“Shall I press send?”
LUCAS
Too many people and too few bathrooms was one drawback of living in this house. Sharing a bedroom was another.
“What?” Lucas said. His cousin was looking at him in the mirror instead of paying attention to the ancient laptop that was open on his knee.
“Do you have a date or something?” Alex asked.
“No.” Lucas turned to face him. They weren’t much alike, but there was a family something there. Lucas spent a lot of time looking for it in all of them – Alex and Kat and little Xen.
“Then why all the…” Alex copied the way Lucas had been faffing with his hair, then waved a hand at what he was wearing. On Lucas, the whitest of his T-shirts and dark jeans was the equivalent of a tux.
“Party. End of school as we know it and all that.”
Saying those words flicked the switch for a moment, fear so glaring it stunned him. Not only fear of spending every exam in a cold sweat of confusion, but fear that he’d disappoint all the people who wanted more for him. No one from home would have gone through old Maths papers at the kitchen table, like Uncle Vas, or downloaded the audiobooks of his English texts like his aunt. Here there was Alex and Kat, who’d done their GCSEs recently enough for their revision notes to be helpful, and Xen was the kind of ten-year-old who enjoyed testing him on his German over breakfast just so she could correct him.
That was the one good thing about no one being bothered: no risk of letting them down.
“How do I look?” Lucas asked.
“Why do you care?”
“I don’t.”
“Then why are you asking my opinion?”
“Forget it.”
But Alex was already grinning as he summoned his sisters with a yell, the two of them appearing in the doorway a split second later, Alex lying back on the bed and basking in his cousin’s obvious unease.
Lucas wished he knew how to be comfortable with this much attention. How not to take Xen’s dismissive “Bit basic” as a bad thing, or how to let Kat tweak his hair and pick fluff from his T-shirt without tensing as if for a fight. His cousins had grown up in each other’s pockets, with two parents who were around enough to know all their business. The three of them fussed as intensely as they fought and after nearly a year of pretending to be one of them, he still struggled with knowing how to ask for space.
Xen got bored first, drifting back to whatever YouTube crafting video she’d paused, then Kat left to finish the other half of her make-up in preparation for a night out with her work friends, until only Alex remained.
“Sleep with one eye open, mate,” Lucas said, hooking his track top off the end of his bed, “because you’re for it when I get back.”
“Planning on a late night, are you?” Alex grinned and made embarrassingly loud kissy noises that followed Lucas out of the bedroom and down into the hall.
By the front door, Lucas checked the contents of his work rucksack – the bottle of Jack Daniels that absolutely hadn’t been acquired via the commis chef and the package for Ryan Krikler resting on a shimmering bed of crisp packet triangles.
He’d have to be careful. Kellan wouldn’t be too pleased about his ex sending a present to his cousin, and the last thing Lucas wanted was to get shot as the messenger.
But then, if Freya hadn’t chosen him for the job, he’d not have met Sunny.
Lucas had no reason to think she’d be at the party. If she’d been in his year, her shirt would have been signed the same as Sophie’s – and he’d definitely have noticed her if she’d ever been down the river. Lucas didn’t think he’d ever fancied girls specifically enough to have developed a type, but there wasn’t any aspect of Sunny that he didn’t find appealing: the shape of her body and the length of her legs; her long straight hair and very pretty face; smiling eyes and braces and dimples…
Yeah. He’d definitely remember her.
September – 102 days before Freya left
Moving from a mixed north London academy with 1,500 students to a Catholic boys’ school half the size, with twice the real estate, came as a bit of a culture shock, but fancy uniforms and semi-regular church attendance didn’t change how people behaved in the classroom. Everyone at Campion could be measured on the same scales as at Lucas’s old school, from keener to couldn’t-care-less, D&D in the library to footie in the yard via I’m-with-the-band in the hall. And the most revealing measure of all: the people who wanted to be someone else and the someone else they wanted to be.
Kellan Spencer was that someone else. When he was in the room, conversations skewed his way – people calling for him to settle an argument, talking a little louder if the topic might interest him. Everyone wanted his attention, and Kellan gave it as readily to the nervy lads with the bad haircuts as he did to his own mates.
A likable quality in someone Lucas expected to be an arsehole.
Not that he aimed for any of Kellan’s attention. All Lucas wanted was a group to sit with at lunch and ask questions of when he’d not paid enough attention in class. Lads he could talk to like the kitchen staff up at Rabscuttle.
Only problem was that none of the groups wanted him. The most conversation he had during the first week was when his classmates tried to get him to say “Newcastle” so they could take the piss, or were told to partner with him on a science practical. Three days into the second week and Lucas figured the rugby try-outs were the best chance he had of proving he was worth knowing.
A plan that worked better on paper than on the pitch. Back home he’d been a decent second row, but coach divided everyone into groups so that Lucas ended up with a bunch of Year 10s who only passed to each other and one other Year 11 who was clearly competing for the same position as Lucas. By the end of the session, Lucas was cold and bored and sick of trying to impress a bunch of people who didn’t care if he was here.
As special dispensation, the coach sent everyone straight for lunch, where they flooded the dining hall with Campion’s blue-and-white stripes, dusting the floor with clumps of mud and wisps of cut grass. Lucas was standing, scanning the crush for a seat, when someone said his name. One table over, Kellan Spencer was twisted round to look at him. Like Lucas, he’d been at the try-outs, cold autumn air still pinking his cheeks, sweat spiking his hair, and he pushed out the chair next to him.
“There’s a seat right here, if you want?”
After ten days of asking for permission to exist, Lucas was grateful for the invitation. When Kellan talked to him like he actually wanted him there, he could have wept. It felt good to have someone talk to him, even if it only lasted for the length of a hot dinner and a custard slice.
Only it lasted longer. Down to the changing rooms, then back up to their form room, Kellan kept the conversation going whenever Lucas slowed things down to give him a chance to escape. When they got to the classroom, Kellan went over to where his mates were sitting, nodded to Matthew Fry and told him to budge up to make room for the new boy.
Glancing back to Lucas, he pointed to the nearest chair.
“Seat’s free, if you want it?”
And when a small, welcome grin warmed Lucas’s lips, Kellan returned it.
Just like that, Lucas became part of a crowd, so that even when Kellan wasn’t around, he had someone to sit with in lessons or lunch, to walk with down the corridors, or out the school gate to the newsagent.