Chapter 113: The Things Isla Doesn’t Say

Roxanne woke the next morning with the play still humming in her head, the way a song lingers after the music stops. She lay there a moment, grinning at the ceiling, before a pillow landed squarely on her face.

"Get up, Wilhelmina," Isla said. "Your public awaits."

"I will throw that back at you."

"You insulted a prince in front of the whole school. I’m told someone cried laughing in the third row. I believe it was me."

"It was acting," Roxanne said, sitting up and pushing hair out of her eyes.

"Was it? You were very convincing. You had a gleam."

"I did not have a gleam."

"When the audience clapped, you absolutely had a gleam."

Roxanne said nothing, which was an answer, and Isla laughed and tossed her a hairbrush.

At breakfast, though, something was off. Usually Isla would have spent the whole meal narrating the performance line by line, doing impressions of Liam’s wounded face and Perpetua’s panic. Today she sat with her tea going cold and her phone face up beside her plate, and her toast stayed untouched.

"You’ve checked that phone six times since we sat down," Roxanne said.

"Maybe it’s become very interesting."

"More interesting than gossiping about Liam’s tragic performance?"

"Nothing is more interesting than Liam embarrassing himself." Isla smiled, but the smile vanished the moment the screen lit up with another message. She snatched the phone, read it, and locked it again, turning it face down.

"Did something happen?" Roxanne asked.

"No. It’s nothing."

Roxanne noticed the speed of it, and the way Isla’s thumb stayed pressed to the back of the phone. She noticed, and she let it go. For now.

After classes that afternoon, she caught up with Isla in the corridor, Tessa a few steps behind. "I was thinking we could go into town this weekend. All three of us. There’s that bookshop you wanted to see, and the pastry place."

Isla’s face did something quick and complicated. "I can’t."

"You were excited about it on Monday."

"I know. But I have assignments to finish."

"Our assignments aren’t due for days."

"I just have a lot on."

"Isla, the history essay isn’t due until the end of next week. You told me yourself you’d finished the outline."

"Well, I haven’t." Isla’s voice sharpened. "I don’t need to account for every hour of my life, Roxanne."

The words landed hard. Tessa, behind them, went very still. Roxanne opened her mouth, then closed it again, surprised by how much it stung.

"Right," she said. "Of course. Sorry."

Isla looked as though she wanted to say something more. Instead she shifted her bag on her shoulder and walked away, and Roxanne stood in the corridor wondering what exactly she had stepped on.

That evening she came back to their room and stopped in the doorway.

Isla stood at the window with her back to the door and the phone pressed to her ear, speaking in a low, urgent voice. Roxanne caught only pieces.

"I know, Mum. I know." A pause. "But what about next term?" Another, longer. "I’m not ready to leave."

Roxanne stood very still, not wanting to be heard and not wanting to be caught listening either. She backed up half a step and let the door creak.

Isla spun around. "I have to go," she said into the phone, and ended the call. Her face was pale, and she held the phone against her chest.

"Is someone at home ill?" Roxanne asked gently.

"No."

"Isla."

"No. Everyone’s fine. My family is fine."

It was clearly not fine. It was written all over her, in the stiff set of her shoulders and the wet shine in her eyes. Roxanne crossed the room slowly and stopped a few feet away.

"You don’t have to tell me everything," she said. "But you don’t have to pretend everything is fine, either."

Isla folded her arms. "And you don’t have to turn every time I go quiet into a problem to solve."

It stung, because Roxanne had only been trying to help. She swallowed it. "All right."

"I’m going to wash my hair," Isla said, and took her towel and left.

The next day, Roxanne tried to do what she thought was right. She gave Isla space. When the last bell rang, she didn’t hover by Isla’s desk the way she normally would. She walked out with Tessa, and they spent the afternoon in the common room arguing about the best way to revise for exams, and Roxanne tried not to look at the door.

Isla noticed. Roxanne saw her notice, from across the corridor, a quick glance and then a turn of the head. But she didn’t come over, and neither did Roxanne.

At lunch, the three of them sat together in a silence that felt borrowed from someone else’s table. Isla tried a joke about the porridge tasting like wet carpet. Roxanne said, "Mm, it does a bit," and took a sip of water. It was polite. It was not the usual back and forth, the easy volley that had carried them through a hundred meals. Isla’s smile faltered, and Tessa looked between them with enormous, careful neutrality.

Neither of them wanted to be the first to say the argument had hurt. Roxanne pushed a pea around her plate and thought it through. Being someone’s closest friend did not mean she understood everything happening in their life. She had always assumed it did, without ever noticing the assumption, and the realisation was humbling.

That evening, Isla went to shower, and she left her phone on the desk.

Roxanne was reading on her bed when the screen lit up. She did not mean to look. But the room was small, and the glow was bright, and the preview scrolled across the top of the screen in plain letters.

*Mum: We can’t keep putting off the decision. Your father needs an answer before the end of the month.*

She looked away at once. Her face went hot. It was private, and she had no right to it, and she turned her whole body toward the wall and stared at the grain of the wood until the screen went dark.

When Isla came back, hair wrapped in a towel, Roxanne was sitting up with her hands folded in her lap.

"Your phone lit up while you were out," she said. "A message came in. I saw the start of it by accident. I didn’t open it and I didn’t read anything else."

Isla went very still.

The silence in the room was so complete that Roxanne could hear water dripping from the end of Isla’s hair onto the floor.

"Is your family asking you to come home?" Roxanne asked, as gently as she knew how.

For a long moment Isla did not answer. Then her shoulders sagged, and she sat down heavily on the edge of her bed.

"They might need me to leave," she said. "After the term ends. Not for definite. But it’s possible."

"Isla."

"I don’t want to." Her voice cracked on it. "That’s the one thing I know. I don’t want to leave."

Roxanne didn’t say anything clever. She got up, crossed the room, and sat beside her on the bed, close enough that their shoulders touched. She didn’t offer to fix it. She didn’t ask for details. She only waited.

"I’ve been trying to find a way to stay," Isla said at last, her hands knotted in her lap. "Without making things worse for them. I just don’t know if there is one."

"Why didn’t you tell me?"

"Because you’ve been through so much." Isla wiped her cheek with the back of her wrist. "The thing with Arabella, and Dorian, and your mother, and your father’s family. I didn’t want to be another person who needed rescuing."

Roxanne felt that one land in her chest. "You think I only have room for my own problems?" she asked quietly.

"No. I think you’ve had enough of them."

"That’s not the same thing as not wanting to hear yours."

Isla looked down at her hands. "I don’t know how to tell you something when I don’t even know how it’s going to end."

Roxanne turned that over. She was hurt, a little, that Isla had believed she would be seen as a burden. But she understood, too, that she had made her own assumptions in the corridor, about what Isla’s silence meant and what she was owed. They had both guessed wrong about each other.

She did not promise that it would be all right. She had no way of knowing that, and Isla would have heard the lie.

"Then you don’t have to know the ending before you talk to me," she said.

Isla laughed, wetly, and leaned her head against Roxanne’s shoulder. They stayed like that until the towel slipped off and her hair dripped onto both of them.

Later, after the lamp was out, Roxanne lay in the dark with her eyes open. The room was quiet. Outside, a branch scratched against the window.

"Roxanne?" Isla whispered, from the other bed.

"Yes?"

"If I have to leave, I don’t know how to say goodbye to this place."

Roxanne stared at the ceiling. She wanted to say something that would help, and nothing came that was true enough.

She lay awake for a long time, understanding at last that the friend who had made Moonstone Academy feel like home might be the one about to lose hers.