“Well?” Hugh asked, when I joined him at the edge of the pool after my interview. “How did it go?”
“Okay, I guess?” I shrugged, feeling slightly disheartened by my earlier meeting with his boss. “She said she would get back to me.” I looked to my brother for some much-needed emotional support. “Is that a bad thing?”
“Nah, if Kim didn’t like you, trust me, you’d know it.” Setting his mop down, he patted my shoulder and walked back to his deckchair. “I bet you a tenner you’ll get the job.”
“She was sort of terrifying, Hugh.”
“Yeah, Kim can be a fair bit of a ball-buster,” he agreed, eyes focusing on the bodies splashing around in the water as he spoke. “She has this hard, take-no-shit approach, but she’s fair.”
I wasn’t sure about that. My brother’s boss, from our brief encounter, had given me some serious Mr. Twomey vibes. I was half-hoping that she didn’t call me back. Sure, a paying job would be super, but I enjoyed volunteering at the community pool, and I was a firm believer in life being about more than just a paycheck.
“Oh my god,” I choked out when a familiar blonde shimmied into my peripheral vision. “What the hell happened to you?”
“I fell,” Lizzie explained, joining us at Hugh’s deckchair.
The fact that she was here wasn’t surprising. Her family had been members for years, same as ours, but it was the scar she bore that took my breath away.
I’d seen similar cuts on Lizzie’s body in the past, but not for a very long time. The faint scars that adorned her inner wrists had appeared in the months that had followed her sister’s passing. After her parents put her in counselling, it seemed to stop. I thought she had it under control. Apparently not.
“On what?” I demanded, gaping at the huge, jagged, freshly scabbed cut going the entire length of her thigh. “A chainsaw?”
“No, on a barbed wire fence I was climbing over, actually.” Clad in a white bikini, Lizzie pulled her hair up into a makeshift ponytail, and offered me a half-hearted smile. Scars or not, Lizzie was ridiculously beautiful. Like for real. She looked like some sort of angel, with a halo of messy blonde hair. “It’s all good, Claire. It happened ages ago. It doesn’t even hurt anymore.”
“Are you sure?” I squirmed in discomfort, eyeing the horrendous-looking cut. “Because it looks recent and it’s hurting me just to look at it.”
“Yeah,” Hugh agreed, tone hard, as his eyes locked on her thigh.
“Didn’t know you were working today,” she replied, folding her arms across her chest.
“Wasn’t supposed to be,” Hugh replied, not taking his eyes off her thigh. “What happened?”
Ignoring my brother, Lizzie moved for the edge of the pool, not stopping until she had eased herself into the water. “I’ll see you later, Claire.”
“Yeah, okay,” I called after her, worrying my lip. “Are you coming to the beach campout?”
“Is Thor going?”
“You already know the answer.”
“Then you already know my answer.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” I asked, forcefully cheerful. “It’s going to be super fun.”
“I’m sure I’d rather drown than voluntarily spend time with him,” she called back and then she disappeared beneath the water.
“Oh crap.” I turned back to my brother, feeling a surge of anxiety fill my chest. “That’s weird, right?” I gestured to where Lizzie had disappeared beneath the water. “She’s not okay, is she?”
“How am I supposed to know?” my brother bit out, tone thick with emotion. “I’m hardly her confidante these days, am I?”
“Yeah, but you used to be,” I blurted out, uttering the words I’d vowed many years ago to never repeat. Seriously, speaking about it was as taboo at Tommen as saying the word Voldemort at Hogwarts. A big no-no.
Their fractured relationship was one that was stored in the memory vault labeled never bring up again for the good of our friendship circle.
My brother’s eyes flashed with pain, and I felt like the biggest jerk in the world.
“Yikes.” Squirming in discomfort, I reached out and patted his shoulder. “Sorry.”
“I don’t know,” he repeated in a low tone – I presumed to hide the tremor in his voice. Because Lizzie affected Hugh badly, and she always had.
For some reason, my brother had been infatuated with my prickly bestie since the beginning of time. And for some even stranger reason, the feeling was mutual for Lizzie.
Throughout the course of our entire childhood, they’d stuck together like peas in a pod. By the time we’d made it to fifth class of primary school, their friendship title had been upgraded to that of boyfriend and girlfriend. Not that any of us had a clue of what that meant. In our young minds, it simply meant that they were each other’s favorite.
Either way, they were together for a really long time, even after everything had seemed to fall apart for Liz when her sister died. Hugh was the one she’d leaned on back then. Come to think about it, he was the only one she’d been willing to speak to for months. It had been a pretty dark time in our lives that had followed us long into secondary school.
Over time, Lizzie’s grief had taken ahold of her in ways none of us were equipped or mature enough to handle, and by the start of second year, Lizzie and Hugh’s relationship, along with a lot of her relationships with other friends, had completely unraveled.
I stuck in there with her, taking on her mood swings and erratic behavior, because I loved her like a sister, but it wasn’t easy. Especially when she focused all of her pain on Gerard because of a rumor that involved his stepbrother.
It sucked because Liz and Gerard used to be really good friends before that. We all were. We had this tight little circle that had been shattered after Caoimhe died.
After the breakup, the rest of our close-knit circle mentally vowed to never discuss it or bring it up again. To this day, we were completely oblivious as to the inner details of their breakup because Hugh and Liz could hardly bear to spend more than a few minutes in each other’s company, let alone talk about it.
Even though they’d been together since primary school, the breakup didn’t seem to affect Lizzie too deeply because she’d started seeing someone else within days of them calling it off.
Hugh, on the other hand, spent several months moping around the house like a dark cloud until he collided with Katie in the hallways of Tommen and the sun started shining for him again.
Deep down inside, I knew the reason Hugh tried to keep me away from Gerard was because he was projecting his own experience on me. When my brother said that he was afraid of me getting hurt, what he really meant was that he didn’t want me to get hurt like he had.
“Hugh, it’s happening again, isn’t it?”
He flicked his gaze to me, and I could tell from one glimpse of his brown eyes that I wasn’t alone in my worrying. “I don’t know.”
“She’s still so angry.”
“Yeah, Claire, I know.”
“Should we … ” Shrugging, I chewed anxiously on my lip and flicked my attention back to our friend who was now swimming laps. “I don’t know, do something?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Anything?”
“I’m not the one, Claire,” Hugh strangled out and I watched as a huge full body shudder rippled through him. “Not this time. Not anymore. I can’t keep saving … ” Dropping his head in his hands, he sucked in a sharp breath, shoulders slumped. “I have Katie now … I can’t do this with her again.”
I got that, but I was scared, and he was my big brother who always seemed to know what to do. After all, Hugh was the one who knew more about Lizzie than any of the rest of us. He’d been there, right there in the middle of her personal breakdown the last time. Before the shutters came down around her heart, blocking all of us out, he was the last person to be pushed away. He knew her better than anyone. The old her, at least.
“I could talk to her parents?” I offered, feeling lost and way out of my depth. “Or Pierce?”
“Pierce?” Hugh gaped at me like I had lost my mind. “Like he’s worth a fucking conversation.” His eyes narrowed in fury as he spoke. “He’s not blind, Claire, he just doesn’t care.”
“He has to care,” I urged. “He has to see. He’s her boyfriend, Hugh.”
“He only sees the parts of her he wants to see,” Hugh spat. “He won’t do a damn thing, which suits Liz perfectly considering that’s the only reason she’s with him.”
“Then we need to talk to Mam,” I blurted. “She’ll talk to Lizzie’s mam and sort it out again.”
“Sort it out again,” he repeated under his breath. “She’s not a computer that needs resetting, Claire. It’s not that simple.” Muttering something unintelligible under his breath, he abruptly stood and rolled his shoulders. “Fine.”
“Fine?” Hope filled my heart. “You’ll do something.”
“Yeah, Claire.” Another shudder racked through my brother, and he nodded solemnly. “I’ll do something.”
