Out of the Woods - 10. A Solidarity Kiss

I was on my way to the swimming pool when someone called my name; I wondered mildly whether I cared enough to turn round. It wasn’t that I was having a bad day, but I was having one of those languorous, slow days, one of those days where I could barely walk for vague, muffled, blanketed sleepiness; one of those days where stringing words together to make a cutting, sly, or sarcastic whole was beyond my mental capacity.

I recognised the voice, but I didn’t turn round until he called again. I needed a moment to collect the pieces of my scattered mind and assemble them into a presentable form—without that moment I was certain that, at the sight of Mark’s broad shoulders and hair the colour of summer afternoons, I’d have leaned into him and nuzzled on his ear.

‘Laurence,’ he called cheerfully. Where Chris was laconic and Tom was innocent, Mark had perfected the art of nonchalance. Everything he did and said was intoned in such a way that you knew he was pleased to see you but that, if he hadn’t seen you, he’d have been equally pleased anyway. Once he’d caught my attention he nodded and walked faster to catch up; but the difference in speed was marginal.

His gym bang, slung over his shoulder, caused his un-top-buttoned shirt to slide downwards, uncovering skin with a similar golden radiance to his hair. I couldn’t help but feel jealous of him because he was physically the opposite of me in almost every way—where I was sickly, darkly, tragically beautiful, he was beautiful like a shining Greek god. Even on his deathbed I imagined he’d look healthier than I did.

Not that sick, dark and tragic is a bad thing. But what a pair we’d make, if ever we were to get together! He was made even more perfect by that he was from the wrong side of town. It’d be like poetry.

‘So,’ he said with a smile, ‘I haven’t seen you around recently. You been hiding in the art department again?’

It was a new thing he did—some strange little joke between us that I didn’t quite understand. I didn’t hide in the art department: considering I fully intended to take the Art Prize at the end of the year I had hardly been there at all. I had to assume he was being ironic but I couldn’t be sure because we never saw each other socially, so there was no way for him to know exactly how sociable I really was. He was confusing to say the least.

And he seemed to enjoy being that way.

‘You know me,’ I said. ‘Conjoined to a paintbrush at birth. And even though they’ve separated us here,’—I gestured to my hip—‘they’ll never part us in here.’

My hand lay over my heart and I sighed.

Mark snorted. ‘You’re so full of shit you’ll turn brown.’

‘I hope so. I could do with the colour.’

We made our way to the changing rooms, and on the way Mark talked animatedly about his friend, who recently got into trouble with the police for breaking and entering and then, as if that wasn’t enough, for indecent exposure. ‘He mooned the policeman and tried to run away,’ he said, shaking his head in wonderment. ‘What an absolute idiot. And you know Will, he’s useless at running, like literally useless. Show him a pair of running shoes that don’t say 'Chanel' in gold lettering, and he’ll stroke on the spot.’

I frowned. ‘Wait—Will Wright?’

‘Yeah. You know him?’

Will Wright, whose every movement was a pivot and a pirouette, who didn’t walk so much as dance through the halls? ‘Yeah, I know him. He’s a nice guy… He got arrested?’

‘Yeah. Well, he ended up in a cell for the night, anyway. His dad collected him the next day.’ He observed my alarmed expression for a moment and smirked. ‘You obviously don’t know him that well after all.’

‘I never said I knew him well, I said I knew him.’

‘I heard you know him well enough. He says you kissed him last year at Francesca’s party.’

I blushed. ‘It was spin-the-bottle. He’s a good-looking guy, but he’s not really my type.’

Well, it wasn’t quite spin-the-bottle, but it certainly wasn’t how Mark described it. Or how Will described it, judging from Mark’s smug expression.

‘How’s things with you and Sophie Priestly?’

Abysmal. Even so much as the thought of calling her triggered my gag reflex. But what was worse was that, as I’d resigned myself to the fact that the relationship was dead even if unofficially, I’d suddenly come to realise that she was seriously hot, and almost every guy I knew was jealous of me. I seemed to hear her name everywhere I turned.

It pissed me off.

‘It’s great.’ I frowned. ‘Why, are you interested too?’

I would have been furious if he was—furious, and somehow devastated. It would have hurt, even if I knew there was no logical reason that it should.

It just wouldn’t be right if Sophie ended up with Mark.

He laughed. And then, ‘Where’s your gym bag?’

And I stopped. I’d left it in the foyer.

‘You go on ahead,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back in a second.’

As soon as I walked into the changing rooms five minutes later, I knew something was wrong. From my vantage point it looked like there was no one in there.

But the room was filled with noise.

It was laughter, but of a very distinctive kind. All kids in school would have recognised it, some with a responding curl of unease in their stomach and some without. It was harsh, with a bitter, ferrous bite to it, and it reminded me of when I watched as Marshall Williams pushed over Dean Johnson in the playground, aged eleven, and when I watched as Marshall Williams threw stationary at Alex Stuart’s head when the teacher wasn’t looking in French class, aged fourteen. I turned the corner, cautiously, to find the guys all in their speedos, leering, circled around a bench where a single figure cowered.

If he’d just run I was pretty sure none of us would have been able to catch Jamie, fat-free athletic absurdity as he was, but I had to admit that breaking through their little circle might have been difficult. And there was also that he was practically naked.

Fuck. How was it that I could already guess what this was about?

At the sound of the door closing behind me they turned. They weren’t bad guys, most of them; most of them had the decency to look guilty. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

Harry Stanley looked furious and elated at once. ‘This little fag was checking me out,’ he spat. ‘We can’t have that—not in the guys’ changing rooms. There are rules in here.’

As I listened to him I couldn’t help but wonder at how much aggression suited him. He was never particularly handsome. His eyes, on normal days, were too piggish and small, his neck too thick, his lips strangely full and swarthy for his face—normally I never noticed him except to say that he had a truly magnificent arse, full and round in the way that only guys experienced in weightlifting can be. Normally I never noticed him at all but his excitement seemed, if anything, to balance out his unfortunate features—his eyes were wider and bright, like a child, and his lips curled in animation disguised the fact that, on any other day, they looked like bloated red slugs on his face. Little could be done, though, about the thickness of his neck.

I’d often thought it would be a great experience to get fucked by him, so long as his head was covered by a paper bag so I couldn’t see it and a sock was shoved in his mouth.

I looked past him at Jamie, who was huddled on the bench, clutching his knees to his chest. What an idiot he was for getting caught so soon after getting outed. ‘You have got to be kidding me,’ I muttered. Everyone heard it.

He flinched.

He flinched, and somebody snickered.

And I realised they thought I agreed with them.

It was as if things grew slower, or my focus shifted, or something fell away and was replaced by something else without my noticing. There was the impression of a rope slipping through my fingers, and things unravelling around me.

For a moment I felt strangely panicked.

I could feel, in that uncoiling moment, the heat rush to my face. Jamie no longer looked my way but I could still see his expression before he’d lowered his eyes; I could see him flinch, as if that flinch was not the twitch of muscle upon bone under skin but the twitch of a whip as it struck me.

It hurt.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ I said, louder now. My lips were dry but I couldn’t lick them, I knew, because to do so would be to betray my nerves. ‘This guy?’ I turned my sneer on Harry, and his stupid eyes widened in surprise. ‘In a room full of hot, sweaty, naked guys you choose him to check out? This is a swim team, for Christ’s sake. Jesus.’

Jamie’s eyes widened.

Harry turned on me, as I imagined he would. They all just stood there and watched.

‘Fuck you, Laurence. You little queer. Do you need to be taught a lesson, too?’

I ignored him. ‘What about Mark? He’s hot. Why couldn’t you pay him the compliment?’

Mark blushed. ‘Hey, look—’

‘What about Damien? If you go for the whole big-dick-small-brains thing then surely you’d be better off with him.’

I wondered, briefly, whether I’d made a mistake. Jamie wasn’t even my friend, after all, and it was hardly a case of empathy or camaraderie or even sympathy—I cared very little for him. Less-so, now that he had proven to be entirely uninteresting. On the precipice—no, beyond the precipice, because I had already jumped, I was already falling through the air, I was already well on my way to meeting the ground as it reared up towards me—I wondered whether Jamie was worth it.

They stood there, mute. They reeled, shocked and perfectly non-functional; they’d forgotten about Jamie altogether.

I made a hurried calculation: for a week, at least, in all likelihood probably two, I’d just made a room full of enemies.

‘Are you with this guy, Laurence?’

I don’t remember who said that. What the hell did it even mean? And I thought—Am I with him? Is that how this works?—and I looked at them all, standing there, suddenly aware of their own nakedness where they hadn’t been before, suddenly scared of me. They looked confused, truly confused, as if reduced to sub-par intellects and confronted with an insurmountable equation—they looked confused, or angry, or hurt.

I wondered whether it meant I’d betrayed them.

I shrugged. ‘Sure, I’m with him. I think he’s got fucking awful taste, but I’m with him. I think you’re all pathetic, the lot of you, but if I’ve got to choose a team then I choose his.’ I leaned forward and roughly pressed my lips against Jamie’s, his scared eyes widening in surprise. ‘Now fuck off.’

It wasn’t my most eloquent moment but I found myself strangely invested in the whole situation. I don’t think I’d ever really felt like that before, and I swam awfully at practice, as I supposed I would; and then afterwards the feeling remained, and I found myself watching Jamie carefully, waiting until he’d left the changing rooms before I picked up my bag and walked. I didn’t go to classics after lunch; I went to the auditorium instead and hid on the black stage, amongst the folds of the black curtain, and thought about very little at all.

I wondered, once I’d gathered my wits again, whether I should be angry at myself or proud. Morally it was fairly straightforward but morality had never really meant much to me—for myself, I figured I’d probably made a mistake. For myself, sticking up for Jamie was probably a terrible thing to do.

And yet I didn’t feel bad about it.

***

That evening, as I sat in Tom’s bedroom, he kept shooting me strange looks. I suppose I should have expected as much. We were watching Pineapple Express but he didn’t seem to be getting it; he wasn’t laughing at the right parts and I grew suddenly nervous, because I found that I could no longer decide whether his abrupt lack of humour was because he had heard about the incident in the changing rooms or because—which, I realised, almost concerned me more—the movie actually wasn’t funny, and it just hadn’t occurred to me yet.

There’s nothing more disconcerting to me than watching a movie in which I’m the only one laughing: it makes me self-conscious. It makes me wonder whether all the things I find funny are, in fact, funny at all, and I simply never realised it because my sense of humour is as damaged as the rest of my psyche.

His shoddily hidden glances weren’t helping matters either.

‘Okay,’ I growled, pausing the movie. I watched as Tom flinched.

‘What’s going on?’

He tried to look nonchalant and failed—deceit always made him nervous. He’d shift and twitch and fidget until he turned blue. After a moment he gave up on the pretence that he didn’t know what I was talking about, and I was glad. It was painful to watch.

‘I heard you came out today.’

‘What?’

‘You know… I heard you came out. Of the proverbial closet.’

‘What?’

Was that what I did? Did I just come out to the whole school?

Shit.

‘Yeah… Alex West was talking about it in biology. He said you came out in front of the swim team and kissed that new kid. Did you?’

‘No!’

A pause. ‘Well, yes, but I wasn’t coming out. They were giving him a hard time because he’s gay, so I defended him.’

His eyebrows rose. ‘With your tongue down his throat?’

I blushed despite myself. ‘It was a solidarity kiss. A peck on the lips for good measure. It was to prove a point.’

He frowned and looked down at his feet.

‘So you’re not gay?’

There it was. Right there. A small part of me, distinct from the rest of my head, whispered things in my ear. Now’s your chance, it said. He’s brought it up, and now is your chance to tell him. Tell him.

I pushed it away and squashed it. I threw it as far away from me as I could; I watched as it disappeared into the darkness. With it gone I was happier for a moment and I turned to him calmly to deny it—only to find that at the sight of him suddenly I was sweating and sick. Because, just like that, it wasn’t even about my sexuality anymore; or rather it was, it definitely was, but the fact of my sexuality was of itself a mere appetiser, the introductory act for a far larger idea altogether, one that I couldn’t deny even if I wanted to—because how could I ever turn round to Tom and tell him, as if it were the most commonplace thing in the world, that I didn’t love him?

Fancy him. That I didn’t fancy him. But if I explained my sexuality to him I could finally explain my feelings for him. I could finally explain that I fancied him.

He was saying something.

‘…Because you’ve made out with a few random guys at parties and stuff. Everyone’s noticed it before, so I guess it would make sense if you were, except that you’re dating Sophie. I won’t mind, though. I promise.’

He paused, and in a moment of clumsy affection he tried to take my hand. I snatched it away, flinching when he looked hurt by the gesture.

‘Are you?’ he said.

‘Am I what?’ I said, dumbly.

He frowned.

‘Are you gay?’

My heart seemed to have moved out of my chest; it thudded now in my head accusingly. My fingers were shaking so I sat on them.

There was a moment in which I was worried—honestly, truly concerned—that I’d say it somehow anyway, that it would just slip out somehow beyond my control. And I longed to say it—because they were there all the time, those feelings. I carried them with me wherever I went and they grew worse around him, so much worse, heavy and exhausting on my back. Maybe it didn’t matter what he would say once I’d told him—maybe that wasn’t the point.

Maybe, the point was that once I’d said it, I’d be free.

I didn’t say it. I even found a way of denying it without saying the word no.

‘If you made out with a guy at a party would that make you gay?’

‘Well, no…’

‘So what’s the difference? I don’t see why I have to be shoved in with Will Wright and his lot just because of one or two kisses. There’s lots of reasons why you might get with a guy at a party.’

Tom didn’t look convinced. ‘There are?’

Even I had to admit, it was a shaky defence.

‘Of course there are. Curiosity. Dares. Spin-the-bottle. For fun?’

‘Kissing girls is fun. Kissing guys is weird unless you’re gay.’

‘And, remind me exactly of how you would know about either?’

Ouch.

‘Look,’ I said hurriedly, ‘I was just trying to defend Jamie. They looked like they were going to beat him up or something. They were such pricks about it. I mean, who cares if he’s gay?’

‘No, I know that, but—’

‘But what?’

Tom sighed. ‘Nothing, I guess.’

***

I felt it all the way home—a vague, shapeless pressure against my temples.

My fingers twitched.

Whenever it came I was always surprised at just how amorphous it was, how difficult it was to close my eyes and put a face to it, or visualise it as a shape that made some sort of sense to me—because even though it was vague and blanketing and overwhelming, I knew what it was.

It was panic. I was about to have a panic attack. I’d just been outed at school, and now I was having a panic attack.

But I’d learned to be economical in these situations. It was small at the moment—a fungal spore, its shoots still pale and soft, just now beginning to sprout. I knew how to delay it. I knew how, by steady breathing, to plunge it into blinding light, to deny it water or freeze it, refuse to give it the circumstances it needed to grow. Thinking helped, thinking random thoughts—each random thought leading to further random thoughts, on anything at all, merging and twisting and convoluting, returning again to where they began, a weaving tentative safety net. By humming, or strumming, or counting the streetlights, I’d stagger on to somewhere more appropriate before my breaths began to judder.

I wondered, knowing that the act of wondering would do me good, whether I should park the car and walk the rest of the way; because with visualisation I could even delay it indefinitely, until tomorrow if I was quick about it, when I’d go to school and realise that things weren’t as bad as I’d supposed, and I needn’t have panicked at all—I could do that easily with enough concentration, but it was impossible to concentrate whilst driving.

I wouldn’t make it, I knew, because of the driving. If I hadn’t had to drive I would have been fine.

I stopped the car around the corner from my house, when my foot could no longer keep steady hold on the clutch. I climbed out, dizzy with hyperventilation, and locked the door. I walked towards the golf course.

Hoarwood House—why hadn’t I gone to Hoarwood House? It was on the way home—I’d just passed it. What was wrong with me?

I sat down and closed my eyes; I tried to imagine the hedge maze but it wouldn’t come. I couldn’t get calm, and my fingers shook, and my thoughts deteriorated, splitting, halving, splitting again, like molecules splicing and tearing, reduced to single atoms of the same homogenous element—splitting into a single word, gradually repeated, until I found myself saying it over and over.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck—

And I could no longer breathe, and I could no longer see. And I lay on the sand dune, curled like a sleeping animal—but I wasn’t asleep. My breaths came in rude, jagged gasps and my body shook—my body shook until my muscles ached, ached and spasmed and cramped, until I ached with exhaustion and I wondered, almost laughing at the absurdity of it, whether I’d wake tomorrow more muscular than when I fell asleep the night before.

In that moment I felt as if I’d never sleep again.

My phone began to ring against my thigh, shuddering in time to my shakes. With difficulty I fished it out, and with quaking fingers I checked the caller ID.

Chris.

I turned it off and put it back in my pocket; I stood up and brushed myself off. I focused on Chris, and his sly, thin smile, and his hair as it caught the sunlight through the window—and I thought of how I hated him, detested that ridiculous smirk of his, and I had never really found gingers attractive anyway, and the more I thought about it, the more I began to feel better.

I didn’t need Chris, I needed damage control.

I needed Sophie.

And so I called her and agreed to meet up with her in town.

Taking the car, I knew, was a bad idea; so I drove home and walked to the nearest bus stop.

And at the sight of her I was given a reprieve—because she didn’t revolt me, for now. Nothing had ever looked so beautiful to me at that moment; and because I was already tender and emotional I found myself so glad, so happy that I was filled with it and it threatened to spill, up through my throat and over my lips as laughter or an embarrassing display of sudden affection. She was dressed in a black duffel coat, a red scarf around her throat and her hands in soft gloves; her skin was pink from the cold and her hair blew gently. Despite that all her clothes were fashionable and expensive there was something childlike about her, all wrapped up as she was—she was beautiful. She smiled at me and we wandered hand in hand, talking softly to each other.

‘This is nice,’ she said with a small smile. She had the most perfect lips imaginable.

I squeezed her hand gently and she squeezed back, but she was quieter than usual and distracted. It didn’t take long for me to figure out why.

‘I heard a weird rumour about you today,’ she said, smiling as some people do in uncomfortable situations, as if the very act of smiling—when, if the rumour was true, she should rightly be crying—was enough in itself to disprove it.

But I wasn’t worried. Strangely, as I held her hand in mine, it occurred to me that I wasn’t worried at all. I could barely even think about the fact that I had been outed at school, or that Sophie had heard—I could barely remember swimming practice that afternoon.

‘Oh?’

‘I heard you came out today.’

‘Came out of the closet?’

She laughed, a weak, mildly strained thing. She was a nervous laugher.

‘Yup.’

‘I got trapped in a closet once.’

‘You did?’

‘Yeah. I was really young, and it had a magnetic catch… And I stayed there for hours before dad found me. Just sat there crying, like an idiot.’ I glanced at her. ‘But this particular closet…’

What should I say? There was no point denying it, with so many witnesses to declare it as truth. And I was tired—the very thought of denying at that moment made me slow and stupid with lethargy.

‘But this particular closet… Well, you sort of have to be in it to begin with, in order to come out. I’ve been giving guys drunken kisses at parties for as long as I can remember. You knew that already.’

She nodded. ‘I did know that. So you didn’t come out to everyone in school? You didn’t kiss a guy in the boys’ changing rooms?’

‘Well, not really. But I did kiss a guy in the boys’ changing rooms.’

She frowned. ‘You did?’

‘Yes. But it was a solidarity kiss. That’s all.’

‘A solidarity kiss?’

‘Yeah. The guy I kissed… He was outed a few weeks ago, and things have been hard on him. Harry Stanley decided that he caught this guy staring in the changing room, and it was getting ugly. So I thought I’d lend a hand. Does it bother you?’

She thought about it a moment before suddenly stopping and withdrawing her hand. ‘Wait—Jamie? Was it Jamie?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Oh my god. Oh, fuck.’

She was staring me with a vaguely horrified look—but she wasn’t really seeing me, not really. She wasn’t really in the street with me at that moment at all: really, she was in Waterstones, behind a mobile bookshelf, giggling to Tom as he excitedly told her about a boy he had heard was gay.

Or perhaps she was sat on her bed, telling one of her friends about a secret she had heard yesterday, about a boy who was spotted on a date in a sushi restaurant. It took a moment to tell, and her friend was mildly shocked; and then they had gone to her wardrobe and discussed for half an hour what shoes she should wear that evening.

‘Oh my god,’ she said again, and she gripped my arm tighter. ‘I didn’t know! Well, I did know, but it never occurred to me… Oh, my god. How awful.’

We continued walking.

‘You did the right thing,’ she said suddenly. She reached up and kissed me on the cheek. ‘You definitely did the right thing. God, I feel ill… Can we get coffee for a while?’

Starbucks was beautiful from the outside looking in, with its honeyed light spilling onto the pavement and its lively mumble of people seeping through the closed door. It didn’t seem to matter at that moment that this Starbucks was identical to the one down the street and the countless all over the world, and utterly, shamelessly lacking in integrity, completely devoid of identity or personality. It didn’t seem to matter at that moment: there was something so warm and personal about the brown leather chairs. We went in and bought a coffee and sank into those chairs, and I don’t think I’d felt so happy in a long time.

And I felt safe. Strangely, curiously safe, with her hand upon mine and her shoes gently resting against my calf under the table. I felt safe, and so relaxed that at any moment I could sink into the chair and drift away, immersed in the ebb and flow of the soothing babble of conversation. That afternoon had gone, gone completely, as if it had never happened—or perhaps I had left it outside on the pavement and I no longer cared that it peered at me through the window, waiting for the moment that I paid the bill and left. At that table with Sophie it seemed as if I’d never pay the bill and leave. It seemed as if I could stay in Starbucks, stay in that moment, forever.

We were silent for a while, but it was a sleepy, contented silence. With the hot coffee in her hands she had slowly forgotten about the incident in the changing rooms and her role in Jamie’s outing; she took out the book she had bought and she read it, stroking my leg absently with her foot. I realised, and not for the first time, that I loved this—I loved that she could do that, that she could simply lean over and kiss me or take my hand, or I hers: that we could be affectionate and nobody would care in the least, because Sophie was a girl.

And it was more than that—I could do that with Chris, if I wanted. It wasn’t illegal. This was the modern age and England—even if people noticed, they would probably leave us alone. A few of them may disapprove but more of them would be pleased, and would turn to their friends and say, Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that wonderful for them? Isn’t that what Modernity is all about?—and perhaps, if we were brave, we could hold hands as we walked down the street.

But it would be noticed. It may be accepted, but it wasn’t the norm. It wasn’t normal. Perhaps in Sweden it was normal but it wasn’t normal here. And I dreaded the thought of them saying, Good for you, I’m pleased for you both, their eyes warm with compassion, almost more than I dreaded the thought of drunken, pot-bellied bigots beating me up in an alley somewhere lonely.

Because I’m not pitiable. I’m clever and I’m beautiful and there’s nothing pitiable about me.

I’d hate to be pitiable.

We wandered around a little after that, going into various shops. I gave my opinions on the outfits that Sophie tried on, and teased her on the things she bought, and held her hand as we walked. I left her outside Burberry to phone Victoria, and once I’d stepped outside I spotted someone I knew.

I considered pretending I hadn’t seen him. After that afternoon, when I had so brashly suggested that Jamie check out Mark instead of Harry, I wasn’t certain that it would be safe to go over and talk to him. Being friends with Will Wright meant that he obviously wasn’t a homophobe—but who wanted to get dragged into a confrontation with Harry Crush-You-With-My-Bare-Hands-Stanley?

Mark looked good. His jeans hugged his ass perfectly, and his polo-shirt showed off his pectorals, and his dirty blond hair was attractively mussed. He was broader than Chris and built slightly more substantially than Tom, though he was by no means a rugby-player build: and there was something about the fact that he was bigger than me that I found fascinating and utterly alluring.

He was chatting with several guys, all clearly not from our school. They were all homogeneously emo, with straightened, dyed black hair, black clothes with bands that nobody had ever heard of; he stood out from them like a peacock amongst crows. One of them, scrawny and pierced but otherwise not a total train-wreck, saw me and very obviously checked me out.

I love it when I get checked out.

‘Hey Mark.’

He turned, frowning, and recognised me. He smiled. ‘Hey, Laurence.’

The smile he gave me wasn’t the smile of a guy about to mess up my face. I made my way over, quashing my sudden nervousness.

The emo kids were friendly. With their black hair and black clothes they all looked like brothers—brothers in desperate need of a decent meal—but they didn’t have that borderline-hostile look that many kids from state schools had at the sight of guys from my school. They appraised me in silence and almost without judgment; they turned to Mark expectantly, waiting to be introduced.

‘Guys, this is Laurence—Elijah, sorry.’ He grinned. ‘Bad habit. This is Elijah. He’s on the swim team with me.’

The boy with the piercings smiled too widely, his gaze blatantly lingering on my lips. I flashed him a brief smile before turning to Mark.

‘So I wanted to apologise for last practice. I know the other guys were pretty pissed off at me and I kind of dropped you in it.’

‘Hey, no it’s fine. Actually, I thought what you did was really great.’

I didn’t have to feign my surprise. ‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah, they were being such dicks about it. I actually only went over there to shut him up but Harry’s, well…’ He frowned and looked away. ‘He’s a big guy. I sort of chickened out. And now I feel shit about it after you went so far as to kiss Jamie.’

‘You kissed a guy?’ asked the boy with the piercings.

I couldn’t help but notice that he had nice eyes. Beneath his piercings, his lips were once probably very kissable.

‘Sure did. But you’re out of luck. Piercings don’t do it for me.’

They laughed, and the boy with the piercings laughed too—and how different their laughs were from my own! It was raucous and cawing and unattractive but it was entirely spontaneous, and it became breathtakingly beautiful when coupled with the careless smiles on their faces, as if laughter was something honestly, joyously unconscious to them. The idea of monitoring the faintest inflection of tone, the minutest change in tempo, depth and volume, of pausing a split moment beforehand to consider the target audience, the intended response, the projected reaction a laugh might incur—the idea of thinking beforehand at all had never occurred to them and I imagined they would laugh at it, as freely as they were laughing right now, if anyone were ever to suggest it.

The sound of their laughter caused me to shiver with a sudden, desperate longing. I was surprised at how much, at that moment, I ached to be like they were.

The boy with the piercings held out his hand. ‘Felix,’ he said, his pretty blue eyes lingering on mine.

Felix. I’ve always liked the name Felix. I shook his hand; it was warm, and he held on a moment longer than strictly necessary, his eyes never once leaving my face. It was just unfortunate he had felt the need to stud himself half to death; how would you even reach his lips to kiss him under those piercings?

How would he pass through airport security checks?

We talked for a while before I remembered Sophie in Burberry. I was about to head back inside when Mark called me back.

‘We’re having a party tonight,’ he said. ‘If you’re not busy you should come. There won’t be many kids from our school there but it should be a laugh.’

I took the address and went on my way. And, strangely, I decided I might actually go. For some reason I felt high.