We Fell Apart: A We Were Liars Novel(25)

24


Brock and Tatum are volleying on the tennis court. Dim night-lights shine onto the green clay. Brock plays shirtless, wearing board shorts and Crocs. Tatum has rolled up the sleeves on his sweater.

“Where did you get racquets?” calls Meer.

“There’s a hutch,” says Tatum, breathing hard. “It isn’t locked.” He serves, and his sweater rides up to show a strip of skin above his pants. “It’s got a mini fridge with water and soda if you’re thirsty. And there was a basket of balls.”

“Plus a weird lemon,” says Brock, who has missed the serve and is now running after a ball.

“An ordinary lemon in a weird place,” Tatum corrects him. “It was in with the balls, like a joke.”

“Did you all take lessons?” I ask. I don’t know how to play tennis.

“I taught them both everything I know,” says Brock, failing again to return Tatum’s serve.

Tatum turns to me and Meer. “It was a gym option in school,” he says. “Should we play snowball?”

Snowball turns out to be a ridiculous game in which we put ten tennis balls on one side of the court and nine plus the lemon on the other. Brock and I throw our balls (and lemon) to Meer and Tatum’s side while they’re throwing theirs over to our side.

The team with the most balls on their side of the court loses.

It’s frantic and fierce. The lemon falls apart with repeated injuries. I get hit with balls many times—and manage to hit Tatum with almost as many. We play for half an hour, maybe? Forty minutes? I lose track of time, but my breathing is hard and I am staggering.

Suddenly, I stumble and skid across the court, scraping my palms and wrists. Pain shoots through me, and when I pick my hands up, they are bloody.

The boys stop throwing. The balls bounce and roll to stillness. The lemon does nothing.

The tennis court comes into focus around me.

And the trees around the court.

The tragedy that happened just beyond the trees.

I realize I had forgotten everything but the game.

“We never set a timer,” Brock moans. “It’s supposed to be played in five-minute innings. We could have gone on forever.”

“Until we collapsed,” says Tatum.

“Until we starved and dehydrated and died and then we were nothing but skeletons, still playing,” says Meer.

“The haunted tennis courts of Beechwood Island,” says Brock. “It has a ring to it.”

They are united in this idea that they could not have stopped themselves, that they were somehow unable to exit the game once they set it in motion.

“Matilda? You okay?” asks Brock.

“She’s not getting up,” says Meer.

I feel like crying. My knees are bruised; my wrists hurt. My hands are ripped raw by the surface of the court.

I’m so damn tired. This island is so strange and sad. But I don’t want to seem weak.

I’m a guest, and they’re all at home.

They live in a castle, and I don’t live anywhere.

They all know each other, and I’m a stranger.

And Tatum doesn’t want me to be here.

I stand up. “I’m fine,” I say. “Only a flesh wound.”

That’s a Monty Python joke. Brock laughs, but the other two look blank.

I tuck my bleeding hands into the pockets of my sweatpants.

The boys begin arguing about whether they can play Snowball again without a timer. They decide to set up bowling instead, using a load of empty water bottles they have discovered in a recycling bin.

Tatum thinks they should find some water to fill the bottles partway so they won’t tip over so easily. Meer says that if they have water in them they won’t fall over easily enough. Brock looks through the recycle bin and wonders which of the Sinclairs drinks vodka while playing tennis and which one drinks Chablis.

Tears well behind my eyes. I don’t want to cry in front of them and have them think I’m crying about falling down. Or ask what I’m crying about. Or not ask what I’m crying about.

I don’t even know exactly why I’m crying, whether it’s my father not being there or my mother not being there, or the strange wonder of meeting Meer, or Tatum being so mean. Or whether it’s seeing the wreckage of the Sinclair house and knowing people died there so recently, people younger than me.

I leave the boys and follow a wooden walkway lit dimly with night-lights. Crickets chirp in the bushes. The roar of the ocean isn’t far away. I can smell the burned wood of the decimated big house, the salt of the sea, the sweetness of the beach roses.

I reach a quaint house with a fence around it. The windows are dark on the side I’m on, but I can see lights on at the back of the ground floor, and lights upstairs, as if people left in a hurry.

A Ping-Pong table lives in one corner of the yard. There are Legos strewn across the porch. Nearby, a wooden staircase leads down to a tiny sand beach. I head down, kick off my shoes and roll up my pants. Then I wash my hands in the water. It stings, but also cools my burning palms and rinses off the dirt and gravel. I press them on my T-shirt to dry.

I turn when I hear a voice. “Matilda. There you are.” Tatum stands on the beach behind me.

“Hey.”

“We didn’t know where you went.”