Lara is waiting for her at the counter, a lit cigarette in one hand, practically bouncing on the balls of her feet. Her dark hair is damp from the rain, curling over her shoulders, and her mascara is smudged, but she’s still pretty in that way Mari thinks of as uniquely Lara. Maybe her nose is a bit too narrow, maybe her chin is a little too sharp, but she’s always just so damn excited about everything, and that gives her face a glow even in the dingy kitchen.
Pierce’s song finishes, and now a record is playing again, somehow even louder this time. It’s George Harrison, Mari’s favorite Beatle, but she’s still casting glances at her journal, wishing for a little quiet again. But now that Lara’s here, she knows there’s no chance of that happening. This has the makings of one of Pierce’s all-night parties, the kind that end with strangers sleeping on her floor, in her bathtub.
She already feels tired thinking about it, and wonders how exactly someone gets to be this tired at nineteen fucking years old.
And now there’s Lara to deal with.
“Okay, obviously something has you all jazzed up,” Mari says, reaching around her stepsister to pull a lukewarm beer out of the sink. The ice Pierce had put in earlier has already mostly melted, and the bottle drips water onto the floor as Mari opens it.
“Let’s go to Italy,” Lara says without preamble.
Mari pauses. “What?”
“Italy,” Lara repeats, blowing out a stream of smoke as she props a hip on the counter, her free arm folded around her waist. Mari realizes Lara is wearing her top, the blue one with the flowers that she just bought a week ago. There’s already a tiny stain there on Lara’s right breast, and Mari bites back a familiar irritation.
“We did Italy, remember?” she nearly shouts. Has the music somehow gotten even louder? “It wasn’t that great of a time.”
When Mari had run away with Pierce three years ago, Lara had begged to be included, and even though the idea of taking her stepsister with them had ruined Mari’s vision of a romantic escape, Pierce hadn’t been able to tell Lara no.
And Mari couldn’t tell Pierce no.
So, off the three of them had gone, leaving Mari’s father’s house in the middle of the night, a note hastily scrawled left behind on the kitchen table. Italy had been their second stop after France, and it’s still something of a blur.
Cramped rooms, cramped cars, the smell of her own sweat, the heat that had felt invigorating at first and then slowly grew more oppressive, making her nauseous nearly all the time. Of course, she hadn’t known yet about the baby—about Billy—and later, all her discomfort would make more sense, but at the time, she’d been certain it was some kind of cosmic punishment. Out of money, slinking back to England with nothing to show for their grand adventure except sunburns and a newfound antipathy for one another.
And now Lara wants to go back there?
Lara rolls her dark eyes, standing up straight as she flicks ash into a nearly empty wineglass.
“That’s because we were skint and on our own,” she says. “This time, it’ll be different.”
The cigarette sizzles as Lara drops it into the glass, and she reaches out, taking Mari’s hands. “At a villa, Mare. With”—she drops her voice, leaning so close that her forehead touches Mari’s—“Noel Gordon.”
Mari rears back at that, eyes going wide. “Wait, as in—”
“No, the Noel Gordon who works at the chip shop,” Lara says, laughing before she swats at Mari’s midsection. “Of course, ‘as in.’ As in Glasgow Noel Gordon. When She Goes Noel Gordon.”
When She Goes is Mari’s favorite album, one she actually had to buy a second copy of when fucking Hobbes scratched the first a few months back. She even had pictures of him up on her wall, when he was in his first group, the Rovers, back before he’d gone solo.
But now, Noel Gordon is famous. Properly famous, a rock star, an idol that Pierce respects and envies all at once.
“How do you even know him?” she asks Lara, and Lara giggles, turning in a little half circle as she flutters her eyelashes.
“Fate,” she says, popping the “t” sound in a way that makes Mari grit her teeth. “I was standing outside this pub in Soho, with Bonnie. You know Bonnie, right?”
Mari doesn’t, but she nods anyway because if she doesn’t, Lara will get distracted and launch into a half-hour soliloquy about her new best mate, Bonnie. Lara makes and loses friends with such speed that Mari rarely bothers to learn their names.
“Anyway, we were chatting and smoking, and then all of a sudden I hear this … voice ask, ‘Either of you lovely creatures happen to have a light?’ And I look up and it’s him. Bloody Noel Gordon, and he is so handsome, Mari. The pictures don’t even capture it, hand to god. And then we started talking, and he invited me to this party, and now he wants us to go to Italy with him.”
“Okay, but after one party, why would he—” Mari starts to say, but then she looks at Lara’s pink cheeks, the way her tongue is poking her cheek, and she understands.
“Of course,” she says, and she hates that she’s a little impressed. “You’re shagging him.”
“You can’t tell anyone,” Lara says immediately, but Mari knows she’s only saying it because she thinks it’s the thing to say when you’re having sex with a very famous married man. Knowing Lara, Mari is sure her stepsister would love nothing more than to march through Piccadilly with a sandwich board announcing the fact.
And what a coup for her stepsister. Mari may have her own musician—Pierce’s reputation is growing steadily in the bars and nightclubs of London, after all—but Noel Gordon is in a whole other stratosphere.
That’s probably why Lara slept with him in the first place.
Ever since Jane married Mari’s dad, when both girls were twelve, they’ve been locked in this unspoken competition. If Mari got good marks in school, Lara’s needed to be better. If Mari bought a new 45, Lara would have two the next day.
Mari hadn’t even been all that surprised that Lara had tagged along when they’d left England, and that she had stayed with them when they’d returned. Lara claimed it was because there was nowhere else for her to go, but Jane would’ve convinced Mari’s dad to take her back, Mari is sure of it. It was Mari who’d run off with the married man, Mari who had committed the unforgivable sin. Lara was just being a good sister.
It’s been on the tip of her tongue for months now to suggest this to Lara, but something keeps holding her back. Strange as it seems, given how often Lara irks her, Mari still wants someone else with her on this adventure, someone familiar. A person she can talk to who isn’t Pierce.
“Gotta say, Lara,” Mari says drily as she puts her beer on the counter, “if we spend a summer with him in Italy, I feel people will probably suss out what’s going on between you.”
Lara snorts, waving one hand. “People will think he invited us because he heard about Pierce’s music. Or maybe because of you. He’s very impressed with your mum and dad.”
Mari fights back that familiar, uncomfortable feeling whenever she hears someone gush about her parents. It’s not exactly pride, not exactly apprehension, just a strange brew of both. She admires them, too, of course, has idolized her mother her entire life, but she wonders about these people, people like Noel—hell, people like Pierce—who paint a picture of her parents that probably isn’t all that accurate. And she always worries when they meet her, are they thinking of her mother? Are they thinking about what Mari’s very existence took from the world?