Eight Perfect Hours by Lia Louis

Chapter Thirty-Three

The reunion looks exactly how I imagined it would. The grounds are lit up with floodlights like they were almost sixteen years ago. There’s music playing – the tinny, bassy notes of a distant live band, and barbecue smoke billows in the distance. It looks alive. With people and cars and noise, the very same stars splattered across the sky.

At the entrance, a young woman beside a table of labels, smiles. She wears huge feathery eyelashes and her eyelids are powdered in hot pink, fading to canary yellow.

‘Take a tag and write your name on it,’ she grins excitedly. ‘And then you can go on in. The college is open too, if you’d like a look around.’

Something fizzes inside of me, as I move inside the building with a little crowd, through the reception area, and outside to where the whole courtyard is lit with fairy lights. Excitement, I suppose. Hope. Because this is where I left it, all the hope I had once. And I can have it again.

A band plays loudly, the barbecue sizzles and smokes, and people stand around in little groups, like a mini music festival. I stand still, my feet on the concrete, and look up at the window of the English classroom Daisy would wave to me from. Her beautiful face. Her beautiful, happy, full of life face. One minute she was there, and the next, gone, destined to be written about once or twice in a local newspaper, and slowly forgotten by most.

I close my eyes. ‘I miss you,’ I say to her, in my mind. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen,’ I say to her, ‘but when I close my eyes, I know you’re watching me and you’re there, saying go on, Elle. Go out there and have adventures. It’s all waiting. And I believe you. This time, I believe you.’

I open my eyes then, and for a moment – I freeze. Because I think I see Sam. Sam. Of course I think I do, I see him bloody everywhere. It’s like I’m hallucinating lately – had too much Calpol or something. The back of someone tall, jogging through town. The sound of anyone with the slightest American twang to their accent. Dilly and Mum were watching a film the other night and butterflies fluttered in my gut as I heard someone say the word ‘dollars’. I miss Sam. I miss his voice and his lips and the way he makes me feel alive and seen and perfect, just as I am. Not for who I could turn out to be. It’s true what I wanted to say to Ed – that he loved me for who I could be. Not who I am. Love. It is love with Sam. At least what I feel for him. Shit. Well, there it is. Noelle Butterby is in love. It should scare me, but it doesn’t, and I can’t help the grin that seems to take over my face – so large, it’d crack plaster. A passing stranger side-eyes me and looks slightly haunted, so I hide it behind my hand.

I take a tour of the college, and drift aimlessly through the grounds, the air thick with woodsmoke, the occasional bang of far-away fireworks. Things I’d forgotten reveal themselves as I do, like the pages of a pop-up book, and with them, rushes of memories. Ed’s arm slung over my shoulder, Daisy, the way she’d gaze over at Lee, smoking in the distance. How happy we all were.

I buy a hot dog, like Daisy and I did fifteen years ago. I watch the band, like we did, and then I buy a non-alcoholic cocktail from the beer tent and make my way inside. I want the camera. I do. But if it’s lost – I’ve made my peace with that, I think. I have Daisy in my mind. I have the Ed and Noelle of back then, in my mind too. No camera will bring her back – bring anything back for that matter. She was a kid. I’m an adult. And I don’t have a corner sofa or a jumper-wearing husband. But I am here. The Noelle of right now, is right here.

In the large reception area, people are crowded around walls of old photos, and I slip into an open space by one of them that’s drawn quite a crowd. And I’m not prepared for it. But there she is. Daisy’s face, beneath a laminated sign that says ‘Gone too soon.’ Daisy Cheng. Aged 17. Beside her, is another student I don’t recognise. Robert ‘Duff’ Duffield. Age 16. There are more than anyone would expect. Smiling, frozen-in-time faces. And then – it’s him. It’s Lee, and my heart aches at the sight of him. He’s laughing in the photo, blue eyes and floppy hair, and I realise I never really knew what he looked like. Not properly, I never got close enough. He was just that smoking kid Daisy would shyly wave at. And I feel shame, then, prickle my body. I was so consumed with the grief of losing Daisy that I hardly thought about him. He was alive for a whole two weeks after she was. Mum had read the small, heartbreakingly small article in the local paper aloud.

‘He’s in hospital,’ she’d said to me. ‘You just concentrate on yourself, love. Daisy would want that.’

And then I’d heard, weeks later, that he’d died too. I hardly remember how I knew, just that I did. Whenever I think of that time, it feels like every memory is underwater. Slow and blurry and muddy. I don’t remember entire weeks, entire months, but I remember some moments with crystal-clear clarity, and I remember feeling relieved. There’d be no trial, no analysing of what happened, no anger and blame pinned on an eighteen-year-old boy that never ever wanted it to happen.

‘Bradley ‘Lee’ Goody. Age 18.’

I never realised his surname was Goody. I never realised he was a Bradley either. He was just Lee to us – the person who crashed the car that killed Daisy, for so long, and nothing more. Sometimes I’d feel shame. Our grief felt so enormous and important that I would forget there was another family feeling the same, somewhere close by.

I move away and towards the reception desk, which is crowded with people queuing for their items and envelopes. I’m ready to go now – say goodbye. I’ll ask for the camera and then I’ll go, whether it’s there or not.

But I feel sick. I feel swirly headed and my feet won’t move. I feel like everything is too loud. Something is bubbling inside of me opening, a black, deep hole.

Bradley.

Bradley ‘Lee’ Goody.

No.

No, no, no.

Then I see him.

Across the crowded room, at the front of the queue. And it’s him this time, undoubtedly. It’s not someone who looks, or sounds like him. It’s Sam, and although relief floods through me, because I’ve missed him, every single day, I can’t unfreeze my feet from the spot. I’m in quicksand, stuck and sinking. And now he’s seen me. And in his hand is an envelope. And I feel like I’m going to faint, that the ground is going to fall away beneath me.

He raises his other hand in a wave, as if I’ve just bumped into him in the street or the supermarket, but his brow crumples, confused. I must look as mad as I feel. My mouth is hanging open, my eyes are squinting – the face of someone trying desperately to join the dots in a room that’s too crowded, too noisy, a room that feels as though it’s swaying from side to side now.

He moves through the crowd. My head spins, but I know.

I know, I know, I know.

‘Noelle,’ he says. ‘Hey, what are you doing here––’

‘That’s Lee’s,’ I say, looking down at the envelope in his hand. Sam’s eyes shoot down to his hand, as if he’d forgotten he was even holding it. And I see it. A camera through the clear plastic. ‘Lee,’ I say, my heart racing, my head rushing. ‘Lee was your cousin.’

Sam nods, then he freezes. ‘Yeah. Yeah, he was.’

‘Daisy,’ I say. ‘Daisy was my best friend.’