Sub Mari Silentium

All places have a sound, and I've learnt to recognise them instantly. Some are quiet, humming, omnipresent but invisible. The common room after lights out. The East Wing hallway after lessons end and the practice rooms are empty. And some; some are unflinchingly, orchestrally deafening. Brighton Pier is the latter, and I prefer it that way. The sea, grey and roiling, crashes against the rock in foaming waves, the rides sing, oil sputters and the gulls scream like something's dying. It’s not quite summer yet - the April wind still bites through my hoodie, and it’s only getting colder as it gets later, but the pier is packed. Some old man busks with a guitar and a voice like gravel as two goth kids on the wall climb all over each other like feeding animals. Their friend chucks a beer can into a campfire. It bursts and pops.

I look away.

Marla’s got her boots hooked over the rail, dangling above the sea. She’s eating a stick of candyfloss like she’s trying to see how much of it she can fit in her mouth at once. It’s started to crystallize, drying in a sticky sugary reddened ring, sticky around her mouth. It’s kind of funny, in a gross-out way. She looks like a vampire. Or a toddler.

“Do you think,” she says, around a mouthful, “if you fell from here, it’d be instant?”

I blink. “What?”

She turns, grinning, teeth stained red, and shrugs. “The water’s shallow. It’d probably break your spine, no?” She points the half-bare paper cone towards the pooling water in the rocks.

“You’re a freak, Marla, you know that?” I punch her shoulder lightly.

She hops down, then mock-curtsies, brushing sugar off her leather jacket. “Proudly so.”

I laugh. Not because it's funny, not really, but because it's so her. Marla’s always been like that. Morbid, theatrical, too clever for her own good. But today, something’s different. It’s in the way she watches people. Like she’s clocking details nobody else would bother with—how tight someone grips their coffee cup, whether they laugh too hard at nothing. Like she’s collecting.

We used to come here in Year Nine. We’d play air hockey till our knuckles bled and lie about the universities we’d get into. She wanted to do philosophy at Cambridge. Now she never talks about uni. Or the future. Just the work. The kind that keeps you up at night, that doesn’t end when the term does.

We pass the arcade. She’s still talking—something about how the candyfloss man looked like Mr Halvorsen with a sunburn—but I only half-listen. I’m watching the kids scream on the ride next to us, spinning upside down. I used to love that feeling. The weightlessness. The trust. Not so much anymore. I’m not sure what changed.

“Julian,” she says, and I snap back to her.

She’s staring at me. Not angry, just searching. Like she knows something you don’t and wants you to ask the wrong question just so she can correct you. Her eyes glitter like the sea – not Brighton’s. Like a real, warm, green sea that'll keep you afloat until the hurricane hits.

“You okay?” I ask.

“Yeah. You were drifting,” she half-asks, half-says.

It’s disarming.

I remember once, in October half term, after some stupid Halloween party in the common room, she told me that power never comes for free. She said it with glitter on her cheeks and black lipstick on her teeth, dripping fake blood around the rim of a cider bottle. I thought it was a joke. A drunken mishmash of lingering essay titles and one of those Marla-eqsue quips. But I think she was right. She’s traded something.

“I’m tired.”

She softens. Smiles. “We can sit.”

We find one of those damp, sticky benches near the edge of the pier, opposite the fortune teller’s booth. The lights flicker even though it’s not quite dark yet. Marla reaches into her coat pocket and pulls out a folded bit of paper. Her eyes flick left, right, like she’s checking for someone.

“What’s that?”

She doesn’t answer. Just presses it into my hand. It’s warm. Damp, maybe from her palm. The ink has smudged—rows of symbols, not letters. Nothing I recognise. They curl and twist and slant into each other. One of them looks like an eye. Another like a key, twisted wrong, the teeth curling inward.

“I think this is the real thing,” she says, low. “Not some symbolic, ‘honour the legacy’ crap. The real Langue. Found it in the lining of Mary’s blazer.”

She says it like that—Mary—like she knew her. Like Mary Brown hasn’t been dead for over a hundred years. Like the old blazers they gave us weren’t just institutional tradition bullshit.

I hand it back. “Marla…”

“What?”

“You’re talking like…” I trail off, then try again. “You’ve been different lately.”

She looks at me sideways. “So have you.”

“No, I mean… You’re scaring me a bit. Today was supposed to be a break from it all.”

“I don’t need a break.”

I flinch. She says it with such certainty, like it’s not even up for debate.

“I just think maybe you do,” I say, carefully. “This year’s been a lot. With the Head Girl stuff. With uni. With—” I don’t say it, even though I know she’s been thinking it too. “Stop thinking about it.”

“You still think this is about me,” she says quietly. “That this ends with me bleeding on some altar or going mad in a tower.”

“No. I think it’s just theatrics, Marlie," I snap, trying to shut her up, to snap her out of it. "It’s just old men who want their institution to feel deeper than it is, so they go and - let's be honest - pretend some old, misinterpreted Catholic shit from back in the day is this dark, mysterious thing. They just want a story. They let all these Head Boys and Girls in on their constructed secret, and they go and spread this mythic lore to their Oxbridge buddies so and they all realise that it means the place is rich. Untouchable. Respectable. It’s about reputation. It’s some Tory status bullshit.” For a second, I feel breathless. Half like a pent-up essay has just spilled out of me, waiting, and half like I'd just ad-libbed the performance of a lifetime. Marla's expression doesn't change.

“Hannah wasn’t pretending,” she says finally, quietly.

“That was…that was an accident,” I say. “That wasn’t to do with any of the bloody secret society cult Mr Laird thinks he’s building. That was a mistake." I feel my voice waver.

I know the story; she tripped, trespassing up on the roof, and was expelled once she got out of hospital. And I know the truth.

I try not to think about it too much. The way her head hit the stone. The way the stone ate her.

“I’ve seen what it can do, Jules. I’ve heard it. Felt it. There’s something under the chapel. It wants to be known. I know it.”

I feel it then. Something shifts. Her face blurs for half a second—like water disturbed, a stone cast into the sea. The campfire still crackles nearby, and I convince myself it's just a trick of the light.

“Do you still want to do philosophy?” I ask, suddenly.

She blinks. “What?”

“Cambridge. That’s what you said.”

“That was then. This is bigger.” She smiles. It’s hollow. “Do you remember when I told you about Tiresias?”

“In Antigone? You were great. You know that.” I’m about to jokingly blow her off, laugh and tell her to stop fishing for compliments (it was a standing ovation performance, for God’s sake), when:

“-No, in the myth. The prophet who lived as a man and a woman, and then saw the truth, but was blinded for speaking it.”

“Sort of.”

She smiles again. “It’s worth it. Knowing.”

Something cracks then, soft and quiet. Like a hairline fracture. I reach for her hand without thinking. It’s cold. Bone-thin. She used to squeeze back when I did this, with both hands, like it was a game. Now she doesn’t move. Her nails are still done, perfect, manicured. It’s the weekend; she doesn’t have to keep them clear-coated and French-tipped. She never used to. She’d stay up late with the other girls every Friday night, just to do them all in rainbow and glitters, only to have to take it all off come Monday. I never got why she did it. It seemed so pointless. I kind of miss it now.

I look at her, this beautiful, perfect girl next to me, with hair like cashmere and skin like silk. But I don't. It's not her. I don’t know what I'm looking at anymore. Not in the petty, charged “you’ve changed” teenage breakup kind of way. I mean I genuinely do not know what she is becoming. Marla, who cried when her roommate’s hamster died, who made me a playlist called “Songs For When You’re Sad But Not Crying Yet.” and listened to it with me on the chapel roof when I thought she might kiss me, who wrote all my birthday cards like Shakespeare. Marla, who used to draw tarot cards on scrap paper and faces on the mirrors in lipstick to convince the Year Sevens their dorms were haunted. It’s all still here, her flesh, her blood, her laugh; but I feel like I’m looking at a sketch of her. Not the real thing. A version of her someone else drew from memory and got just slightly wrong.

I want to shake her. I want to ask what she saw. I want to ask if she’s still mine.

“Let’s go on the Ghost Train,” she says, before I can ask, standing, pulling me up with her. "We'll get donuts after. My treat." She smiles.

I almost say no. I almost tell her I’m going back, and she can catch the next bus without me. That we’re not kids anymore, and whatever she’s chasing, I can’t follow. But the words don’t come. The sea crashes. The gulls scream. The waltzer shrieks to life behind her, all blaring music and flashing lights.

I still want to see where she’ll go.

I follow her onto the ride.