Paris is trying to tell us a campfire story, but I’m watching the girl with the short black hair. Beer cans crack and fizz. Waves hush on the shore. We built a fire between us, hours ago, before dark fell, and now it spits at shadows. It’s always hungry for more driftwood. Darren sits beside me with a heavy arm around my waist, breath hitting my neck whenever he laughs, which is often. He’s hungry for something more. Paris reckons I should just give it to him. But like I said, she’s telling a story, so we’re at least trying to give the appearance of rapt attention. She stares out at the ocean, watching moonlight ripple on the tide, and I know she’s imagining herself on film.
‘It’s the story of a serial killer,’ Paris whispers. ‘Of a cannibal.’
‘What a crock of shit,’ Darren mutters in my ear. I think he thinks ear muttering is sexy. I’ve seen him do it with other girls at our campfires, and I remember the jealousy I felt at the time. To be touched, to hear his secrets. Now it’s happening to me and his breath smells like Speights and his arm is making my lower back sweat. I wriggle frustrated toes in the sand but keep my face and body language neutral. We look good together. Everyone says so.
‘People have been plucked right from this beach,’ Paris warns, brushing her fingernails through her blonde hair. ‘They wash up days later. Liver eaten. Staring into the sun as crabs, like, crawl through their intestines.’
We consider this as a group, before someone asks, ‘So why haven’t we heard this before?’
‘I don’t know, look it up!’ Paris huffs. She was Drama Captain at our school this year. She’s used to long assembly speeches and onstage soliloquies, where the door is locked and attention shines solely on her. There’s a tall ginger dude stroking her thigh, trying to calm her, I think. He went to the boys’ school so I don’t know his name. Brian? Brandon?
‘But the monster has returned,’ Paris continues, sitting up straighter. ‘Just yesterday they found a corpse on the beach.’ She barely seems to notice the boy’s hand on her body. Either that or she very much does, but she’s using him as an accessory, the way powerful men do with half-dressed girls.
‘What kind of creature?’ Darren asks. ‘A taniwha?’
She shakes her head. ‘It’s like this horrible, evil monster that should be locked up where no one can see it.’
I don’t hear what comes next because the girl with short hair snorts. Either the firelight shifts or she’s just rolled her eyes. She’s sitting with her back to the ocean, bare legs spread out lazily, and I’m stealing another glance her way. There’s something about her poised casualness that makes her feel dangerous to watch. Her lips are painted black, but her eyes are even darker. Like glistening ebony beetles. It’s hard to explain, but over the course of the night I feel like we’ve shared a secret, me watching her when I get the nerve, her ignoring everything and everyone, but still listening. I don’t know who invited her. Paris, probably. Paris invited everyone here, including me in Year 10 when I’d just moved to Dunedin for my father’s work. It was a relief, falling right into a group like that. There’s nothing more comforting than being told here’s where you belong. With us.
I hope that girl belongs with us.
Darren mutters something by my neck.
‘Huh?’ I ask.
‘I said you look hot tonight.’
His face is close to mine. He’s smiling hopefully, brown eyes soft. This is probably how he looked as a kid when he was asking his mum for something; a biscuit, or ten more minutes on the computer.
‘Thanks, Darren.’
He hesitates, staring at my lips. His are nicer than mine; russet coloured and soft. I think of the group watching us kiss, the faces they’d make. What Paris would say. Then I think of the girl with short black hair, and it’s me who leans in first.
Finally someone goes, ‘Whoa, easy,’ and we pull away. Darren pecks my temple with wet lips, and I try to give the impression I’m embarrassed.
When I look back at the girl with short hair, she’s staring right at me. It’s hard to tell, but I think she’s disappointed.
*
‘Who was that girl at the beach last night?’ I ask, fingers drumming nervously on my floating rubber ring. I have the green one. Paris has the pink one. We’re in her parents’ pool, on the shaded side because we couldn’t be bothered with sunblock.
Paris takes a long sip from her virgin margarita. ‘What?’
‘The girl with short black hair and silver studs through her ears?’
‘Who?’ She’s pushed her sunglasses down her nose to glare at me.
This is too much. I shouldn’t have asked.
I push off the side of the pool to dodge her splashes, then lie back and stare at the patterns of trees barely visible through the canvas above.
‘Don’t make shit up,’ Paris calls after a pause. ‘You scare me.’
Before I can think what that means, Paris kicks off, hard. We bump together, legs touching, and I fight the urge to pull her in close so I can wrestle her into the chlorinated water. To wet her ponytail and that pale, skinny body of hers. To really piss her off. No one hates the human touch more than Paris.
I give her the finger instead, kicking her floating ring away.
‘I don’t know what you think you saw,’ Paris warns. ‘But personally, I was focused on the boys.’ She’s looking deep into my eyes, drifting lazily backwards, and it takes me too long to realise she’s looking at her reflection in my sunglasses.
*
Next Saturday night it’s drizzling, so we go to our spot in the cave. It’s hidden far along the beach, kind of an open secret to those who know about it. Sandy logs line the sides as crude benches, and an ashen firepit settles near the entrance. Some fuckwit has sprayed unintelligible red letters near the back of the cave, but we’re sitting up front near the fire, trying to avoid where the wind sends the smoke.
That girl isn’t here tonight.
Darren brought nangs. Paris makes him and his mate go first, puffing into bright yellow balloons. The dumbest expression clouds their faces when the high hits, like how I imagine an orgasm looks. I sit back and watch, with what I hope comes across as indifference. The thought of being out of control gives me intense anxiety.
‘Try it,’ one of the girls urges me, but I shake my head and point at Paris.
‘She said she’s next.’
Paris nods with forced enthusiasm, eyes on me like lead. I’m trying to smile as Darren’s mate empties the nang into a balloon for her, but I’m thinking about that girl from last week. Who was she? Why isn’t she here tonight? And if Paris hadn’t invited her, who had?
Paris takes a breath from the balloon and recoils. ‘Tastes like fucking shit.’
‘Keep huffing, Paris,’ Darren chuckles. His eyes flash to me. ‘We don’t do it for the taste.’
Lightning starts around 10 p.m., and by then our small fire is down to cinders. Hard to gather wood in a storm. Everyone is wasted except me, and Paris won’t shut up about cannibal killers. At one point we slip away to the back of the cave and she traces my fingers on the graffiti.
‘Whoever did this,’ she slurs, ‘was pulled away. He didn’t get to finish, see? He didn’t finish, and now he’s dead.’ She uses my finger to highlight a slash of spray on stone. The paint molecules are spread further and fainter, like the can was indeed yanked back from the rock face. Paris is staring past the cave wall, gone somewhere else in her head. She’s just talking and talking and her hands are shaking.
I have to shout over the rain and our friends. ‘If it’s so dangerous here, Paris, why do you keep coming?’
She looks at me for a moment. Really looks at me. Lightning flashes and her eyes are glassy.
‘I don’t know why I do anything,’ she says.
Now with a big plastered smile she’s turning her attention to one of the boys, who’s calling her name. A bucket of half-and-half shots is tucked under his arm, the kind you put your teeth in the middle of and let the cloying syrups mix into oblivion down your throat.
I leave my fingers on the graffiti, tracing shapes, and in that moment, I realise how alone I am and always have been.
In the next moment, the world stops.
I squint outside. A bolt of lightning is suspended over the ocean, cutting an impossible slash through the haze of rain that hangs stationary, in the air. My ears ring in the absolute silence.
Fear pinches my blood vessels. Light arcs through the cave. Darren is tossing a crushed can over his shoulder, the metal suspended just above the sandy ground, a glistening drop of liquor curved around its lip. Girls like statues suck frozen balloons. By the cave’s entrance, Paris holds a shot in both hands, unblinking and unmoving, staring down at the liquid like it contains the whole world. My friends, my life, lit up in a tableau.
Then in the shadows in the back, I see her.
Up close the girl with short hair smells of deep salt and predatory animal. For just a moment, her eyes shine silver in the dark. She smiles and her teeth are much, much sharper than I remember, and it scares me that I still find her more beautiful than anyone I’ve ever known.
‘Should I be afraid?’ I whisper.
She smiles.
‘There was another party here.’ She’s by my side suddenly, but still in shadow. She reaches out and strokes my cheek with two fingers, dagger-like nails painted seaweed green. ‘Last century, perhaps. All men. I came to enjoy the fun. When they tried to do to me what drunken men do to women, I made them pay.’ She laughs softly, which melts into melodic humming, and in the echoes of sound across the cave walls I hear echoes of that night, the drunken laughter, the leering, followed by an abrupt wet tearing. In my mind’s eye I see bodies swelling, clothing ripping, men distorting into seals. Blood ruddies the tide as animals flee, terrified and still drunk, uncomprehending of their new bodies. An ancient monster stands in the middle, dripping gore, her shark’s mouth open, roaring. Silver eyes glow in the dark.
Then we’re back in the cave, listening only to my heartbeat. Her humming has stopped.
‘You were defending yourself,’ I murmur. ‘You did nothing wrong.’
My eyes flick to Paris.
Beetle eyes glint as the girl shakes her head. ‘Vanity in young women is … disproportionately punished, I find.’ I’m calming down until she adds, ‘But you know Paris will never want you’.
The words gut my heart. I close my eyes and breathe.
After a long time, I hear myself say, too formally, ‘I know. Of course I know. Paris wants boys, not me.’ I’ve never said anything like this out loud.
‘Wrong.’ A pause. ‘Paris doesn’t want anyone.’
I stare in confusion until it hits. The way she looks at Paris … there’s disappointment there. But there’s also recognition.
I wonder if it stormed the night they met.
‘So … what happens now?’
She smiles and draws closer, arms around my waist, and I’m sucked into her entirely. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ she purrs. ‘Embrace me.’
Then her lips are on me like fire and the whole night is swirling around us, and for the first time I’m me, wholly me, and there is nothing in the dark to be afraid of.