Half the floor was watching us.
Suddenly, the music cut out and girls in Santa hats were holding us back from each other, the full soap opera. Jai turned out his pockets like a cartoon character, and of course they were empty. And he looked so innocent and sweet that I knew I had to double down. See, back home, I’d learned from the best. You don’t let innocence stop you, you can’t allow sweetness or lack of malice to slow you down. What you do is you go at innocence a hundred times harder. Because then the other person might blow their lid, blow up right back at you, a little mother-father action, and then it doesn’t matter who was originally right and who was originally wrong. You’re both down in the dirt together, covered in so much shit that no one can say for sure who threw it first.
JAI MAHMOOD:
He gets this superior look on his face, yeah. This curling, smug grin, and he says, “What about your jacket?” And I know what he’s getting at. He thinks I won’t turn out my pockets because of the pills. Then he can stomp off looking like he was right all along. We’re surrounded by people, out on the edge of the landing, this audience he’s playing to. So I go over to the pile of coats and dig through them for mine. I don’t care who sees some pills in my pockets—half the people at the party are scoring from me by then anyway, and I know for fuck sure there’s no gold Rolex in there, man. So I hold up my coat and turn everything out for the whole room. I don’t even look. Not until I hear this sharp intake of breath.
LIU WAI:
I just saw Zoe gasp and put her hands over her mouth, you know, like “Oh my God.” Her knickers, the ones that had been stolen three months before, were scattered all over the corridor.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
And everyone—fucking everyone—started cheering. Like, “Yeah, we all knew what you were, Jai.” Everyone thought this was him admitting to stealing Zoe’s underwear. People started jostling him, roughly rubbing his hair and stuff. Dickheads picking thongs up off the floor and rubbing his face in them. He looked at me to say something in his defense. We both knew he had nothing to do with that, and his eyes actually implored me, like, Say something. I didn’t have the balls to back down, though, so I locked myself in a bathroom instead.
JAI MAHMOOD:
There was some rough stuff, some shit talking, then some guys grabbed me by the arms and legs and threw me down the staircase. I must have rolled down a whole flight before I hit a wall. There were a couple of seconds where I stopped, where I remember concentrating on breathing, in, out, in, out, just to see if I could still do it. Then they all crashed down on top of me and kept kicking. Luckily, I’d taken too much Oxy to really feel it.
FINTAN MURPHY:
I followed them down the staircase in mounting disbelief. I didn’t know what Andrew and Jai’s problem was with each other, but I thought Andrew’s behavior was repulsive. He showed himself up as a real shitbag. The lads who threw Jai down the stairs were even worse. If that’s a party, I’ll stay home, thanks.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
When I saw Andrew wasn’t going to say or do anything, wasn’t even going to defend Jai, I saw what a two-faced fucking coward he could be. I went outside for some air.
Like I said, Fintan’s not my cup of tea, but at least he has the strength of his convictions. He threw himself on these guys and just started scattering them around. I couldn’t believe it, this wiry, white Irish kid. And they actually backed off, they actually shit it. They were laughing at him and taking the piss, but they backed off.
LIU WAI:
I mean, teenage boys, am I right? The moment passed, people dispersed, and I think Zoe wanted to get the music back on. Then the next thing I know, all these lads are looking at their phones, pointing at Zoe. This time, it wasn’t like with the underwear, where she was kind of the victim and in on it. It was cruel, they were all laughing at her. One of them came over with his phone and showed us what they were cracking up over. My mouth just fell open. I didn’t know what to say.
SAM LIMMOND:
I’d already left and gone home for Christmas before the party, but Alex called and told me what happened. She said, “That fucking girl, that fucking laptop.” She was drunk, ranting. I said, “What girl?” She told me the sex video of Zoe and Andrew that she walked in on had leaked, that it must have come from the laptop Zoe gave to Liu Wai.
LIU WAI:
Look, Zoe clearly didn’t think I’d put it out there. When Andrew finally emerged from the bathroom, she fully lost it with him. I’d never once seen that girl lose so much as her temper, but here she was, scratching his face, and I mean badly. Slapping him, kicking him, calling him names, ripping his shirt. You wanted to stop it, but he just stood there and took it, very un-Andrew. Almost like the guilty man he so clearly was. In the end, I grabbed her arm, like, for Zoe’s sake as much as anything. I was scared she might kill him.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Why did I stand there and take it if I didn’t leak the video? Well, what should I have done? Hit her back?
LIU WAI:
I said, “Zoe, let’s go somewhere and talk.” She looked around, dizzy, like she didn’t remember where she was, then said she needed a minute. There were people everywhere, all through our flat, everyone staring at her, all laughing. She said, “Meet me on the roof in five minutes.” I offered to go with her, but she just said, “Five minutes,” and walked up the stairs. That was the last time I ever saw her.
FINTAN MURPHY:
I guess I was helping Jai down the stairs while all this was going on. He lived in Owens Park, but I lived outside it, down Wilmslow Road. He was upset, annoyed with Andrew and insisting he wouldn’t stay in their flat, so he asked me to wait a second while he got his stuff to go and stay with a friend. When he came back out, he seemed shaken by something. He hardly seemed to notice I was there. We walked out, down the road together, but when I asked what was wrong, he kind of shrugged it off. I don’t think we even said good night when I got to mine. He just kept walking.
JAI MAHMOOD:
Man, I was too out of it to even notice Fintan. I went to my room for the only thing I had worth keeping, yeah, my stash, which had been hidden under the bed. It was an empty Ben & Jerry’s tub filled with Xanax and Oxy, and it was gone. And just like that, man, I owed Vlad the Inhaler a grand I didn’t have. He’d always been sound with me, but he was still built like a brick shithouse. They said he’d been a bank robber, like a safecracker back home, and if you saw him, you’d believe it. If Fintan says we walked out together, I’ve got to take his word for it. I just remember looking back at the tower. All those lit windows, all those lives behind them. I felt banished. Not just from the building, man, from something way bigger. That night was the end of something for me.