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The Crazy Frog song “Axel F” blasted through the room then, loud and annoying as fuck, and caused Gibsie to reach for his phone and me to groan in sheer fucking despair.

“It’s mine,” Claire chirped, holding her phone up. She glanced at the phone and grimaced. “It’s my mamagain.”

“Don’t tell her that you’re with me,” Gibsie warned. “Whatever you do, babe, donottell that woman that I’m with you.”

Claire glared at him. “Who else would I be with? Besides, there’s no point since she saw me getting into your car!”

He shrugged uncomfortably. “She’ll kill you.”

“Yeah, Gerard, I know,” she hissed before clicking receive and putting the phone to her ear. “Hi, Mam… Yeah, I know what you said… Yeah, I know, Mam, but it’s not what you think…” Putting her head down, Claire hurried past me, speaking so softly and fast that I couldn’t make out a word of it.

“Why will her mother kill her?” I asked, eyeing Gibsie with suspicion. “What have you done that you haven’t told me about?”

Looking everywhere but at my face, Gibsie muttered something abouta huge fucking mistakebefore bolting after her.

I hoped for Gibsie’s sake he didn’t makethatkind of mistake with Claire because Hughie Biggs had a temper on him when the notion took him, and I wasn’t in any fit state to stop them from killing each other.

“Well, shite,” I mumbled, staring after them both. “The drama just keeps on coming.”

18

Stay with Me

Shannon

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to find when I walked into Johnny’s bedroom, but my brother passed out on his bed wasn’t it. He was lying diagonally across the foot of Johnny’s huge bed, but his feet were still planted on the floor.

Slipping inside, I quietly padded over to the bed and stared down at Joey’s sleeping form. His lips were slightly parted and his breathing was deep and even. I sagged in relief. For a moment, I’d feared he was dead.

My gaze flicked to where he was still clutching Johnny’s phone. Reaching out, I gently pried it out of his hand, careful not to wake him. I was terrified of what would happen when he did wake. Where would he go? Would he come home? Go to Aoife’s? Go back to Shane Holland and his scumbag friends?

I honestly didn’t know and the uncertainty worried me more than my father’s disappearance. Because I cared about Joey. He was important to me. For most of my life, he was the most important person in it. The thought of something happening to him was unbearable. It was too much to take, and I honestly didn’t think I could take a whole lot more of anything.

I remembered how it was last year. The fighting at home had been terrible, the mood exceptionally arctic. Dad was spending all of his time at the pub, and Mam was rotating between working herself into the ground and falling apart in her bedroom.

Dad had been having yet another affair with one of the barmaids, an affair that had come out in glorious fashion a few short months later, and Mam knew. She knew and instead of throwing him out, she took to her bed. Sean hadn’t yet turned two, and was a handful. Between cutting his back teeth and screaming through the night, all of us were exhausted.

Things were getting worse for me at BCS, and Joey was losing his temper more often. Talking back to teachers, getting into brawls at school and even bigger brawls at home, until one day he had a new group offriends. Friends who were too old to be hanging around with a schoolboy. Friends who had no business showing up to the school for drop-offs. After that, Joey began to withdraw. He turned secretive and disconnected. He didn’t care about anything. Not school or hurling. He was just disappearing.

Until one day at school one of the girls from his class, the pretty blond who always watched him, a girl I was sure Joey had never spoken more than two words to, chased him outside to the schoolyard and stopped him from climbing into that car. I knew this because I, too, had followed at a distance. The girl had caused an unmerciful scene in the car park and had waved her phone around at those older boys in the car. And then she did something that had shocked me. She fisted his school jumper in both hands and dragged his face down to hers, kissing him right there, without thought for suspension had they been caught.

I never did find out what Aoife said that day, but whatever it was, it caused Joey to walk away from the car and climb into hers instead. After that, things slowly started to change for him.Hestarted to come back to us, piece by piece. Because Aoife gave him something that day, something to cling to. Hope for the future.

And then my father took that something away from him again.

He took his hope.

I saw it in his eyes when he visited me at the hospital; the light bulb Aoife had switched on inside of him had been slowly dimmed to the point where he was back to darkness. If he could just sleep it off, sleep whatever he had taken right out of his system, then maybe he would wake up with some clarity. A clear head and the ability to do some calm, rational thinking. Maybe he could—

“Shan? My mam called and I need to go home.” Claire’s voice cut through my thoughts and I swung around to find her standing in the doorway. Pressing my finger to my lips, I begged her with my eyes not to make a sound as I slowly crept out of the room.

“Sorry,” she whispered when we were both standing in the landing with the bedroom door closed behind us. “I didn’t realize he was asleep.”

I didn’t respond until we were at the top of the staircase and far away from the door. “It’s okay. Neither did I.” On shaky legs, I descended the steps, feeling the burn in my lungs as I moved. Since leaving the hospital, I’d spent the majority of my time holed up in my room. All the walking today had taken it out of my body. Niggling pains and aches were resurfacing, and without the prescribed pain relief I had forgotten to take before I left my house, I was feeling every one of them. “What were you going to tell me?”

“I need to go home,” Claire replied in a huffy tone. “My mam’s been calling nonstop.” She rolled her eyes for emphasis. “She says if Gerard doesn’t bring me home by ten, she’s locking me out of the house.” Huffing out a breath, she added, “It’s a quarter to ten now.”

“Would that be such a bad thing?” Gibsie waggled his brows, joining us in the hallway. “You could always stay with me.”

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