Telling Tales

It must be, because little weird sparks prickle the length of my spine when Cameron puts a hand on my shoulder. Like he wants to steady me as we make our way back down the hallway, like maybe he knows that my heart is hammering and my legs don’t want to keep walking – even though that’s impossible.

Cameron never knew anything about me, least of all this.

He doesn’t know that I can hardly bear to look Wade in the face, not even when we come to the entranceway and Kitty’s giggling her ass off, camera in hand as usual, snapping away like there’s no tomorrow. And then there’s Wade, my Wade, just standing there with his back half turned as though this is nothing at all, really.

‘Allie!’ Kitty screams, and I see how easy this is for her too. I see her in slow motion, tiny arms out, charging toward me – oh, she was always the one who never let me forget she loved me, with postcards from far-flung places and ridiculous emails about swimsuits made of ham – but it’s Wade I can’t stop watching, Wade who turns in that said same slow motion while my heart tries to eat itself.

He looks older. And then my brain kick-starts and yells at me that of course he looks older, people with masses of handsome stubble generally look older. At which point I have to process that he has masses of handsome stubble and, dear God, I can’t let it slide. I just can’t! It’s all over-styled and too practised and he’s gonna get it, now. He has to.

‘Did something grow on your face?’ I ask, and oh I’m so grateful for the great chunk of incredulity in my words. I’m so grateful that it all floods back into me – the way we used to talk, like nothing could ever be serious. Nothing could ever hurt.

And he grins that shit-eating grin of his through the great mess of hair all over his chin, as though to tell me I’m right.

He’s still him and I’m still me. I haven’t lost him forever, my best friend in all the world.

‘There’s something on my face?’ he says, with a real and perfect slice of panic in his electric eyes, and then he just throws his arms around me. Just like that. Nothing to it. Cameron’s hand slides right off my shoulder and I’m hugging Wade as though no time has passed at all.

Makes me wonder what I was worried about, really.

It takes three boring conversations about jobs we all do now – Kitty models, of course, Wade mysteriously works in real estate and Cameron now does something to do with software I’ve never heard of – and around two bottles of the terrible wine Kitty found in the back of the fridge – Cameron drinks more than I remember, Wade drinks less – before we get around to stories.

Of course, we all know it’s coming. I can feel every tale I ever told right on the tip of my tongue, and when Wade congratulates me on staying true to my dreams I can’t stop myself. I have to start us down this path – the one none of us have actually taken.

‘It’s not real writing, what I do. I just…’ I start, but Wade cuts in. Of course he does. I can see he’s been raring to go ever since that stubble crack in the entranceway. He looks so bristling and spark-eyed, with all his hair slicked back and his new, gorgeous man’s face.

‘So it’s fake, then. You write on air with a magical unicorn hoof.’

‘I don’t –’

‘They print your articles in Non-Existent Monthly.’

Gah, him and his stupid fake magazines. I make them up myself, but it’s only because of him.

‘No, it’s not fake. It’s just…not what I always wanted to write.’

He raises his glass to me.

‘Hey, it’s still more than any of us managed, kid.’

I kind of hate him, for saying that. But then Kitty stretches out on the couch beside me, and curls an arm around my scrunched-up legs, and puts her head in my lap. She’s already half-cut, I know she is, but I also know why she then says: ‘We could all still manage, if we wanted to. People don’t ever run out of stories.’

I expect Wade to interject then – with something about rejection, probably, or losing the will to or any of the things I’ve felt myself a thousand times – but it’s Cameron who gets there first. I’d almost forgotten he was there even though he’s just to my right, in Professor Warren’s old wingback. Sitting at the head of the room like a tombstone, still and quiet and far more comfortable than he’d looked two hours ago.

I guess maybe he’s a little cut too.

‘Apart from me. I think I ran out before I ever even began.’

And then everyone laughs, of course they do. Funny, that I don’t really feel like it.

‘I always loved your spaceship story,’ I tell him, because that’s the truth. I did. It’s not a pity party I’m throwing here.

But he looks at me as though maybe I am.

‘Ohhhh no you didn’t. I stopped writing years ago anyway,’ he says, and then he runs on before I can push at him again. ‘But I did always want to hear the end of “Hamin-Ra”. Did you ever finish that one, Allie?’

I think I go a little cold then. Not because I couldn’t remember ever reading it out to them – after a moment, I vaguely recall reading the tame, vanilla beginnings of it – but because it’s so fresh in my mind. I think about the answering machine and the lurid list of bizarre scenarios, prancing through my head. I think about the window in the boat room, just waiting to open and let me through to another world of joy and pleasure and beauty.

Not like this world of leather and drinking and designer stubble.

‘Yeah,’ Kitty mumbles from my lap. ‘I want to know if the Queen ever found her heart.’

And now I feel slightly less disconcerted. It’s better when it’s not just Cameron remembering this one weird story I wrote, as though it had some special meaning or even worse…as though he somehow heard me through a fucking answering machine.

But it’s still odd. I can’t even recall writing that part of it, about the heart or whatever it is Kitty’s blathering over. The whole and original thing is in one of my bags, but I’d stuffed it in there without looking, while the majority of me pretended I wasn’t doing it at all. After all, it isn’t as though this month is really going to be about ancient writing we did three hundred years ago. We aren’t really going to share stories just like before, and God knows I’m not going to share ‘Hamin-Ra’ even if we decide to do just that.

I only brought it because…I brought it because I brought other stories too. I brought it because I grabbed a bunch and shoved it all in, and there’s nothing more to it, really. Just as there was nothing more to Cameron shoving rolls of stories into the back of his trousers as though yeah, none of us were ever going to find them. None of us were ever going to say come on, come on, where’s your tale, Cam?

‘Probably,’ I say, but Wade laughs, then, and says, ‘Oh, she knows. She knows for sure, she’s got it with her!’

And I hate him for that too. Now they’re after me to read it and no, no, no, I can’t, I can’t, and then I have to tell them why and it’s mortifying somehow. It’s like pulling a tooth. Out of my vagina.

‘The ending’s smutty, OK? No no no.’

It’s more than smutty – it’s downright pornographic. But I don’t say that and I’m glad, because even something as tame as the actual word I used has made Wade touch his tongue up to one pointed incisor, and I can see Cameron sitting up even straighter, on the periphery of my vision.

Plus Kitty starts giggling like an idiot into my lap, spilling wine from the glass she should no longer be holding, while she’s sprawled all over me.

‘Great. Great, guys. Laugh it up.’

But Kitty goes one better than that.

‘I always knew you wanted to write porn,’ she says, in-between hilarious, hilarious laughter. ‘All those stories about ghosts that wanted to have sex with people but couldn’t.’

Oh, Lord.

‘I didn’t really want to write about porn, OK?’ I say, but then Wade has a go too.

‘I think you kind of did.’

And then even worse: ‘I do remember a lot of sex-ghosts.’ Everyone turns to look at Cameron immediately. Mainly because he just used the words sex-ghosts as a term, and he didn’t even have to spend a lot of time searching for it. He just blurts it out and then, when we all stare at him in amazement, he takes a massive swallow from his wine glass.

Definitely half-cut.

‘See. Even Harvard over there thinks so,’ Wade says, and of course Cameron rolls his eyes in reply. Sometimes Wade would call him Yale or Dartmouth, but the result was usually the same.

‘We went to the same university!’

‘Yeah. Yalevard.’