A scream ripped through the air. She didn’t know if it came from her, or from him as his hands flew up to cover his face, or from the car itself as it left the road with a screech of tyres on tarmac.
Then silence, the tree filling the windscreen, its leaves black in the head- lights. A crunch of metal and the lights went out. Her face rammed hard against something, pain flowered in bright colours inside her skull. She tilted her face and opened her eyes, seeing blues and reds and nasty purples. There was a silence in the car. Terror washed through her, and the terror was bigger than the pain.
‘Please help me,’ Jude said to no one at all.
They had been driving back from a party in Liam’s rusty old Fiat, with one of its wing mirrors held in place by tape and an ominous rattle on steep hills. Jude and Liam were in the front, Yolanda and Benny in the back, though Benny was passed out, his head on Yolanda’s shoulder and his mouth open, and Yolanda was also fast asleep. Jude looked at the clock on the dashboard: it was two in the morning, but still warm after a sweltering day. It felt like the sky might split open at any moment and a flood of rain would soak into the parched, cracked earth.
It had been a hot summer. Jude thought of sitting her A levels in May and June, the sun glaring through the large windows and her fingers slippery on the pen, beads of sweat on her forehead and damp patches under her arms. That seemed like another world away because since the middle of June she had been in love. Stupid and dizzy and glorious with love, in love as never before. Her body ached with it. She could feel where his fingers had touched her; her lips were sore. At the party he had taken her into the garden and kissed her until she would have lain down on the lawn in full sight, but he’d whispered, ‘Later,’ his breath hot in her ear. And now it was later: they would drop off Yolanda, haul Benny out of the car and onto his front steps, and drive into the woods. He had a blanket in the boot of his car. She didn’t mind if it rained; she imagined their wet bodies pressed against each other and a shiver of anticipation rippled through her.
She looked over at him and he felt her looking and put his hand on her thigh, through the thin material of her dress. Liam Birch: not her type at all. Liam was not on track; Jude was. She had known she was going to be a doctor since she was at primary school and she had worked for years to get there, never letting up. She had a place at medical school and as long as her results were all right, and she was sure they would be, in six weeks she would be heading to Bristol…
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