Mum hands us each our packed lunch as we leave.
“Be good,” she says.
I wonder whether I should stay home with her, but my feet are carrying me out the door.
When we’re out of sight, Dillon takes his foil-wrapped sandwich and chucks it in the hedge.
“Why did you do that?”
“Because they’re disgusting,” he says, and pretends to heave. “I hate tomatoes.”
“Why do you lie so much? Don’t you feel bad about throwing them away?”
“Why do you ask so many questions?”
Dillon never answers my questions: I don’t expect him to anymore.
“Want one?” I say, holding out my packet of cigarettes while I scrabble in my pocket for a lighter.
“Where’d you get those? Dad’ll kill you if he finds out.”
“Screw Dad! He’d be more annoyed about you wasting food when there are so many starving children.”
Dillon doesn’t reply, but he helps himself to a cigarette and waits for the lighter.
“Where do you think he goes?” Dillon asks. “You know, when he leaves the house and doesn’t come back for ages. There’s no way that he could run for four or five hours.”
“I know exactly where he goes.” I take Dillon’s cigarette from him and light mine and his at the same time, like I’ve been doing it for years, then pass his back. Smoking is my new hobby.
Dillon turns to me, holding his burning cigarette away from himself. “Where does he go, then?”
I notice a snag in my trousers, and it turns into a hole when I inspect it, revealing my pale knee underneath.
“Nowhere. He just sits on a bench near the woods—by the duck pond.”
“Do you spy on everyone?”
“Aye.”
Dillon chokes on the smoke and pretends that he needed to cough anyway.
“You shouldn’t provoke him,” he says.
“Why do you always stick up for him? Are you scared of him or something?”
Dillon is quiet for a moment, pretending to suck on his cigarette. “No. I just think you could cut him some slack.”
“He could cut me some slack, especially on my birthday. Moping isn’t going to help Eddie, is it?”
Dillon flinches. We talk about most things, but we never talk about Eddie in public.
“Did you think about it yesterday?” I ask quietly.
“Think about what?”
“You know. That day.”
Dillon is quiet again, and I use the pause to smoke as much as I can.
“I thought about the day he chased after that dog,” he says eventually.
The memory makes me smile. The dog bolting out of the hedge with Eddie still hanging on to the leash and the owner going nuts.
“See? That’s a happy memory. You should’ve told that story yesterday. That’s what we should do from now on. We should tell funny Eddie stories. Like that time he got a pea stuck up each nostril.”
“That was your fault. He was copying you.”
“I know. But it was a hoot, though. At least until we had to go to hospital.”
We both giggle, but the image of Eddie with peas up his nose suddenly becomes too sad to bear.
“Dil, can I ask you a serious question?”
“Okay. But I might not answer. Especially if you’re going to ask me if I’m sad, because I’m fine.”
Dillon never admits when he feels sad. He always says he’s “fine.”
“No, a different question.” I lower my voice in case anyone is listening. “Have you ever had a flashback?”
“A what?”
“A flashback,” I repeat, louder. A bunch of S1s knock us out of the way to get past.
Dillon’s mouth hangs open for a second, the same way Mum’s does when she doesn’t want to answer.
“I don’t know what you—”
“Hey, knobhead!”
Dillon’s friends are across the road waving like lunatics. Even though Dillon’s a brainbox, he’s still in with the popular crowd. He has tons of friends at school. I don’t even know most of their names because they call each other by weird nicknames, or insults like bender or knobhead.
The boy calling him is very tall with spiked-up black hair. He always wears white Adidas trainers, even though no one is supposed to wear trainers to school.
“Dilmeister! Come on!” the boy shouts.
“I’ll see you later, okay?” Dillon says to me.
He waits for a car to pass, then runs across the road. The boy with the Adidas trainers waves at me. I think Dillon must’ve told them to be nice to me. I wave back, then shove my hand in my pocket and look at the ground.
Now I’m alone, I’m at the mercy of the handbag girls. These are the girls who carry handbags to school instead of backpacks. I don’t know where they put their books. When I’m with Dillon, they don’t pester me, but when I’m alone they close in, commenting on the way my hair hangs or the tightness of my trousers. The leader of the handbag girls is Ailsa Fitzgerald. Ailsa is mean to nearly everyone, but I’m her favorite target, ever since the day we first met and a boy from another class pushed her into the school pond. I wanted to help, I tried to, but I was afraid of falling in and being sucked under. I couldn’t even speak because of my Laryngitis. I ran to get a teacher instead, but by the time I returned, half the school had seen her covered in pond slime. She’s been punishing me ever since, mocking my cowardice and silence that day.
Ailsa slams into me, nearly knocking me into the road.
“Ergh, you’re still here. We all hoped you’d died over the holidays,” she says.
I walk on. Sometimes I do wish I were dead, but then who would look after Eddie?
8
Fortrose is the biggest town on the Black Isle, but it’s still small. It doesn’t even have a cinema or a bowling alley. The high street wiggles through the middle of it with poky shops crammed next to each other, selling buckets and spades in the summer and umbrellas in the winter. The only useful shops are Superdrug, Co-op, and the bakery. The people here like to know everything about everyone. Nearly everyone in Fortrose knows who I am.
“You’re Elsie Main, right?” they ask. “You’re Colin’s wee one.”
My father knows a lot of people, women mostly.
Sometimes I lie and tell them they must be mistaken, but they just tilt their heads in sympathy.
Despite being small and full of busybodies, Fortrose does have plenty of places to hide. On one side of the town is Rosemarkie beach, where jagged rocks line the coast and the otters hang out. On the other side there’s a small harbor hidden from the main road where a handful of fishing boats are moored. Dillon and I aren’t supposed to go near the water unsupervised—at least, we never used to be allowed. Sometimes I think the rule doesn’t stand anymore because Mum and Dad don’t say much, but every now and then one of them will freak out if we’re home late and accuse us of going swimming. It’s an insane rule anyway, because how can we not go near the water? We’re surrounded. I have my own rule: it’s okay to go near the water; just don’t go in it.
Dillon goes off with Lara after school, probably to avoid my questions, so I head straight to the harbor—and the boathouse. Set back against the trees that shade the narrow pebble beach, the boathouse is a tall wooden structure with big arched red-painted doors and a corrugated iron roof. Right next to the boathouse is a rickety old clubhouse on wooden stilts that used to belong to the sailing club. The sailing club moved to the shiny new harbor in Inverness a few years ago, so now the clubhouse is all boarded and the boathouse no longer in use. This is my secret hiding place.
As I walk along the beach, a seagull nearly flies into me, making me turn toward the water.
That’s when I see the boat.
It’s a small one with a loud, jittery engine, which chucks out a plume of black smoke as the boat pulls up to the harbor wall alongside the other fishing boats. There are four boys in it, joking around, shoving each other. They’r
e older than me, maybe seventeen or eighteen. I sit on a bench and pretend to gaze out to sea. Three of the boys are wearing what I first think are leggings, but then notice are actually wetsuits with the arms dangling down like extra legs. One of the boys is bare chested, and even from here I can see he’s muscly. Two are wearing T-shirts, and a fourth boy is dressed in black from head to toe: black jeans, a thick hoodie, and sunglasses. They all seem to be experiencing different weather conditions. They clamber up onto the stone jetty via a rusty ladder bolted onto the wall. The boy at the front, in the hoodie, carries a heavy-looking bag over his shoulder, and two pairs of flippers. Their laughter carries out into the dusky evening, and I feel sad that I don’t have a group of friends to hang out with. Hoodie Boy looks in my direction, and I turn away. When they have their backs to me, I crouch down under the clubhouse and crawl across litter and pebbles to the loose panel in the side of the boathouse. It’s just big enough for me to squeeze through.
Inside the boathouse, there’s one boat—a moldy kayak that must have been orange once but is now a peachy-white color. The kayak sits near the arched doors as though it can’t wait to get back in the water. The rest of the boathouse is empty, with wooden beams across the walls and ceiling where I suppose other kayaks used to hang.
It’s dark inside today, but the afternoon light pushes through the cracks in the front door, making pale triangles of yellow on the floor. It smells musty too, like old wood and moss, but over the last couple of months I’ve made it quite homey—with blankets on the floor and one to wrap around me when it’s cold like today. There’s a small cupboard that I found discarded on the beach one day and managed to drag inside. This is where I keep my stash—Coke, sweets, matches, cigarettes (if I have any), pens, paper, and playing cards. I play solitaire if I’m bored, but mostly I sit and listen to the wind and rain outside. Sometimes the fog makes its way inside.
My stock needs replenishing. I unwrap the last Mars bar and eat it as slowly as possible, trying to remember the details of the flashing images I saw at the Point, wondering if they contain any new information about what happened the day Eddie disappeared.
It’s not that I don’t know what happened—I remember the whole day—it’s just that there are a few black spots in my memory. I can’t remember what Eddie and I were talking about right before he disappeared—our last conversation together, his last conversation ever. And the moments after I realized he was gone are hazy. During the Laryngitis Year, I tried to work it all out—I even drew maps of the Point and tried to place everyone, but I ended up more confused. I don’t know why my brain wants to remember now, but I think it must be something to do with Eddie being around so much.
I make a list of the facts.
THINGS I KNOW ABOUT THAT DAY:
Dillon was swimming with the dolphins.
Eddie and I were wading close to shore.
One minute Eddie was there, and then he was gone.
Dad was on the beach, but I couldn’t see him.
Mum was at home baking. She arrived later after the police called her.
I collapsed and Dad came to get me.
All my memories are tinged with a blue haze.
I remember the morning. We opened our birthday presents after breakfast. Eddie got a remote control helicopter, which he crashed within a couple of minutes, and I got a new football, a real leather one. It was a bit drizzly and windy outside, so we dribbled it around the living room until Eddie smashed a glass on the coffee table and Mum got really cross. Eddie had a tantrum because he didn’t want to wear the blue T-shirt. Blue wasn’t his favorite color anymore, but his red T-shirt had a big rip in it. And then Mum told Dad to take us to Rosemarkie beach to get us all out of her hair.
Rosemarkie is the village next to Fortrose—it’s beautiful and old and has the best beach and the best ice cream on the Black Isle. But Eddie really wanted to go to Chanonry Point to see the dolphins. Dillon was on Eddie’s side because he liked swimming around the Point—the strong currents were good practice apparently, and he had a swimming competition coming up that he was determined to win. Dillon was already the Black Isle 1-km open-water champion—he wanted to be the Highlands champion too.
We were just leaving when the phone rang. Dad answered it, and it was my friend Emily’s mum saying Emily was too sick to come to our party later. I got in the car in a sulk and no longer cared about the ice cream. It was too cold anyway.
After a little while of sitting and remembering, I wonder if anyone at home has noticed that I’m not there. Sometimes I feel invisible, like a wisp of air that tickles the back of someone’s neck before they close the window to block the draft.
I’m about to head home when the panel door creaks open. I hold my breath and move back into the corner. It better not be my dad.
“Hello?” a voice calls from outside.
The voice is young.
“Someone in here?”
Then a face appears. A boy with floppy brown hair and a bit of stubble. He has a hand-rolled cigarette hanging from his mouth.
“Ah, I knew there was someone in here.” He climbs through the panel and walks toward me. My pulse races as I start to gather my things.
“Don’t leave on my account,” he says, and sits beside me, stretching his long legs out along the concrete floor. The bottoms of his black jeans are scuffed, and when I see the sunglasses in his hand, I realize he’s the boy in the hoodie from the boat.
“Who are you?” I ask, hoping the quiver in my voice isn’t too obvious.
He lights up, and it’s not just a cigarette. The space between us fills with a fog, and the fumes get in the back of my throat, sickly and sweet.
“Tavey McKenzie,” he says as he exhales. “Call me Tay. You like to smoke?” He holds the joint out to me, smiling. His arm presses against mine, and my raincoat rustles. I wish I’d taken it off earlier—I’m suddenly really hot and now I can’t seem to move.
I’ve never smoked a joint before, but the other S4s smoke behind the school field all the time. They are much nicer to me in the afternoon, patting me on the shoulder, smiling, and sometimes even offering me a cigarette. I never take one, though. I don’t want to owe anyone.
“Yeah, of course,” I say, and reach out my hand. I think about how I’m going to get out of here.
He doesn’t look like the boys at my school. They have styled and gelled hair; this boy’s hair is messy and long and hangs down over his ears. They have smooth round faces; this boy has a rectangular face with dark stubble. I wouldn’t describe him as good-looking, but he does have nice brown eyes and really long eyelashes that I can’t help but stare at. He reminds me of a boy I saw on a documentary about youth prisons a few months ago. Even though the boy in the prison had been in a fight that ended badly (really badly), I remember feeling sorry for him because I knew he’d been misunderstood. I recognized the furrowed brow of the prison boy—the same furrow I see every morning in the mirror. Tay has this look too, like the world just doesn’t get him.
I suck on the joint and get a faint taste of strawberries. Strawberry lip balm. I wonder if he’s just been kissing his girlfriend. My throat tightens and I try not to choke. Discreetly, I shuffle away from him so we’re no longer touching but watch him out of the corner of my eye. I want to show him I’m not afraid, and that I meet people like him all the time.
“I’m Elsie. Are you a friend of Dillon’s?”
The boy blinks. “Who?”
“Never mind. What’s your name again?”
“Tay,” he says slowly. “You’ve got a bad memory.”
“Like the river?” I ask. “Did you know that an earthquake once reversed the flow of the Mississippi?” I know a lot of rivers, thanks to the encyclopedias that Granny gave Dillon one year. When I was younger I used to read about all the underground rivers around the world and wonder if that’s where Eddie had gone.
“Yeah, like the river,” Tay says, seemingly amused. “And no, I didn’t know that. Thank you fo
r educating me. So you must be the mystery squatter. It’s quite the setup you’ve got here.”
“Have you touched my stuff? This is my spot, you know.”
Even though he seems okay and is named after a river, this is my secret place. The joint makes me feel lightheaded, so I pass it back. I quite like the taste of it, though.
Tay tilts his head back and blows smoke rings, which float up and last for ages. I stare at them until my neck aches.
“I think you’ll find this was my spot before yours,” he says when the rings have dispersed. “I’ve just been away for a while.”
“Really? Where’ve you been, then?”
“Just away.”
“You must’ve been away at least a year,” I reply. There was no sign that anyone had been here before me when I discovered this place.
“Over five years. I moved away when I was twelve,” he says.
Five years. Prison, I bet. I wonder what he did. Although twelve is pretty young to go to prison, even a youth one. Maybe it was some kind of boarding school. This is actually good news, though, because he likely won’t know about Eddie.
“I have to admit,” Tay says, “I thought a small child had moved into my hideout.” He holds up an empty sweets bag as evidence.
“I don’t just keep sweets.” I point to the packet of cigarettes on the floor by our feet. Tay seems to find this amusing.
“Nothing wrong with sweets,” he says, and flicks the empty bag behind him. “So, you go to school in Fortrose?”
“Yeah, but I hate it. There are these girls that are always horrible to me.”
“I hated school. Girls were horrible to me, too, so I gave it up,” he says, laughing. “I go to the school of life now.”
“Is there a school of death?”
Tay sits forward and grins at me. His long eyelashes flutter and somehow soften his angular face. His teeth are shiny white and his lips look smooth. I wish I could apply another coat of lipstick.
The Art of Not Breathing Page 3
