Page 26 of High Season
“What?” said Barnaby. “She can give it out, but she can’t take it?”
Josie unclipped her seatbelt.
“Oh,” she said. “I can take it. Believe me, I can take whatever you guys have to say about me.”
They stayed much later than Hannah had intended. Late enough that people had begun to peel off, a drunken girl passed out on a sofa, kids clustered around a coffee table snorting coke through rolled-up bank notes, something that Hannah thought people only did in films. Outside, a group of boys cheered each other on as they took turns at climbing out of an upper-floor window and plummeting, meters below, into the glassy, illuminated stretch of the pool.
Somehow, between going down to the kitchen to get another drink and returning back to the upstairs window ledge where they had perched for the last hour, Hannah had lost Josie. Somehow, she didn’t particularly mind. She drifted through the house, a vodka tonic clutched in one hand, feeling faintly as if she were watching herself from above. She had drunk enough that, for the first time in a while, she wasn’t thinking about if anyone was looking at her, or whether she seemed out of place. She was imagining that she lived here. That this was her party. That all these people were here for her.
Blake must have seen her before she saw him. When she caught his eye across the room, he was already staring. Already watching her. He was in a group, a girl with long, highlighted hair, a boy whose body was angled hungrily in her direction. He left them, wordlessly, and they didn’t seem to notice. He was walking straight to Hannah with such purpose that she was briefly unsure of herself, briefly certain that he would pass her by, on to somebody else. But, instead, he stopped right in front of her.
“I thought I’d lost you,” he said, and the idea that he might have been looking for her sent a shiver straight through Hannah’s core.
He took her hand.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get some air.”
They were only just outside when Barnaby leaped on them, wrapping his arms around Blake’s shoulders. His face was pink, an alcohol-induced flush. Hannah could tell he had taken something from hiswide eyes and starry pupils, the way his body twitched. His hair was soaking wet, and in the aquatic glow of the pool his teeth looked sharp and bone-white as he grinned.
“Mate,” he said, enunciating the vowel of the word, stretching it out long. “You’ve got to give it a go. Jumping off the roof. It’s crazy.”
Blake shook him off.
“Nah,” he said. “I’m alright.”
“Aw, come on,” Barnaby said. “Don’t be chicken.”
“Seriously, mate,” said Blake. “I’m good.”
Barnaby looked around, his eyes settling on Hannah as if he was seeing her for the first time.
“You’ll do it, Hannah, right?”
“I don’t—”
“Aw, come on,” he said again. “You went off the cliffs last year, right? You were the only one of the girls who’d do it. I remember.”
He slid away from Blake, wrapped his arm around Hannah. She could smell something chemical and metallic on his breath.
“None of the other girls wouldever,” he said conspiratorially, and Hannah knew exactly what he meant. None of the other girls with money, with parents with good jobs, with the kind of status that Hannah could only dream of would ever. The kind of girls who didn’t have to prove themselves.
She eased herself away from him.
“The cliffs are different,” she said. “I’ve been jumping off those cliffs since I was a kid.”
It was true. The things that Barnaby and Blake thought were daring, an escape from reality, the kind of adrenaline spike that their lives back in the UK denied them, were routine for her. The coastline had always been her playground.
“So?” said Barnaby, a slur encircling the edge of the word. “You should be able to show us how it’s done then, right?”
She knew that he was baiting her. It was the oldest trick in the book, after all, that appeal to her ego. But still, her eyes drifted up to the second-story ledge. Not a huge drop. Twelve or fifteen feet.
“Come on,” said Barnaby. “What are you scared of?”
“Give it a rest, mate,” Blake said. “She said she doesn’t want to.”
“Actually, I will,” said Hannah.
They both looked at her.
