He opens his mouth to say something, and then closes it again.
“How’s the car, by the way?” I scrape together our notebooks and pens – the skeleton of the story he’ll take back to his grandfather – tucking them to one side.
“Oh. It’s good. Well. It’s nearly dry, so it’s a start?”
“Sorry. About flooding it.”
“Nah.” He waves a hand. “I shouldn’t have driven into a river.”
“It was a ford.”
“That,” he says, unfolding his crossed legs and jumping up in one fast motion, “was a river and nothing you can do or say will convince me otherwise.”
“Nothing?” I put my hands on my hips.
“Nothing.” In a moment, he has wrapped his arms around me, knocking my hands aside and pulling me closer. I breathe him in, feeling the warmth of him as he rests his head against mine, feeling the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes. His heart, pounding against mine.
I don’t want to pull away from him. I don’t want to let go of him.
When we turn over the last page of that stack, I have to.
He leans even further into me, the two of us taking up the same space in the attic, in the world. The thought of how much I’ll miss him, miss this, when he leaves is like someone reaching into my chest and taking hold of everything inside and twisting.
Not just because I really do like him, but because I like the version of me I’ve become since he arrived. The old me. And however much I try not to be, I’m scared that when he leaves, he’ll take that me with him.
Gently, he slips a finger underneath my chin and turns my face towards his.
“You do know, don’t you?”
“What?”
“That when I came here, I only planned to stay until I found a name. That was all I needed.” He hesitates, and I can actually feel his ears reddening. “All I thought I needed.” His words cut through everything, slicing clean through the rising noise in my head, the rising doubt. “I stayed because of you.”
And he catches my face between both of his palms and draws me to him again; his lips on mine and mine on his until everything else – the rest of the world, the ghosts and the living, all the clocks and calendars and all the time they keep – flares brightly, then flickers out.
“You still want to go to Bath? Not Bristol? We could have gone to Cabot Circus!” Mira drops the loose change for her fare into the bus driver’s hand, then yanks her ticket out of the machine and pinballs off the seats along the aisle until she gets to an empty double.
“Like either of us could afford something there.” After a bit of rummaging around in my bag, I manage to dig out the right cash and grab my ticket, dropping into the seat next to Mira as the bus starts moving with a lurch. We only just made it to the stop on time – and that was only because Mira came barging into the attic and dragged me out. That’s the thing about Hal – when I’m with him, time seems to have no meaning.
Except the stack of pages is so small, and however much he says he’s stayed because of me (has he? Did he mean that?) he can’t stay for ever. He has a life away from here – one he’ll have to go back to. One I’m not part of.
Mira elbows me – hard. “Hey! Stop it.”
“What? I wasn’t doing anything!”
“You were. You were thinking.” She nods. “You were thinking about him, weren’t you? Your face does this…thing…when it’s him.”
“It does not! Hang on – a ‘thing’?”
She just nods again, infuriatingly.
The little bus bumps its way out of the village, climbing up from the valley and out onto the top of the next hill. Mira flicks through a shopping list of dresses she wants to look at in town, skipping between pages and maps on her phone, planning the afternoon like it’s a military campaign.
“And there goes my phone signal,” she sighs. “Give me your phone?”
“I don’t think my signal’s any better,” I say, unlocking it and handing it over. She jabs at the screen…and misses the icon she was going for, hitting the one next to it. The screen immediately fills with a scroll of photos, each one more perfect than the last. Perfect people with perfect hair and perfect faces and clothes, all in perfect places living perfect lives with perfect friends.
“You have an Instagram account?” Mira stares at my phone. “You never told me!”
I shake my head. I want to ask for my phone back – or for her to at least close the app – but my lips have glued themselves together and my tongue is stone in my mouth. I watch her swipe over to my profile page – and frown when she finds a completely empty grid. “Where are all the photos?”
“I deleted them.” I force my voice to work, to say the easiest thing, and reach for the phone before she asks any other questions…But it’s too late. I’ve been caught.
“Why?”
If I close my eyes, I can do it. Mira may be my best friend, but there are things I haven’t been able to tell even her. Things I keep in the darkest, softest corners of my memory. “It’s complicated.”
“I’m listening.”
“When I was…ill, you know? I wanted to…disappear.”
“Disappear?” I can feel her looking at me.
“Everything was so hard. I just wanted it to stop. I wanted to stop.”
Silence, except for the bus engine and tinny distorted grime leaking from the headphones of the guy three seats in front of us.
Then she understands. “Oh.” It’s less of a word than a breath – but at least I can’t see her face. I don’t want to see.
She’ll be different around you now. She can’t not be after that – not even Mira. She’ll think you’re weak or weird or looking for attention. Freaky Flora, right? Just like everyone else thought.
Doesn’t matter anyway. She’ll forget all about you when she gets to college.
But then, from somewhere behind the voices inside my mind comes another one. Quieter, gentle, but clear like a bell.
And you let her in anyway. Well done.
And even though I can’t see Mira’s face, I feel her hand close around mine, holding it tight.
“I don’t think you should delete it, Flora. Take down the photos, by all means. Temporarily deactivate it if you must. But keep the account.”
“Why? I don’t want it any more. I don’t need it. I don’t…”
“Need anything?” Sanjay leans back in his chair. “Come on. We’ve talked about this kind of language.”
“I don’t care.”
“I know.”
We sit in silence, him in his chair and me in mine. He waits. He always waits. It drives me crazy. Crazier.
I fold my arms. He knows I’m not going to break first.
“Our brains,” Sanjay says at last, leaning forward in his chair again and putting his hands together on his knee, “are the windows through which we perceive the wider world. Not,” and he holds up a hand, because he knows I’m going to say it, “the eyes. No, Flora, listen. Our eyes take in the information, but they don’t process it. We see with our eyes, but we don’t perceive with them. That’s what our brains are for. So, if you picture yourself as standing behind a window, looking out, then the glass between you and the world is your brain. With me so far?”