🎖 Featured on Teen Fiction Reading List #YA Ambassadors🎖Love or Music... Which should they choose and what price do they have to pay? Love will give Kit and Tully a future together, but music can make Tully's dream come true.
Sixteen-year-old Kit...
Spike rings constantly over the next few days. In the end I talk to him, just to keep my mother quiet.
"We're still your friends," he says.
It's not so much Spike I'm angry with. I mean he's got his place in university like he wanted, and he has to live somewhere.
"Nothing is going to change," he tells me.
Easy for him to say. He has no idea what boarding school is like.
Felice is the one I blame. She's the one who's moving out and leaving me in St Catherine's alone.
"We miss you," Spike goes on. "And we haven't seen Tully either. He's working the day shift."
My first reaction, when I hear this, is relief. Tully left early on Sunday night because of work.
Deep down though, I know that's not true.
Tully left because of me.
The weekend is long and interminable but it makes me realise how much I need my friends. I'm even tempted to go into More Video 4 U and talk to Tully, but I'm too embarrassed.
I can't bear to look weak in front of him.
He's supposed to be the one who needs me, no matter how much I ignore him.
I can't be the one who needs him.
When Felice rings on Tuesday, I take her call.
"Come over on Thursday," she says.
"Thursday?"
"Yeah, Tully is bringing out a bunch of videos when he finishes work," she says. "We're gonna sit in all night watching films before the weekend. Like old times."
"Okay." I take the olive branch. It's not like there's a better option.
Thursday (Full Moon)
In the end, Tully brings three videos and we settle in for a marathon.
On the surface it's like old times, the four of us, munching crisps, drinking Axel's beer, watching the films and not feeling any real need to talk.
Underneath, tension simmers, a new awkwardness with Felice and Spike. The dynamic has changed. It used to be the three of us. Now it's the two of them plus me. Tully is silent for the most part, and I wonder if he's here because he wants to be or because he's afraid of pissing Felice off.
The beer makes me sleepy and towards the end of the second film, I start to drift off.
I awake suddenly, the dream still vivid in my mind.
"Kit!" Before his voice dies away, I see him, damp, shivering, trapped.
Tully! I throw aside the rug, sit up on the couch, and rub the sleep from my eyes.
Felice and Spike sprawl in front of the tv, still half-awake, but only just.
"Where's Tully?"
Felice shrugs, not taking her eyes off the screen.
"He went to crash out," Spike says. "After you fell asleep."
"We have to find him." I stand up and push my feet into my runners.
Neither of them stir as I pick my way through the debris of crumpled crisp packets and empty beer cans and cross the hall to the front door.
Tully's car is parked outside, small and forlorn, grey in the moonlight.
I race upstairs to check the guest bedroom.
I turn the handle and push the door open, expecting to find him asleep.
Moonlight streams in through a pair of french windows casting the empty room in an eerie light, with shadows in unexpected places. Twin beds, sterile and discreetly apart, pale covers untouched, exactly the way the cleaner left them on Monday.
Outside, under the full moon, there's nothing but fields of sheep and cattle, a wide river at one end and the ancient burial site at the other. The silence scares me. It's the old, familiar dread.
Anything could be out there and you'd never know.
"Found him yet?" Felice doesn't budge from her beanbag as I burst back into the room, merely raises her eyebrows.
"He's in danger." As soon as I say the words, I know it's true. "He's not in the house."
"Relax, Kit." She grinds her cigarette into the ashtray. "There's nowhere else to go."
"Unless he's sleepwalking," Spike says.
The river.
The three of us exchange glances as the thought enters our heads simultaneously.
"Can't believe we're doing this," Felice mutters as we grab our coats. "Take these." She finds us each a torch and arms herself with a hiker's stick.
We race across the lawn, through the gap in the hedge, into the field beyond. Above, the moon is so bright we hardly need the torches.
As we charge towards the river, scattering drowsy sheep, I glance back at the house.
In my dream, Tully was dying, damp and chilled through, croaking out my name with his last breath. "Kit!"
But he wasn't drowning.
No, Tully was buried alive.
In the distance, the moon shines like a beacon above the prehistoric burial mound where Aonghus sleeps.
In my soul, I know.
That is where I'll find Tully.
Author's Note
Thanks so much for making it this far. Hope you're enjoying the story 💜
This entire scene originated in my short story Full Moon at Lunasa, which I wrote for Round 1 of the #trialsoflove contest in June 2019. At the time, Kit & Tully was still a work in progress. Most of the story elements, the characters, their friendship, the band, were in place, but I wanted to include a supernatural element. Except I couldn't figure it out until I started writing the story for the contest. It all fell into place and Aonghus was born. (And the short story won the #Mystery category in the contest too, which was kinda cool!)
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