‘Relax?’ he says. ‘If you didn’t want to be friends you could have just said no. Do I need to beg every single day? You haven’t even bothered to say sorry.’
He yells the last bit, and George doesn’t answer for what seems like a long time. Eventually she says, very quietly, ‘Sorry.’
‘What?’ Martin asks. ‘You’ll have to speak up.’
‘I’m sorry,’ George says loudly.
‘I accept,’ Martin says.
‘Careful of my penis please,’ Henry says, and I suddenly find the whole situation hilarious. I haven’t found anything funny in ten months. Usually I pretend to laugh. I try to make jokes.
‘Don’t laugh while you’re cutting,’ he says, making me laugh even more.
‘You’re shaking,’ he says, and George is laughing now and Martin too and Henry’s saying, ‘I’m glad my naked nuts are so hilarious to you all,’ but he’s laughing as well and he’s happy that everyone else is happy, because that’s the kind of guy Henry is.
We pile in the car, and Henry and I listen to Martin retelling the story of tonight to George, who interrupts every five seconds or so to say she’s sorry. He gets to the part about Henry talking to Amy, and then Greg arriving, and I look quickly across to the passenger seat.
Henry’s staring out the window, with an old jumper I keep in the car over his lap. ‘You can say it.’
I’m dying to say it. What kind of a girl doesn’t call the police when her idiot boyfriend throws two guys into a car and drives away? What kind of person stands on the side of the road and stares into the boot and doesn’t do anything? ‘It’s not my business, Henry,’ I say instead, because he doesn’t need to feel any worse.
I’m not in the mood to drive all the way across town, so Henry and George convince Martin to stay at the bookstore. ‘You can sleep in my bed,’ Henry says. ‘I’ll sleep in the shop with Rachel.’
After Martin and Henry get dressed we all sit behind the counter and watch the clip of them on YouTube. ‘You can’t really see much,’ Martin says.
‘Of you,’ Henry says. ‘There’s a fairly shocking close up of me.’ He puts down his phone after a while. ‘So people see us naked? So what?’
‘So I go back to school and face a storm of ridicule,’ Martin says.
‘I’ll be there,’ George offers, and he gives her a look that suggests that this is a very good consolation prize.
The two of them go upstairs and Henry and I lie on quilts in front of the Letter Library. He turns off the lights so we’re just voices in the dimness. ‘She left me,’ he says after a while. ‘She didn’t call my parents or the police.’ He holds up his phone. ‘Hasn’t even sent a text.’
‘In her defence, that’s a hard text to write.’
‘I used to worry sometimes,’ he says, ‘before we really started dating, that other guys were better kissers than me, and that’s why Amy and I weren’t going out officially.’
‘Speaking as a girl who’s kissed you, I can say you’ve got nothing to worry about in that department.’
‘I’m sorry I don’t remember more of it. Was I better than Joel?’
‘You were different.’
‘Did you have sex with him?’
‘That’s a personal question. Did you have sex with Amy?’
‘You’re right. It is a personal question,’ he says.
‘Maybe we should talk about something else.’
‘Things have changed between us,’ he says, but he doesn’t say how, and I’m not sure if he means things have changed between him and Amy, or him and me.
‘What good things have happened to you in the last three years?’ he asks. ‘You’ve only told me the bad things.’
I haven’t thought about the good things in a while but a lot of good happened before Cal died. ‘I won the science awards, before Year 12. And the maths awards. I swam two kilometres almost every day with Mum. Dad visited and took Cal and me windsurfing. I was Sports Captain in Year 11. What about you?’
‘I won the Year 11 English prize. I did pretty well in Year 12. I went to the Year 12 formal with Amy. Lola and Hiroko wrote a song about me. I won a short story competition.’
‘That’s a good list,’ I say.
‘Can we try again to go dancing?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ I tell him, for the second time.
He falls asleep, and I lie awake, enjoying being next to him.
The Broken Shore
by Peter Temple
Letters left between pages 8 and 9
1 February – 5 February 2016
Dear George
I appreciate all the apologising, but seriously, you can stop. So everyone in class saw me naked on YouTube? The shots were mostly of Henry.
If you really want to make it up to me, maybe you could tell me about the letter guy. Who do you think he is?
Martin
Dear Martin
I know you’ve told me to stop, but I need to say one more time – I’m sorry. To make it up to you, yes, I’ll tell you about the guy, who I think is Cal Sweetie.
I’m not a hundred per cent sure it is Cal, but before the first letter arrived, he was in the bookshop a lot, and he wasn’t just here to talk to Rachel. He spent loads of his time looking through the Letter Library.
He’d tried to talk to me at school but I hadn’t said much back. You’re right. I’m a little defensive, but I don’t fit in there. I’m the girl reading second-hand books when everyone else has the latest smartphones. I wear second-hand clothes. My dad comes to school at parent-teacher interviews and loudly announces to my homeroom teacher that he can’t afford to send me on camp.
Let me be clear: I don’t care that we’re broke sometimes. The bookshop is worth it. But it doesn’t exactly pave the way to popularity. It’s easier to block people than hear them call me a freak.
But Cal isn’t like that, and I missed out on talking to him and then he left for Sea Ridge with Rachel. The letters kept coming, but I saw Tim Hooper at our book in the Letter Library. He’s Cal’s best friend, and it convinced me even more that the writer was Cal.
I could have told Cal I knew before now, but I wasn’t sure that I liked him that way until he stopped writing. I thought he was kind of geeky and a little strange at first, but some time after his letters he started to look cute to me. He’s sweet. And kind. And I want to meet him face-to-face and talk.
George
Dear George
I know Cal a little, and he is all the things that you’ve written about him. I hope you get to meet him and I hope it works out.
You might think you need to keep people at bay – but if you weren’t so reclusive at school, I think you’d actually have a lot of friends. You’re interesting and funny. And I very much like your clothes. I very much like everything about you, George.
Martin
Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell
Letters left between pages 6 and 7
30 January 2016
Dear Rachel