“That’s not . . .” Maeve closed her eyes and shook her head. “I told you that in . . . That’s yours. I know you bought it. Tell the truth!”
“I did buy it. For her. Because she was too scared to get it herself.”
“I wasn’t too scared! I never needed it in the first place.”
Oliver spun the box. “So you’re not pregnant?”
“No!” Maeve shook her head again. “I mean I never thought I was! It’s hers. It’s Ellie’s.” She pointed as if they might need reminding who Ellie was. Or perhaps she wanted to redirect their eyes away from her, but Oliver’s gaze held firm.
“And why would Ellie need a pregnancy test?”
Maeve looked at Oliver. Everyone else looked away. None dared say it, Maeve least of all. She would rather let herself be slaughtered. And when it seemed the final knife would stab Maeve’s heart, her denials and accusations disregarded, prepared to become the detritus of an unfair joke dug up over the next several months, a cataclysmic shift occurred.
Callum stood up.
Callum, his thin arms hidden in the padding of an oversized gray sweatshirt, Callum, a good stone lighter than Oliver, grabbed the box from Oliver’s fingers and walked it out to the garden. In the silence formed by their shock, they heard him deposit it into the big bin. He returned with hands again stuffed into the front pocket of his hoodie.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s none of our business.”
Without meeting anyone’s eye, he crossed the circle of bodies and walked up the stairs. The tension that had held them there like the grip of a spider’s web unraveled. Hollis grabbed his coat off the hook and left through the front door. Oliver let out a single confused laugh that fell on empty air, muttered to himself, and scurried upstairs. Lorna went next, leaving Ellie and Maeve alone. Neither would look at the other. If either spoke, the force of their words would’ve been enough to crack the foundations of the house. So it was in silence that Ellie ran upstairs, leaving Maeve shaking in the kitchen doorway until she, too, gathered enough strength to move.
The light in Lorna’s room shifted from gray day to gray dusk. Her hunger had grown, but leaving her room wasn’t an option. The last time she’d left she’d caused near disaster. So it was better to stay locked away where no one could trouble her. Where she could trouble no one. She read the same passage of Hitchcock over and over, underlining the same sentences, her highlighter leaking through the page, until a new distraction emerged in the form of voices on the other side of the cold wall that partitioned her room from Callum’s. Callum and a girl. Maeve, she thought, based on the conversation.
“I told you. I really don’t care.”
“But I want you to know the truth.”
“I meant what I said. It’s none of my business.”
“But it was . . .”
“I don’t want to gossip!”
Something thumped against the wall, and Lorna jerked away. Had that been a hint to stop eavesdropping? No, they couldn’t have known, but their voices dropped to an indistinct hum rather than words. She pressed her ear to the wall but heard nothing more than mumbles. In her distraction, her book slid off the bed and thudded to the floor, waking her from her trance. This was ridiculous. She would never behave like this at home. Never.
A sudden knock sounded on her door. The voices in Callum’s room went quiet. Lorna bookmarked her page and opened her door to find Maeve in her woolen winter jacket, snowflakes coating her shoulders like a heavy layer of dandruff, eyes puffy from crying. She held out two containers of microwavable cannelloni.
“The off-license down by the pub was open. Not sure how good they are but they’re within the expiration date, so . . .” She held them out.
“Thanks.” Lorna took only one. “You need dinner, too, right?”
Ellie appeared at the opposite end of the hall, ready to turn into the bathroom, but when she spotted Lorna and Maeve, she hurried back upstairs.
“I’m not really hungry.” Maeve handed Lorna the other container. The words Lorna wanted to say caught in her throat, but she managed to speak before Maeve walked away.
“I believe you.”
She also wanted to say she was sorry, but she couldn’t get it out. Maeve hesitated as if she wanted to say something in return, but she dusted the melting snow from her hair and then shuffled to the staircase.
Maeve watched the water bead on her jacket and wished she could stay downstairs with others, but no one wanted her in their presence. Not even Lorna, whose door had once again closed. As she retreated upstairs, Callum emerged from his room, and she paused, thinking he might welcome her, but he made no acknowledgment that he saw her, even though he had to know she was there. She wasn’t trying to hide. It was like he wanted her to watch, to bear witness as he knocked on Oliver’s door and asked, “Can we talk?”
All doors closed to her, Maeve went to the only one over which she retained any control. The spacious double had never before felt as empty as it did now, even cluttered as it was with her suitcases and clothes and posters and textbooks. She curled up on her bed because she wanted to feel small, contained, manageable.
Why the fuck had she told Ellie about Thomas Kinsey? What moment of utter weakness had caused her to sit cross-legged on the floor and spill her guts about losing her virginity to her secondary school crush over Christmas break? Thank god she hadn’t told Ellie everything. She had left out the bit about how Thomas Kinsey had gained a stone and an acne problem since the last she saw him and now smoked so much that his breath always stank and his teeth were the color of weak piss. Because those were the only reasons the once-beloved golden boy had deigned to sleep with her. The freedom of university life had wrecked him, and Maeve, who’d always been a wreck, was finally in his league.
But she’d never feared pregnancy, never told Ellie she had. Her period had come two weeks later, right on schedule. In fact, the arrival of her period remained the only reliable thing in her life. None of that mattered now, not with what Ellie had said. Though they both lived on the top floor, in the house hierarchy, Ellie remained firmly above her. The others would always believe her lies over Maeve’s truth.
At some point she’d begun crying again, her face a soggy mess, and she wiped it across her coat sleeve, unable to motivate herself to get out of her wet things, and swore she would never forgive Ellie for this—not tomorrow or in a month or in a year or in twenty years—and her crying became more fierce, a mix of anger and shame, and if she was grateful for one thing that night it was that Hollis turned on his music and she could not be heard.
A mere four steps away, in her own room, perched on the edge of her bed, Ellie also appreciated Hollis’s music, but for a different reason. She did not know the artist or even the song, but the deep, pounding base-line mixed with the jarring chords spoke to a part of her she didn’t know existed, mimicking a feeling she kept buried beneath her smiles and graciousness and cleanliness. A feeling that made her want to rage and scream and smash. That music wound its way inside her, wrapped itself around every nerve, and before she knew what she had done, all of her framed pictures were smashed on the floor. Like a wicked fairy, the feeling flew out of her when the song ended, leaving her ashamed and trembling, surrounded by her destruction.