Conor’s face when he opened the boot was not one of his happy ones. He was busy inflating his Halloween costume, and I had clearly interrupted him halfway.
‘Have you lost your tiny mind?’ Lily asked, blowing a bubble of gum in my face.
‘What were you thinking, Daisy?’ Rose said, sounding just like our mother. ‘If anything had happened to you—’
‘Come on, credit where credit is due. She wanted to come to the party and she came,’ said Conor with a kind smile. He reattached a nozzle to his costume and started stepping on a foot pump.
‘She’ll ruin this year’s theme,’ Lily moaned. ‘The Lion, the Witch, the Pumpkin and the Daisy doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.’
Conor ignored her. With every enthusiastic foot pump, I could see that he was wearing an inflatable pumpkin costume.
‘This is an adult party,’ whined Lily.
‘Then you should probably go home,’ I said.
‘Watch it, pipsqueak,’ Lily snapped. My dad’s nickname for me morphed from a term of endearment into an insult whenever she used it.
‘Lily’s right,’ said Rose. ‘Some of the others might feel a bit funny about a thirteen-year-old being on the beach and seeing what they get up to.’
‘I brought this,’ I said, pulling the white sheet ghost costume out of my bag.
I was allowed to stay, because none of them wanted to leave, but only if I promised to remain hidden under my makeshift costume for the entire evening. I didn’t mind. I was just excited to be out with other people, witnessing a snapshot of humanity first-hand instead of reading about it in a book or seeing it on TV. It was a big step for someone who rarely went anywhere without her mother. Peering through those two holes in the sheet felt like looking at life through a tunnel. A bit like the View-Master my dad gave me one Christmas. I liked the imagined safety of my disguise; it meant that I could see everything without being seen. And I wanted to make the most of it because I knew that the things, people and parties that had always been out of reach before were within touching distance for one night only.
Everything that happened next was a real education.
After so many years of feeling like I’d been missing out, I actually missed being at home. It was cold on the beach at night, and curling up in an armchair in front of the fire, with a good novel and a mug of hot chocolate, suddenly seemed a lot more appealing. The ‘party’ consisted of fifteen or so boys and girls – some of whom I’d seen before but were still strangers to me – all sitting around a small fire on the beach, drinking cheap cider and white wine.
Conor – our designated driver – drank Coke to begin with. I knew better than to drink alcohol with the cocktail of drugs my mother made me take every day to keep my heart ticking, but I did have an occasional sip of Rose’s wine when nobody was looking. I didn’t like the way it tasted – it was nothing like Nana’s birthday champagne, which I’d tried earlier that evening – but I wanted to know what it was like to be like the others. How it felt to be normal. After an hour of sitting on the beach with a sheet over my head, all I felt was cold, and tired, and a little bit sick. I concluded that being normal might be overrated. Lily drank more than the rest of us combined, and it was her suggestion to play spin the bottle.
‘You have to kiss whoever it points to when it stops spinning. I’ll go first,’ Lily said, with a naughty grin stretched across her pretty face. The other kids smiled too; everyone except Rose seemed to be having a good time. We all watched as the bottle spun, a zoetrope of drunken teenage faces lit up by the flickering light of the fire. It seemed to spin forever, but then it stopped, and the bottleneck pointed at the boy next to Conor. Without hesitation, Lily took out her bubble gum, then leaned over and kissed him. There were tongues involved and it looked unpleasant. She popped her gum back in her mouth afterwards and smiled at everyone.
Sex was a mystery to me back then. I’d read about it, and thought about it, but the idea of actually doing it seemed both unnecessary and unhygienic. Watching Lily kiss a random boy only made me feel more queasy.
‘Conor’s turn next,’ Lily declared.
‘I don’t really want to play—’
‘Man up. Perhaps you can write about it for the local newspaper,’ she said when he tried to refuse.
Conor – a now slightly deflated orange pumpkin – leaned forward and reluctantly played the game. He stared at Rose the whole time the bottle spun, but it stopped on Lily.