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“I don’t know, Cai,” said Zoe’s voice through Cai's phone. “I’m not good company right now.”
“I can be good enough for the both of us,” Cai said. “I can, I’m super good at company. Is this because of the lockdown?”
There was silence for a while. It had been a week since the lockdown. They had been planning to hang out last weekend but Zoe had cancelled; her stress levels were so high she felt like she was going to burst, and if she’d gone out instead of doing something productive she would have been drowned by guilt. So she spent the weekend with her head down studying for exams, trying to push distractions away, and the distraction of Cai was swept up with all the bad distractions and firmly ignored till the stress levels went down again.
Not that, by the time the next weekend rolled around, her stress levels were low. It had been a weird week at London College, everyone’s breaking points were closer than normal, with the added adrenaline from the stupid senior prank and exams and their futures rushing toward them like a freight train.
There’d been a few breakdowns, a few panic attacks, a few fights. Zoe kept messing up experiments in chemistry, her portfolio in art was still frustrating her, she could barely hold a thought in her head in Critical Thinking; the only class that didn’t stress her out that week was PE.
So when Cai called on Saturday, she was still feeling… she wasn’t sure how best to describe it… put-together-wrong.
“I don’t know,” Zoe said, eventually. “Lots of things.”
“Don’t worry about being good company, then. Just, come out. Life’s been shit lately, and we’re both crazy worried about what might happen, and, I don’t know, I want to show you something.”
“Want to show me what?”
“Well,” said Cai. “I was kind of going to pretend to wing it, be all spontaneous and sensitive.”
“Right,” said Zoe.
“So, maybe, you could do me a favour, and let me? I mean, I did save your life.”
“You’re going to have to stop using that, one day.”
“Yeah probably, but not today. Today I let two preteen girls dress me, and if I don’t go out, they’re going to be really upset. There could be tears.”
“Theirs or yours?” Cai liked to believe she was starting to smile.
“Probably mine,” he said. “I’m a weeper.”
“A spontaneous, sensitive weeper.” Yeah, he was sure he could hear a smile in her voice.
“A persuasive, spontaneous sensitive weeper.”
“Hm.”
“Are you going to make me beg, Zoe? Because I could beg. But it would impeach on my inherent dignity.”
“Hm.”
“I could throw in a pretty please,” he seceded. “As a token of goodwill.”
“You don’t need to say pretty please,” Zoe said. “I’ll come out. Just. Don’t be too cheerful, all up in my face.”
Cai could have kissed the phone. “I’ll be sober as a judge,” he promised.
“You better be,” Zoe said. “You’re driving.”
~
Zoe didn’t tell Liz and Emma she was going out with Cai – or rather, she told them Cai was picking her up and they were going to meet Rachel and Danny to study together, because her moms would have made a fuss.
If she was being honest with herself she knew they wouldn’t be that bad, but she felt that they would put expectations on her. They probably wouldn’t mean to, but they would. Zoe didn’t think they’d see her, hanging out alone with a boy she’d only recently met and had been spending a lot of time with, as something simple. And Zoe wanted it to be simple. Just a day out. No expectations, no baggage, no explanation needed.
Sitting in the car next to Cai as he drove, she texted Rachel and Danny to tell her what she’d said, so they didn’t call her house and ask for her and blow the whole thing wide open. Her moms would definitely have opinions if they found out Zoe lied about it.
Rachel replied: ;) :x, which Zoe promptly ignored.
This was supposed to be a day of doing something unrelated to visions – a proper, pretend we’re normal day, which was… difficult, and hard, and confusing, and after Zoe put her phone away she didn’t know what to say. If you crossed out all the supernatural stuff, what did that leave her with?
School? But she didn’t want to talk about school, too worried that it might lead onto the university topic, which she’d also forbidden.
So… family? Hope anecdotes? Except Zoe didn’t feel particularly like talking about family either. It was a bit too wrapped up in all the things that made it hard to pretend to be normal.
When was the last time Zoe had had to make small talk? When was the last time she’d wanted to?
This was so frustrating. She’d warned him she wasn’t great company today.
It was hard to tell if Cai minded, or if he was trying to think of something not too cheerful to say, or if he was just concentrating on driving.
Help, Zoe thought to herself. She wished they were meeting Rachel and Danny to study, that would have been a lot easier.
What the fuck, Zoe? She thought to herself. She’d barely buckled in and already she felt like bolting. How did normal people do this? How did you have a decent time with someone while navigating such large forbidden topics of conversation? Maybe she should fake sudden sickness and get him to take her home? Maybe she should just say something, anything! And just hope that he wouldn’t mind when she screwed it up.
God, this was such a mistake. Zoe felt the silence pressing down on her, grinding her down into the passenger seat like a giant shoe making sure a spider was definitely dead.
It had only been a couple of minutes, and Cai had been concentrating on getting out of Zoe’s swanky neighbourhood and back onto a road he knew. He didn’t consider Zoe’s silence to be anything particularly unusual; she was a fairly internal person. But when he cast his eyes over at her as he stopped for traffic, he saw how tight her hands were clenched on her knees and how she looked like she might pop under the slightest amount of pressure.
“Okay Zoe!” He said, wondering just how cheerful was too cheerful. “Let’s see how your music education’s coming along. There’s a reservoir of CDs in the glove box; find us some driving music?”
“A reservoir?” Zoe asked, raising an eyebrow at him but reaching for the glove box, anxious for something to contribute, but not so anxious that she wouldn’t question his occasionally odd vocabulary.
“What’s wrong with reservoir?” Cai protested. “It’s a perfectly good word.”
“Yeah, for transporting Roman water, maybe.”
“That’s an aqueduct?”
“Aren’t they the same thing?”
“Uh,” Cai said. “I don’t know. No, they can’t be. Because ‘there’s an aqueduct of CDs in the glove box’ sounds ridiculous.”
“Oh,” said Zoe, flicking through CDs. “Well, you wouldn’t want to sound ridiculous.”
“’Solutely not,” Cai shook his head firmly.
Zoe pondered over the CDs, discarding the ones she didn’t know, which left her with barely any choice at all. Three traffic lights and some complaining from Cai later, she closed her eyes and let the envelope fall open and let fate decide.
“This wait better be worth it,” he said.
“They’re all your CDs,” Zoe pointed out. “Clearly you’re going to like whatever I pick. Why would you keep something you hated in here?”
They talked music for a while, finding out that they had very, very few bands in common, but at least it wasn’t one of the forbidden topics. Cai kept giving Zoe openings to make fun of him, which helped her relax a little, so maybe he was doing it on purpose. Suspicious male behaviour.
“Nearly there,” he said, “Keep an eye out for a park?”
“Where are we going?” Zoe asked, taking her role in park hunting seriously and leaning forward like a few more inches would help her spot one. “Are you going to tell me or are you going to blindfold me before we get out of the car. Because I warn you, I probably won’t let you do that.”
“Nah,” Cai grinned. “Have you ever been to the Heart of the Cross before?”
“Oh,” said Zoe. “No, haven’t.”
“Cool, you’ll love it, it’s really… yeah, you’ll see. AHA FOUND ONE, victory for Cai,” his grin turned a bit mad as he pulled into the park, and Zoe gripped the dashboard.
A little over four years ago, a large fire in the shape of a cross had devastated part of London. It had been a bad time – horrifically bad – and had come only a couple of months after the school shooting. The fires, and the crucifixions and everything else had blurred together in Zoe’s head into one giant hellish ball. She’d not been a nice person to be around, that year. Not that she’d been particularly better the next year, either.
It had been easy to avoid this part of the city since it happened, mostly because Zoe didn’t go out much. She’d heard life had started to return to the area but she’d never needed to go and see if for herself.
The Heart of the Cross had been industrial buildings once, but had been left undeveloped while everything was rebuilt around it, and had since turned into a sprawling community garden and memorial to those London had lost.
Cai talked as they walked, telling her about how Dom had become involved with some other volunteers from church and how he and Dom had helped to build planter boxes and donated them to the cause, and how Nonnie knew a trio of (“frankly quite scary”) old ladies from a local refugee group who presided over of a whole segment of garden, which had since blossomed with fresh vegetables.
The whole area smelled aggressively of spring, and dotted around the vegetable gardens were large planters of marigolds and daffodils and magnolias.
There were food stalls throughout the garden, and kid’s games, and buskers and one living statue dressed up like a tree.
“Holy shit,” said Zoe, stunned. There were people everywhere too, of course. Tourists were taking photos of the memorial to everyone who had died in the fires, and families were lining up for kebabs, and couples in their thirties were buying produce from the stalls. “Is it always like this?”
“Pretty much,” Cai said. “This is their second spring, or third? No, second. It took a while for all the burned out rubble to be taken away, and then to get set up. There’s a photowall of the process, over there. The progress photos are just insane- before the fire, then after, then as this place started up, and how it is now. Just wild. Smoothie?” he asked, nodding toward one of the stands, and Zoe nodded.
“I don’t know,” Cai continued talking as they waiting for their smoothies. “I just love it here. I love that it went from something so crap to something so great. There are so many different people involved; like people in rehab programmes have a piece of garden they have to look after, and some of the youth offenders grow the strawberries they put in the smoothies, and it’s like… London’s been through some shit, and… and this is what people do with that shit.”
Zoe looked around, trying to see the square as Cai saw it. It spun her head, a little, to think so positively. Yet looking at the world through Cai’s eyes was oddly soothing.
“It’s… pretty amazing,” she said.
“It’s fucking incredible,” Cai said, and Zoe wondered if that was the first time she’d heard him swear. “People, man. They tear me up.”
They took their smoothies (made with youth offender strawberries, apparently) and sat down on the wide stone lip of the fountain in the centre of the square. The stone was warm from the sun, and Cai sprawled down upon it like a lizard, making a noise of gratification as he soaked up the warmth. Zoe sat near his head, watching a small boy getting his face painted like Iron Man.
“You’ve been through a lot of shit too, haven’t you, Zoe?” Cai asked, tilting his head back to look at her for a moment before returning his gaze to the sky, a misty white that could almost be considered blue in some places. “Kind of like London.”
She raised her eyebrows at him, in a kind of yes, obviously but what is your point? look.
“Well,” continued Cai. “If you do need to share it, you know, that’s okay. With me.”
Zoe put her straw between her lips to avoid unbidden facial expressions.
“I mean,” he said. “You showed me the auction, how you came to London, and that was, well, really horrible. But better, right? After we all knew about it?”
She sucked at her smoothie, but after a moment, she nodded. So far, she thought.
“And,” said Cai. “I won’t ask about anything you don’t want me to ask about. And! If you want to ask me anything, you can ask me anything. I’ll answer it. It seems only fair, to balance it out a bit.” He smiled at her.
Sometimes she hated the way he handed out smiles like they didn’t cost him anything, like he’d never run out.
“Okay, here’s a question,” said Zoe, stabbing a strawberry with her straw. “Do you always talk so much?”
“Yeah,” admitted Cai. “I can be quiet though.” He zipped up his lips and tossed the key into the fountain, then folded his hands behind his head, eyes closed in the sunlight.
Zoe smiled, had a little more of her smoothie and watched the other people move around the square for a while. She knew he was being quiet to try and get her to talk, so she was going to let him.
Across the way was the photowall that Cai had pointed at before. From this distance she could only see the largest ones, black and white photos with an antique wash that looked at odds with the images of tall buildings in the photos. So surreal to think those buildings stood where she sat, now. Four years ago. Four whole years. It felt like no time at all had passed, while also feeling like a lifetime.
Near the photowall was a low stone wall into which dozens of names were inscribed. Zoe knew a memorial to the dead when she saw one, though the one at London College was a long metal plaque. On top of the wall, flowers were growing.
“Whole world feels like a memorial, sometimes,” Zoe said quietly.
“Yeah,” Cai agreed, his eyes still closed. “Yeah, it is. Everything we build, so people will remember we were here, or so we can remember the people we already lost.”
“You know the one at school,” Zoe asked, watching the memorial flowers dance in the breeze.
“Yeah.”
“You know whose name’s not on it?”
Cai opened his eyes as he shook his head.
“Jane Rochester,” said Zoe. “Silva. Gloria killed her later. Stole her out of my bedroom window.” She waited to see if Cai would ask anything but this time he did stay quiet, his lips sucked in between his teeth as he listened. “Belle and Juliet, they’re on the list. Not Silva – Jane. She was killed in the wrong place at the wrong time, so no memorial to her.”
“Jane Rochester,” Cai said, his mouth treating her name gently. “What was she like?”
Zoe shook her head. What was she like? “I don’t know if I really knew any of those girls,” she said. “Juliet, maybe. Gloria was too-” she grimaced. “Belle was too sad, Silva was… projecting the girl she wanted to be, I think. I know the girl she wanted to be. Bold, magical, reckless, special. Mean, too. Sometimes. I think I only met the real Silva the night she decided to be Jane.” That had been the night Gloria came to find her.
“And who was she – Jane?”
“Grieving for her sister,” Zoe said, after a while. It was hard to think of more than that. She’d been torn apart, that night, but Zoe had been sure Silva had wanted to try to be better. “They found Belle in the music room. Silva thought she’d probably been waiting for Gloria. She probably knew what was going to happen. She didn’t leave a note, but… Look, I did say I was bad company today.”
“No,” said Cai, sitting up. “You’re not bad company.” Earnestness just oozed out of him. Zoe couldn’t quite believe him.
“Yeah, a barrel of laughs, I am.”
“Making someone laugh isn’t the be-all and end-all,” he said. “This stuff is clearly important to you.”
“I don’t know,” said Zoe. “Sometimes I just think: if I’d been cleverer. If I’d tried to know the real Silva before the end. If I’d known Belle and saw how much trouble she was in. I could have done something.”
“If only we could travel in time, instead of just seeing it, hey?”
“Hey,” she agreed. “Sometimes when Rachel is kind of down she makes me think of Belle. Sad white blondes. I don’t know.”
Cai drained most of his own smoothie. "Are you worried you don't know who Rachel is?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Zoe repeated. “Yes. I think so. I don’t think she’s putting up a front. Sometimes, she definitely is, but not always. Not even most of the time. I think she’s the real Rachel around me, around Danny too. I hope so.”
She thought about it for a little while longer. “I think the Rachel I see most of the time is the person she wants to be, the person she is trying to be, I don’t know who the person she used to be is.”
“Well,” Cai said, thinking. “People change the real them all the time.”
Zoe frowned in thought. Did they?
“I mean, say the Rachel you know, the Rachel she shows you, is the Rachel she is trying to be; that doesn’t make her less real-Rachel. I mean, the person we project, the way we act, is still part of us. Like, right now I am being way more exuberant than I usually am, I think, but just because it’s the way I’m acting today, doesn’t mean it’s an act, you know?” He looked at her, as she frowned at him. “Like Zoe, you’re almost always so guarded, but that guarded shell around you isn’t hiding the ‘real’ Zoe, it’s part of you. People aren’t layered like an onion, where you peel back one act and find the truth, yeah? They’re big nebulous clouds of who they want to be and who they don’t, and maybe they default to certain kinds of behaviour but that behaviour is just as real as the behaviour they choose when they’re trying to change.”
His whole speech was getting tangled up in knots. “What are you trying to say?”
Cai shook his head, he wasn’t sure exactly. “Not sure exactly. That we’re all big balls of confusion, I guess. We're all hundreds of different faces for hundreds of different moods and all of them are us. That if people don’t seem genuine, it’s more likely to be because they’re still figuring themselves out as they’re lying to you.”
You’ve known better people than I have, Zoe thought, but she didn’t want to ruin him by saying it out loud and she didn't want a lecture on how most people were decent actually.
This was a difficult conversation and Zoe wasn’t sure she wanted to be having it. Cai was trailing his hands in the fountain. "Do you know how many people pee in there?" Zoe asked cynically.
Cai inspected the drops of water on his fingertips before grinning and flicking them at Zoe. It was a point of pride that she didn't shriek.
"Oh sh-" he said, hit by her glare. "I just remembered why I used to be scared of you."
Zoe calmly wiped the drop of water from her cheek. "Really?" she asked.
"You don't have to look so pleased about it," Cai said.
Zoe squashed her smile. "What did you think I was going to do?"
"I didn't think you were going to do anything. You were always so... angry, though, you looked like you'd attack anyone who talked to you. I mean, I got it, you were probably all torn up inside from what had happened. I couldn't believe that your parents made you come back to LC after."
"They didn't make me," Zoe said. "I chose to."
"Serious?"
Zoe nodded.
"Why?"
She didn't answer for a moment. "You almost died - why did you come back? Why did anyone?"
"Well, it wasn't going to happen again," Cai said, despite the certainty he'd felt on Thursday that it was, in fact, happening again. "And people there, they understood. If I'd gone to a different school, I would have been different, I would have stood out. That would have made it harder."
"Exactly," Zoe said. "It wouldn't have been any better at a different school. People would have found out who I was. They would have hated me there, too."
"Plus the snazzy uniforms," Cai said. "Couldn't leave those behind."
"Why do you always do that?" Zoe asked. "Go from serious to daft in a sentence. Making light of everything."
"Do I always do that?" Cai asked, leaning backwards over the fountain. "I dunno. Not everything's dire, all the time. Plus, you've got a great smile. I make it my mission to get more smiles out of you."
"Shut up," said Zoe.
"Why do you always tell me to shut up?" Cai teased.
"Cos you got a big mouth," Zoe pointed out.
Cai grinned with his big mouth. "Fair enough," he nodded. "I'm going to get an ice cream and shove it in my big mouth, that'll shut me up for a minute. Want one?"
"Nah," Zoe held up her smoothie, which she hadn't finished yet.
Cai made it half way to the ice cream stand when his phone rang, and Zoe watched in worry as he answered it, and returned to her after with a concerned look on his face. "That was Dom," he said. "He got a call from Faye asking to be picked up, she's at a friend’s place and they had a big fight, but he's at work. Uh, do you wanna come on a rescue mission for a distraught nine year old? There'll probably be more ice cream at the end of it."
"Would she want me there?" Zoe wondered.
"Are you kidding? Faye wants to grow up and be you." He offered her his gloved hand.
"No, she really doesn't," Zoe said, standing up without his help. "What lies have you been telling her?"
"No lies," Cai said as they made their way back to the car. "You're a cool, pretty, adopted black woman, and she's a short, dorky, fostered black girl who can't see how stunning she's going to grow up to be."
~
Cai was right about Faye. She brightened up as soon as she saw Zoe. Zoe wondered if Faye looked at her the same way Zoe had looked at Jude when she first met. Zoe kind of wanted to buy her a game console.
“So chica,” Cai asked, as Faye bundled into the back seat, hugging her backpack. “Want to talk about what happened at Heather’s?”
“Nope,” said Faye. “I want to go home and watch the Eurovision we taped.”
“Alrighty,” Cai said cheerfully. “Just remember, the proud Finch name goes down the toilet if you let girls named after plants push you around.”
“I’m not even a Finch!” Faye protested. “I’m an Osborne!” She shared a look with Zoe, like can you believe this guy?
They drove back to Casa Rosa and Faye stomped her way out the house and straight into the living room to turn on the television. “Hope you don’t mind Eurovision,” Cai said, heading for the kitchen.
“I’ll live,” said Zoe. Zoe hadn’t seen any Eurovision this year because organic chemistry came first, and secretly she’d kind of missed it.
“So I promised ice cream, but you look like you need some of the hard stuff,” Cai said, pulling two shot glasses from the cupboard and laying them down on the bench. Zoe looked at them, her eyebrows a little raised. She wouldn’t say no to a shot of something, probably. But she was surprised that this was coming from Cai, and with Faye in the other room. On second thought, she would say no to a shot because Zoe wasn’t so keen on surprises.
With a serious expression he turned from the fridge with a box of apple juice and poured out two shots, then pushed one across the bench toward her.
She looked at him. Raised her eyebrow a little more but raised the glass higher, and they tapped their drinks together and shot them back.
Something about the things he did made her feel softer, even when she was gearing up to be hard. She put the glass back down in front of him. “Another,” she said.
“Whoa there Zoe,” he said, pouring another. She threw this one back as well, and put it down again.
“Another,” she said, and held his eyes. She watched as the smile crept across his face, lighting up every part of him. She held eye contact till she couldn’t take it anymore, and looked away. It felt like her heart was beating in her stomach.
“What are you two doing?” Faye asked, walking into the kitchen and looking at the shot glasses.
“Oh no, you’re way too young,” Cai said, and Faye put her hands on her hips. “Oh alright, but don’t tell anyone or I’ll be in so much trouble,” Cai relented, and poured her a shot of juice as well.
Faye took it cynically, and sipped at it. “It’s juice,” she sounded betrayed. “Why can’t I have a whole glass if it’s just juice? Why are you laughing at me?” she demanded, and both teenagers covered their mouths with their hands.
“I’m sorry, I’m a crap big brother, is why,” Cai said, getting Faye her favourite glass and letting her pour as much juice as she wanted.
Faye sighed heavily. “You’re not that bad,” she said, and filled the glass to the brim. Cai’s expression shifted to one of caution, but he didn’t say anything, just let her risk the carpet if she spilled any over the rim.
Faye balanced the glass into the living room and Cai and Zoe followed with the rest of the apple juice and the shot glasses.
Their living room was small compared to Zoe’s (Zoe had to stop comparing houses in London to her own, she knew this) and all the furniture was centred around the fireplace, which felt strangely old fashioned. Some of the arm chairs even had their backs to the television, before Faye wheeled it to centre stage in front of the fireplace.
It was kind of sweet to think that the living room was set up for talking and fire gazing instead of telly.
She and Cai took the couch and Faye took up the whole floor space in front of them, giving the performance of her life for Zoe. She knew a number of performances off by heart (“I am a weapon!” she sang along with Molly, “Fire in my bones!”) and for others she just danced, or sat on the rug and fastforwarded while she gulped down her juice, then she’d be up again, whatever fight she’d had with Heather long forgotten.
As the sun began to dip in the sky and cast long fingers of sunlight across the living room, Cai felt a movement he couldn’t quite believe, and looked down; Zoe was holding his hand. Her face hadn’t changed, though; it stayed facing forward, watching the television, masked in an unreadable expression.
Cai could feel the warmth of her hand, through the glove. He was ready to pull away if he felt the undercurrent of a vision tugging at him, but it didn’t. He suddenly thought he knew why Roe sat so still all the time, in case she moved too suddenly, and frightened all the good things away. So Cai didn’t move, and Zoe didn’t acknowledge him, but she didn’t let go of his hand either.
“I can be good enough for the both of us,” Cai said. “I can, I’m super good at company. Is this because of the lockdown?”
There was silence for a while. It had been a week since the lockdown. They had been planning to hang out last weekend but Zoe had cancelled; her stress levels were so high she felt like she was going to burst, and if she’d gone out instead of doing something productive she would have been drowned by guilt. So she spent the weekend with her head down studying for exams, trying to push distractions away, and the distraction of Cai was swept up with all the bad distractions and firmly ignored till the stress levels went down again.
Not that, by the time the next weekend rolled around, her stress levels were low. It had been a weird week at London College, everyone’s breaking points were closer than normal, with the added adrenaline from the stupid senior prank and exams and their futures rushing toward them like a freight train.
There’d been a few breakdowns, a few panic attacks, a few fights. Zoe kept messing up experiments in chemistry, her portfolio in art was still frustrating her, she could barely hold a thought in her head in Critical Thinking; the only class that didn’t stress her out that week was PE.
So when Cai called on Saturday, she was still feeling… she wasn’t sure how best to describe it… put-together-wrong.
“I don’t know,” Zoe said, eventually. “Lots of things.”
“Don’t worry about being good company, then. Just, come out. Life’s been shit lately, and we’re both crazy worried about what might happen, and, I don’t know, I want to show you something.”
“Want to show me what?”
“Well,” said Cai. “I was kind of going to pretend to wing it, be all spontaneous and sensitive.”
“Right,” said Zoe.
“So, maybe, you could do me a favour, and let me? I mean, I did save your life.”
“You’re going to have to stop using that, one day.”
“Yeah probably, but not today. Today I let two preteen girls dress me, and if I don’t go out, they’re going to be really upset. There could be tears.”
“Theirs or yours?” Cai liked to believe she was starting to smile.
“Probably mine,” he said. “I’m a weeper.”
“A spontaneous, sensitive weeper.” Yeah, he was sure he could hear a smile in her voice.
“A persuasive, spontaneous sensitive weeper.”
“Hm.”
“Are you going to make me beg, Zoe? Because I could beg. But it would impeach on my inherent dignity.”
“Hm.”
“I could throw in a pretty please,” he seceded. “As a token of goodwill.”
“You don’t need to say pretty please,” Zoe said. “I’ll come out. Just. Don’t be too cheerful, all up in my face.”
Cai could have kissed the phone. “I’ll be sober as a judge,” he promised.
“You better be,” Zoe said. “You’re driving.”
~
Zoe didn’t tell Liz and Emma she was going out with Cai – or rather, she told them Cai was picking her up and they were going to meet Rachel and Danny to study together, because her moms would have made a fuss.
If she was being honest with herself she knew they wouldn’t be that bad, but she felt that they would put expectations on her. They probably wouldn’t mean to, but they would. Zoe didn’t think they’d see her, hanging out alone with a boy she’d only recently met and had been spending a lot of time with, as something simple. And Zoe wanted it to be simple. Just a day out. No expectations, no baggage, no explanation needed.
Sitting in the car next to Cai as he drove, she texted Rachel and Danny to tell her what she’d said, so they didn’t call her house and ask for her and blow the whole thing wide open. Her moms would definitely have opinions if they found out Zoe lied about it.
Rachel replied: ;) :x, which Zoe promptly ignored.
This was supposed to be a day of doing something unrelated to visions – a proper, pretend we’re normal day, which was… difficult, and hard, and confusing, and after Zoe put her phone away she didn’t know what to say. If you crossed out all the supernatural stuff, what did that leave her with?
School? But she didn’t want to talk about school, too worried that it might lead onto the university topic, which she’d also forbidden.
So… family? Hope anecdotes? Except Zoe didn’t feel particularly like talking about family either. It was a bit too wrapped up in all the things that made it hard to pretend to be normal.
When was the last time Zoe had had to make small talk? When was the last time she’d wanted to?
This was so frustrating. She’d warned him she wasn’t great company today.
It was hard to tell if Cai minded, or if he was trying to think of something not too cheerful to say, or if he was just concentrating on driving.
Help, Zoe thought to herself. She wished they were meeting Rachel and Danny to study, that would have been a lot easier.
What the fuck, Zoe? She thought to herself. She’d barely buckled in and already she felt like bolting. How did normal people do this? How did you have a decent time with someone while navigating such large forbidden topics of conversation? Maybe she should fake sudden sickness and get him to take her home? Maybe she should just say something, anything! And just hope that he wouldn’t mind when she screwed it up.
God, this was such a mistake. Zoe felt the silence pressing down on her, grinding her down into the passenger seat like a giant shoe making sure a spider was definitely dead.
It had only been a couple of minutes, and Cai had been concentrating on getting out of Zoe’s swanky neighbourhood and back onto a road he knew. He didn’t consider Zoe’s silence to be anything particularly unusual; she was a fairly internal person. But when he cast his eyes over at her as he stopped for traffic, he saw how tight her hands were clenched on her knees and how she looked like she might pop under the slightest amount of pressure.
“Okay Zoe!” He said, wondering just how cheerful was too cheerful. “Let’s see how your music education’s coming along. There’s a reservoir of CDs in the glove box; find us some driving music?”
“A reservoir?” Zoe asked, raising an eyebrow at him but reaching for the glove box, anxious for something to contribute, but not so anxious that she wouldn’t question his occasionally odd vocabulary.
“What’s wrong with reservoir?” Cai protested. “It’s a perfectly good word.”
“Yeah, for transporting Roman water, maybe.”
“That’s an aqueduct?”
“Aren’t they the same thing?”
“Uh,” Cai said. “I don’t know. No, they can’t be. Because ‘there’s an aqueduct of CDs in the glove box’ sounds ridiculous.”
“Oh,” said Zoe, flicking through CDs. “Well, you wouldn’t want to sound ridiculous.”
“’Solutely not,” Cai shook his head firmly.
Zoe pondered over the CDs, discarding the ones she didn’t know, which left her with barely any choice at all. Three traffic lights and some complaining from Cai later, she closed her eyes and let the envelope fall open and let fate decide.
“This wait better be worth it,” he said.
“They’re all your CDs,” Zoe pointed out. “Clearly you’re going to like whatever I pick. Why would you keep something you hated in here?”
They talked music for a while, finding out that they had very, very few bands in common, but at least it wasn’t one of the forbidden topics. Cai kept giving Zoe openings to make fun of him, which helped her relax a little, so maybe he was doing it on purpose. Suspicious male behaviour.
“Nearly there,” he said, “Keep an eye out for a park?”
“Where are we going?” Zoe asked, taking her role in park hunting seriously and leaning forward like a few more inches would help her spot one. “Are you going to tell me or are you going to blindfold me before we get out of the car. Because I warn you, I probably won’t let you do that.”
“Nah,” Cai grinned. “Have you ever been to the Heart of the Cross before?”
“Oh,” said Zoe. “No, haven’t.”
“Cool, you’ll love it, it’s really… yeah, you’ll see. AHA FOUND ONE, victory for Cai,” his grin turned a bit mad as he pulled into the park, and Zoe gripped the dashboard.
A little over four years ago, a large fire in the shape of a cross had devastated part of London. It had been a bad time – horrifically bad – and had come only a couple of months after the school shooting. The fires, and the crucifixions and everything else had blurred together in Zoe’s head into one giant hellish ball. She’d not been a nice person to be around, that year. Not that she’d been particularly better the next year, either.
It had been easy to avoid this part of the city since it happened, mostly because Zoe didn’t go out much. She’d heard life had started to return to the area but she’d never needed to go and see if for herself.
The Heart of the Cross had been industrial buildings once, but had been left undeveloped while everything was rebuilt around it, and had since turned into a sprawling community garden and memorial to those London had lost.
Cai talked as they walked, telling her about how Dom had become involved with some other volunteers from church and how he and Dom had helped to build planter boxes and donated them to the cause, and how Nonnie knew a trio of (“frankly quite scary”) old ladies from a local refugee group who presided over of a whole segment of garden, which had since blossomed with fresh vegetables.
The whole area smelled aggressively of spring, and dotted around the vegetable gardens were large planters of marigolds and daffodils and magnolias.
There were food stalls throughout the garden, and kid’s games, and buskers and one living statue dressed up like a tree.
“Holy shit,” said Zoe, stunned. There were people everywhere too, of course. Tourists were taking photos of the memorial to everyone who had died in the fires, and families were lining up for kebabs, and couples in their thirties were buying produce from the stalls. “Is it always like this?”
“Pretty much,” Cai said. “This is their second spring, or third? No, second. It took a while for all the burned out rubble to be taken away, and then to get set up. There’s a photowall of the process, over there. The progress photos are just insane- before the fire, then after, then as this place started up, and how it is now. Just wild. Smoothie?” he asked, nodding toward one of the stands, and Zoe nodded.
“I don’t know,” Cai continued talking as they waiting for their smoothies. “I just love it here. I love that it went from something so crap to something so great. There are so many different people involved; like people in rehab programmes have a piece of garden they have to look after, and some of the youth offenders grow the strawberries they put in the smoothies, and it’s like… London’s been through some shit, and… and this is what people do with that shit.”
Zoe looked around, trying to see the square as Cai saw it. It spun her head, a little, to think so positively. Yet looking at the world through Cai’s eyes was oddly soothing.
“It’s… pretty amazing,” she said.
“It’s fucking incredible,” Cai said, and Zoe wondered if that was the first time she’d heard him swear. “People, man. They tear me up.”
They took their smoothies (made with youth offender strawberries, apparently) and sat down on the wide stone lip of the fountain in the centre of the square. The stone was warm from the sun, and Cai sprawled down upon it like a lizard, making a noise of gratification as he soaked up the warmth. Zoe sat near his head, watching a small boy getting his face painted like Iron Man.
“You’ve been through a lot of shit too, haven’t you, Zoe?” Cai asked, tilting his head back to look at her for a moment before returning his gaze to the sky, a misty white that could almost be considered blue in some places. “Kind of like London.”
She raised her eyebrows at him, in a kind of yes, obviously but what is your point? look.
“Well,” continued Cai. “If you do need to share it, you know, that’s okay. With me.”
Zoe put her straw between her lips to avoid unbidden facial expressions.
“I mean,” he said. “You showed me the auction, how you came to London, and that was, well, really horrible. But better, right? After we all knew about it?”
She sucked at her smoothie, but after a moment, she nodded. So far, she thought.
“And,” said Cai. “I won’t ask about anything you don’t want me to ask about. And! If you want to ask me anything, you can ask me anything. I’ll answer it. It seems only fair, to balance it out a bit.” He smiled at her.
Sometimes she hated the way he handed out smiles like they didn’t cost him anything, like he’d never run out.
“Okay, here’s a question,” said Zoe, stabbing a strawberry with her straw. “Do you always talk so much?”
“Yeah,” admitted Cai. “I can be quiet though.” He zipped up his lips and tossed the key into the fountain, then folded his hands behind his head, eyes closed in the sunlight.
Zoe smiled, had a little more of her smoothie and watched the other people move around the square for a while. She knew he was being quiet to try and get her to talk, so she was going to let him.
Across the way was the photowall that Cai had pointed at before. From this distance she could only see the largest ones, black and white photos with an antique wash that looked at odds with the images of tall buildings in the photos. So surreal to think those buildings stood where she sat, now. Four years ago. Four whole years. It felt like no time at all had passed, while also feeling like a lifetime.
Near the photowall was a low stone wall into which dozens of names were inscribed. Zoe knew a memorial to the dead when she saw one, though the one at London College was a long metal plaque. On top of the wall, flowers were growing.
“Whole world feels like a memorial, sometimes,” Zoe said quietly.
“Yeah,” Cai agreed, his eyes still closed. “Yeah, it is. Everything we build, so people will remember we were here, or so we can remember the people we already lost.”
“You know the one at school,” Zoe asked, watching the memorial flowers dance in the breeze.
“Yeah.”
“You know whose name’s not on it?”
Cai opened his eyes as he shook his head.
“Jane Rochester,” said Zoe. “Silva. Gloria killed her later. Stole her out of my bedroom window.” She waited to see if Cai would ask anything but this time he did stay quiet, his lips sucked in between his teeth as he listened. “Belle and Juliet, they’re on the list. Not Silva – Jane. She was killed in the wrong place at the wrong time, so no memorial to her.”
“Jane Rochester,” Cai said, his mouth treating her name gently. “What was she like?”
Zoe shook her head. What was she like? “I don’t know if I really knew any of those girls,” she said. “Juliet, maybe. Gloria was too-” she grimaced. “Belle was too sad, Silva was… projecting the girl she wanted to be, I think. I know the girl she wanted to be. Bold, magical, reckless, special. Mean, too. Sometimes. I think I only met the real Silva the night she decided to be Jane.” That had been the night Gloria came to find her.
“And who was she – Jane?”
“Grieving for her sister,” Zoe said, after a while. It was hard to think of more than that. She’d been torn apart, that night, but Zoe had been sure Silva had wanted to try to be better. “They found Belle in the music room. Silva thought she’d probably been waiting for Gloria. She probably knew what was going to happen. She didn’t leave a note, but… Look, I did say I was bad company today.”
“No,” said Cai, sitting up. “You’re not bad company.” Earnestness just oozed out of him. Zoe couldn’t quite believe him.
“Yeah, a barrel of laughs, I am.”
“Making someone laugh isn’t the be-all and end-all,” he said. “This stuff is clearly important to you.”
“I don’t know,” said Zoe. “Sometimes I just think: if I’d been cleverer. If I’d tried to know the real Silva before the end. If I’d known Belle and saw how much trouble she was in. I could have done something.”
“If only we could travel in time, instead of just seeing it, hey?”
“Hey,” she agreed. “Sometimes when Rachel is kind of down she makes me think of Belle. Sad white blondes. I don’t know.”
Cai drained most of his own smoothie. "Are you worried you don't know who Rachel is?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Zoe repeated. “Yes. I think so. I don’t think she’s putting up a front. Sometimes, she definitely is, but not always. Not even most of the time. I think she’s the real Rachel around me, around Danny too. I hope so.”
She thought about it for a little while longer. “I think the Rachel I see most of the time is the person she wants to be, the person she is trying to be, I don’t know who the person she used to be is.”
“Well,” Cai said, thinking. “People change the real them all the time.”
Zoe frowned in thought. Did they?
“I mean, say the Rachel you know, the Rachel she shows you, is the Rachel she is trying to be; that doesn’t make her less real-Rachel. I mean, the person we project, the way we act, is still part of us. Like, right now I am being way more exuberant than I usually am, I think, but just because it’s the way I’m acting today, doesn’t mean it’s an act, you know?” He looked at her, as she frowned at him. “Like Zoe, you’re almost always so guarded, but that guarded shell around you isn’t hiding the ‘real’ Zoe, it’s part of you. People aren’t layered like an onion, where you peel back one act and find the truth, yeah? They’re big nebulous clouds of who they want to be and who they don’t, and maybe they default to certain kinds of behaviour but that behaviour is just as real as the behaviour they choose when they’re trying to change.”
His whole speech was getting tangled up in knots. “What are you trying to say?”
Cai shook his head, he wasn’t sure exactly. “Not sure exactly. That we’re all big balls of confusion, I guess. We're all hundreds of different faces for hundreds of different moods and all of them are us. That if people don’t seem genuine, it’s more likely to be because they’re still figuring themselves out as they’re lying to you.”
You’ve known better people than I have, Zoe thought, but she didn’t want to ruin him by saying it out loud and she didn't want a lecture on how most people were decent actually.
This was a difficult conversation and Zoe wasn’t sure she wanted to be having it. Cai was trailing his hands in the fountain. "Do you know how many people pee in there?" Zoe asked cynically.
Cai inspected the drops of water on his fingertips before grinning and flicking them at Zoe. It was a point of pride that she didn't shriek.
"Oh sh-" he said, hit by her glare. "I just remembered why I used to be scared of you."
Zoe calmly wiped the drop of water from her cheek. "Really?" she asked.
"You don't have to look so pleased about it," Cai said.
Zoe squashed her smile. "What did you think I was going to do?"
"I didn't think you were going to do anything. You were always so... angry, though, you looked like you'd attack anyone who talked to you. I mean, I got it, you were probably all torn up inside from what had happened. I couldn't believe that your parents made you come back to LC after."
"They didn't make me," Zoe said. "I chose to."
"Serious?"
Zoe nodded.
"Why?"
She didn't answer for a moment. "You almost died - why did you come back? Why did anyone?"
"Well, it wasn't going to happen again," Cai said, despite the certainty he'd felt on Thursday that it was, in fact, happening again. "And people there, they understood. If I'd gone to a different school, I would have been different, I would have stood out. That would have made it harder."
"Exactly," Zoe said. "It wouldn't have been any better at a different school. People would have found out who I was. They would have hated me there, too."
"Plus the snazzy uniforms," Cai said. "Couldn't leave those behind."
"Why do you always do that?" Zoe asked. "Go from serious to daft in a sentence. Making light of everything."
"Do I always do that?" Cai asked, leaning backwards over the fountain. "I dunno. Not everything's dire, all the time. Plus, you've got a great smile. I make it my mission to get more smiles out of you."
"Shut up," said Zoe.
"Why do you always tell me to shut up?" Cai teased.
"Cos you got a big mouth," Zoe pointed out.
Cai grinned with his big mouth. "Fair enough," he nodded. "I'm going to get an ice cream and shove it in my big mouth, that'll shut me up for a minute. Want one?"
"Nah," Zoe held up her smoothie, which she hadn't finished yet.
Cai made it half way to the ice cream stand when his phone rang, and Zoe watched in worry as he answered it, and returned to her after with a concerned look on his face. "That was Dom," he said. "He got a call from Faye asking to be picked up, she's at a friend’s place and they had a big fight, but he's at work. Uh, do you wanna come on a rescue mission for a distraught nine year old? There'll probably be more ice cream at the end of it."
"Would she want me there?" Zoe wondered.
"Are you kidding? Faye wants to grow up and be you." He offered her his gloved hand.
"No, she really doesn't," Zoe said, standing up without his help. "What lies have you been telling her?"
"No lies," Cai said as they made their way back to the car. "You're a cool, pretty, adopted black woman, and she's a short, dorky, fostered black girl who can't see how stunning she's going to grow up to be."
~
Cai was right about Faye. She brightened up as soon as she saw Zoe. Zoe wondered if Faye looked at her the same way Zoe had looked at Jude when she first met. Zoe kind of wanted to buy her a game console.
“So chica,” Cai asked, as Faye bundled into the back seat, hugging her backpack. “Want to talk about what happened at Heather’s?”
“Nope,” said Faye. “I want to go home and watch the Eurovision we taped.”
“Alrighty,” Cai said cheerfully. “Just remember, the proud Finch name goes down the toilet if you let girls named after plants push you around.”
“I’m not even a Finch!” Faye protested. “I’m an Osborne!” She shared a look with Zoe, like can you believe this guy?
They drove back to Casa Rosa and Faye stomped her way out the house and straight into the living room to turn on the television. “Hope you don’t mind Eurovision,” Cai said, heading for the kitchen.
“I’ll live,” said Zoe. Zoe hadn’t seen any Eurovision this year because organic chemistry came first, and secretly she’d kind of missed it.
“So I promised ice cream, but you look like you need some of the hard stuff,” Cai said, pulling two shot glasses from the cupboard and laying them down on the bench. Zoe looked at them, her eyebrows a little raised. She wouldn’t say no to a shot of something, probably. But she was surprised that this was coming from Cai, and with Faye in the other room. On second thought, she would say no to a shot because Zoe wasn’t so keen on surprises.
With a serious expression he turned from the fridge with a box of apple juice and poured out two shots, then pushed one across the bench toward her.
She looked at him. Raised her eyebrow a little more but raised the glass higher, and they tapped their drinks together and shot them back.
Something about the things he did made her feel softer, even when she was gearing up to be hard. She put the glass back down in front of him. “Another,” she said.
“Whoa there Zoe,” he said, pouring another. She threw this one back as well, and put it down again.
“Another,” she said, and held his eyes. She watched as the smile crept across his face, lighting up every part of him. She held eye contact till she couldn’t take it anymore, and looked away. It felt like her heart was beating in her stomach.
“What are you two doing?” Faye asked, walking into the kitchen and looking at the shot glasses.
“Oh no, you’re way too young,” Cai said, and Faye put her hands on her hips. “Oh alright, but don’t tell anyone or I’ll be in so much trouble,” Cai relented, and poured her a shot of juice as well.
Faye took it cynically, and sipped at it. “It’s juice,” she sounded betrayed. “Why can’t I have a whole glass if it’s just juice? Why are you laughing at me?” she demanded, and both teenagers covered their mouths with their hands.
“I’m sorry, I’m a crap big brother, is why,” Cai said, getting Faye her favourite glass and letting her pour as much juice as she wanted.
Faye sighed heavily. “You’re not that bad,” she said, and filled the glass to the brim. Cai’s expression shifted to one of caution, but he didn’t say anything, just let her risk the carpet if she spilled any over the rim.
Faye balanced the glass into the living room and Cai and Zoe followed with the rest of the apple juice and the shot glasses.
Their living room was small compared to Zoe’s (Zoe had to stop comparing houses in London to her own, she knew this) and all the furniture was centred around the fireplace, which felt strangely old fashioned. Some of the arm chairs even had their backs to the television, before Faye wheeled it to centre stage in front of the fireplace.
It was kind of sweet to think that the living room was set up for talking and fire gazing instead of telly.
She and Cai took the couch and Faye took up the whole floor space in front of them, giving the performance of her life for Zoe. She knew a number of performances off by heart (“I am a weapon!” she sang along with Molly, “Fire in my bones!”) and for others she just danced, or sat on the rug and fastforwarded while she gulped down her juice, then she’d be up again, whatever fight she’d had with Heather long forgotten.
As the sun began to dip in the sky and cast long fingers of sunlight across the living room, Cai felt a movement he couldn’t quite believe, and looked down; Zoe was holding his hand. Her face hadn’t changed, though; it stayed facing forward, watching the television, masked in an unreadable expression.
Cai could feel the warmth of her hand, through the glove. He was ready to pull away if he felt the undercurrent of a vision tugging at him, but it didn’t. He suddenly thought he knew why Roe sat so still all the time, in case she moved too suddenly, and frightened all the good things away. So Cai didn’t move, and Zoe didn’t acknowledge him, but she didn’t let go of his hand either.
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