September – 115 days before Freya left
Freya had been a name on the roster before she became a face. Blonde hair swept up into a big clip that couldn’t contain all of it – and a face too beautiful for Lucas to take seriously. (Or – more truthfully – too beautiful to take him seriously.)
They got on well, though.
While the kitchen staff treated him as one of their own, the front of house crew could be a bit distant, all their best manners used up on the customers and all their best jokes on whichever chef was running the pass. The kid washing the dishes got the conversational equivalent of whatever they scraped into the slop bucket.
Freya was the only one who made an effort.
First shift together, she’d asked for the ketchup that Ed kept under the sink and tried to tempt Lucas into eating the chips the customers hadn’t. It didn’t work. Lucas had no problem squeezing the literal crap out of prawns or helping wipe down a blood-drenched prep area, but he drew the line at eating someone else’s leftovers.
She’d grin if she caught his eye, call out a guess as to what tune he’d been singing, and leave him plates that were scraped clean and stacked neatly.
For someone still finding his feet, it felt good to have a friend, even if it was only for the length of the Saturday lunch shift and every other Sunday afternoon.
The first time they clocked out together – weeks after he’d started – Lucas emerged from changing his T-shirt, ready to collapse onto a bed made up with ancient brushed-cotton sheets until he got called down for his dinner. All he had to do was get there.
“Hello.” Freya was waiting by the back door, hair freed from its clip, spilling onto the shoulders of her denim jacket, ends curling up like the frilled edges of a fresh lettuce.
“Hi.”
“I wondered if you’d like a lift home?” she asked. “My mum’s picking me up.”
“I’ve got my bike.” Technically, it was his cousin’s bike – like the house he’d be cycling to along the path that cut between Rabscuttle and the edge of the estate where his aunt and uncle lived. A home that had only been his since the 25th of July.
“But you’ll keep me company while I wait?”
Exhaustion rested across his shoulders, weighing down his every move. And yet…
“Sure.”
They sat on the break barrels, and Lucas cracked open the bag of crisps he’d found in his rucksack. Auntie Helena had been slipping snacks into the side pocket every shift as if she didn’t trust the restaurant he worked at to have any food in it. His favourites were the homemade Greek stuff that his mum had never bothered with – sweet pastries, like bougatsa, or maybe a spinach slice. But he was perfectly happy with bananas on the cusp of becoming too ripe, or Aldi biscuits wrapped in a bit of cling film. The crisps he’d found were fake Wotsits, also from Aldi.
Lucas held the pack out for Freya, who took one between thumb and forefinger and told him they were her favourite. (“Well, the branded ones, but I’m not that fussy.”) They finished the crisps in silence, still recovering from their shift, then Lucas pressed the pack flat, scored the sides and folded it lengthways into three.
“Are you going to make it into a triangle?”
“I am.”
“I’ve always wanted to do that.”
“I can show you, if you want?” he said, turning to look her in the eye.
“I’d like that,” she said, only then she added, “I have a boyfriend.”
“That’s good.”
“I just.” She frowned, a genuine frustration that Lucas wasn’t sure he deserved. “Sometimes people get confused.”
Lucas nodded; he could see why. Flirtatious was her default state – and she was gorgeous – but Lucas was perfectly clear where he stood, and happy with his location. “Well. How about me and you stay mates and I show you how to make a triangle out of a crisp packet in a non-romantic way?”
When she smiled properly, Freya’s face lost the cool beauty he’d seen when he first saw her. She became adorable.
“I’d really like that.”
SOPHIE
As the others hurried to chase the triangles caught on the breeze, Sophie crouched down to collect the ones by her feet.
All that “I’ve no idea who Lucas is” in the car and it turned out to be Big T all along.
She felt sick and ashamed, pranked by someone she trusted. Why hadn’t Freya said anything once Big T became part of Kellan’s posse? All that time Sophie’d spent hanging out with the lads, her and Big T having the last few puffs on a balloon down by the river before it got too cold to stay out, and that time they’d teamed up during The Great Jaffa Cake Debate … Freya could at least have mentioned that she worked with him.
She might have grown a little cagey about sharing every detail of her life with the rest of the world, but Freya never had reason to hide anything from Sophie. Or, at least, that’s what Sophie had believed.
“Sophie?” The question came from above, Sophie’s face level with the faded knee of Win’s jeans. She’d not realised that she was still crouching. Standing up, Sophie gritted her teeth as her left leg protested. Too much crouching today.
“You OK?”
“Yup.” The word was tight, clipped short by discomfort and residual embarrassment over Lucas’s identity. “Are these crisp packets?”
“Seems so.” Win held out the heap in her palm. Wotsits and Quavers and Skips … the less it resembled a potato, the more Freya liked it.
Before they could speculate on the why, someone dressed in kitchen whites emerged from the building. A folded bandana kept the woman’s hair back from her forehead, exposing a glare that could have blistered the skin from a chicken at fifty paces.
“Looks like Lucas is in for a bollocking,” Win muttered.
WIN
As Lucas bargained with his boss for a five-minute break, Win reached across and returned Sunny’s jaw to the correct elevation.
“Stop drooling.”
“I was breathing.”
“Of course you were.”
“You can talk,” Sunny said, darting a glance at Sophie.
Win would happily have killed her sister if she’d thought Sophie was paying even a pixel’s worth of attention, but now the parcel had passed to Lucas, he was the one she was watching.
None of this made sense. Lucas was someone Sophie knew; and someone she didn’t. He was Freya’s friend at work; her boyfriend’s mate at school. Sophie and Freya’s best friendship was coloured by overlapping layers of living in the same place, doing the same things and seeing the same people.
If Freya hadn’t seen fit to let Sophie in on the secret of Big T’s identity when she lived here, doing it like this seemed a little callous.
Once the angry chef returned to the kitchen, Lucas turned back to the others, an over-saturated shade of embarrassed.
“I could take her,” Sunny said, scowling at the door. “If you want me to.”
“Thanks, but I’d like to keep my job.” There was a depth and warmth to the way he smiled at the side of Sunny’s head that Win wished her sister could see.