Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Three

Havermouth, Five Years Before

Aislen woke at midday and fought down a wave of nausea. Her stomach rumbled, demanding food, adding another layer of discomfort to the nausea. She broke out in sweat, breathing heavily, trying to maintain control. “Fuck,” she slapped a hand over her mouth and dashed across the room and down the hallway to the bathroom, vomiting miserably into the toilet bowl.

She could hear her parents talking in the kitchen, and the clink of China and silverware has her mother washed the dishes. She brushed her teeth and showered, before tiptoeing back down the hall towards her bedroom. As she reached the door, her father stepped out, with her suitcases in his hands.

“What…?” She frowned. “What are you doing with those?”

“Get dressed, Aislen,” he replied grimly and carried them out to the front door.

“You are very lucky,” Tiffany said from the kitchen doorway. “That there is a room available for you already. Considering the drama last night, Mr. Mason called this morning and suggested that it might be best to send you to Rideten early.”

“I… No,” Aislen’s stomach churned, and her heart felt as if someone had wrapped icy fingers around it. “No, mum. I haven’t… I haven’t said goodbye. I wasn’t planning on leaving until the weekend…”

“This is not a conversation starter, Aislen,” Tiffany said sternly. “This is what is happening. You have half an hour to get dressed, pack up anything you haven’t packed already, and have something to eat, and then you are going.”

“It is for the best,” Patrick returned from putting the suitcases in the car. “Aislen… For fuck sake, a doctor recommended you be kept for observation and assessment last night. Police came to our door looking for you. I don’t know what you are into, but I do know that in the last month things have gone haywire and you need to get away and reset your life.”

“I don’t even have their numbers to call them!” Aislen burst out the thing most forefront on her mind. “At least give me a day, a night, to say goodbye!”

“Aislen,” Tiffany sighed. “Why don’t you have their numbers, have you ever wondered that? Because you don’t matter to these boys. They know that if they show up here, you’ll make yourself available to them. They don’t have to date you, court you, arrange a time to see you. You’ll drop everything and anything and just hop into their cars, for however long they take you away for, until they are finished with you. That is not a relationship, that’s… Well,” her voice softened. “Honey, that is being used.”

“Your mother is right, Aislen,” Patrick said. “She is right about that. If a boy actually likes you, if he’s after more than… that. If he is truly interested in you, you’ll have his number, and he’ll have yours.”

“And we'd be complaining about the phone bill because you'd be constantly on the phone when you're not together. Listen, I’ll make you a sandwich,” Tiffany glanced at the slender watch on her wrist. “You’ll be pushing it to get there and back tonight, Pat. It'll be a good opportunity, Aislen, to get to know your roommate.”

“There’s a roommate?” Aislen couldn’t imagine sharing her space with someone else.

“It’s in the brochure, honey,” Tiffany sighed. “Get dressed quickly now. You can eat in the car.”

Aislen looked between them, feeling her world drop away from her feet. “I don’t want to go today,” she told them. “I need… just one more day.”

“Your father has today off, tomorrow he needs to go back to work.” Tiffany wasn’t open to compromise.

“Fuck!” Aislen snarled and stormed into her room, slamming the door shut behind her. She dressed quickly, whilst searching on her phone for the Triquetra's numbers. The Edison’s had a landline phone listed. She dialled it as she threw her makeup and toiletries into the bag with the grimoire and gathered her art supplies together. “Answer,” she told the phone. “Answer.”

“Hello?” A woman asked.

“Mrs. Edison,” Aislen couldn’t remember her name, and Mrs. Edison just seemed politer. “My name is Aislen Carter.”

“Oh,” she was baffled. “Yes, I know about you.”

“Can I leave a message for Cameron?” Aislen was almost panting in frantic panic.

“I suppose so,” Mrs. Edison wasn’t interested.

“Better yet, do you have his mobile number?” Aislen was hopeful.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mrs. Edison said in the tone of voice that said no. “I don’t really feel comfortable giving that out to someone I’ve never met, some girl who calls out of the blue. You might not even be Aislen Carter. How do I know?”

“I am,” Aislen insisted. “I am.”

“Leave a message with your number, and he can give you the number himself when he gets home.”

“Okay,” Aislen was fighting a losing battle. “Tell him that Aislen called, and that I have to go today. To the Rideten School of Art. Tell him to call me,” she rattled off her number. “Okay?”

“I’ll let him know.” Mrs. Edison hung up the phone, leaving Aislen staring at the screen uncertain if her message had gotten through.

“Aislen,” Tiffany knocked on the door. “Hurry up.”

“Hurry up?” Aislen repeated. She felt as if her life were ending, and her mother was impatient.

She threw open the window and jumped out, trampling on her mother’s flowers deliberately before running up the drive and onto the street as fast as she could. She tore through the streets, narrowly missing bowling over pedestrians, running as if someone pursued her until she reached the graveyard and the gazebo, hoping that, somehow, the Triquetra would manifest there as they had before, appearing out of thin air as if knowing that she was there.

They did not.

She doubled over, panting and weeping, panic and fear overwhelming her. “What am I going to do?” She cried out, as if the gravestones would offer her an answer, a solution. “Oh god, what am I going to do?”

She didn’t have any choice, she thought. She needed the scholarship. She needed to get out of Havermouth. If she stayed, she would end up being dumped by the Triquetra, working a dead-end job that barely paid enough to get her by, forevermore branded as the mentally ill ex-Triquetra’s whore…

She wiped her face off and walked back to the house.

Patrick and Tiffany were on the porch and her arrival caught them mid-argument. They both stared at her, their expressions caught on the edge of frustrated anger, as she walked to the car and slid into the front passenger seat, closing the door behind her.

After a moment, Patrick got into the driver’s seat and handed her a sandwich in a paper bag and a bottle of water. “Your mother made you something to eat. Let’s get going then,” he reversed out of the driveway.

Tiffany stood on the porch and waved as they drove away, the cheerful gesture at odds with the expression on her face.

"Rideten’s not that far away,” Patrick said to her as he waited at a traffic light. “I’ll come down sometime next week, and we’ll get you a car, and then you can come and go as you like. Stay the weekend, here, if you want to. Visit your friends…”

They rode for a bit in silence before he tried again. “It’s not the end of the world, Aislen.”

She checked her mobile phone. There were no missed calls or messages. She sighed and leaned back in the seat, fighting the urge to call the Edison’s again. Were they at the river house? Were they thinking of her, as she was thinking of them?

“It will be good for you to get a few days to settle in and get things organized,” Patrick added. “Time to explore Rideten for yourself, learn the campus, make some new friends.”

“Do adults really forget about what it’s like to be eighteen?” She muttered, shaking her head at him. “It’s like you hit forty and senility sets in.”

“Aislen,” Patrick heaved a sigh. “I don’t want to fight with you.”

Neither did Aislen. So, she closed her eyes and pretended to sleep.