I call Clem from the driveway outside his house. He lets me in through the back door and we go into his room, which is at the opposite end of the house to his parents’. It’s impossible to tell if they’re home, anyway. When they are, their cars are locked out of sight in the big, double garage.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asks and I realise I’m crying. He reaches out and touches my face; he’s never done that before. He clears his throat and passes me tissues from the bathroom. While I mop my face and blow my nose, he disappears and comes back with two mugs of chocolate milk and a flower he’s picked from his mother’s garden.
‘Dad . . .’ I shake my head and wipe my eyes. I can see the edge of the belt I’d made for Clem poking out from under his pillow.
‘You don’t deserve this,’ he says, his voice shaking. ‘Any of it.’
I think of everyone at Fairyland, the people I’ve grown to love there and how things endlessly happen – good and bad – that people don’t deserve. I’ve given up on the idea of deserving. People so rarely get what they deserve, it seems such a strange thing to say.
I reach for the Lego on Clem’s shelf, the sort that seems to soothe him. And an envelope falls out from behind them with three words written on the front. Do You Remember?
‘Stell . . .’ Clem says, and I hear him move behind me. I tug the envelope open, even though I probably shouldn’t, and out spill all the little notes I’ve ever tossed across the classroom to Clem. All the little bits of paper I’d been so certain he’d just smiled at and thrown away. I pull them out and unfurl them. Do you remember when you snuck into my room and stayed the night when I went through that phase of being scared of vampires? Do you remember when we got stuck in the roof cavity of your grandma’s house? Do you remember . . . Do you remember . . .
The flower smells of sharp wind and earth and somehow of stars, and before I’ve thought about it, I try to kiss him, but he pulls away and his face is the saddest I’ve ever seen it.
‘I can’t.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you don’t really mean this – you’re just mad and confused. I can’t, Price.’
I make a weird protest noise and he looks at me very closely and then he takes my hand. ‘You don’t mean it,’ he says and maybe there’s something hopeful in his voice, something waiting to be convinced. But I don’t give any of it a chance. I’m crying and it’s all too much. He’s holding my hand in a pointed way that lets me know he doesn’t want me closer. Doesn’t want me near.
I run back to Fairyland, past all the cabins and old cars and the pool. I go down to the river and try to climb one of the trees but can’t get a foot hold, and the fact that I’m stuck on the ground when I want to be up there, in the green, is enough to make me sink to my knees and sob.
‘Hey,’ someone says, and I know it’s Matthew without looking.
I wipe my nose. Instead, I get up and start walking off.
‘Hold up a sec.’ I feel his hand on my shoulder, and I pull away and keep striding away. A moment later, he falls into step beside me, the way Clem does. Except he’s not Clem.
‘Scratchies,’ I say, my voice hardly working. ‘Track.’
We sit by the river and I show Matthew the winning scratchie, and he looks at it closely and lets out a low whistle. When he hands it back to me, my hand trembles. I rip it into little pieces and I panic the second that it’s done. ‘It’s money. We need money. Everyone here needs money.’
‘But not like this,’ Matt says, his voice calm, like he’d expected me to rip up the winning ticket. Like he would’ve done the same thing himself.
‘Sometimes I pour all my dad’s alcohol down the toilet. He just goes out and buys more. Sometimes when he’s already drunk, but I do it anyway.’
‘Do you think about your mum much?’ I ask, after a while.
‘I try not to.’
‘But you do?’
‘I try not to,’ he says again. ‘But yeah, I guess I do.’
‘I’m sorry about your mum,’ I say.
‘Me too.’
And then he quietly brings his knees up to his chin and stares out at the river, and I think of Clem and squeeze my eyes shut until my head starts to throb. I can feel myself calming down. A few times, Matthew tenses as though he’s about to move, but he doesn’t. Not until it’s very late and the night’s almost cold and he gets stiffly to his feet and offers me his hand.
‘Families,’ he says softly, his voice carried off by the cicadas and chuckling of the lively, rushing river.
‘Yep. Families,’ I say. And we start walking slowly back towards the cabins.
***
Dad works even longer hours than before. I want to ask Mum about the salary that was meant to be going into her account, but I can’t bring myself to. It all seems so pointless, so hopeless. I think about how determined Taylor and I had been at the start of summer to monitor him; to stop him from damaging the rest of us. As though everything that had been broken could be jammed back together with just a little bit of attention.
I try hard not to think about Clem. He doesn’t get it. He’ll never get it. Mum always talked about how she’d drifted from her friends. I’d never been able to imagine it. But I don’t need to imagine it. It’s happening. We’ve become too different. And whatever had been left is gone. Clem has broken it.
‘I’m going to get him to fill out time sheets,’ Mum’s telling Taylor in the annex. I’ve been sleeping badly and Clem’s stopped messaging me and I can’t find Matthew. I’ve been spending time with Richard and his mum and Muriel and Ginny, but I feel restless. Uneasy. ‘Maybe you just need to lay off him!’ I snap.
Mum and Taylor both look at me. Mum puts down the draft time sheet she’d been holding. ‘What?’
‘You can’t treat him like a little kid. It’s only going to make things worse.’
‘Responsible adults don’t do what he’s done,’ Mum says, her voice shaking. ‘To even think that I’ve driven him to gamble . . .’
‘That’s not what I’m saying! I’m just saying that we’ve been trying to control every part of his life and how’s that going to help anything?’
‘Stella . . .’
‘Leave him if you’re so unhappy. He’s got an addiction, Mum. He’s not doing it to spite you. But we can’t keep doing this! We can’t control his every move. We just can’t! If he changes, it’s gotta come from him. Not us.’
I slam outside and lie down on Dad’s hammock. For a while, I look up at the stars patterned on the sheet strung above my head. I don’t expect to sleep, but I do. I’m vaguely aware of Taylor leaving, of Dad coming back. Of the silence that hangs between everyone, like something solid, throughout our home.
***
I wake up in the evening with a throbbing headache. I don’t think of Clem. Do you remember the time you wouldn’t kiss me? I refuse to think of him.
I can hear smashing, things breaking. I think it must be coming from the manager’s house, but it’s closer than that. My parents, fighting again. I close my eyes and am tempted to go back to sleep, but I know that won’t change anything. Breathe. Compartmentalise. Create your own bridge to goddess greatness.