“What’s the other reason?”
James takes a long slow breath before answering. “Two, is we made a pact. That we wouldn’t ever target our own firms. Fonchem’s off limits for what we do.”
Chapter Forty-Two
I have to take a walk after everything I’ve heard. I end up by the river, watching the swirling water rolling past below me, and in a sudden flash I miss the beach. I miss the island, where I can get away from everyone on empty sands, where the water is right beside me, not channeled into a concrete-banked river, and the path that runs alongside flanked by a four-lane highway. I have to sidestep joggers, earbuds leaking tinned music, mom’s with prams, people taking their dogs for their walks.
One the one hand, everything that James has told me is ridiculous. Why would they do what he said? Why would anyone do it? But on the other, I did some stupid things when I was younger, so why wouldn’t anyone else? And it’s definitely true there is some strange bond between them all. I guess it’s why I was interested in them in the first place. Plus they have led unusual lives – the four of them at least. They’re all rich, in a way I’ve never experienced, so maybe that does lead you to do strange things.
If James was simply lying to me, and I ask Lily about it, then he’s going to look stupid. She’ll tell me the truth, and we’ll both know he’s trying this strange trick to break us up. It’ll backfire on James, and only make me and Lily stronger. But James isn’t stupid – he’s far from it – so he’d know that. Which kind of suggests it might be true.
The other possibility is that Lily would deny it, even though it is true. Which would mean… I guess it would mean she doesn’t trust me, like James said. Or at least, she doesn’t feel safe yet confiding in me. Or she doesn’t think I’ll be around long enough to risk letting me in on the secret. I don’t like the thought of that at all.
OK, how about if she does admit it. What then? I walk on, sidestepping a fat man jogging, with his headphone cables bouncing up and down. To lose the image, I look at the river, a goods barge coming down it now, the water dark in the dying afternoon light. An image hits my mind, unbidden – it’s me, under the water, that sunny summer afternoon, in the north of Lornea Island, when Dad and me were waiting to sneak through the restricted zone, by Lily’s family’s chemical plant. When I spent the whole afternoon in the warm water, diving amid the golden sands, the water pure and clear like liquid glass, all the way down to the seagrass beds below, with the pipefish and sea horses, and the Lornea Island sea-dragons.
If she does admit it – I drag myself back to reality. I don’t know, it’s all too confusing. But then another thought forms. Something I wished I’d thought to ask James earlier. Are they still doing it? What they do. Is Lily secretly doing all this stuff with James and Oscar and Jennifer and Eric, behind my back? The whole time I’ve known them?
Before I get anywhere near making sense of it, I get a call from Lily. She’s just back from her classes and she’s obviously in a good mood. And I know she’s going to suggest I come round to her house, or maybe even that we go out somewhere, but before she does she starts telling me about a funny thing that happened in her lecture. It wasn’t that funny, it was something about how the lecturer broke the projector. But when she’s finished I can’t bring myself to laugh, and I guess she picks up that I’m not in a good mood. But instead of asking what’s wrong with me, she gets uptight, and suddenly the conversation is going about as badly as it can. And then even though I knew she was going to invite me round, suddenly she doesn’t. She tells me she’s going to hang up now, and I know I should say something, to stop her, to undo this moment that doesn’t define what we have, but I don’t have the words to do it. I stay silent. She tells me again she’s going to hang up, and she sounds distant and upset, but I just let her go. And the feeling it leaves me with, it’s like actual pain. It’s like my stomach has been punched.
Chapter Forty-Three
I decide not to ask Lily anything about it in the end. James is right, if she told Eric, then eventually she should tell me, and I need to give her the chance to do so. In the meantime, it sort of goes back to how it was before. We meet, in the downstairs coffee shop with the comfy couches. We go to play pool, we have dinner at Lily’s house.
But then I get an odd text from James. He invites me to his dorm room. It’s odd, because I haven’t been there before, in fact I’d never even thought about where he lives. But I say yes, because I suppose this is just his way of us getting to know each other better. And then he sends a second text, asking me not to say anything to Lily or Eric. Which seems even weirder.
He lives in a kind of shared set of dorm rooms. It’s sort of similar to where I live, only it’s a lot nicer. Instead of only having one room to himself, like I’ve got, he
