[English] HUNTING LILA

Author: Sarah Alderson

Source: books4u.me

Only when the tip of the knife started to shave against the white of his eye like a scalpel about to pierce a boil, did I realise that I was the one holding it.
Or, rather, controlling it.
The three of us stared mesmerised as the knife hung there in the jagged space between us. The boy, whose arms were locked around me, and against whose eye the blade was now pressing, let go of me, his arms dropping like a puppet’s whose strings had been cut.
And then I felt it. The weight of the knife in my mind. And the blade clattered to the pavement.
I couldn’t take my eyes off it, just lying there, like a prop someone had arranged in front of me.
The scramble of metal hitting brick made me raise my head. Both boys were back on their bikes, kicking at the pedals, trying to get a grip on the narrow pavement. They collided as they tore off down the street but kept their balance, bikes weaving down the centre of the road, before disappearing around the nearest corner.
I was on my knees. The thrum of traffic from the main road ten metres or so away cut into me, interrupting the sound of someone nearby choking on barbed wire. I spun my head left to right to see where the noise wasing from, then realised it wasing from me. I bit down on my lip to stop it, then stood up slowly.
A jolt of pain in my right leg snapped me back into the present. I looked around uncertainly, trying to place myself. It took a while before I realised I was standing on the corner of my street. My tights were ripped and laddered where the front wheel and handlebars of one of the bikes had smashed into me. A tinny noise escaped from the headphones dangling around my neck, and my right hand was still clutching tightly at the school bag they had tried to snatch.
Maria wasn’t there when I got home and neither was my dad. He wouldn’t...

Hunting Lila
Page 1



1

Only when the tip of the knife started to shave against the white of his eye like a scalpel about to pierce a boil, did I realise that I was the one holding it.

Or, rather, controlling it.

The three of us stared mesmerised as the knife hung there in the jagged space between us. The boy, whose arms were locked around me, and against whose eye the blade was now pressing, let go of me, his arms dropping like a puppet’s whose strings had been cut.

And then I felt it. The weight of the knife in my mind. And the blade clattered to the pavement.

I couldn’t take my eyes off it, just lying there, like a prop someone had arranged in front of me.

The scramble of metal hitting brick made me raise my head. Both boys were back on their bikes, kicking at the pedals, trying to get a grip on the narrow pavement. They collided as they tore off down the street but kept their balance, bikes weaving down the centre of the road, before disappearing around the nearest corner.

I was on my knees. The thrum of traffic from the main road ten metres or so away cut into me, interrupting the sound of someone nearby choking on barbed wire. I spun my head left to right to see where the noise was coming from, then realised it was coming from me. I bit down on my lip to stop it, then stood up slowly.

A jolt of pain in my right leg snapped me back into the present. I looked around uncertainly, trying to place myself. It took a while before I realised I was standing on the corner of my street. My tights were ripped and laddered where the front wheel and handlebars of one of the bikes had smashed into me. A tinny noise escaped from the headphones dangling around my neck, and my right hand was still clutching tightly at the school bag they had tried to snatch.

Maria wasn’t there when I got home and neither was my dad. He wouldn’t be back for another week or so. The house was as echoey and cold as an empty fridge. I put the chain on the door and leant against it, taking a deep breath. Then I hobbled to the downstairs bathroom, lifted the toilet lid and threw up until there was nothing left but stringy green bile. My hands were shaking so hard they were blurring against the white of the porcelain. I sat back against the wall, hugging my knees to my chest, trying to steady my breathing.

I couldn’t use it again – whatever kind of freaky mind power it was – that much was clear. But I had had no intention of using it in the first place – it had just happened, unconscious as breathing. Except breathing had never led to nearly blinding a person, I didn’t think. I was out of control. Dangerously out of control. With just a flicker of thought, without moving an inch, I could have squeezed that blade through the white of that boy’s eye as easily as slicing through a soft-boiled egg. A wave of bile swung up my throat again. I ground my teeth and swallowed it down.

Up until this moment this psychic weird moving things without actually touching them ability had been a secret. Something I’d wrapped up and bound tightly to me like a deformed extra limb – a sixth finger; a third arm. Not something I particularly felt like showing off. Yet now two complete strangers knew about it, one of whom I’d almost blinded.

I sat there in the humming dark, waiting for the knock on the door from the police or the men in white coats. Maybe I would just go with them. Clearly I was too dangerous to be walking the streets of south London. Possibly I was unhinged. Definitely I wasn’t normal.

I waited and waited, shivering on the floor, but the knock didn’t come.

Eventually, I unclasped my hands from around my legs and stood up, resolved. I had to regain control. I wouldn’t use it again, ever. As in, never.

I wouldn’t use it to open doors, to turn on lights or pop the toaster – and I certainly wouldn’t ever use it again to defend myself against teenage muggers. If I could possibly help it.

I was going to go cold turkey. It was either that, or a future in orange overalls.

I splashed some water on my face and into my mouth and looked up to see myself in the mirror, pale and shadowed as a corpse. Except a ten-day-old corpse would probably look better. My hair was a tangled blonde mess and my lips so white they merged with my skin. I looked down at my legs and, leaning on the sink, carefully peeled off my ripped tights. A bruise about the size of my palm had turned the right side of my thigh an interesting shade of black. It looked gruesome and mottled against the paleness of my skin. I touched it lightly and flinched. I could feel the hardness of congealed blood under the surface. I tested my weight on it – and screamed. I looked back at my reflection, shuddering back a sudden onslaught of tears. I wanted my mum. I wanted Jack. I wanted him to come and rescue me just like he had when I was five and had broken my leg. I wanted my brother, simple as that. OK, truth be told, I really wanted Alex. I wanted my brother’s best friend every bit as much as I wanted to see my brother, and then some.

Heathrow’s Terminal Five was an immense vault of whiteness. It was close to midnight. I stared at the frozen departures board, willing it to come to life so that I could get on the plane right now and not in six hours’ time, because by then my dad might have found out that I’d stolen his cre*** card and the odds were that he’d try to ground both me and the plane.

I stared at the plane details on the board. I couldn’t make them move. Not that I was supposed to be trying. I was supposed to be going cold turkey.

I sank into a seat, feeling something like despair shroud me. Or maybe it was outright panic. I was going to have to come up with a believable story for both Jack and my dad. The email I’d sent Jack was not going to cut it. I’d written him just one line saying:

Hunting Lila
Page 2



Surprise! I’m coming to LA. My flight gets in at around midday. Lila x.

No explanation.

But what believable explanation could I give?

I almost stabbed someone in the eye with this weird mind power I have. Is it OK if I come stay with you?

That would go down about as well as me telling him that I’d been in love with his best friend my entire life.

I took a deep breath. I was in so much trouble. So I did what I always did in times of stress, I unpacked every Alex memory from where I’d filed them in the most accessible part of my brain and started to slot them together like puzzle pieces.

The day I broke my leg – that was the day I’d fallen in love with him. He may have only been nine, I may have only been five, but it was definitely that day. I had steered the sledge into the tree, or Jack had pushed me into it. But the bone poking like a pencil through my skin was still one of my best memories ever because alongside it was the memory of Alex’s face as he’d wrapped me up in his red parka. He’d lifted me back onto the sledge and towed me, with Jack’s help I guess, half a mile to the nearest adult. That was definitely the day.

After that, my next memory was of all three of us in the garden of our old house in Washington DC. It was cold. I knew that because I could see the ice crystals on the ground, and the thwacking sound of the shovel hitting frozen earth still echoed loud and clear in my head. I must have been about seven because the hamster had been a present from my parents for being brave about my leg two years before. The hamster had lived ‘a long, happy and carefree life’, Jack had intoned from his position at the head of the grave. I remembered also the tissued ball that Alex, standing next to me, solemnly lowered into the hole they’d dug out with the neighbour’s trowel. I remembered the feeling of hot tears running rivulets down my cold cheeks and the hotter hand he’d placed in mine. He hadn’t said anything, just held my hand until I stopped crying.

Without any warning, my mind jumped to another memory, this one from five years ago, a darker echo of the previous one. I was twelve years and three days old in this one. I knew that for a fact because it was seven days after my mother had died and we were at her funeral. Alex had held my hand then, too. For practical reasons really, since my dad, who should have been doing the job, was not keeping it together very well, and was at that moment on his knees by the hollow grave, sobbing. A tangle of well-meaning arms surrounded him. Jack was a blur at the edge, before he backed out of the press of people and took off. Alex, I realised only now, must have chosen to let him go and stay with me instead.

I could recall with perfect clarity the mud-slung soles of my dad’s shoes as he knelt by my mum’s grave, but that was all. I couldn’t remember the people, the words, the hymns, the flowers. I could remember nothing but those shoes and Alex standing next to me, anchoring me with his grip.

At the reception after the funeral, Alex didn’t let go of me once. He didn’t follow after Jack. I don’t know why. To anyone watching, it was Jack and not me who needed looking after. But Alex hadn’t tried to find him. He’d stayed with me. He’d sat me down on an out-of-the-way sofa and stayed with me, responding politely when blurry faces hovered overhead whispering vacant words. It was Alex who had eventually led me through the murmuring crowd to the stairs and up to my room. He’d let me lie down, had pulled the duvet over me and had sat on the edge of the bed, his hand resting on my back until I’d fallen asleep.

Then, literally days after, Dad had taken me with him to London. There had been no choice, not even a warning, just ‘the cab is coming’. I hadn’t packed my bags or said goodbye to my school friends. Locked in my silent bubble of grief, I had been incapable of arguing. My dad may as well have told me we were going to the supermarket, for all the impact it had on me. Jack, on the other hand, went ballistic. The fury with which he responded to my dad’s news was shattering. It sapped every single last emotion from me, like I was the source of his energy and the battery had died. My dad hadn’t had the energy to fight him, either. His battery kind of died permanently along with my mum.

So Jack got to move in with Alex’s family and stay in Washington, while I had to move to London, my dad’s hometown. At first I’d felt nothing about this, not even on the flight over with Jack’s empty seat gaping like a black hole between us. But in the months after, as I emerged from the numb coma I’d slipped into, I’d resonated with anger. A perfect, biting, furious anger towards my dad for taking me away from everything I knew, from my home. Anger towards Jack, for deserting me. And for being the one who got to stay with Alex.

But, like most things in life, unless you really work at it, anger’s a hard thing to hold on to, and after a few months that anger had become less perfect, less biting, until it was eventually dissolved completely by the ache of missing Jack. I’d started to email him and to speak to him again and found I couldn’t resent him. Because, if I’d had the choice to stay with Alex, I would have done the same. In a heartbeat.

2

I came through customs warily, stumbling a little from the lack of sleep and the tired throb of my leg. I scanned the blur of faces massing at the sliding arrival doors. I wasn’t sure if Jack would be there. And if he was, whether it would only be to hand me a return ticket and frogmarch me straight to the check-in counter.

‘Lila!’

A familiar voice made me turn my head. Jack was leaning through the crowd, grinning at me. I felt such intense relief that I wanted to collapse right there and then and let him pick up the pieces of me. When I reached the barrier and fell into his arms, a sob came out of nowhere. I forced it down, pressing my face hard into Jack’s shoulder. He pulled me away, grabbing my bag from me. I ducked under the barrier and he put his free arm round my waist, tugging me gently through the throng of people.

Hunting Lila
Page 3



When we were free of the crowd and walking across the terminal he looked at me quizzically. ‘So, good flight?’

I couldn’t help but smile at him, ridiculously grateful and relieved that he wasn’t leading me to the check-in counter and that he hadn’t asked me the question I was dreading – the reason I was there.

‘Yeah, it was OK,’ I said.

He was different to look at. It was hard to put my finger on why, but there was something about him now that definitely hadn’t been there before. Jack had always been confident: good looks and popularity tend to have that effect on people. Now, though, as he manoeuvred us through the busy terminal, I was aware that this aura was somehow enhanced, like he’d been bitten by a spider and had come over all superhero. Whereas before he’d been fully aware of his charm and had worked it to maximum girl-attracting effect, now his confidence seemed utterly unself-conscious. He was completely indifferent to the effect he was having on people. A woman dragging a wheelie suitcase turned to look at him over her shoulder as we passed and a couple of giggling girls a little younger than me nudged each other. He drew people to him but left them in a kind of wake, bobbing hopelessly after him.

Jack was wearing jeans and a white crew-neck T-shirt. His sunglasses hung down from the collar. When we stepped outside into the glaring sunlight he put them on and flashed a smile at me. Yeah, he could have stepped out of a Police sunglasses advert, I thought with a familiar pang of envy. I, on the other hand, felt pale and creased in this land of tanned, polished people. I wanted to get home and shower. Home, I thought, with a shock – I was already thinking of this as home. And this was just the LAX arrivals hall.

Jack kept up a steady stream of conversation on the way south to Oceanside. My sudden arrival sat between us, a great white elephant in the car. I ignored it studiously and focused instead on absorbing everything about him. And the car. I knew nothing about cars, but this one was seriously impressive. How much were they paying Marines these days? It had a leather interior, a low roof, a killer sound system and a disembodied voice which welcomed us when we got in. Jack drove the car smoothly, pushing the limit without an ounce of hesitation as he wove in and out of traffic on the freeway. I relaxed back into the seat and let him talk. His eyes flicked from the road ahead, to the rear-view mirror, then back to me. He was telling me about his house – it was near to the beach, which sounded good, way better than living slap-bang in mugging central, south London.

His words started to wash over me as I focused my attention on him, observing his profile. He looked so much older than the teenage boy he’d been when I’d last seen him, he was tanned and his dark hair was growing out of a crew cut. Three years was a long time I supposed, we’d both changed a lot. I wondered how I looked to him.

As if reading my mind, he cast his eyes in my direction, then looked back at the road. ‘You look different, Lila.’

‘Yeah, I look wasted,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I’ve slept in thirty hours or more.’

He brooded for a moment. I hoped he wasn’t going to ask me why. I could see he was thinking about it.

Instead, he said, ‘I almost didn’t recognise you when you walked through the arrivals hall.’

I didn’t reply. In the three years since we’d last seen each other I’d grown quite a bit taller but was still a good six inches off his six feet. My hair was still long, though perhaps duller than the honey blonde he remembered. No sunshine to streak it in England. We had the exact same eyes, both dark green, both framed with thick black lashes, though his were even longer and thicker than mine. There was, of course, one major change, but it wasn’t something physical and as he couldn’t read my mind, I was certain he wasn’t talking about that. I shifted in my seat, trying to avoid thinking about it.

As he reached to change gears, something caught my eye and I leaned across to touch his arm beneath the sleeve of his T-shirt. He saw my raised eyebrows and reached to tug the sleeve up, exposing his bicep and a tattoo in black ink of two crossed swords. The words Semper Fi were etched above it.

‘Mum would be so mad!’

‘Yeah? Well, she’s not around to see it, is she?’ He flicked the sleeve down and stared at the road ahead.

I turned to look out of the window too. I shouldn’t have mentioned Mum. Five years didn’t seem to have softened the effect of hearing her name. I could see the muscles stretched taut around his jaw. He was as easy to read as I was, every emotion slapped across his face like a neon sign. I couldn’t believe I’d managed to upset him within half an hour of seeing him again. I really needed to not do that if I had any hope of convincing him to let me stay for the foreseeable future.

‘What does it mean?’ I asked, to distract him.

Jack’s jaw untensed. ‘It’s the Marine Corps motto. Always Faithful. The crossed swords are the Unit’s emblem. It’s something we all got done when we finished recon and special ops training.’

His unit – he’d spoken only sparingly on the phone to me about his unit. I didn’t know much about it at all; it had taken me months even to figure out that re******ant reconnaissance. Though I still hadn’t figured out what exactly they were reconnaissancing. What I did know was that the training had been two long years, for much of which he hadn’t been contactable. That had been difficult.

A thought occurred to me. ‘Does Alex have one too?’

‘Yep, of course.’

Hunting Lila
Page 4



Of course. I could have guessed. I stopped myself from asking him, If Alex drank poison, would you do it too? It was what my mum used to say all the time but I didn’t think the reminder would go down too well.

‘He’ll be over later by the way. He can’t wait to see you.’

My heart lurched. I was sure it punched out of my chest like you see in cartoons. I looked over at my brother, biting the inside of my cheek to rein in my unstoppable grin. I didn’t want him to see how ecstatic that bit of news had just made me.

Half an hour later we were still cocooned in the air-con***ioned cool of the car. I was staring out at the blue ocean to my right, wrapped up in imaginings involving Alex in uniform, when Jack interrupted my reverie with a nod to his left. We were passing a turn-off. A large sign announced the entrance to the Marine Corps Base at Camp Pendleton. Several army trucks were turning in ahead of us.

I squinted up the road as we passed it by. ‘So that’s where you work?’

‘It is indeed.’

‘Is it big? It looks big.’

‘Two hundred square miles. We’ve been driving alongside it for the last thirty minutes.’

I thought about that for a bit. ‘Don’t you live on base?’

‘No, our unit doesn’t. We need to be near to San Diego and the border.’

The border? With Mexico, I assumed, not Orange County. I wondered why that was important. The only thing I could think of was drugs, or maybe illegal immigrants, but I didn’t ask as I knew Jack wouldn’t give me a straight answer. He always changed the subject when I asked what his unit actually did. I knew they hadn’t been deployed overseas, thank God, but it seemed a little weird that they’d gone through all that training just to sit around in sunny California, kicking back in civilian clothes and driving fast cars. And, anyway, didn’t the police or border control deal with drugs and immigration?

A few miles further down the road and we came to Oceanside. It was a small, sun-bleached town facing the Pacific, the kind of place you see in the movies, with palm trees swaying languorously in the breeze. We drove through some back streets, away from the ocean, and pulled up outside a small two-storeyed detached house. It had a square of front yard, with scrappy grass and a wooden veranda running along the front. The house was painted grey. There was an integral garage which we drove up to, Jack hitting a button in the car that made the garage door swing open for us.

When we entered the house through the internal door, I stopped short. I had imagined something semi-squalid, like his bedroom used to be, and instead I was confronted with a photo shoot from Ideal Home. I caught my breath in the hallway when I saw the little wooden letter table by the door. It looked strange sitting there. The last time I’d seen it had been five years ago, back in our house in Washington. I looked around the house more carefully, spotting one or two other items from our childhood. A whitewashed bookcase in the living room, a framed print of a Klee painting in the hall, an antique coat rack by the front door. No wonder it had appeared so homey on first glance. It was like putting on a familiar old coat in the winter. Even though she’d never stepped foot inside this house, my mum’s touch was all over it.

The kitchen, which Jack led me into now, was slightly old-fashioned, with a big ceramic sink, crackly lino floor and a flimsy veneer table and chairs. I glanced around for anything familiar in here. The only thing I recognised was a postcard of Big Ben tacked to the fridge door, one I’d sent Jack a year or two back. I wondered what I’d written on the back, probably some barefaced lie about how happy I was.

I wandered over to it. It was posted amongst a litter of other scraps of paper and one or two photos. I flinched when I saw one was of me, taken the last time I was over in Washington, three years ago. I felt sorry for my fourteen-year-old self when I looked at it. I had a stricken expression, like I was hiding a terrible secret. The irony was, back then I hadn’t even known what terrible secrets were – I’d just been a scared fourteen-year-old, confused by the rift opening up between her dad and her brother, and not sure whether she’d see her brother or his best friend ever again. I resisted the urge to tear the photo off the fridge and rip it up.

I almost didn’t want to look at the other photo, which I’d clocked out of the corner of my eye. To do so was like tearing off an itching scab: a momentary thrill of satisfaction, followed rapidly by pain and clotting. It was a dog-eared picture of a stunning blonde woman, caught mid-laugh, one of her arms wrapped tightly around a boy who was looking up at her, his head shadowed beneath her chin, blue sky behind them. The boy was Jack and the woman was my mother. The top of another, blonder, head appeared in the bottom left of the picture, but it was impossible to tell that it was me. I turned away, wanting to shield Jack from the picture, then remembered that he had put it there and was confronted by it every time he went to fetch the milk. I guessed that was progress.

‘It’s a nice place, Jack. Really nice.’

‘Yeah,’ he nodded, ‘it’s good to come home to.’

I agreed silently, then, experimenting with my indifferent voice, asked, ‘So where does Alex live? I’m surprised you two aren’t room-mates.’ My indifferent voice needed work.

Jack laughed. ‘Contrary to popular opinion, sis, Alex and I are not joined at the hip. Alex lives five minutes away. He has a very cool bachelor pad on the oceanfront.’

My heart rebounded back into my chest. Bachelor pad? Of course. It was absurd that Alex wouldn’t be dating girls. He was beautiful, and yes, I was blinded by bias, but it was still an indisputable fact. By anyone. Together, he and Jack had cornered the market in good looks and charisma. When I was about ten I’d had to watch in silent agony as Alex dated a few girls – all older than me, all able to fill a bra – and it had almost killed me to watch. But in the fantasy world I’d created in my mind since leaving, Alex lived in a woman-free vacuum. It was the only way I’d kept myself sane. Now the words ‘bachelor’ and ‘pad’ were being bandied around and my mind was erasing that carefully crafted fantasy and redrawing it with images of hot tubs and women in bikinis.

Hunting Lila
Page 5



Breathe, I reminded myself. This is Alex. Not Jack. Alex, who always played the cool, collected one to Jack’s extrovert. He’d never been one to chase the girls, he was the one who always apologised to them when Jack forgot their names. He would hang back, watching silently with one blond eyebrow raised whenever Jack went in for the kill. And even if he did have a bachelor pad, it didn’t mean he was entertaining streams of women every night, or even any night.

Yeah, keep clutching at those straws, Lila.

‘You hungry? Thirsty?’ Jack asked.

I certainly wasn’t hungry now. My stomach was in knots. I shook my head.

Jack led me through into the hallway, where he stopped in front of a small white box on the wall by the front door.

‘This is the alarm,’ he said, flicking open the box. Inside was a space-age-looking row of blinking lights and a touchpad with both letters and numbers on it.

‘The code is 121205,’ he said. ‘You need to set the alarm when you’re in the house, not just when you go out. If something sets it off when you’re inside, the whole place will lock down. You won’t be able to get out. Just hang tight and wait for me or the police.’

I stared at him in silence for a few seconds. I hadn’t taken in the instructions, just the code. It was the date of my mother’s death. Jack ignored my expression and snapped the box shut. I understood the paranoia. Dad had installed an alarm on the house in London too. But having an alarm hadn’t helped Mum.

Jack picked up my bag which he’d dumped at the bottom of the stairs and waved me forwards, up them. I went first, pausing on the landing, not sure which door to take.

Jack edged past me to the door at the end of the short corridor. He opened it and let me go first into what was going to be my bedroom for the next however many days he let me stay. It was nice and simple. A single bed, a dresser with a spiky cactus in a red pot on top and a blue comfy chair wedged in the corner – another relic from our previous lives. The window looked out over the back garden. I could definitely make this room my home forever.

‘It’s great. Thanks,’ I said, turning towards him. It was kind of awkward, him not knowing why I was there. Me not telling, him not asking.

He put my bag on the chair and said, ‘Do you want to have a sleep? You could probably use it. I’ve got a few things to do this afternoon. You sleep. When you wake up, we’ll have dinner and talk.’

Yeah, there, he’d said it, Talk. Guess I knew it was coming. I had a few more hours to think up something to tell him. I glanced at the clock on the bedside table. It was coming up for 3.30 p.m. Sleep was seeming like a very good idea indeed, especially when I looked again at the bed.

‘OK, sounds like a plan,’ I agreed.

I looked at him then walked over to where he was standing by the door. I stopped a few inches away from him and let my head fall against his chest. He brought his arms around me as I mumbled into his T-shirt, ‘Thanks.’

‘Hey, no problem,’ he said softly. I felt his lips press against the top of my head and then he left.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and kicked off my shoes, then fell backwards onto the cool sheets. It felt so inviting but my skin was tacky and glazed from travel and I needed a shower more than I needed to sleep. I groaned and sat back up, glancing around for my bag. It hovered off the chair, unzipped itself and moved towards me. With a shock I realised what I was doing and let it fall to the floor with a thud.

‘Lila? You OK?’ Jack yelled from downstairs.

‘Er, yeah, fine, just dropped my bag,’ I called back.

I knelt on the floor, breathing loudly. I had to get this under control. No more using my ability, for anything. That was the rule. I absolutely had to stick to it if I wanted to avoid any more eyeball incidents. Or worse. I had to concentrate. I’d pretty much managed it at school and when I was around people. It was just being tired that made it harder to control. Tiredness and having a knife held to my throat.

I reached into my bag, feeling for my wash things and a clean T-shirt. It felt weird. I was using muscles I hadn’t used in a while. I was going to have to get used to that.

3

I sat on the edge of the bed, feeling dazed from jet lag but buzzing like a high voltage power line had been connected to me while I was asleep. I had been woken up by voices from downstairs; one was Jack – I could hear him laughing and joking around. The other was softer, deeper, and I would recognise it anywhere, even in my sleep. It had broken through my dreams and nudged me into consciousness. Alex.

The room was gloomy, it was dusk outside. I twisted around to look at the clock. It was 7.30 p.m. but it felt like I’d only been asleep for ten minutes. The jet lag was messing with my body, but not half as much as that voice downstairs was. My heart was racing, I could feel my cheeks starting to burn. I glanced at the light switch and narrowed my eyes – the light flickered on, then straightaway off. I got up, frowning at myself, and flicked the switch by hand.

A part of me, a big part of me, wanted to bound out of the room and down the stairs right that second. The need to see him was suddenly overwhelming. It felt like I’d been stuck at the bottom of the ocean for the last three years, surviving on one mouthful of air, and now I could see the surface, or an oxygen tank, only a few feet away. But bed hair and a wrinkled T-shirt was not a good look and vanity got the better of me. A few more minutes wouldn’t kill, whereas Alex looking at me and thinking I looked like the inside of a used sick bag would.

Hunting Lila
Page 6



What to wear, though? I’d not been thinking all that straight when I’d packed and consequently discovered a random assortment of clothing in the drawers. I seemed to have covered all bases though, I noted, apart from skiing. I pulled out an electric blue silk dress. I wasn’t sure what scenario would arise where I was going to need that but hey, you never knew. There was also a school shirt, which I scrunched up and fired at the bin. I didn’t need any reminders of where I should be right now. In the end I pulled on some jeans and replaced the T-shirt I’d worn in bed with a purple vest.

I turned to look in the mirror above the dresser. My hair was all over the place, I’d gone to bed with it wet and was now doing a good impression of a blonde Alice Cooper. I smoothed it flat, hacking a brush through the ends to get the tangles out. I leaned closer to the mirror. I didn’t normally bother with make-up, but tonight I really needed to make an impression. A little bit of mascara, maybe some lip balm. I didn’t need any blusher, that was for sure. I cast my eyes around the dresser, searching for my make-up bag. It was nowhere in sight. I let out a groan. Great. Just great. On the one day I needed to look amazing, to look older, my make-up bag was five thousand miles away.

I reappraised my reflection in something of a panic. Yesterday I’d looked like a dead thing, now I looked very, very alive. Almost too alive – like I was on something. Which, I supposed, I sort of was. There was nothing I could do about that, unfortunately. I brushed my hair behind my ears and bit my lips to make them redder, hoping to take the focus away from my burning cheeks.

I took a deep breath, then another. I could do this.

I made it to the top of the stairs and gripped the banister with all my might. How was it I could make inanimate objects do my bidding but couldn’t get my own legs to obey? I took the first step and the voices in the kitchen cut off in mid-sentence. I felt like an actor about to walk out on stage in front of the world, without knowing the words or even having read the script. I could hear the sound of chairs scraping back so I picked up my pace, wanting to make it to the bottom before they could. I took the next steps two at a time. I caught sight of the top of Alex’s head and inhaled fast, my heart rate skyrocketing. I missed my footing on the next step and went tumbling forwards. In the split second before I hit the wall all I could think was that this wasn’t exactly the reunion I’d fantasised about in my head every hour of every day for the last three years.

My eyes closed involuntarily to avoid the collision and I braced myself. I hit something good and hard but it wasn’t a wall. I opened one eye slowly, peeking to see. Alex was holding me by the top of my arms where he’d caught me. I’d crashed right into his chest. My hands were splayed against him. He rocked back on his heels, not letting go of me. I was thinking I had to move my hands but, much like my legs earlier, they wouldn’t obey. Here he was, literally at my fingertips; I had dreamed about that – though there had been fewer clothes in my dream – for a long time now. I could feel the muscles of his chest and, yep, they lived up to the fantasy. My head barely came up to the height of his shoulders. I just wanted to rest it there and not move but Jack was getting into my peripheral vision and I didn’t want him to see the look of dazed delight that was surely on my face. I straightened up, pulling away abruptly. Alex let go of me. I drew in a breath. He was even more beautiful than I had remembered. His tanned face and ice-blue eyes made my stomach lurch violently I grabbed the banister with one hand to stop myself from falling again. That would be bad.

‘Lila. It’s good to see you.’ Alex chuckled.

I smiled back ruefully.

‘Hey, you too,’ I garbled, as the power of coherent speech momentarily deserted me.

‘Do I get a proper hug?’ he said, and he opened his arms wide.

I stepped into them. It felt familiar, warm and, truth be told, unexpectedly painful too. Not physically, but his closeness, the headrush of familiar scent and touch, brought back so many memories from before, it was like someone had turned a television right by my head from silent to full volume.

‘Been a long time – you’re looking well,’ Alex said, as we walked through into the kitchen.

He pulled out a chair for me and I sat while he rested, long and lean, against the kitchen counter. Jack turned back to the stove where something was cooking.

‘So, what’s the deal then?’ Alex said. ‘Why the escape to southern California? London not rocking enough for a teenage girl, so you’ve got to check out the entertainment factor of a military town?’

Maybe Jack had put him up to it. I doubted it though. Alex never did anything he didn’t want to.

‘Kind of, something like that,’ I muttered. I didn’t want to answer any questions right now. I just wanted to enjoy the moment. To which end I shrugged off the teenage comment. I was back with the two people in the world who I loved most. I felt complete. And happier than I’d been in a good long time.

‘So, when’s Sara getting here?’ Alex said to Jack.

Well, that didn’t last long. I felt the smile melt off my face, my ribcage start to crack. Who was Sara?

‘She’s working. She said she’d see us tomorrow,’ Jack answered over his shoulder.

‘That’s a shame. She’s looking forward to meeting you, Lila. You’re going to love her,’ Alex said in my direction.

That did it. My heart skidded to a stop. Alex had a girlfriend and he’d used her name and the word ‘love’ in the same sentence.

Hunting Lila
Page 7



‘The woman who tamed Jack,’ Alex continued. ‘I have to hand it to her, she’s done something no other woman has been able to.’

I shook my head and felt my heart start to beat once more. ‘I don’t get it. What are you saying?’ I turned to Jack. ‘You – you have a girlfriend?’

Jack, to my knowledge – which clearly had great big supernova-sized holes in it – was about as likely a candidate for boyfriendhood as I was for getting the attendance award this year at school. Flings, flirtations, one-night dalliances, but Jack usually ran screaming from commitment. Or maybe not. Maybe in the last three years I really had stopped knowing him.

‘Yep, little sis, I do have a girlfriend,’ he said.

My jaw fell open. I stood up and hopped onto the counter next to the stove so I could look directly at Jack. ‘I want details.’

‘Her name is Sara. Get the mustard.’ He turned, holding a sizzling pan towards the table.

‘Sara who? I don’t know where you keep the mustard. Don’t change the subject.’

Alex moved to my side of the stove and stretched over me to open the cupboard behind my head. I had to duck slightly to avoid the door. As I leaned out of the way, I brushed up against his outstretched arm. My thoughts suddenly detoured as my heart accelerated. The cupboard banged behind me and Alex turned to hand the mustard to Jack. In the second his head was in profile to me, I burnt every single detail of him into my mind like it was photo paper and he was the sun.

He was so close I would only have had to move my face an inch or two forwards to press my lips against his neck. I resisted the urge to trace the shadow of stubble along his jawline to the hollow of his chin. His dark blond hair had been recently crew-cut – I could tell by the thin white line that traced his hairline at the nape of his neck, which stood out against his tan. There was a crease by his eyes that looked suspiciously like the beginnings of a laughter line. I felt a pang of jealousy that someone else was making him laugh, getting to hear him laugh. I was entirely pathetic, I realised that.

Alex turned back towards me as though he sensed me examining him and I looked away, glancing over his shoulder at the steaks Jack had put on the table. I suddenly felt a warmth against the bare skin of my waist, where my top had ridden up over my jeans. Then I was lifted clean off the counter and placed gently on the floor. I tilted my head up. He’d definitely grown too, he was an inch or two taller than Jack now. Alex moved his hands from my waist and gave me a quick smile.

‘Dinner?’ he said, inclining his head towards the table. He pulled out my chair and I pretty much fell into it. He pushed it in and took the chair diagonally opposite.

I gathered myself and focused on Jack. ‘So, come on, start talking. Who’s Sara? Where’d you meet her?’

Jack sat down opposite me. ‘She works with us, with our unit.’ His eyes flicked to Alex.

‘She’s great,’ Alex said.

I didn’t like Alex calling any girl, even my brother’s girlfriend, great. A hideous thought surfaced like a shark. Just because Sara wasn’t his girlfriend didn’t mean he didn’t have one. But if he had, would Jack have said he lived in a bachelor pad? I didn’t know which version I’d rather was true. It was like playing Russian roulette with a full chamber.

‘But I thought women weren’t allowed into the Recon Marines?’ I knew this as I had googled it to check.

‘They aren’t. She’s not a Marine. She’s a neuroscientist.’

That stopped me in my tracks. ‘A neuroscientist? Why would you need a neuroscientist in your unit?’

I caught the sideways look Alex was giving Jack. As though he too was interested to see what Jack would say. This was bizarre.

‘Um, well, it’s sort of standard practice,’ Jack fumbled.

It was? What kind of weird stuff was the army doing these days? I narrowed my eyes at him.

‘So, you’re dating someone who studies brains? Is this an experiment for her or something?’

‘Ha ha.’

‘How old is she?’ I was sure that neuroscientists didn’t just leave university after three years. Jack must have an older woman.

‘Twenty-six.’ He caught my eye. A warning to stop right there.

I bit back my original response. ‘So, how long have you two been dating? Where does she live?’ I asked.

‘Eight months. She lives on the base.’

‘I thought you said your unit lived off base?’ Hah – I’d caught him out.

He continued smoothly, ‘We do. She doesn’t. It’s better for her being on base.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Can you pass the mustard?’ Alex interrupted, reaching over and giving Jack a hard stare.

Then he turned to me. ‘So, talking of living arrangements . . .’

I stared at him now. I always knew when these two were being shifty. Like the time I’d walked into Jack’s bedroom and found them acting in exactly the same way. Trying to distract me. They’d been trying to hide a copy of Playboy.

Alex’s words still hung in the air. They were both staring at me with questions, actually one question, in their eyes. It was a dual-pronged attack. I cut a piece of steak to buy some more time. The steak knife had a serrated edge. I put it down on my plate and stared at it. I suddenly didn’t feel like eating.

‘Lila, are you going to tell us why you’re here?’

I looked at Jack and the words wouldn’t come. I didn’t know how to tell him. The secret had been inside me for so long it wouldn’t come out. I didn’t know how to find the words to even describe it. And besides I was going cold turkey. There was no point in telling them. I could make up a thousand excuses but the real truth of it was I couldn’t bear the thought of Alex looking at me like I was a freak. It was bad enough that he looked at me as Jack’s sister.

Hunting Lila
Page 8



I took a breath. ‘It’s revision time,’ I tried. ‘I just thought on a whim that it would be a good time to come and check out colleges.’

‘Colleges?’ Jack was frowning.

‘Yeah, you know, the places that you go to get a further education? Or, alternatively, the places you drop out of when you decide to join up.’

‘Very funny. You’re on form tonight, Lila. Why are you looking at colleges over here?’

He didn’t seem happy. I looked at Alex, who had stopped chewing and was now eyeing me carefully. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Damn, he could be so contained sometimes.

‘I thought college over here would be better. San Diego University has a good reputation. Or there’s USC . . .’ I petered out.

‘Lila . . . I’m not sure California’s such a good idea.’

His words shot through me, making my insides curl.

‘I . . . but . . . I can’t stay in England.’

‘Look, it isn’t that I don’t want you here. It’s just . . .’ He fumbled around for the words. ‘There are safer places.’

Yeah, safe like south London, I thought. It crossed my mind that I should just tell him about being mugged. Maybe then he’d see the logic of his argument was seriously flawed. But that would just open a huge can of worms. And, anyway, there was no logic to his argument. Oceanside was hardly a hotbed of crime. A great big army base up the road had to act like a flashing siren to most criminals except the truly stupid ones. But then why did he have the crazy alarm on the house? Maybe Oceanside was some crime capital and I just didn’t know about it. But still.

Suddenly Jack’s eyes narrowed. He put his knife and fork down. ‘Is this about a boy?’

‘What?’ Where did that come from? My mind seized up at the totally unexpected twist. ‘A boy? What? No!’

Did he know about Alex? Was I that obvious? Were they both onto me? For years I’d been plotting my escape back here for college and my reasoning had been nothing to do with the diversity of study options and all to do with a boy. Though he wasn’t technically a boy now.

‘Then why the suddenness? That couldn’t have waited? You’re not going to college for over a year.’

Yes, he had me on that one.

‘You left in the middle of the night. You didn’t even call. Just sent an email. What were you planning on doing if I hadn’t got it?’

‘Um, catching a bus?’

‘Lila.’ Jack was irritated now. ‘You can’t just skip off halfway around the world without telling anyone first.’

‘I emailed you,’ I said, ‘and I left a note for Maria.’

‘Forget the email, leaving a note for the housekeeper doesn’t count. You knew she’d call Dad and that he’d call me. He wasn’t – well, let’s just say he wasn’t that happy.’ Jack paused.

I knew he hadn’t spoken to Dad in a long time and could just imagine the tension between them buzzing down the line like interference.

‘I told him you’d be fine with me – but you need to call him tomorrow first thing.’

‘Jack, do we have to talk about this now?’ The evening was going rapidly downhill. Alex was looking serious and I was feeling fed up. I’d always known I’d have to talk to Dad at some point but with the phone I always had the option of hanging up. With Jack and Alex, there was no such easy way out. And it was clear they were both trained in interrogation. They had probably topped the class.

‘Lila, what if I hadn’t been here? What would you have done then?’

I looked over at Alex. His expression hadn’t changed, was still unreadable. He didn’t look like he was about to jump in and rescue me.

‘I, guess, I . . . I don’t know. I didn’t think about that.’

But I would have been fine, I wanted to yell. I can look after myself. Have been looking after myself pretty well, actually, all things considered. I looked down at my plate. Tears were pricking behind my eyes. I couldn’t believe we’d moved from banter to parental lecture, and from my brother of all people, in the space of ten seconds.

‘Well, maybe you should have thought first.’

I shot him a look. What was he saying? That I shouldn’t have come? That he didn’t want me here? I heard my knife and fork clatter on the plate and the chair scrape the lino as I pushed back from the table. I didn’t want to sit here anymore, being interrogated. I needed air. I stumbled to the back door, yanked it open and stepped outside, letting the screen slam behind me. I could hear Alex saying something to Jack and the sound of a chair moving.

I tried to pull myself together before one of them came out after me. I looked around. I was on the back veranda. I went to lean against the waist-high ledge, looking out at the silhouettes of two palm trees waving against the mauve sky. The door behind me opened gently but I didn’t hear anyone move. I turned my head slightly to look. It was Alex. He was standing only a foot or so behind me.

‘Lila.’ He spoke softly, almost a whisper. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Yeah, I’m just fine,’ I said.

He put his hand on my shoulder and I closed my eyes as my body unwound like a sigh.

‘Hey,’ he said, twisting me gently around so he could look at me. His eyes burnt blue, even in the dark. His hand dropped from my shoulder and I felt my body tense up again. ‘It’s only because he cares about you,’ he said.

Hunting Lila
Page 10



‘What the heck? You scared the hell out me,’ I whispered, hanging on to the fridge door for support as my heart restarted. It couldn’t take much more of these adrenaline spikes.

Alex was standing an inch behind me. He’d snuck up on me from God knows where. I revised my estimation of Marine recon training. I turned slowly, giving him a look, and staggered to the table.

‘Sorry,’ he said, looking at me with concern as he flicked on the overhead light.

‘S’OK,’ I muttered, blinking in the sudden glare. ‘I just wasn’t expecting to see you, is all. Thought you’d gone back to your place.’

‘Yeah, we, um . . .’ He hesitated and I looked up. ‘We had a little situation at work, Jack had to go and take care of it, so I came over to sleep on the sofa, in case you woke up and didn’t know where he’d gone.’

I smiled and shook my head at him. ‘Usually a note works just fine.’

He was wearing the same blue jeans that he’d had on earlier, but had taken off his shirt and was now wearing only a white T-shirt. It was physically painful to tear my eyes away from his shoulders and arms, like ripping a Band-Aid from my eyelids. The same black inked tattoo that I’d seen on Jack covered the curve of his upper arm and I wanted to press my fingers against it and indent it into my hand.

When I managed to force my mind back onto a less X-rated track, I realised he was glancing downwards and his face wore a questioning expression. With a start, I remembered I was wearing only a T-shirt that came halfway down my thighs, just covering the bruise that I’d gotten from the bike and knife incident. But it wasn’t my bare legs he was looking at, or the bruise.

‘Hey, I recognise that T-shirt!’

Oh God. Inside my head I doubled over, cringing. I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks as, casually, with as much insouciance as I was capable of, I pulled the front of the T-shirt away from my body as though I too was wondering what on earth I was wearing. As if I didn’t know. As if I hadn’t undressed myself just a few hours ago and pulled that very T-shirt on as I did almost every night. Unthinkingly, or at least not thinking that the person who used to own that T-shirt would come across me wearing it in the middle of the night.

I tried for wide-eyed innocence: ‘What, this thing?’

He was frowning at the almost faded Washington State logo across my chest. I wished it had faded off completely. ‘Yeah, that was mine, I’m sure of it,’ he said.

‘Oh, really?’ My voice had picked up an octave. I lowered it. ‘I thought it was one of Jack’s old ones. I found it lying around one day and kind of adopted it.’

I risked a glance at him.

Alex looked puzzled.

‘It’s good for sleeping in,’ I continued.

‘Yeah, I can see that.’ He was smiling now.

I jumped up. The subject needed changing before I died. ‘So, you fancy some tea?’

‘Yeah, OK, thanks.’

I filled the kettle, feeling his eyes burning into my back.

‘Has it really been so bad?’

I turned around, frowning. ‘What do you mean?’

‘London. Living there with your dad. I can see you’re not happy. I can hear it in your emails too. Tell me what’s been going on.’

The kettle almost fell from my grip. ‘Nothing much. It’s just not home, you know?’

Alex didn’t say anything but he didn’t take his eyes off me either.

How to explain? Telling him the reason I was so unhappy was because I was away from him wasn’t an option unless I never wanted to see him again. Urgh. This was so difficult. Especially with him focusing on me so hard it was like he was trying to see all the way through me. It made it difficult to keep a train of thought going. I looked down at the floor.

‘In Washington, I always felt a part of everything. In the middle of a family. I had you and Jack.’ I risked a glance back up at him. He smiled at me briefly and then lapsed back into a half-scowl.

‘In London I didn’t know anyone apart from Dad and he wasn’t around much. And I couldn’t talk for a long time, I felt so numb.’ My voice cracked. ‘By the time that passed, I just – I just felt so separate, so different to everyone else, like I didn’t fit in.’ I paused. There was so much I couldn’t tell him. Like how when I said I was different to everyone else, I wasn’t talking about having an American accent and a dead mother. I was talking about suddenly and inexplicably being able to move things just by looking at them. I think that qualified me for the ‘different’ category. Hell, it put me right to the front of it.

There was an awkward silence. I turned away and switched on the kettle and reached up for the tea bags from the cupboard overhead.

‘There’s so much I don’t know about you,’ he said.

I bit my lip. He had no idea just how much.

‘What the hell?’

I spun my head to see what Alex was swearing about. He was staring at my right leg and wincing. I tried with my free hand to yank the T-shirt down to cover the ugly black bruise that spread like an oil slick along my thigh.

Alex crouched down, his fingertips grazing mine as he brushed my hand away. He began to trace the line of the bruise towards my knee, like a doctor checking for a break. He was quick and methodical about it and I wondered for a second whether this was some in-built response Marines were trained for whenever they saw injuries. If so I’d have to injure myself more often. I drew in a sharp breath, not because it hurt, but because his fingers were causing little shocks to dance up my legs.