Zaire | BeforeIt doesn’t take long for me to stop thinking of her as Charlotte and start thinking of her as Charlotte’s body.Charlotte’s body is laid out on a long table in the Assembly Hall, flat on her back. She looks exactly as she had on the beach when we had found her about four hours ago. Back when she was Charlotte and not Charlotte’s body.She had been lying half in the sea and half out. Her hair was swaying in the water as the waves lapped around her. Sand clung to her damp legs, something she would never have allowed. She was always the image of perfection, like a model in a glossy magazine. She was on her front but her head was tilted to one side, her lips tinged an unnatural blue.It had taken me only a second to realise what had happened. She had drowned. Charlotte, the star swimmer who had taught me to swim when we were five, had drowned.Everyone else who had been there is asleep now. Only I had refused to go to sleep, not wanting the image of Charlotte’s tangled hair

Zaire | AfterExactly six weeks and one day ago, Charlotte Brooklyn Cezanne died. Exactly six weeks and one day ago, my life fell to pieces. Exactly six weeks and one day ago, Zaire Denzel Sullivan officially went mad.But thank God (and science) for letting me keep my good looks. For not having me look like the spiralling madman I am. Or— as Raffiel would say— mad teenager because I’m not eighteen yet. For now, I still look like Zaire. Perfect hair, not too perfect uniform, perfectly blank expression. I stand in front of the mirror in our bathroom, examining myself.Outside, rosy streaks have coloured the skies and a pale, watery sun shines through the glass of the window in a traditional English fashion. It’s way too early for hardly anyone else to be up. At Claire Hall, you learn to cherish every minute of sleep you get. We’re not like most boarding schools which keep you so busy you can’t get a free minute to be homesick. At Claire, you cherish every moment of sleep because it’s a

Zaire | AfterWe sit in Room Seven, an empty classroom. It’s not a room I particularly like to be in. It was our Year Seven and Eight Maths classroom, so immediately associated with bad memories. Usually, I strangely love Maths. But the teacher I had those two years made me want to drive a knife through the subject. I have similar feelings towards Shakespeare. Only, I want to resurrect him with Charlotte’s coven of witchcraft practicing highlighters just to kill him all over again.“How did you become friends?” he asks. “If you remember.”“Dad thought I was lonely. Her mum thought she was lonely. They brought us together for a play date and we were stuck with each other, I guess.”“Just best friends?” Davidson raises an eyebrow.“Boys and girls can be friends, you know,” I snap. “It’s the twenty-first century.”“Did she have a boyfriend?”“As far as I know, she didn’t.”“Did she want to have one?” he questions. “Anyone she was interested in?”“Leo Forrest. He’s in our class.” I pause.

Zaire | BeforeThey look like us. Mr Oriel, Mr Cezanne, Mr Forrest and Mr Salvatore all sit together and they look like us. I don’t know where the women are, Natalia took them off about an hour ago and they are a no-show for lunch. My father is still in Paris, arriving in two days. It’s the earliest he could arrange the trip for. I try not to resent the fact that the parents of all my friends got here within twenty-four hours of her death and mine couldn’t. His absence is abundantly obvious to me, a gap between Nick Cezanne and Matteo Salvatore.“This is creepy,” Leo says, also staring at the table of fathers. “Is he still carving that headstone?”Matteo Salvatore arrived while carving Charlotte’s details into a slab of stone with a marble angle on the top. Raffiel gets the talent with woodwork from him. Mr and Mrs Cezanne insisted he didn’t have to, but he insisted that he did.“If I could do this when I was eighteen, I can do this now,” he said stubbornly. “The workshop still here?