The State of Grace

by Rachael Lucas

  I open my mouth to say that, no, there’s another packet on the table over there, and then I realize that Charlotte’s making a point. But even I can tell that that’s the lamest excuse ever, and Holly doesn’t even let it register. She just takes the strawless glass, downs it in one, and takes a flat bottle of something clear out of her bag.

  ‘Sausage rolls. Excellent,’ says Archie, helping himself to four at once.

  I don’t really know how things happened. It’s like time kaleidoscoped and one minute they’d all arrived and the next – because, weirdly, Gabe has this effect on people – we were messing around and actually taking the piss, playing Musical Statues and laughing our heads off and it was childish and silly and brilliant and everyone was laughing. I suppose the cider helped. And I wasn’t even superglued to Anna’s side, which is what usually happens. She was off somewhere else and I was hanging out like an actual look-at-me-I’m-doing-this-properly proper person.

  ‘Just going to the loo,’ I say, leaving the girls, who are covered with straw after someone had broken open one of the bales and we’d ended up having a straw fight, throwing it around until the barn was carpeted with the stuff and the room smelled all deliciously soft and warm and like a stable and I felt safe.

  ‘All right, Grace?’

  I can see shapes by the fire pit, but they’re in shadow.

  ‘Hi.’

  I can’t see who it is and suddenly I feel awkward again, like I’m failing the how-to-do-this-right test. So I keep walking towards the house and the bathroom.

  My eyeliner has smudged and I’ve got straw in my hair. The light in the bathroom is yellow-bright and my eyes look a bit mad and red and wild and I know if Mum was here she’d be giving me That Look, the one that says it’s time to calm down now, darling, but I don’t want to because I feel almost dizzy with the everything of it all.

  I go back outside and the shadow people are still there, and I make my way over. It’s Emily, with Archie, Tom Higginson of two-broken-ankles fame, Megan and – with a sort of internal sigh of familiarity and relief I realize – Anna.

  There’s a click and a flare of light, which illuminates Tom’s face. He inhales on a cigarette and passes it towards me, eyebrows raised, his mouth pursed as if he’s holding his breath.

  ‘I don’t smoke, thank you,’ I say, watching as he exhales a stream of green-smelling smoke, which swirls through the air. He gives a satisfied nod, and looks at me with an odd expression I don’t recognize. I look at Anna, whose eyes widen slightly, but she doesn’t say anything. He offers her the cigarette and she shakes her head.

  ‘I’m all right, thanks.’

  I feel like I’ve missed something again. Anna seems to know what the right thing to say is, because nobody looks at her like she’s weird.

  Archie reaches across and takes it between finger and thumb, sucking smoke into his lungs, his eyes narrowed.

  ‘I’ll have some,’ says Megan.

  ‘I’ll see you inside,’ I say to nobody in particular, and I make my way back to the barn.

  I’ve screwed up somehow and because I’m already teetering on the edge it’s as if all the magic shatters out of the evening. My bones ache with tiredness and my head is crashing full of noise and the people are everywhere and I want it all to stop now, but when I look at my phone I see it’s midnight and there’s a text from Leah which says –

  If Mum asks, I was at Malia’s house this evening, OK?

  – which doesn’t make sense because obviously she was at Malia’s house, because that’s where she said she was going, and I want a cup of coffee and bed and –

  ‘Grace!’ Rhiannon drags me by the arm into the centre of the room where there’s a big circle of people sitting on the straw-covered floor. ‘Come on, we’re playing Spin the Bottle.’

  It feels as if everything in my vision is beginning to melt. The music is banging and the voices are going wonky and everything feels as if it’s been smudged, as if someone took an oil painting and smeared it sideways with the palm of their hand.

  ‘You OK?’

  Anna appears out of nowhere and sits down beside me. She’s cross-legged and she sort of bobs herself sideways, giving me a shoulder nudge, which is comfortingly familiar because it’s her, and because it reminds me of Mabel. The room smells of beer and too many perfumes and hot people and squashed sausage rolls.

  ‘I’m not sure I’m exactly a Spin the Bottle sort of person,’ I say to Anna.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ says Anna, and for the first time since I can remember I worry that I’m a sort of awkward inconvenience. And she’s like a sort of talisman, and I don’t want to risk that. She keeps me safe. So I just sit there on the floor.

  I’m feeling really weird now. I could just get up and leave, except I’m sort of jammed in between people and it would be super awkward and maybe I could just escape when nobody is looking, which isn’t now.

  I try to distract myself. I watch as Holly positions herself directly opposite Gabe, and Charlotte edges herself in beside him, smiling at him sweetly. She looks a bit fuzzy round the edges and she’s got a bottle of cider, which she’s drinking, through a straw. (‘Do we assume they hadn’t run out after all?’ Anna whispers to me.)

  Her make-up is still perfect, though. How do people do that?

  ‘Right then, everyone,’ says Holly loudly. The circle listens, because Holly’s like that. Charlotte looks unimpressed.

  Gabe, who’s joking with the boy sitting next to him, doesn’t pay any attention to Holly.

  Someone turns the music down, which helps my head a bit, but the jostling noise of everyone is so loud in my head that I want them all to just stop talking, now. I want to scream at them to shut up. I start picking at the fake black nails, pinging them off one by one. It hurts a bit, like I’m pulling the ends of my fingers off, but it distracts me from what’s going on, until Anna nudges me again.

  ‘Grace.’

  I look up from the little nest of fingernails that sits between my crossed legs, and feel myself going ice cold.

  There’s a noise, and it’s building.

  It’s a roaring, jeering, cheering sort of noise.

  And it’s directed at me.

  ‘Come on, then,’ says Gabe, standing over me.

  He extends a hand downwards, offering to pull me out of my space in the circle. I shake my head slightly and push myself up. The nails skitter on to the floor and lie on their backs like ten little beetles.

  And then the clapping starts, slowly.

  Charlotte, who has somehow taken back the hostess role, is standing by a side door that leads out of the barn – not to the terrace where the fire pit is smouldering, but into a little room with concrete walls and stainless-steel sinks. It looks like some kind of milking parlour. Gabe steps back.

  ‘After you.’

  For a moment I wonder if I could make a run for it, but I’d have to climb across a heaving circle before I made it out of the door.

  So I walk into the room, and Gabe follows, and the door closes behind us.

  I close my eyes. I can feel the smooth cold greyness of concrete on my hands, which are balled up behind my back and pressing up against the wall, which I’m leaning on for support. And it smells of dust and old things and faintly of something clinical, which reminds me of hospitals and headaches. I can hear the party outside and I wonder if Charlotte’s standing right by the door waiting to hear kissing noises, except kissing doesn’t make a noise, and this room is mainly just quiet and I realize something in my ears is rushing in the space where the music used to be. I close my eyes and bite the inside of my lip and I realize I’m counting breaths in out in out in and I know that I should have gone home ages ago because now I’ve had enough of all this and there’s no way of leaving and I don’t know how to say I want to go and . . .

  ‘David Tennant’s my Doctor.’

  I open my eyes.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘He’s my Doctor.’ Gabe’s voice soun
ds loud in the echoey concreteness.

  He nods his head towards the picture on my T-shirt.

  ‘Ten,’ he says, explaining unnecessarily, because of course I know what he means. David Tennant’s my Doctor too, just like Peter Davison is my dad’s. And he’s peering round the side of the TARDIS on the front of my shirt, with his sonic screwdriver in hand and his long brown dustcoat and his Converse.

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘Good.’

  I swallow, and it’s so loud that I swear I hear it echo around the whole room.

  ‘It’s a bit mental out there, isn’t it?’

  And I look at Gabe then.

  Not Gabe the boy everyone fancies from our year, but Gabe the actual person. And I watch as he runs a hand through his hair, and he does a sort of smile at me, and I see his one tooth crossed over the other, and then he hitches himself up on to the work surface beside me so he’s close enough for me to feel the heat of him through his shirt, radiating towards my arm. And I think then that my heart is thudding so loudly that he can probably hear it and I feel like I’m made of shivers.

  And I know why we’re in here. The rules say we have to kiss, because it’s Spin the Bottle and that’s the whole idea. And generally I’m really good with rules because they make life nice and uncomplicated and also hello, Asperger’s. Duh. We’re good on rules. But this is Gabe Kowalski and I am me, so that’s not going to happen. I decide to be practical.

  ‘The rules are that we’re supposed to kiss.’

  Gabe’s eyes widen slightly.

  He’s got really, really long eyelashes.

  ‘But it’s OK, because we don’t have to. Nobody will know.’

  And then he looks at me for a second that lasts a really long time. And then he sort of cocks his head to one side slightly as if he’s thinking about something. And he sort of leans towards me, so the words are almost a whisper on my skin and not an actual sound.

  ‘What if we want to?’

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘An actual proper kiss?’ Anna skips sideways beside me as I push the wheelbarrow across the stable yard. We’ve had this conversation about five times already. The thing is Anna is desperate to keep the feeling of the party going, and I don’t have the words to tell her that I need to switch my brain off. It happens.

  People – even the best kind, like Anna – don’t really get that I need downtime. But I was on high alert in the lead up to the party, and even sleeping in a strange bed meant that there were loads of new sounds and smells and noises to deal with, and the people and the – well, the everything. Not to mention the actual proper kiss.

  I need to be quiet, somewhere, and just let myself settle, like a snow globe. But it’s hard to make people understand that.

  So I sort of brace myself and just get on with it, like I’m balancing on a high wire with a basket on my head. Someone ends up adding another thing to the basket, and I can’t form the words to say no, so I just grit my teeth. The thing is I love Anna, so I want to be with her. She’s beside me in a pair of borrowed jodhpurs and my old wellies, skipping with excitement, clueless about what she’s supposed to be doing. The wheelbarrow wobbles sideways. It’s heavy, and I’m tired, and the acrid ammonia smell is biting at my nostrils. The cold of the metal in my hands is familiar, though, and comfortable. Anna is chattering away and I don’t think she even realizes I’m not listening. Last night used up everything I have, and even my brain is tired.

  Despite all that, though, I can feel a weird swooping feeling inside when I think about it, so I turn to her and say yes.

  ‘An actual proper kiss.’

  I feel the nerves kicking in again. It’s like someone’s shooting electric shocks down my legs and I can hear my heart thumping in my ears. Because when I think about the feeling when I walked out of the room, and everyone was looking at me and Gabe, it felt as if something secret and magical instantly flipped over to a dark side of something dark and horrible and unnerving. Holly Carmichael had said, loud enough that I could hear as I walked past, ‘Probably the only time freaky Grace will get a snog between now and when she’s about thirty,’ and I’d felt myself go all prickly with embarrassment.

  I hadn’t looked Gabe in the eye all through the rest of the game. I just looked at the floor and fiddled with a piece of straw, and felt my cheeks prickling with a scarlet that didn’t stop. Anna took great pleasure in nudging me every time that Holly didn’t get chosen, right up until Charlotte’s parents had appeared at 1 a.m. and their huge driveway was filled with car headlights and parents looking bleary eyed in the darkness and – in what felt like moments – the spell was broken and the party was over.

  I dump the wheelbarrow contents by the muck heap and start forking it up to the top of the steaming pile.

  ‘Eww,’ says Anna, wrinkling her nose. ‘Do you have to do this bit?’

  I pause for a second, the metal of the fork tines scraping on the concrete. When I’m tired like this, everything is sharper and louder and harder. I don’t mind mucking out stables. In fact, I quite like it. I like the way that every day at the stables is the same. I think that won’t make sense to Anna, though, because who would like shovelling horse shit?

  ‘Nearly done,’ I say, because I think that’s what she wants to hear, and – feeling guilty – I sort of shove the last bit into the edges with my boot.

  ‘Can we get a coffee now, then?’ Anna’s walking backwards beside me as I trundle the barrow back up and put it in place. She gives a twirl, crashing into the yard broom and knocking it over with a clatter.

  Polly emerges from her horse Hector’s stable next door.

  ‘You lot making enough noise?’

  Anna, who is a bit nervous around Polly, flushes pink and steps back again, knocking against a shovel, which sets off a domino effect until all the yard tools are lying in a heap on the floor.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, trying to gather them up.

  Hector, who is a huge bay dressage horse with Bambi eyes, pops his head out of the stable door to see what all the fuss is about. He’s got strands of hay hanging from his mouth and he gives a sigh, as if to suggest that we’re interfering with his weekend, and disappears back inside.

  ‘When you’ve quite finished,’ says Polly, who is definitely joking – she’s like a one-person sarcasm training school, ‘if someone’s putting the kettle on, I’d love one. I’m dying of thirst here.’

  ‘So what happened last night?’

  I’m curled up on the sofa in the tack room, surrounded by the smell of saddle soap and leather, with warm, stinky stable rugs hanging overhead. I could live here quite happily. In proper winter, when it gets cold, Jill, who owns the stables, sometimes lights a fire and then I think I could stay forever.

  Polly is warming her hands on a mug of coffee, and Anna is perched on the arm of the chair. She flicks me a sideways look.

  ‘I saw that,’ says Polly. She takes off her beanie hat, rubs her white-blonde hair. When it’s squashed flat like this, she looks younger. Less spiky, somehow.

  And I let Anna tell the whole story, because she’s still bursting with it, and I’m on the verge of running out of words. I can feel my batteries going flat, because I’ve had to negotiate people this morning when usually I just potter around the yard and it’s my safe place. The thing is that it sort of feels as if it’s not my story now, anyway. It’s something that happened in a tiny little bubble, and nobody is ever going to know about it – well, besides me and Anna and now Polly – and normal service will resume at school next week. I’ll be Grace who is on the periphery of things, and Anna will be Anna who is accepted by the cool people and the swots and everyone in between, but chooses to be friends with me, and Gabe will carry on being the boy everyone fancies, and –

  Polly pokes me with the toe of her boot, stretching out her leg.

  ‘So are you going to see him again?’

  ‘Hardly,’ I say, giving her A Look.

  ‘Well, he kissed you. That suggests an elemen
t of interest.’ Polly cocks her head sideways, looking at me directly.

  I look down at the knees of my jodhpurs, which are pretty disgusting, even by my standards. She carries on.

  ‘You like him, right?’

  ‘I don’t know him,’ I say reasonably.

  ‘Grace,’ says Anna, snorting. ‘This is Gabe Kowalski we’re talking about.’

  ‘OK,’ says Polly, and I see her and Anna exchanging glances. ‘So you are physically attracted to him. And kissing him was not an unpleasant experience.’

  I feel myself go icy hot and cold all over in a rush. No, it was not unpleasant. It was so not-unpleasant that I even forgot that it was happening and I kissed him back and didn’t accidentally lick his nose or bang teeth or fall over or any other horrors, which, frankly, wouldn’t be that unsurprising given my track record for doing ridiculous things when under pressure.

  ‘Grace?’ Anna reminds me that meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, they’re waiting for an answer.

  ‘I’ll see him next Monday, I imagine, when we go back to school.’

  Polly shakes her head, then tears open a packet of custard creams.

  ‘You girls need to take the power back.’ She stuffs a biscuit in her mouth, whole, and continues through a muffle of crumbs. ‘If you’re interested in him, why don’t you ask him out?’

  I don’t even know where to start with this one, so I just drink my coffee and pull a face and Anna doesn’t say anything either. Polly picks up an old edition of Horse and Hound and starts looking at the back pages, and we all sit there in a silence that might be awkward but might not be. I can never quite tell.

  It’s nothing to do with Gabe being a boy that stops me contacting him. It’s just – being me. I don’t imagine Polly hesitated for a second before asking Melanie out, either. She’s just the sort of person who does things. I’m the sort of person who thinks about doing things, then goes home and eats toast instead. Not just that, but the potential mortification factor is so high that it’s off the scale. Holly Carmichael has already got me in her sights, and the rumour mill’s so efficient at school that I’m already feeling sick at the thought of going back next Monday.