Free Twisted Heart by Eden Maguire

exactly?’
    ‘That we all belong to the earth, the sky, the water. We belong to fire. Like Amos and Channing said, Conner’s spirit surrounds us.’
    ‘Sorry, I honestly don’t get that.’
    ‘Neither did I, at first. You have to be in the wilderness a couple of times. Then you know.’
    I spread my hands, palms upwards. ‘What can I say?’
    Jarrold began to smile in sympathy at my confusion but the expression froze before it was fully formed. He’d obviously spotted someone coming along the trail towards us. I glanced over my shoulder to see Aurelie, skirt blowing in the breeze, her pale top standing out amongst the shadows.
    And before I knew it, without saying another word, Jarrold had jumped back across the creek and started to scramble quickly down the steep scree slope towards the beach.
    ‘What was that about?’ I asked Aurelie, gesturing down the cliff towards Jarrold.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she sighed, waiting until he’d made it safely down. ‘Jarrold just broke one of our guiding principles, and he knows it.’
    ‘Why? What was he doing that was so wrong?’ I was still watching and secretly admiring him from a safe distance as he strode along the very edge of the lake, heading towards the inlet where the two rescue boats had waited on Saturday.
    ‘He spoke to you,’ Aurelie explained, slowly and simply like a kindergarten teacher.
    ‘And?’ Did they have a vow of silence here at New Dawn? If they did, it was news to me.
    ‘Right now Jarrold holds the status of Outsider. He’s forbidden to speak.’
    He was walking away, growing smaller, turning the corner into the inlet and disappearing from view.
    ‘He did something bad?’ I asked.
    ‘Not really.’ Aurelie slipped her arm through mine and started to lead me towards the cabins. ‘Here at New Dawn we don’t make judgements about bad and good. No, Jarrold is simply excluded from all group activities. He needs to be alone with his pain.’

5
     
    M y laptop screen showed Orlando surrounded by cases and cardboard boxes in the room in Dallas which he was about to vacate.
    ‘I move out tomorrow,’ he told me on Skype. ‘Ryan already gave me the key to the new place.’
    ‘It’s exciting,’ I told him.
    ‘How’s your mom?’
    ‘She’s doing good. Dad just came back from the hospital. They told him that getting through the first forty-eight hours is the tough part. Now they start doing tests to find out if there’s any permanent damage.’
    ‘Oh, babe.’ He commiserated on screen, so near yet so far away. It made me ache to be there in the room with him, to be able to touch him and kiss him, feel his warm breath on my cheek. ‘There’s nothing major, is there?’
    ‘Dad says they don’t know yet, it’s too early to say.’ And besides, I wasn’t certain if Dad was telling me everything, or if he was holding some things back. ‘I’ll visit her tomorrow morning.’
    ‘So don’t stress, OK? Not until after the doctors come up with a verdict. Who knows – maybe she escaped any bad effects.’
    ‘Let’s hope. How was the flight?’ I asked, ready to switch topics. I still had to give him my decision about Paris and it was weighing heavy. There he was, pixillating and breaking up on the small screen, lips out of sync with the sound of his voice, surrounded by boxes, moving on.
    ‘Good flight, no problems. Hey, and I spoke with Aaron.’
    ‘Holly’s Aaron?’ I asked with an air of distraction.
    ‘Yeah, Holly’s Aaron. What other Aaron do we know? So now he tells me his girlfriend has another crazy plan that he’s not happy about.’
    ‘You mean the New Dawn volunteer thing?’
    ‘The last I heard she hated the juvies – one of them especially. The one she blamed for the kid’s drowning.’
    ‘Oh, Jarrold.’ Jarrold the Outsider, forbidden to speak so that he could be alone with his pain. ‘But you know Holly – she comes out with this high-octane junk without stopping to think. It was just the first thing that came