* * *

  It’s almost lunchtime on the day after the storm when Ana calls her best friend. She doesn’t answer, so Ana does the only reasonable thing. She calls again, and again, and again. In the end Maya answers, sounding irritated. She’s on the train, which obviously wouldn’t have been a problem, only she was sitting on the toilet in the train, which again wouldn’t have been a problem if Ana didn’t always insist on video calls.

  “Can’t you take the hint if people reject your calls or what?” Maya snaps, trying to balance the phone on the sink.

  “Are you doing a poo?” Ana asks, unconcerned, her mouth full of chips.

  “Well if I was, and you’re eating chips at the same time, I’d still be the only person who was disgusted.”

  “Why should I be disgusted? I can’t even see the poo!” Ana wonders, shoveling in some more chips.

  “There’s something wrong with you.”

  “With me? You’re the one talking about poo. Is there something wrong with your poo? Are you ill?”

  “Stop it!”

  “Is it sticky? It’s not supposed to be sticky.”

  “What do you WANT, Ana?”

  “Hello? Sorry I exist, then—I just wanted to ask if you’d like me to pick you up from the train.”

  “You haven’t got a driver’s license.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t have the energy to have this discussion with you. Don’t worry. I’ll get the bus.”

  “Why don’t you call your parents?”

  “Because then they’d pick me up.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes!”

  “Isn’t that the point?”

  “The point is that I don’t want to bother them. They’ve got enough crap to think… what are you doing? Are you okay?”

  “I just got some chips stuck in my throat. Now I’ve got stuff on the screen. Hang on, I’ll just wipe it off.”

  “Charming, Ana. Really.”

  “Is that your guitar next to you? You take your guitar with you when you’re doing a poo?”

  “I’m on the train, you idiot, I don’t want anyone to steal it!”

  “No one wants your useless guitar, loser!”

  “It’s great to be going home, it really is.”

  “Mmm. Don’t talk crap, you miss me loads.”

  Maya smiles.

  “I miss my best friend.”

  Ana softens and whispers to the screen:

  “I miss you too.”

  Whereupon Maya obviously can’t resist adding:

  “You really should meet my best friend, she’s way funnier than you are!”

  It’s fortunate for her that this is a video call, because now Ana can only slap the screen, but Maya still flinches. The first time Maya went home Ana accidentally hit her for real when she meant it as a joke, and then Maya couldn’t sleep on that shoulder for a week.

  “Play something for me,” Ana mutters, nodding to the guitar case.

  “I only play for my best friend,” Maya grins.

  “Ha! If I had a heart, I’d have been really hurt by that,” she fires back, and they both laugh.

  Then Maya opens the case and pulls out her guitar, and plays for her best friend, sitting in a cramped bathroom on a jolting train. Ana loves her for that. The song is new, the words old:

  Me and you, you and me

  Let the whole world come and see

  They don’t know who I can be

  They’ve never seen the real me

  They’re status symbols, careless trifles

  Your defiant eyes, loaded rifles

  Let them talk, they’ve got nothing for me

  Let them hate, we’re a two-woman army

  Let them scream, let them fight

  Let them leave, step out of sight

  None of them knew me, just my name, anyway

  I never needed anyone else, come what may

  Whatever must fall can fall

  It’s you and me against it all

  When it’s tough, when it’s not

  Always, always, no matter what,

  Me and you, you and me

  Let the whole damn world come and see

  They don’t know who we can be

  The final notes of the guitar strings bounce between the screens until space swallows all the echoes. The train is rumbling against Maya’s backside, the tumble-dryer against Ana’s, she’s washing her dad’s sheets, Maya doesn’t have to ask to know that he’s had a relapse. Ana always calls when she’s doing the laundry, to stop her having to be alone. They say nothing for what must be almost ten minutes before Ana says:

  “Nice song. Your new best friend must like it a lot.”

  Maya laughs, making the guitar bounce on her stomach.

  “You’re such a dork.”

  “Mmm. Says the girl going to music college. If there was a world championship in being a dork, you wouldn’t be allowed to take part because you’re dork-doped. The jury would be like: No, sadly, everyone else has worked really hard to be a dork, but you obviously just fell into a vat of DORK JAM when you were little so it wouldn’t be a fair contest if you took part!”

  Maya laughs so loud she’s pretty sure the whole train can hear. She doesn’t care. She and Ana are half a country apart for months at a time, but a single phone call is enough, then it’s as if they’ve never been apart. As if nothing terrible had ever happened.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t realize there was a storm at home, I should have…,” Maya begins, but Ana interrupts:

  “Shut up. How were you supposed to know?”

  “I miss you,” Maya whispers.

  “Call me as soon as you get home,” Ana whispers back.

  Maya promises, and the incomprehensible idea that so many people who don’t have Ana in their lives still manage to be people at all gives her a headache.

  They end the call and Maya maneuvers the guitar case out of the train bathroom. The same case she had when she moved away from Beartown, she was sixteen then, is eighteen now, she left soon after Vidar’s funeral and is going back to attend Ramona’s. She doesn’t know if she’s sad because she’s grieving or because she’s feeling nostalgic. She hardly knew Ramona at all, not really, but when some people die it’s like watching the string on a balloon snap. We don’t miss what she was but what we lose when she isn’t there.

  Maya wonders who will be at the funeral. Most of all, if Benji will be there. Deep down in a pocket inside the battered guitar case are the lyrics to the last song she wrote before they both left.

  Love that gets out of control

  The most intense adventures

  I hope you find your way out

  I hope you’re the kind of person

  Who gets a happy ending

  She’s thought so much about him. The wildest, loneliest person she knows.

  * * *

  Benji has done his best not to think about anyone at all, but the shield of drink and smoke gets more brittle as his heart beats against the plane ticket in the chest pocket of his shirt. He has a postcard in his hand, the last one he was going to send Ramona, there was always more silence than words between them, but he thought she’d like to stick it up on the wall in the bar anyway. He’s long since given up hoping that anyone would be proud of him, but he hopes that at least Ramona didn’t think he was an embarrassment.

  On the way to the airport he found a bar that reminded him of the Bearskin. If you want to know how little he’s changed, it’s enough to know that it took him four drinks to get into a fight with two guys who were talking crap about his long hair and tattoos. If you want to know how much he’s changed, it’s enough to know that he lost the fight. He isn’t as strong as he used to be, not as fast, perhaps not even as wild.

  His eye is bruised and he has blood in his nostrils, but he doesn’t mind the fact that it hurts. As least he can feel it, it’s been a long time since he felt anything at all.

  He wonders who his hometown will see him as when he returns. He was a hockey player and a fucking fag when he left, and he doesn’t know if they’re going to tolerate the fact that he’s still the latter but no longer the former. You are loved if you win in Beartown, he learned that at an early age, you can get away with almost anything as long as you win and win and win. But now? He’s of no value to anyone now.

  He’s traveled so far, so long in the hope of finding all the answers, but no one ever manages that. You just find more bodies, more dance floors, more mornings of hangovers so heavy that it hurts to blink. There are no new lives, just different versions of the old one. People talk about “coming out” as if it’s something you only do once, but obviously you never run out of new people, so you keep having to come out and come out until you snap. Night after night he dreams that he stayed with Kevin at that party. It’s almost two and a half years ago now, but he still can’t stop it happening over and over again every time he closes his eyes.

  When they were little they did everything together, Benji never left Kevin’s side. When some boys find their first best friend it’s the first real love of their lives, they just don’t know what falling in love is yet, so that’s how they learn what love is: it feels like climbing trees, it feels like jumping in puddles, it feels like having one single person in your life who you don’t even want to play hide-and-seek with because you can’t bear being without him for a single minute. For most boys this infatuation obviously fades as the years pass, but for some it never does. Benji traveled right across the world but never found a single place where he could stop hating himself for still loving Kevin.

  When they were young the boys were always having sleepovers, where they read superhero comics and talked about nightmares they’d never tell anyone else about. Sometimes Benji would wake from a really bad one with his arms flailing and Kevin would have to duck to avoid ending up with a broken nose. When they went off to tournaments and had to sleep with other guys in gym halls, Kevin would sneak out of bed at night and pull the zip of Benji’s sleeping bag right up to his chin, so if anyone else woke him they wouldn’t get a fist in the face before Kevin had time to intervene. In summer the boys would set off alone into the forest, swimming naked in lakes and spending weeks at a time sleeping on an island that only they knew existed. In winter Kevin was the whole town’s hockey hero and Benji was the one the old men in the stands called the “insurance policy,” because if anyone attacked Kevin, Benji went after them, pursuing them to the ends of the earth. Benji was Kevin’s best friend, and Kevin was the love of Benji’s life.

  So it’s Benji’s fault, he knows that. It was his job to protect Kevin from everyone else, and everyone else from Kevin. If only Benji had stayed at the party, Kevin wouldn’t have raped Maya, and then everything would just have carried on as normal. If only Benji hadn’t gotten jealous when Maya arrived at the party and he saw the way Kevin looked at her, if only he had stayed when Kevin asked him to, then Maya’s life would never have been shattered. She would have been happy. Kevin would almost certainly be playing in the NHL now. And maybe no one would have known the truth about Benji either, but he wouldn’t have minded, he would have swapped being able to be himself for everything staying the way it used to be. He might still have been playing hockey now, and perhaps it would have been worth it. Because he misses how simple it was: just win. Then we’ll love you. He misses fighting on other people’s behalf, meaning something in a group, being the person their opponents fear will leap over the boards if they touch his teammates. He misses the locker room and shaving foam in shoes and sitting at the back of the bus throwing peanuts at the heads of Bobo and the other idiots. He misses feeling the coach’s palm slap the top of his helmet the way a dog owner pats his dog’s head, because then Benji knew he’d done something right. He misses having somewhere he belongs, even if it was a lie—sooner that than being lost in the truth.

  We all have a hundred fake personalities depending upon who we’re with. We pretend and dissemble and stifle ourselves just to fit in. The very last words Benji said to Kevin the last time they saw each other were: “I hope you find him: the Kevin you’re looking for.” He doesn’t know if Kevin ever did. Benji has been looking for a Kevin he can put up with, but hasn’t succeeded yet.

  When he finally boards the plane he pulls his safety belt as tight as he can before slipping his hands under it, so he doesn’t hit anyone if he gets woken up.

  Then he sleeps and dreams about time machines. Those are his worst nightmares.

  * * *

  When the power goes off again Leo walks out into the kitchen and sits at the table with his mother for a while. On the chair next to her, not opposite. They eat sandwiches and drink chocolate milk, and even a fourteen-year-old has trouble denying how good it feels that something so simple can make anyone as happy as it makes her then.

  Matteo crawls in through the basement window of his neighbors’ house and lies on the floor in the darkness listening to the sound of their voices. He tries once more to open the gun cabinet, but fails again.

  Leo says nothing to his mom about his sister being on her way home. It will be a surprise.

  Matteo wishes he could call his sister and tell her to stay where she is, wherever that might be. He doesn’t want her to come home. She can be anywhere in the world, as long as she doesn’t come home. His joy at shooting Leo in the head in the game quickly leaves his body. Leo still has everything that Matteo has lost.

  “Two of everything, one we see and one we don’t,” as Ramona used to say. Two funerals. Two fourteen-year-olds in two houses waiting for their big sisters. Two young women on their way home to the town they haven’t quite managed to leave behind. One coming by train, the other in an urn.

  24 Dreams

  A common misconception about dangerous people is that they lack emotions. That they aren’t sentimental. That’s almost never true, often the most sentimental and sensitive people are the most dangerous, because they’re not only capable of abuse, but can also justify it. Sensitive people never feel that they’re doing the wrong thing because their feelings always convince them that they’re on the right side.

  “Star Wars guys,” Ramona used to call them. “Show those films to a hundred men with a hundred different political opinions, and every damn one of them will think he’s Luke Skywalker. No bastard ever thinks they’re that Darth Vader.” She wasn’t really that bothered about films, but when Vidar was little she used to watch them with him, she didn’t love them but she loved him. She loved being right too, but even she would probably have hated how right she is going to be proved over the next few days.

  Tails is already up and about when he hears that she’s dead. He goes to the ice rink and helps the caretaker hoist the flags at half-mast. Then he starts making calls. He has tears in his eyes, that makes it easy to underestimate him, because he’s already started looking further ahead than anyone else. Ramona doesn’t just leave an empty pub behind, but also an empty seat on the committee of Beartown Hockey.

  When most of us look back on the storm in years to come, we won’t be able to tell the stories in the right order. That’s why psychologists get patients who have been through trauma to start by putting together a timeline, trying to find a chronological order made up of fragments, because terror muddles dates up. People too, sometimes. But the memory we share, the one everyone in Beartown and Hed remembers most clearly, is probably the silence. It comes as soon as the wind has moved on and the trees have stopped swaying, and is almost as harsh in our ears as the chaos that preceded it. The town centers of Beartown and Hed look like bombs have gone off there, but that isn’t the worst of it: at kitchen tables on the outskirts of both towns, men and women who have owned forest for generations sit with pocket calculators and count the cost of survival, with their entire inheritance to their children and grandchildren erased outside their windows, the wind smashed their lives into the ground and left only the ruins of silent tragedies behind. Not everyone around here had their insurance in order, and of course the insurance companies will do all they can to avoid paying out even to those who did have insurance. In the weeks following the storm younger members of the family will take turns staying awake and sitting by their older relatives’ side to make sure they’re not thinking of taking their shotgun and going out into the forest. That’s what the hunters call it around here. No one says “suicide” in these parts.

  All the boundaries between Beartown and Hed become less defined directly after the storm, not only between plots of land but even between neighbors. Sometimes that’s good, and sometimes it’s terrible. We’ll spend many years from now thinking about what hit us and what we ourselves were the cause of in the days that followed, what was coincidence and what was conspiracy. But it begins the way it always does: with politics.

  It’s Tails who makes sure all the council’s most powerful men and women meet up at lunchtime on the day after the storm. “To come up with a crisis plan,” he says repeatedly over the phone. Obviously the politicians will have loads of meetings with local business leaders in coming days, even in Hed, but the very first of them is held in the office of the supermarket in Beartown. In hindsight we’ll know that this was a bad idea, and that people in Hed saw this as symbolic. All the strongest voices in the district come to the meeting, but the person who speaks most is Tails, he holds no elected office but he seems to direct everything anyway, and in time we’ll understand that this too was a bad idea.

  The first item on the agenda is how the clearance work should be prioritized. The fire brigade and volunteers are already out trying to make the roads passable, but someone has to decide which roads should be cleared first. Everyone expects Tails, with his customary lack of modesty, to suggest that the road to his supermarket be placed near the top of the list, but instead he gets to his feet and says: