Soul Beach

Meggie, and the Beach, must come first.
    When I log onto the Beach, I can’t make sense of what I’m seeing at first. My screen lights up with flashes of cherry pink, ice white, sherbet lemon. And the noises are thunderous.
    On the sand, a hundred or more Guests are standing and pointing upwards, and the chatter’s so loud it almost drowns out the waves.
    Fireworks!
    Tropical flowers bloom in the night sky, then fade away again in an instant. Beautiful, but gone too soon. It wouldn’t take one of the smarty-pants philosophers on the Beach to see the parallels.
    But the kids – and they look like young children right now, the candy colours reflected in wide eyes – are too thrilled to think morbid thoughts. The sky is deepest navy, as though it’s been darkened especially. Why wouldn’t it have been?
    On Soul Beach, everything is possible.
    I glance round, looking for Meggie, but the first person I see in the distance is Triti. As I watch, a sapphire firework explodes. It seems to flash through her like an x-ray: it’s almost like I can see every one of her bones.
    ‘Florrie! Over here.’
    I weave through the crowd towards my sister, dodging between the spectators. Even though they can’t see or feel me, it seems rude somehow to walk through the Guests, as though they don’t exist.
    Danny smiles when I reach my little group of friends, but then looks away again without his usual soul-searching stare. ‘I thought you were gonna miss the party.’
    ‘What’s the celebration?’
    Triti speaks without moving her head; her gaze is fixed on the heavens. ‘They knew it was what we needed, somehow. To cheer us up.’
    Meggie raises her eyebrows at me, but says nothing.
    ‘And is it working?’ I ask Triti.
    ‘Oh, yes! I feel so different. Alive.’ Then she giggles at her own joke. ‘Well, kind of.’
    I laugh, too, but my brain is buzzing. This must mean that They – whoever ‘They’ are – listen in to every conversation on the Beach. I should have known that anyway, after they banned me from the site the instant I asked the wrong thing, but the idea that every stupid exchange that I have with Meggie is being recorded, monitored, pored over . . . well, it freaks me out.
    Though I suppose the alternative is worse: if the site is a hoax, then some creepy hacker knows everything I’ve said to my sister online.
    I chase the thought away. This can’t be a hoax. It feels more real than real life.
    ‘Hey, day-dreamer? You coming with us?’ My sister reaches out, as though we could actually take each other’s hand. ‘We’re feeling claustrophobic.’
    Javier rests his fingertips on Triti’s elbow, guiding her like she’s blind, because she’s refusing to look anywhere but up. We head towards our palm tree. Meggie, Javier and Danny sit down, but Triti stays standing, hypnotised. Meggie leans across and whispers in my ear, ‘You want to know her story, don’t you, Florrie?’
    I jump slightly. ‘I’m not allowed to ask, though.’
    ‘Anorexia,’ my sister says, still whispering, though Triti looks so distant that she wouldn’t hear if we had a loud-hailer.
    Anorexia makes perfect sense. She’s so slight, almost translucent. And now, in the light of the fireworks, I catch a glimpse of downy hairs covering her limbs. I’ve seen that before, on a girl I knew at school who refused to eat.
    Before that girl, I always thought anorexics did it to be the centre of attention, but she treated not eating as some kind of terrible competition with herself, one she’d lose even if she won. I only realised when she was taken out of school that she didn’t want to be noticed at all. She wanted to be invisible.
    ‘That’s tragic,’ I say. There’s so much joy in Triti’s face right now that it’s impossible to believe she could have willed herself to die. ‘But if she chose not to eat . . . if she chose to die , then how is her death unresolved? What’s she doing here?’
    Meggie shrugs. ‘I don’t make the rules, sis.’ And she lowers her voice still further. ‘And if I did, would I still be hanging out round here, however pretty the bloody fireworks?’
    I freeze. ‘I thought . . .’ I don’t stop, because it seems such a stupid thing to say, that I thought she might have got used to being dead. That she might even enjoy hanging out with me these days. ‘You’re still that unhappy, then?’
    I think she realises what she’s said, now, because she plasters the fakest of fake smiles onto