  I glanced at him and then back at Daisy, who was already tearing open her envelope as she came towards us. I felt stupid for holding on to mine, making a big deal out of it.

  ‘How’d you do, babe?’ I asked.

  Her eyes flicked across the page. ‘Three As and a B!’

  ‘Nice one!’ Dev high-fived her and then she flung her arms round me. I hugged her tight, not wanting to let go.

  JB was reading his results. ‘An A, two Bs and a C,’ he said, with obvious relief. ‘Good job I’m dropping chem though.’

  ‘Well done, mate,’ I said, clapping him on the back, and then I realised they were all looking at me. Not my favourite thing at the best of times.

  ‘Come on then, open it,’ JB said, grinning at me. ‘You’ll be fine.’

  ‘You can wait if you want,’ Daisy said. ‘You don’t have to do it with all of us watching.’

  ‘No, it’s fine.’ I knew I should just get it over with. It’s not like I was worried or anything. I slid my finger under the flap of the envelope and dragged it open. The piece of paper felt thin and cheap in my hand. I unfolded it and read – I was so conscious of their eyes on me that it took me a second to line up the characters on the page and translate them into words.

  ‘Logan?’

  I looked up at Daisy and realised I’d been quiet for longer than was comfortable. ‘Two Bs and two Cs,’ I said.

  ‘Hey, that’s great,’ JB said. ‘Well done, man.’

  ‘Yeah, good work, Logester,’ Dev said.

  ‘Thanks.’ I shoved the paper back into the envelope. ‘Shall we go?’

  As we walked back out towards the car park, I started to feel numb. I knew those results were fine, good in fact, especially given I hadn’t tried particularly hard. But I hadn’t been expecting them – I know that sounds stupid now. I know that makes me sound like an idiot. But, I don’t know, I’d just always got by on being reasonably clever – and now, suddenly, that hadn’t been enough. I’d been expecting to have some big celebration and a couple of As under my belt but instead I’d got my first ever Cs. And I had no one to blame but myself.

  ‘Hey! Logan!’

  I glanced up. Zack was standing by his dad’s car, about to get in the passenger side. ‘How’d you do, mate?’

  I did a weird kind of thumbs-up thing.

  ‘Want to come over tonight and have a few beers?’

  I hesitated. ‘Um … yeah. OK.’

  ‘Cool. You too, Dev-Dogg!’

  And then he climbed into the car and Gordon sped off in his usual show-off style. Zack hadn’t even looked in JB’s direction.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ Daisy asked. I glanced at JB, who just shrugged.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it, mate.’

  I TRIED TO persuade JB to come to Zack’s that night anyway, but he said he wanted to hang out with Georgie and their parents. They were going for a pizza at the new Italian place in town, or so he said, and Josh was going with them. It was kind of a big deal because he hadn’t met the rest of the family yet, apart from JB, who wasn’t his biggest fan. I hadn’t really seen Georgie since the two of them got together – I knew it had caused a bit of tension with Charlotte, and that that was how the girls’ holiday had ended up getting cancelled. How Hope had ended up on ours. Other than that, I hadn’t taken much interest.

  Daisy’s parents were taking her out for dinner too, and she’d asked me if I wanted to go – but I knew she was just being nice. It wasn’t that her parents didn’t like me; they seemed to, and they were always really polite to me. But I still didn’t feel like I knew them all that well, and this was a special occasion for them – they were really proud of pretty much everything Daisy did. I didn’t want to get in the way.

  And, OK, if I’m being honest, I wanted to get drunk.

  Mum was working when I got home from collecting my results, but when I got out of the shower that evening I heard her calling for me as she came in the front door.

  ‘You’re home early,’ I said, coming to the bathroom door in my towel.

  ‘Wanted to hear about your results,’ she said, smiling at me. ‘I would’ve called on my lunch but this piece of junk had no battery again. You’re going to have to help me pick a new one.’ She tossed her phone onto the hall table. ‘So come on then. How’d you get on?’

  I swallowed. It wasn’t like Mum was the kind of parent who pushed for perfect grades or would cry if I didn’t go to Cambridge. She expected me to do my best and that was it. No matter what I said at that moment, she’d probably tell me, ‘Well done,’ and then make me a cup of tea or even offer me a beer.

  But somehow I heard myself saying, ‘Two As and two Bs.’

  Because I wanted to see that smile spread across her face. I wanted to hear her say, ‘Wow, that’s great!’

  Because I’m weak.

  I left the house an hour later, after Mum had broken out a dusty bottle of prosecco from the cupboard. It tasted like ash in my mouth and I’d had to keep a smile on my face – while inside, the whole time, I was kicking myself. Why had I said that? Why had I lied? Two Bs and two Cs were perfectly good results – why hadn’t I just told her the truth?

  But I knew why. It was because I’d let myself down by not studying. I was ashamed. And so I drank a glass of prosecco and then another and then I made my excuses and left – but not before Mum had promised we’d go out to dinner at the weekend to celebrate.

  ‘This is exactly what the Rainy Day Fund is for,’ she’d said, a bit fuzzy-eyed from her third glass of prosecco. ‘We’ll go to that new pizza place or something, push the boat out.’

  And of course that made me feel really great. As I walked to Zack’s, I felt like the lowest person alive. I knew I’d have to tell Mum the truth, and I knew she wouldn’t understand why I’d lied.

  Before that had to happen, there was beer.

  Zack’s family lived in a massive house right near the centre of town. There were steps up to it from the street, and a huge double front door. I rang the bell and listened to it echo inside the house. Zack’s mum answered, her hair in a towel and a glass of champagne in her hand. ‘Hello, love. Go on through – they’re in the den.’

  ‘Thanks, Mrs Conway.’

  The hallway was one of those ones where the upstairs landing was a balcony that went right the way round, and there was a massive swooping staircase in front of me. I’d got used to it by now, but it was still pretty impressive. Zack’s mum disappeared back upstairs. ‘Help yourself to whatever you want, love,’ she called back to me. ‘I’ve just got to put my face on.’

  I wandered through the house, my footsteps echoing on the polished floorboards. The den was a room right at the back, looking out over the huge garden. It was kitted out with giant leather sofas, a wall-mounted flat-screen TV the size of a cinema screen, and a log fire. The house had this fancy sound system with hidden speakers in every room and a voice-activated dock, and in the den it was currently playing the playlist Zack had made for Malia. I recognised a couple of songs from the boat and felt sick.

  ‘Logan!’ Zack came towards me with a beer and did the Zack handshake. Dev was already sprawled on one sofa and
Marcus was sitting in one of the La-Z-Boy recliners. He raised his bottle to me in a toast.

  I took the beer from Zack and downed most of it in one.

  ‘Why didn’t you invite JB?’ I asked, before I even realised I was going to.

  Zack frowned. ‘Don’t know what you’re on about, mate.’

  ‘Yes, you do. He was right there, next to me and Dev, and you blanked him. Just like you cut him out of the new WhatsApp group.’

  Zack shrugged. ‘Look, I know what you’re thinking. But it’s not personal, Lo. JB can do whatever the hell he wants with whoever he wants.’

  ‘So why don’t you want to hang round with him any more?’ My voice was getting louder. I finished the rest of the beer.

  Zack glanced back at Marcus and Dev, who were sitting there in silence, watching us. ‘No offence, lads,’ he said, looking from them to me and back again, ‘but I can’t have anyone thinking I’m some kind of faggot.’

  I felt winded at the way the word just fell out of his mouth, like it was nothing. And I realised that it had been nothing – at school people called each other gay and fag and homo all the time, like it was funny. How had it taken me this long to realise that it wasn’t?

  ‘Who’s a faggot?’ Gordon said, appearing through the doorway with bags of takeaway. ‘No son of mine, that’s for sure.’ He grinned at me. ‘Hi, Logan. Let me get you another beer.’

  I stared at Zack, and then I put my empty bottle down on the coffee table. ‘That’s OK, Mr Conway,’ I said. ‘Turns out, I’m not really in the mood for celebrating after all.’

  I TOLD MUM I’d come home early because I was feeling ill. I went to bed and I mostly stayed there for the next week and mostly she let me. I told Daisy I was ill too and she sent me nice messages and funny links and she stayed away like I’d asked her to.

  I didn’t tell Zack anything because I didn’t bother replying to his messages. I left the new WhatsApp group and I put the old one on mute. After a while, I realised my phone had an off button and I pressed it, and some days it stayed off.

  I stopped sleeping at night at all really. I would lie there and lie there and I’d think, Soon I should go to sleep, but just the act of turning over, of closing my eyes, felt impossible. And so I’d stay where I was, letting all these thoughts keep circling through my head. I should’ve studied more. I thought I was so smart. I’m an idiot. I’ll have to completely rethink my UCAS application. Maybe I shouldn’t even bother going to uni. I probably can’t hack it anyway, look at me.

  It went on like that for hours sometimes, while I just lay looking at the ceiling. I kept thinking of Uncle Darius’s face on my phone screen. Good man. Yeah, right, the voice inside my head kept saying. Can’t even get a job in a sandwich bar, can’t even get the marks I was predicted in piss-easy AS exams. Why would Daisy even want to be with me? She could do so much better.

  Sometimes I felt like crying but mostly I just lay still, because doing anything more would have felt like moving a mountain. The voice liked that too.

  What do I have to cry about? What’s actually wrong with me? Man up.

  Man up man up man UP.

  Loser.

  Maybe you’re thinking the same.

  One night, lying there, I ended up on Facebook. I’d had an account since Year 9 but I hardly ever used it any more – I’d kind of stopped when me and Hope were together, because she wasn’t on it and thought it was kind of lame. Getting the friend request from Lucy was the only reason I’d opened the app in weeks. But, you know, there’s only so much stuff to look at on the Internet and I was bored of my usual sites, so I logged in to see what was going on.

  It was mostly the same old thing – people posting memes I’d seen a million times and funny cat videos which, to be fair, I always appreciated. Charlotte had posted some photos of her, Daisy and Georgie in the park, and it was kind of nice to see those. Nice to see Daisy happy.

  Better off without me, the voice said as I carried on scrolling down.

  I was surprised to see Nate’s name crop up in my feed. I didn’t even know he still uploaded stuff to Facebook. But he’d posted a whole album of photos, ‘Malia 17’, only a couple of hours before. I clicked on the first picture, the six of us at the airport, taken by the minibus driver we’d hired. It’d been an early start and Zack’s parents had said they’d rather pay for that than get up and take us. It’d been so much more exciting, all of us bundled into a seven-seater, the sky getting lighter as we bombed along the motorway, and the driver had let Zack hook his phone up to the stereo. We’d ended up chatting to him, this young guy, and when we’d all lugged our bags out onto the pavement outside Departures, he’d offered to get a photo of us. I studied us all, arms round each other, grinning and looking half asleep, half drunk already. It seemed like a long time ago.

  I flicked through the rest of the album – mostly group shots, a couple of JB throwing up and one of Dev asleep standing up in a bar somewhere, his head resting against the sweaty wall. There was a cool one of me, Zack and JB jumping into the pool one afternoon, where Nate had caught us mid-air, and another good one of him and Hope on loungers, both wearing shades and making fake-pouty faces. A shot of all of us outside Rodeo, the first or second night, all of us laughing at something someone must have said just before Nate took the picture, and the lights flashing bright pink behind us so we all kind of glowed. I liked that one. I downloaded it, thought about making it my desktop background.

  We all look so close, I thought. Surely we can be again?

  Admittedly I’d started in on a bottle of rum from Mum’s cupboard.

  There was a photo of Dev and Hope dancing on the boat, a crowd gathering round them. I didn’t remember that happening, and my stomach lurched, searching the crowd for the guy in the vest top. I didn’t know if I was ready to see his face again.

  The next photos were on the boat too, but they weren’t particularly good – a selfie Nate had taken with JB, where the angle was bad and it was mostly their foreheads with a bit of sea behind them. One of the crowd on the deck which was kind of blurry, like Nate’s hand had moved while he was taking it. And then one on the island, at night, when the paint party was happening – but Nate hadn’t used his flash so it was mostly dark, you could only make out the DJ with his strobe light.

  I was clicking through fast, not even sure why I was still going. I didn’t want to see any photos of myself that night. I didn’t want to remember it any more.

  But I was in luck, because there weren’t any photos of me. That was maybe a bit weird, given me and Nate had ended up spending most of the day together – but then I guessed it hadn’t really been a photo-taking kind of time. It had all started with him asking me about what had happened with Hope the night before – I guess she’d told him about it after I’d left. We’d both been wasted and we’d ended up talking for a long time, just sitting on a couple of big rocks on the other side of the woods, away from the party.

  And then everything had just started spilling out – I’d even started trying to explain how I’d felt after me and Hope broke up, how I’d already been feeling down before that happened, and even though I wasn’t exactly in the right state for a heart-to-heart, Nate had actually listened. I’d told him how me and Daisy had been arguing, how guilty I was feeling about the whole Hope thing, and he’d understood.

  ‘It’ll all sort itself out,’ he’d said. ‘You can talk to me, you know.’

  I’d really believed it then – and we’d ended up talking about all kinds of crap, drunk with our bare feet hanging in the sea: about my dad living in America and Nate’s parents putting pressure on him to go to uni, about how Daisy and me were kind of different and it worried me, about how Nate had never really liked anyone as much as he liked Polly. About how much he missed his sister, who’d died two years ago.

  It had felt great, opening up like that, but we’d been drunk. I tried to imagine calling him up now and telling him how much worse I was feeling, but I couldn’t. What was he su
pposed to say? Um, get some real problems, Logan?

  I glanced at the next photo. It was in a bar somewhere, so I assumed it was the next night. The last night. But I wasn’t in this one either – it was just Zack, Nate and Dev. I stared at it for a second, wondering what was bothering me about it.

  And then my eye caught on Dev’s vest. It was the same one he’d been wearing on the boat.

  I mean, I’m not the kind of guy that pays much attention to his mates’ clothes. But, like most of Dev’s clothes, this was a pretty distinctive vest.

  I flicked back to the boat pictures and then forward to the bar one. All three of them, same clothes. Nate had taken the picture himself – you could see his forearm along the right side of the picture, and they were all cheering into the camera, their eyes bloodshot and glazed-looking. They certainly looked like they’d been on it all day.

  This was definitely the night of the boat party. The night Zack had come home with me, and I assumed he’d fallen asleep in the same room I had.

  So what was he doing out on the strip with those two?

  And why had they all lied about it?

  I clicked onto the next picture in the album. Same night, same outfits, same bar – but in this one it was Zack and Dev, both with their heads tilted back as they tried to down a pint of something, whatever it was splashing all over both of them and the floor. Nate’s thumb obscured the bottom left corner of the screen, and above it you could just make out a group of guys clapping Zack and Dev. I switched my attention to the other side of the photo, which was mostly taken up by the bar – industrial-looking metal with green lights hanging over it.

  But right at the edge of the photo, the bottom right corner, there was something else.

  At first I thought it was just Nate’s other thumb. He’d been drunk enough that it was pretty likely. But when I looked closer, I realised that it was someone’s hair – someone standing in front of Nate, right in front of Nate, and just in the edge of the shot. Someone with reddish blonde hair.

  Emily had reddish blonde hair.