The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions Book 1)

IT’S A BOY, THIS TIME. His longish mouse brown hair lies on the pillow, sideways, as was my view, which was slitted. His brain is clouded, heavy, and the stench of sick permeates his nostrils.

On his nightstand, among books and pictures and empty glasses, are clusters of bottles; phenobarbital, Klonopin, Benadryl, alprazolam, Vicodin, and clorazepate. Who knows how many he took? He probably doesn’t even know himself. He just recognises the feeling in his stomach, and in his head, and he’s trying not to throw up again.

I can’t hear his thoughts, but after the others, a space has opened up in my mind, and I try and cast around for something, anything, to tell me who he is. Why he’s doing this. Where he’s doing this so I can—

“Noah!” Small fingers grip my shoulders, bruisingly hard. The film of his reality slips, and when I open my eyes, it’s Mara’s face that I see.

“What’s wrong?” I ask her, sitting up. I feel sluggish, hazy, but here. Normal.

Her face becomes mask of disbelief. “You were having a nightmare. You were curled up and your shoulders were heaving and I thought—I thought you were having a seizure.”

Maybe he was having a seizure. Epilepsy would explain some of those drugs . . . .

“What happened?” Her eyes narrow, search my face.

“I saw someone die.”

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“He overdosed,” I say, and hesitate just a fraction of a second before adding, “On purpose.”

Her hands round into fists in the sheets as her spine straightens. “So, that’s three now.”

I get out of bed, begin getting dressed. Technically, she’s right, but there’s something different about the boy I just saw. Or rather, not different. “This wasn’t like the other night, with that girl. Or in England.”

She’s out of bed now too, the sheet wrapped around her body. Her arms are crossed. “Tell me.”

I sit back down on the bed, staring out at the Manhattan Bridge. “I could hear their thoughts,” I begin. “The girl who jumped the tracks, her name was Beth. She played piano.”

I struggle for words to explain what it feels like to inhabit someone else. To see what they see in their worst moments, to smell what they smell, and to live their experience—it’s not a gift. It’s a curse.

“What about Sam?” Mara asks.

I itch for distraction. Could do with a cigarette. I exhale slowly. “His last thoughts were ‘Help me help me help me,’ over and over again, until his mind went black.”

Her face loses its expression. She turns quickly and reaches for her shirt from last night, pulls on jeans.

“I couldn’t help him, Mara. I wouldn’t even know Beth’s name if she hadn’t thought it before she died.”

She’s quiet still, with her back to me.

“What?” I ask her.

She looks at me over her shoulder, fakes a smile. “Nothing.”

“Liar.”

She smiles again, a real one this time. “I take offence.”

“Keep taking it,” I say, and try forcing a smile but can’t quite manage it. “I don’t know what he was thinking. I felt the way I usually do when someone like us dies.”

Mara doesn’t flinch at that, and I love her more for it. “So, still no idea who he was, then?”

I search my memory for the still frames I sweep away after each death, those collages of misery. The pill bottles on the nightstand all have different names on them, different doctors, different addresses—

One of them matches the one scrawled on my arm. In imaginary fucking ink.

Fuck. Fuck.

“What?” Mara’d been watching me. Closely.

I regret saying the words before I even speak them, but it’s too late to lie. “There’s—I think I might know where he lived.”

“Really?”

“He took pills—there’s an address on one of the bottles.” I slip my wallet into my back pocket, head for the doorway. “I’m going to go.”

Mara slips something into her pocket. “No, we’re going to go.”

“All right, we’re going to go,” I say, but Mara hasn’t moved.

“All of us.”

“All of . . . whom?”

“You weren’t the only one who saw Beth die.”

“No . . .”

“We should tell everyone.”

“Everyone in the subway that night? The police, the random—”

“You know who I mean. Daniel. Jamie.”

I could talk to Daniel. He’s sort of become the brother I never had, and never knew I actually wanted, but more than that, he’s distanced from this—from me—in a way Mara isn’t. I can tell him about the suicides, and he might be able to help draw a connection without drawing a line through Mara.

Jamie, however . . . The issue of the professor scratches at my mind. “Why?”

“Because Daniel’s my brother, and—”

“I mean, why Jamie?”

“He was there.”

“On the platform, yes, we’ve established that—you want to tell Sophie as well?”

“God, Noah, stop. Jamie was there for everything. We were lab rats together with Stella, we had to break out of that fucking place together, we had to get to New York on our own together, with no money, and ended up exactly where your father wanted us. He was there.”

And I was not. Guilt heats the back of my neck.

“And he’s our friend, and the most loyal person I know. You want him to move in with us, for fuck’s sake!”

Not because I trust him, necessarily. Possibly in part because I don’t.

I give her a look, arrogant, condescending. “It can’t have escaped your notice that he’s wearing the pendant.”

“So?”

“Haven’t you ever wondered what was in his letter?”

Mara goes still.

“Jamie’s never mentioned it? What the professor wrote to him?”

“Why would he?”

“He couldn’t get his pendant on fast enough, as I remember it.”

“What are you saying?”

The air feels bruised, and I press on it. “Our friend’s thrown his lot in with someone who goes on about fate and destiny and made it quite plain that he’d like to use us as tools. Weapons, even, perhaps.” That’s a trigger of hers, and I pull it.

Her voice flattens out. “He doesn’t want to use me as a weapon.”

“No, he wants you to leave me instead.”

“And we decided to ignore him.”

“We did,” I say. “But that doesn’t mean he decided to ignore us.” That thought tramples every other. “We’re talking about a man who literally manipulated and lied to generations of my family and yours in order to breed us. He said it was our decision, our choice to make, whether we wanted to help him achieve his vision for a better world. We said no. Jamie said yes.”

“Do you want to know what Jamie said after you went down on the platform?”

“I’ve a feeling you’re going to tell me regardless.”

“After he helped me get you into a cab—you don’t remember that, do you? Leaning on Jamie because you could barely stand?”

I don’t remember it, and I’m glad of it. It’s shameful enough that it happened in the first place.

“He said he could kill whoever’s doing this to you.”

“No one’s doing anything to me.” And why was murder where his mind went, after a girl, a stranger, supposedly committed suicide?

“Really? So you’re fine, then?”

“I’m alive. Beth and Sam aren’t.”

“Oh, okay, cool.”

“Don’t patronise me—it’s unbecoming.” Mara looks like she wants to hit me. I hope she does. “What makes you think what’s happening to them has anything to do with me? You want to tell your brother and Jamie, fine. Tell them. But the boy who killed himself this morning, he wasn’t like Sam, or Beth. They didn’t want to die. He did.”

“How do you know?”

I can’t explain it, the difference between the suicides I’ve witnessed before. It’s the difference between a kicked wasp’s nest and a hanging beehive, between violence and free will. “He wanted to die, Mara. I wish he hadn’t taken his own life, but it’s done now, and I’m not going to violate his dignity by bringing a parade of strangers to his home, or wherever he is, to pick through his life.”

“So, it’s cool as long as it’s just you? By yourself? Fuck that. It’s all of us or none of us. Your choice.”

“I choose not to choose.”

“Then I choose all of us,” Mara says. She crosses over to her mobile, to text Daniel and Jamie, presumably. And I let her. Because I love her anyway.

“He wouldn’t love you if you weren’t what you are.”

Father’s words, haunting me still, wherever I go.