The summer I was seventeen was ruled by hunger and backlit by a fat lemon sun I’ll never forget. When I think of it now, it feels like my skin was always just about to melt right off my bones, but that feeling is only a trick of the light. We didn’t get sweltering summers. There was no heat wave, although my memories seem tinted with fever. 

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Time was inconsequential. The days stretched out in front of me, as clear as the stunning blue sky. And I knew, amidst all my little rituals, that this summer was going to be so special. I could feel it—this prickling right beneath my skin, this sloshing of my ravenous heart against my ribs—something was going to happen. Chalk it up to magical thinking, desire manifesting itself into the physical realm. But it was a premonition, this feeling. It was. 

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For weeks, I’d watched our neighbours creep together to speak in hushed tones. Eve Hayward with her flimsy blonde hair tied up in a ponytail. Deborah Barnard next to her, the reusable water bottle in her hand the exact same shade of lilac as her expensive leggings. Their arms touched. She’s coming out next week, they’d say, the words light like icing. 

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The gossip buzzed in the neighbourhood. It was real as a swarm of wasps. 

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When I was a kid, Agnes Devlin used to babysit me. Then, when I’d just turned seven, she went to prison for life. But this isn’t America—life doesn’t really mean life. Not your whole life, anyway. 

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Old anger still simmered in the air. Anger doesn’t curdle like milk; it stays raw. 

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So I knew she was getting released. 

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What I didn’t know, what nobody knew, was that she was coming back. To us. Our little sprawl of suburbia with our decadent houses and bustling gardens. Our sparkling pools and trimmed, verdant lawns. This little utopic nightmare. This illusion of pure safety. 

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But my body knew. My veins thrummed with anticipation. As I went inside to get an ice lolly from the freezer, as I sat at the edge of the pool and kicked my feet in the water, as I licked my fingers clean of melted cherry juice—I was waiting. The summer was going to be so special; I could feel it. 

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Anything could happen.

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—

 

The first time I saw her back in our neighbourhood, I’d just vomited for forty minutes. If I say it like that, it sounds like I might’ve been hungover or down with a stomach bug, which is not true. The truth circles back to my rituals. The truth circles back to my obsession with my body and its appearance. A few times a week, I’d tie my hair up with a cherry red elastic and scrub my hands clean before arranging a whole bag of muffins on my favourite gold-rimmed plate. Carefully, I’d break off the first chunk and chew it slowly. Pillowy and sugary-soft, it’d cling to the roof of my mouth. Then I’d rip off another bite. 

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I ate each one, then excavated vanilla ice cream from the freezer and spooned an entire pint into my greedy, greedy mouth. There was an unfillable hole inside me. It was sickening and delicious, my body swollen and pained and on the verge of splitting in half. It was a terribleness that I couldn’t stop. No, it wasn’t so much that I lost control—I gave it up willingly. I could’ve stopped, but didn’t want to. Do you understand? Sometimes you want the bad thing to happen. 

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Bloated, whining a little to myself like a movie starlet at rock bottom, I’d go to the bathroom and wash my hands again. They were cold and still slightly damp, which I liked. I liked that special taste of clean, cold skin as my tongue knocked against my fingers. And I liked how my eyes would tear up, how my stomach clenched and clenched, pulsating, slowly and painfully forcing it to happen. Vomit cascading into the toilet bowl, made slick and sweet from the ice cream. 

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Even if you don’t get it, it’s important you understand: it was not a punishment, nor something I didn’t love. I wouldn’t want to live without it. Even now, years later, I still indulge the desire sometimes. It’s nostalgic. It always brings me right back.

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It was after one of these episodes that I first saw Agnes again. I’d wobbled back out in the garden and she was suddenly there. I didn’t recognise her at first, which sometimes upsets me to think of. I feel like I should’ve. With that tickling under my skin, I should’ve known right away that this was it.  This was her. 

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There she was, with her rapeseed hair and spine straight as a ruler. She stepped out of the taxi and raised her hand in a wave, face remarkably expressionless. I stared, as did everyone else. Shock sucked every sound out of the whole street for a long moment; not even the dogs dared bark.

She walked into the house that still belonged to her parents but had stood empty the last decade, and I walked back into ours. I lay in bed and cradled my stomach, poked at a freckle on my inner thigh.

There was no stopping it. Everything that happened was always going to happen. Like a train wreck. Or a miracle.

 

—

I walked up to her house the next day and knocked twice without hesitating. The thing is, she’d never confessed. Back when the case against her had been unfolding. Back when everything was fresh and hadn’t yet fermented, she hadn’t said yes. She hadn’t said I did it on purpose.

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So I was the vulture that wanted to hear it from her. But I was also something else. I was bored and attracted to her and I didn’t care what she’d done. If it was intentional or an accident. If she could’ve done something to stop it. Most of all, I was obsessed with attention and spent my entire adolescence fashioning myself into a honeytrap that I needed everyone to fall right into.

I wanted her to look at me.

I wanted her to want me.

This isn’t very fashionable to admit, I know. I should’ve been demure and naïve; that’s how the story is supposed to go. But this is not a story about blame and I have always cared very little about how things are supposed to be. They either are or they aren’t—and if they aren’t, you can make them so. If you’re skilled enough. If you’re brazen enough to do what it takes. Bold enough to reach for it and grab it with both hands, twist it till it stops thrashing.

She opened the door and looked at me without blinking. I wasn’t sure she recognised me. Later, in a hotel room with no air conditioning, she told me that she had.

“I’m Margot.” I held out my hand, which I’d moisturised just before walking over there so it was soft and smelled like artificial strawberries. Real strawberries don’t smell like much. But they taste like a promise.

“Hello, Margot,” she said, and shook my hand. Her grip was less firm than her voice.

“I thought we could go somewhere,” I said. I’m sure by now you have no sympathy left for me. That’s good. I don’t want your sympathy. Can you have sympathy for a lamb that leads itself to the sacrificial altar? Blink and it might transform into a blade. Blink again and it was never even there. Another trick of the light. Just another invention.

She didn’t say what I’d imagined she might say. Instead, she asked if I could drive.  

“Yes,” I said. “You game?”

And it was that easy, which I hadn’t expected. But she grabbed her purse, locked the door behind her, and followed me to the car I’d steal from my mum whenever I wanted to go somewhere else. And then we were in the car and I rolled the windows down and her split ends danced in the wind. She turned on the radio and Debbie Harry sang to us about how love is confusing.

We drove to the beach and got a big box of fries that we ate while looking at the waves. They left a sheen of grease on my fingertips that I licked off with shameless flicks of my tongue. I figured she was auditing me and I wanted to uproot her expectations. I did not want to ask any questions she’d foreseen: nothing about her conviction or her time behind bars. Nothing so predictable. Nothing about the time she babysat me either, only because I didn’t want her to think of me as a child.

So instead, I asked about her favourite bird and she looked at me, unblinking.

“Magpie,” she said a beat later. She didn’t ask what? first. Didn’t need me to clarify anything. She just answered and I loved her more than I’d ever loved anything. “You?”

“Not into birds,” I said. “But my favourite animal is a fox.”

“Yes,” she said, and gave me another once-over. “I can see that.”

A tinge of heat rose into my cheeks and I twisted my body a little. I was wearing a baby tee and denim shorts. The man selling fries had looked at me in a way that was dehumanising and, thus, electrifying. Sometimes I look back at the girl I was and feel deeply embarrassed. Other times, most of the time, I just feel jealous of the easy sexual energy I yielded. “What’s that mean?” I asked, even though I knew.

She shrugged and ate another fry. She was so thin it was depressing. Her skeleton shone through her skin.
 

For a while, we sat in silence. Seagulls shrieked above us. We didn’t go into the water; she asked if I was done with school. I wasn’t, but I said I was. I said I was starting college in September.

I did end up going to college, later. Time has always been so meaningless. It always slips right through my fingers.

 

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Agnes was the one who taught me to launch a perfect dive into the water. I might’ve started the story there: me, six years old, in my green swimsuit, jittery on the edge of the pool with my feet wet and an unshakeable tightness in my chest. I was scared and I didn’t want to do it.

She could tell, of course, because it was so obvious. My hands were clenched into tight fists. She leant close and told me everyone’s afraid the first time, then asked if I wanted to know a secret. At that age, you feel about secrets how ducks feel about bread. This doesn’t really change as you get older. She told me I had two options: jump or don’t jump. “If you don’t,” she said, “you’ll feel bad about it tonight.” She said it like that and it became the simplest thing in the world.

And of course I didn’t want that. I wanted to be fearless.

“It feels good,” she told me, still hushed as though we were allied spies. “To do something you’re afraid of. You feel like you can do everything in the world.”

I’ve never forgotten that. Those words, you can maybe tell, have been something of a guiding force my entire life. It feels good to do something you’re afraid of.

Maybe this explains everything I’ve ever done.

With time, this principle has morphed slightly. It doesn’t just feel good after. It feels just as good during and before. Fear itself is not really fear anymore; it is pleasure through a funhouse mirror. And it is addictive.

 

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After our beach trip, I let myself simmer for a few days. I wondered if she’d come knock on my door this time. I knew she wouldn’t, and she didn’t. So I went back to hers and invited myself inside; she made me a strawberry daiquiri but kept it virgin, which infuriated me.

You must be wondering what it is that she did. What got her sentenced to prison.

 

There was a toddler that died. Her name was Kayla. Agnes was babysitting her when she drowned. Kayla should’ve never been so close to the water. Why was she so close to the water? Where, exactly, were Agnes’s hands?

“Are you happy?” I asked, staring straight at her.

She turned her head and looked out the window. Her face was all angles—the sharp jut of her cheekbones, the straight bridge of her nose. “I’m fresh out of prison,” she finally said, quirking a smile at me. “Happy. What a word. Are you?”

“Of course,” I said, still looking at her. I winked, which made it seem like I was lying when I wasn’t. She was right there with me; how could I be anything but happy?

She looked at me straight-on and gave me a smile I’ve never forgotten. Think of a cat. Think of its teeth. Think of those dark eyes. Think of its soft paws and how fast it can unfurl its claws. I wanted to keep looking at her, but I forced my eyes back to the garden, where a tree stood bursting with blackish red cherries.

In the fourth grade, I was best friends with a girl called Katherine. Katherine had hair the colour of liver pâté and eyes the size of saucers. I was so jealous of her eyes. They were the clearest blue I’d ever seen, like the sky on the hottest day in June. I used to think, secretly, that if I’d just soak in the pool long enough and keep my eyes open underwater, then I’d get eyes like Katherine had.

I spent hours in the pool. Chlorine sluiced into my eyes till they were shot through with red and I kept tearing up from the burn.

My eyes stayed brown. Of course they did.

 

In the fourth grade, we picked some of our most beloved things—a glittery keychain, macramé friendship bracelets, the plastic wrapper of strawberry laces—and put them all in a shoebox. We taped the shoebox shut with so much duct tape the whole thing shone silver.

We buried it in Katherine’s backyard with the promise to return in ten years.

A year later, Katherine moved away because her dad got a new job in Brussels, so we never got to dig up our box of treasures. In the beginning, we’d write each other long letters, but Katherine was rapidly learning French, which made her seem sophisticated and better than me. I got obsessed with being the most beautiful girl in each room I entered. I started searching for mirrors everywhere, and skirts that’d show my legs.

I’m not only bringing up Katherine to reminisce. I’m bringing her up because Agnes reminded me not only of a cat, but also of that shoebox. Stuck in the past.

Was I trying to dig her up?

 

Possibly.

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I don’t know if you can say Agnes and I became friends. I think it was worse than that and also better. The next week, I strong-armed her into adding rum to my drink. And we listened to music and ate cherries from her garden. Later, we pierced my nose. It stung deliciously. I re-dyed my hair and silky tendrils of red bled down my torso in the shower. We went to the beach again and had ice cream this time. I wanted to do drugs with her because it seemed dangerous and sexy. I could’ve asked someone from school, but that’s not what I wanted. I wanted Agnes to give this to me, this precious gift, so I asked. And she looked at me. Long and hard; it made me think of her trial. The look the judge must’ve given her.

But she got us ecstasy, and I reached heaven one summer afternoon right in Agnes’ living room. I felt invited, initiated, special. That tickling inside my body crescendoed.

 

And then it happened, the thing you must’ve been waiting for since the beginning of this—maybe with a twist of revulsion in the dark pit of your belly, maybe with something else. Our mouths pressed together in a kiss, first clumsy, then wet with our tongues, slick and loose from the drugs. You’re wondering who started it and I can’t tell you. It’s lost now, like the shoebox with childhood memorabilia. I’d like to say I leant close and I’d like to say she did too, but it was fast and hard and the air was shimmery with heat and something else.

Did she hold Kayla’s head underwater?

 

She never told me.

 

But she did mine.

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And then I did hers.