And then, of course, there’s Jake.
* * *
SHE MEETS HIM ON A typically rainy afternoon. They’ve only got the one car, she and Mum, and Eliza needed to drive into the village to do some shopping after school. Mum let her use it, but only if Eliza agreed to pick her up from work that afternoon. Eliza is irritated that her shopping trip has been cut short, and then more irritated when her mum doesn’t come out at the appointed time, even after she blows the horn.
Rain splatters on her, slithering down the back of her jacket as she jogs up to the front steps of the fancy brick house with its box hedges and its smart red door.
Eliza rings the bell, pissed off and wet, her hair already curling in the damp, and when the door opens, she’s ready to snap at her mum or some other tight-arsed maid standing there.
She doesn’t expect him.
Tall, with hair just a few shades darker than her own golden blond, and eyes that are almost painfully blue, Jake Kelly is, she’ll eventually learn, both his family’s pride and their black sheep, a Problem Child already kicked out of two boarding schools back in Australia, where the Kellys are from. This move to England is a sort of last resort, a chance to finally “straighten the boy out.”
It won’t take. Nothing ever will. But Eliza doesn’t know that yet.
She only knows that he is the fittest boy she’s ever seen, standing there in his school uniform with his tie undone, his jacket off. He’s a year older than her, she knows, having heard her mum mention Mr. Kelly’s son, how he goes to the posh boy’s school in the next village over, how there are already “issues,” and that Mr. Kelly is thinking of transferring him somewhere a bit stricter.
“Um, hi,” she says, and he smiles at her appraisingly, leaning against the doorframe.
“G’day.”
He does this, she’ll eventually learn. Leans heavy on the Aussie thing with new people. He is charm and sunshine itself when it suits him.
It’s a long time before Eliza figures out that it’s all mostly surface, an act, as much as her queen bee thing is.
But all that is still to come. Right now, Eliza just returns his smile and says, “I’m here to pick up my mum? Beth?”
“Here I am, love. Sorry.”
Her mum rushes toward the door, pulling on her coat, and Eliza notices that her hair is mussed, the pretty pink lipstick she was wearing that morning is gone, and she won’t figure it out, not then, but it turns out cleaning is not the only thing Beth does for Mr. Kelly.
“See you around,” Jake says to Eliza, and it feels like a promise and a threat all at once.
She likes that.
* * *
IT’S A SECRET AT FIRST, Eliza and Jake. She starts needing the car more regularly so that she has to pick Mum up from that big fancy house, starts turning up earlier so that she has to hang around and wait.
The first time Jake kisses her, it’s in the car, parked in the driveway while the rain pours down outside, and he tastes like smoke and cinnamon gum, and Eliza falls hard, so hard that she doesn’t notice what’s going on with her mum. Her sudden distraction, the phone ringing at all hours, the way she always seems to be at the Kellys, even on Saturdays—none of it registers as strange. Eliza is in her own bubble of school and Jake, so she’s genuinely shocked when, about a month after that first kiss, Jake says to her, “You know our parents are fucking, right?”
She and Jake are in his bed, his door locked, his music playing loudly, not that it really matters. Eliza’s never seen anyone able to get away with as much as Jake manages to get away with.
Now she places a hand on his chest, pushing herself up to look in his eyes. “What are you talking about?”
Nodding, Jake skims a hand over her bare back. “In case you haven’t noticed, she’s always here, and this house is never all that clean, petal.”
That makes sense, even as it curdles something in Eliza’s stomach. There’s something so … pathetic about it. Being the side piece to a rich guy, always at his beck and call.
But Eliza won’t realize just how pathetic it is until that night in April when her mother doesn’t come home.
At first, it doesn’t really worry her—she likes having the house to herself, figures her mum is off with Mr. Kelly again. When the phone rings, she has no premonition of how much her life is about to change.
The first thing she hears is Mum sniffling. “Oh, baby,” her mum says. “Oh baby, I am so sorry.”
The story comes rushing out then. How she was just “popping down to London for the afternoon,” and got stopped at Kings Cross, how the little carryall bag she brought with her just happened to be full of three kilos of cocaine, and now she’s sitting in a jail in London, and she’s calling Mr. Kelly to see if he can post bail, but he’s not picking up, so she’s not sure when she’ll be home.