Be Myself! - 32. Games & Gambles

Oliver was reluctant to share his worries about the new binder with the rest of our friends. He did not want to talk about binders at all, because it reminded him of how inadequate his body was. I respected his wishes, and did not say anything either. At school, during the first morning break, he did not speak at all, even though the LGBTI Club had spent most of that time laughing and making fun of pop culture and their insistence that everyone and everything must be straight and cisgender.

By the time lunch came around, though, some of our friends got tired of Oliver’s silence.

“Is anything bothering you, Oliver?” Hannah asked my boyfriend. Her tone was a lot gentler than the one she normally used to talk to me. “Did Oscar upset you?”

“Why is it always me?” I protested. Hannah (and Helena too) always seemed to assume the worst from me for some reason.

“Because I still don’t like you that much. You’re a cis guy, so you’ll have to try twice as hard as everyone else before you convince me you’re a good person.” Hannah sounded threatening again. Helena smirked and nodded, and Luce and Charlie stifled a laugh. I wanted to say something in my defence, but other than monosyllabic exclamations of surprise, nothing came to mind.

“It’s ok, Hannah. Oscar didn’t do anything wrong.” In the end it was Oliver who came to my rescue. “I’m just anxious about things in general.”

“About coming out next week?” Hannah guessed. My boyfriend just nodded, still not getting into too much detail.

“Then I have the perfect plan to get your mind off the anxiety!” Luce beamed. Her enthusiasm was such that we all turned our attention to her even before we had properly processed that she had spoken. Once Luce realised she had a captive audience, she explained her plan. “My birthday is coming up soon, and I want to celebrate with a Halloween party in September because that’s more fun. But my parents are running low on money, so I thought you guys could help me get the party going as my birthday gift, and then we can all have fun together!”

“But how would that be a distraction?” Jean asked. He was sitting on Henry’s lap, as per usual, but he looked so innocent that for a moment I thought he would not find a way of including sex in the conversation for once. My illusion did not last. “Are we getting the party going with an orgy? Or just hanging penis decorations on the walls? I volunteer to make the penis-vampires and the penis-zombies and…”

“There will be no penises,” Charlie groaned. He face-palmed so hard it left a mark on her forehead.

“What if I’m dressed as one?” Jean asked, still looking creepily innocent. Henry’s face had become a shiny tomato.

“I thought you would go as an ass,” Helena answered. She rolled her eyes when she realised most of us did not understand her reasoning. “If you become a giant penis, wouldn’t that imply that you want to fuck people? I thought that was against your morals.”

“True that.” Jean considered Helena’s point for a couple of seconds, then his usual sexy grin took over his face, and we all sensed what was going to happen next. “I’ll find an ass costume, and it’ll have an opening just for my head, so that it can still take on all the dicks I want!”

“I don’t want to imagine it,” Ariadne whispered to herself. Helena and Hannah groaned, Luce and Charlie sighed in defeat, and Henry looked like he wanted to disappear forever. Oliver was the only one who smiled. I felt mildly worried that my boyfriend was turning into another Jean, but those thoughts were kept in the back of my mind. The mental image of Jean as a big ass with a head for an arsehole was strongly forcing its way to the forefront of my thoughts, so that I could not think of anything else even if I tried.

And how I tried.

“Look, it’s a Halloween theme. You can’t dress as something that is not Halloween-related,” Luce tried to argue, but it was no use.

“What if I make a zombie-ass costume?” Jean insisted. Luce realised resistance was futile and finally gave up.

“Whatever. Make it Halloween-themed.” Jean beamed and kissed Henry. The kissing soon turned into a full-blown make-out session, which was promptly ignored by the rest of the group. We kept discussing the party and how to divide our tasks so that we were all helping a little.

“And Oliver and Oscar can bake the cauldron cakes,” Hannah announced, pointing at us. As soon as Luce declared her intention of dividing us for tasks, Hannah jumped in to the role of main organiser. She explained to Luce (in proper businesslike fashion), that she took great pleasure in telling people what to do, and most importantly, how much money they could spend. She immediately drafted a provisory budget for the party and divided it in sections of food, decorating, and publicising. Then she divided us into these sections and announced who would do what and with how much money. She seemed particularly keen on managing the money part. “You’ll have ten pounds to spend in cake ingredients. Any leftovers should be handed back to the group in case someone else needs more money.” Hannah rolled her eyes and mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like ‘though anyone over budget will face disciplinary action.’

“That sounds like a good plan. Thank you for your help, Hannah,” Luce said. She was obviously pleased that our friend was so keen to help, even though Hannah put Jean and Henry in charge of decorating the party.

“Oh, you’re welcome. It’s my pleasure.” Hannah sent menacing glares towards all of us, as if we were already guilty of over-budgeting before we even went shopping. “We could all go to the city centre tomorrow to get the supplies. When we get there, we separate into smaller groups, but keep in touch via phone. This way I’ll be able to help anyone who can’t find the right items for the right prices.” Hannah pointedly looked towards Jean as she spoke, and Luce nodded in approval. “If everyone agrees, we leave as soon as the bell rings. Don’t be late.”

Hannah acted as if this was the end of the discussions about Luce’s party, but I still had some questions about her plans. So, against all my self-preservation instincts, I approached Hannah as we headed back to the main building to start the last block of lessons for the day. “Hannah, wait a sec!” I called. She turned towards me with her best annoyed expression, but otherwise did not bother to acknowledge me. “You know how you put Oliver and me in charge of baking cakes?”

“Yes. So?”

“I don’t know how to bake. Or cook. Or anything to do with the kitchen, really.” I had been told it was a woman’s territory and I should never get near it. My father never explained it as ‘you will become a woman’, but his actions ended up proving his thoughts were somewhere in that area.

“It’s not a problem.” Hannah spoke like I was a piece of chewing gum that had just stuck to her shoe. “I suppose I should’ve realised you wouldn’t understand the whole point of the party preparations.” She sighed. I felt like a toddler being scolded for trying to put the square peg into the round hole. “It’s Oliver’s task to do the baking. Yours is to keep him distracted so that he feels less anxious until next week.”

“Oh, I see.”

“You’re really thick sometimes. I’m impressed you survived this long.” And with those flattening words, Hannah hurried to her next class, leaving me standing in the corridor with a chirped self-esteem.

(...)

Hannah was really pleased that everyone was able to make it to the shopping trip the next day. We found seats on the upper deck of the bus heading to the city centre and sat together for the forty minutes that it took us to get to there. At first the journey was not too bad, the bus was full of students from our school doing their own things and chatting in smaller groups. The closer we got to our destination, however, the more the bus filled with other kinds of people. At that point, the discreet stares started. People glanced at us, sometimes making disapproving faces. Some whispered to those sitting next to them, and then both turned around again to get another look. Oliver whispered to me that he thought the stares were directed at him, but I disagreed.

For one, Jean was once again sitting on Henry’s lap, even though there were other seats available. He was not doing any kind of inappropriate touching, but he was not being particularly ‘discreet’ about it either. Moreover, I had the impression that people’s stares would more often than not focus on Charlie and me. It seemed that everyone who got into the upper deck did the same things: firstly, they noticed Jean and Henry and were either shocked or entertained by them. Then, they noticed Oliver and me sitting together on one side of the bus, and Charlie and Luce sitting opposite us. Their eyes followed the two pairs, and their faces turned to disgust and sometimes hostility.

I knew that stare. It was the same one I always got when I went out with my parents. These people had the kind of look that would have made my father rise from his seat and yell in their faces about racism and prejudice. In fact, just looking at these people reminded me of my father’s rants, and of a time I thought he was the best father in the world.

We got off next to the City Council’s building and made our way to the main shopping street. It was an all-pedestrian zone, the street itself curved to the left as it reached the Glasgow Concert Hall, a place I used to visit a lot as a child. My parents used to take me to classical music concerts almost every Saturday before I started secondary school. This led to my interest in music in general and the viola in particular, and to a short-lived dream of playing in a professional orchestra. Being in front of the concert hall again reminded me of this past dream, of how anxious I had been to finally learn the viola at school. I wanted to be a violist for about two months, before my father told me I was too intelligent to waste my life with music. He convinced me I should invest in Physics because it would make the most use of my brain potential. I trusted his judgement so much back then that I did not question it, and the viola became just a relaxing pastime. We rarely went to concerts after that.

And my viola was still in my father’s house, in the room I used to call mine. I had not played since my music exam in June. Maybe I should start planning a ‘rescue operation’ for it.

“Ok, here we go on our separate ways,” Hannah announced, bringing me back to reality. We were standing by the steps that led to the concert hall. The main area of the shopping street extended to our left. Despite it being late afternoon on a Wednesday, the street was considerably crowded. “I think most shops close at six, which gives us about an hour to do all the shopping. Call me if you get in trouble, otherwise, everyone meet back here at quarter-past six. Understood?” Hannah looked expectantly at all of us. We mostly nodded, though Jean felt the need to do a full military salute. As soon as Hannah looked away, he grabbed Henry’s ass.

As Oliver and I started to make our way to the nearest ‘assorted cake ingredient shop’ (all my knowledge of baking was not even enough to tell me which kind of shop sold the things we needed), Hannah followed closely behind. At first I thought that she was just going the same way as us because whatever she was going to get happened to be close to our target shop, but it soon became clear that she was, actually, following us.

“What are you doing here?” Oliver asked when Hannah kept walking with us even as we entered the cake shop.

“I’ve decided I wanted to go with you and make sure you stayed on budget. I know it can be hard to resist temptation when cakes are involved,” Hannah answered. She smiled to Oliver, but I had a feeling she would not do the same for me.

“Shouldn’t you be watching Jean and Henry?” I asked. Sure enough, when she turned to me her face was much more threatening. “I mean, Jean had his own ideas about decorating the party…”

“That’s why Henry’s with him,” Hannah coldly reassured me. “I have no interest in listening to him talking about penises and asses and sex for the whole day.”

“I thought you were friends?” Hannah had been the only one to stand by Jean when our group almost split because of his attitude towards Henry, and back when we first met, Hannah had told me that Jean had once saved her. It was weird to think that she would not want to be near him.

“We are. We just agree to disagree on some things. I don’t like penises, he doesn’t do pussies, and we all live happy every after.”

“You do know that girls can have penises, right?” Oliver asked. Hannah became surprisingly embarrassed. It was the first time I had ever seen her blushing. The sight made me so uncomfortable I had to look away.

“Yeah, sorry. I forgot.” There was an awkward pause, but Hannah soon spoke again. “Let me rephrase that, then. I don’t like boys, with particular emphasis on those with penises, and Jean doesn’t like girls. Any kind of girl. Is that better?”

“I guess,” Oliver answered. I still did not want to look at them. “Though why do you hate guys with penises so much?”

“Straight guys with penises are the worst scum of humankind. Some gay guys are ok, but if they keep going on about how awesome other men are, to the point they forget that women exist and have feelings too, it gets boring after a while.”

“And is there a particular reason you don’t like Oscar?” Oliver asked. This time, I found it impossible not to face them. Hannah looked only at my boyfriend, though, like I was not even there.

“He’s a guy with a penis. That’s reason enough for me to need a more thorough assessment of his personality before I decide how much I like him.” I was beginning to feel relieved that this was the only reason for her rudeness when my feelings were unceremoniously shattered by her second reason. “And he’s a wimp.”

“Hey!” I tried to protest, but as soon as Hannah’s menacing stare turned to me, I changed my mind. It probably proved her point, but I was not in the mood for pointless arguments. Oliver snickered. Thankfully, the matter of my personality was dropped after this, and we carried on with the shopping.

As it turned out, finding all the cake ingredients was surprisingly easy once I had been told what we needed. Oliver and Hannah got everything on the list, plus extra sparkly decorations, for just eight pounds, which made Hannah particularly proud of herself. We had been so quick that everything took less than fifteen minutes.

“What do we do now?” Oliver asked. It would be a while before our friends were done with their own tasks. We had plenty of time to kill.

“We could get Luce some other birthday gifts. Out of our own pockets, of course,” Hannah suggested. I was about to ask what kind of gift she had in mind when she answered my question. “We could get her some good LGBT books, seeing as we are the LGBTI Club and all that.”

Oliver and I agreed with the idea. We were close to two big bookshops, so it would hopefully be a quick search. I had never seen an LGBT section in a bookshop, but I had plenty of reasons to believe it was not so much because they were not there, but because a certain someone (I had thought about that person far too much in the last hour to bear repeating his name) had actively discouraged me to wonder if this was something that could even exist. Oliver and Hannah seemed to take for granted that big bookshops would have an LGBT section, so I believed them.

Rather disappointingly, though, the first bookshop had no LGBT section. It was not actually just a bookshop; it sold stationery and assorted sweets on the ground floor and books down in the basement. Oliver and Hannah were disappointed and somewhat angry about this (particularly Hannah), but they tried to keep their spirits up by arguing that the basement-bookshop could not keep as many books as a proper bookshop, and that was why they did not have an LGBT section. By this rationale, larger bookshops should not be so disappointing.

So we went to the second bookshop. Hannah managed to locate the LGBT section, but once we got there, she was obviously not happy. “Only one shelf?” she complained. The LGBT section was squeezed in with the literature on general sexual health, which occupied the rest of the wall with books about STIs, pregnancy, and even adoption. “Seriously, what is wrong with you people?” She began looking through the titles and covers, declaring their main audience in an increasingly outraged tone. “Gay men, gay men, gay men, gay men in the US, gay men, more gay men in the US, gay men… oh, I found a lesbian book!” She took the book in question, looked at the cover, the summary, and turned back to the bookshelf. “By the looks of it, I’m holding the entire lesbian section in one hand.” Oliver laughed, but he seemed to share her disappointment.

“And if that’s all they have for lesbians, I doubt there will be anything on bisexual and trans…” Oliver noted, glancing hopefully at the bottom of the shelf. “Nope, all gay men.”

“And we still have twenty minutes to kill.” Hannah put the lesbian section back on the shelf and we left the bookshop in a much worse mood than when we came in.

“Now what?” Oliver asked the two of us. From the bookshop, we could see the meeting point that Hannah had established earlier, and none of our friends were there yet. “Aimless walk? Shop for chocolate?”

“I wish there was a decent bookshop around here,” Hannah grumbled. We ended up deciding to spend the next twenty minutes walking up and down the crowded street, window shopping and scaring pigeons away. That was the plan, anyway.

After five minutes of uphill walking, we noticed that one of the side streets was eerily empty compared to the busy area we were in. There was no need to verbalise our wish to immediately relocate there, if only for temporary relief. Crowds were exhausting, even more so when I had to watch my every step to not hit someone, and to keep making sure I did not get separated from my friends.

“I never noticed this place before,” Oliver said. The side street was pedestrian-only, uncomfortably narrow, and ridiculously short. There were only two tenement buildings on either side, all of them with shops on the ground floor. At the end of the street was a small building that vaguely resembled a mini-church. Its exterior was made of the same beige limestone of the tenements; it had only one floor with a pole on the roof, and the windows were made in unusual shapes and colours. There were two windows on each side, and a battered-looking door in the middle. The top window on the left had the shape of a fish and was covered in blue glass. Underneath it was a window shaped like a circle with strange thin shapes coming from it, covered in yellow glass. The top window on the right was in the shape of a pig and sealed with green glass. Under it, the fourth window had the strangest shape of all: two thin lines seemed to form an adorned letter ‘s’ and, even though the space carved out of the limestone was really thin, it was still covered in red glass.

“I think I would remember coming across a place like this,” Hannah agreed. We looked for the street name on the buildings, but there was none. Despite its emptiness and the strange ‘church’, the street did not give off dangerous vibes. It was a quiet place; the overall feeling was of peacefulness rather than fear. Encouraged by that feeling, we decided to explore the street some more.

The first shop on the left seemed to be some kind of charity shop, though I did not recognise the name. Like everything on this street, it was completely empty of customers, but it was possible to see a tall, dark-skinned man standing at the back of the shop, most likely the owner. The first shop on the right was one of those places that sold all-natural products and alternatives for healthy living. The second shop on the right was a clothes shop, though interestingly enough all the mannequins in front of the window had stereotypical male faces while dressed in fine women’s clothes. When we looked at the second shop on the left…

“Hey, a bookshop! It’s almost too good to be true!” Oliver beamed. It did sound horribly suspicious to find a bookshop in a place like this, but I was not used to thinking of coincidences as any more than that. It never occurred to me that this was yet another lesson my parents had gotten wrong.

“We have nothing to lose, we might as well take a look inside,” Hannah declared. She walked towards the bookshop and Oliver and I followed. The shop was called Games & Gambles, though it was hard to make out the words because the paint had fallen or faded in some places. The name appeared on the display windows and on a sign above the door, and in all of them, the paint had decayed at the exact same spots. Because of its strange title, the only way to tell that this was a bookshop was because the display windows were littered with all kinds (and widths and weights and colours) of books, and as far as we could see inside the shop, it was a building mostly made of books as well.

This first impression was confirmed when we got in. Everywhere we looked we saw books and more books. Bookshelves created a labyrinth of narrow corridors identified by letters and numbers on signs fixed from the ceiling. There was so much stuff inside that it was hard to believe it all fit in the relatively small space that the tenement building suggested. We walked around, partially marvelled by the sheer amount of books, partially wondering if this could be the place where we would find Luce’s perfect gift. It was easy to lose track of time inside of the shop, so it was difficult to pinpoint how long it took for the shopkeeper to find us. My personal impression was that it took forever, but later Hannah and Oliver would tell me that they thought it took merely an instant.

“May I help you?” the shopkeeper asked. At first I could not decide if the person in front of me was a man or a woman (and then I realised it did not really matter). Their hair was tied in a bun on top of their head, they were thin and tall like me, and their skin was slightly darker than mine. They spoke with a soft Indian accent, though their voice was at the same time low enough to sound like a woman with a deep voice and high enough to sound like a man whose voice did not break enough during puberty.

“Well, we are…” Hannah seemed surprisingly reluctant to speak to the shopkeeper. Her voice sounded uncertain, like she was trying to be careful about what she said next. Oliver realised this and jumped in on the conversation, much more secure than Hannah. It was a weird inversion of roles.

“We’re wondering if you have an LGBT section here. We want to get a book for our friend’s birthday, but in all the shops we looked they didn’t have anything decent.”

“Oh, I see.” The shopkeeper smiled. “We do have an LGBT section, please follow me.” They indicated one of the corridors, and we followed in single file with Oliver ahead, followed by Hannah and myself. We walked through many other corridors, confirming my suspicions that this place was much bigger than it seemed, until we finally reached an area decorated by discreet rainbows. “This whole corridor is about the Western concept of homosexuality. Male homosexuality is on the right; female homosexuality is on the left. The corridor next to it has material on human sexual behaviours and cultures from other parts of the world, and the corridor after that is about all kinds of cultural practices that accept genders beyond male and female. I am currently working on gathering material on other sexual minorities in Western cultures, like asexuals and demisexuals, but the section is still not ready. And I am sorry to say that Western erasure of bisexuality has influenced my shop as well. You will find materials on bisexuality if you look at the cross-cultural behaviour section only. If you have any questions, just call me and I will be happy to help you.”

“Thank you,” Oliver said. Like Hannah and I, he seemed still partially in shock from the sheer amount of material we had just found. The two other corridors that the shopkeeper mentioned were even longer than the one we were at. “But what is your name?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot my name tag again.” The shopkeeper smiled once more. They seemed like a nice person. “You can call me Sid.”

“Ok, thank you, Sid.” Oliver smiled too. “Can we call you to find our way back to the front of the shop when we’re done?”

“Of course. You can call me for anything.” With one last soothing smile, Sid was gone, leaving the three of us with the task of choosing a book for Luce and getting back to the meeting point by quarter-past six. We had no clue what time it was, and for some reason none of us thought of looking at our phones to find out, so at first we tried to quickly skim through the books to get something suitable so we could leave soon. Little by little, however, we were caught by all the interesting titles we found, and our search slowed down considerably as we carefully read back covers and inside folds of books about every possible aspect of sexuality and gender identity. It soon became obvious that we would not be getting just one book out of this place, but would instead buy as much as we could carry.

One of the books that caught my attention first was about being gay and dark-skinned in a land of white supremacy. Despite not identifying as gay, I thought it would be something interesting to read about. Not long after that, I found a book telling the story of a person who was bisexual and Indian living in the United Kingdom. And not long after that, I came across a book about being transgender (with special focus on non-binary identities) in places that use heavily-gendered language. I showed the book to Oliver and he immediately fell in love with it.

“What do they mean by heavily-gendered language?” I asked Oliver. I had not read too much of the book’s summary, just enough to see it was the perfect book for my boyfriend.

“Spanish, and Portuguese, and Italian, for example, have not only gendered pronouns like English does, but also gendered adjectives and adverbs. So, for example, ‘beautiful’ has a feminine form and a masculine form depending on whether the thing that is beautiful is male or female. Oh, and yeah, all things have genders. Like, a book is male, but a bookshop is female. So to say ‘beautiful book’, we use a different word than if we say ‘beautiful bookshop’.

“And how does that affect being trans?”

“It means that every time I talk about myself to my family, they’ll expect me to use all the feminine adjectives. It’s like calling myself a girl without needed to say ‘I’m a girl’, and it hurts just the same, or even more.”

“I see.” Oliver and I looked at each other in uncomfortable silence. I was not sure if there was anything I could say besides ‘this sucks’ or ‘how horrible’. None of those things would actually help Oliver feel better. Thankfully, though, we were soon distracted by Hannah’s happy face (which was also kind of scary).

“They actually have decent books! I can’t believe it!” Hannah was holding four books in her hands. None of them sounded like romance or Young Adult novels, but seemed to focus on more complex subjects of discrimination, economics, exploitation, and feminism.

“No fiction books?” I asked her, intrigued by her choices. It was probably some sexist part of me that assumed Hannah would be interested in romance stories, but I had nothing else to talk about and I wanted to distract Oliver.

“No, I don’t like fiction, particularly the sappy romance kind.” Hannah rolled her eyes. “I don’t get why people think they need love to complete their happy endings.”

“You don’t like romance in general or just in books?” Oliver asked. As always seemed to be the case, Hannah’s tone was much gentler with him, even though my boyfriend and I had asked similar questions.

“In general. It’s a waste of time. I have no problems with sex, but I have no patience for all the sappiness that comes with relationships.”

“Fair enough,” Oliver looked at me and tried not to laugh. I felt like they were somehow making fun of me, even though nothing apart from my gut seemed to suggest that. “So if Sid had finished the section on the other sexual minorities, you would’ve looked in there?”

“I don’t know. I’m pretty happy being a lesbian.” Hannah shrugged. “I just don’t want a girlfriend. Or cats.”

“You don’t like cats?!” Oliver exclaimed. From then on the two of them argued about the pros and cons of cats, kittens, and lions. I was not really interested in cats all that much either, so I focused on completing our original task of finding a book for Luce. It took me a while, but eventually I found a fairy tale about a princess that was born with a penis and lived happily ever after with a prince from a faraway land. It fit the impression I had of Luce so far, and the whole story (from words to illustrations and decorations on the margins) was bright and uplifting. I showed my findings to Oliver and Hannah and they accepted it.

“Ok, now we can call Sid and get out of here,” Hannah said, taking the book from my hands and assuming the posture of someone who is in charge, the kind of posture that came naturally to her.

“Did you call me?” Sid appeared from behind us, smiling innocently. If Hannah was scared by their sudden apparition, she did not show it in her face.

“Yes. We got all the books we want. Can you help us get to the checkout?” she spoke as if, instead of appearing so suddenly and sneakily, Sid had come to us after we spent minutes shouting his name through the labyrinth of books.

“Of course I can. Please follow me.” It was a short walk to the checkout, which was thankfully just beside one of the display windows. Once we took turns to pay for our personal purchases, we were all pleasantly surprised to discover that Sid’s books were much cheaper than in conventional bookstores. “I’m not here to make a profit. I work in this shop out of love, and for reasons that are much more important than greed,” Sid explained. I almost asked him how he kept such a huge shop going if it was always so empty and the books were so cheap, but I realised it could potentially sound rude, so I said nothing.

“Thank you for everything,” Oliver told Sid. He was carrying one huge bag of books. I had gotten two, but Hannah only bought one of the four books she had seen. She said she did not have much spare money, even at severely reduced costs, so she would come back later when she had more money.

“You are welcome, Oliver,” Sid answered. They gave us their card. “Please come back whenever you feel like buying more books. This shop will always be open for you.”

“Thank you,” Oliver said. “I’m glad we found your shop. It saved our day!”

“Nothing happens by chance.” Sid’s smile was very soothing, but their words generated a big exclamation mark in my head. There were centuries of scientific evidence that proved that the entire universe had been created by chance events. Everything happens by chance. But I said nothing. Sid’s voice had the kind of authority that made even that kind of claim seem true. “Now go in peace, children. Have a great day.” Sid did not seem old enough to call us ‘children’ like patronising old men usually did. They were probably in their thirties at most. I shrugged it off, though, because there were other things we should worry about.

Namely, it was almost quarter-past six and our friends were likely already at the meeting point.

(...)

As it turned out, everyone was already there when we arrived. Jean was carrying four bags of suspicious content, and Henry’s face looked like it was recovering from extended blushing. No explanations were needed. Hannah made everyone give her their receipts to prove they had not gone over budget. When our ‘’boss’ gave everyone the ‘all clear’, Luce enthusiastically jumped and kissed everybody, and thanked us for being awesome friends.

We went our separate ways after that. Oliver and I got a train back home, but we spent most of the trip focusing on our own thoughts. I was trying to remember if I had ever seen the small side street in the city centre before, when I realised I could check its name on Sid’s card. I fished the card out of my pocket, and it read ‘Games & Gambles Bookshop, 3 Harmony Street, Glasgow, G1 0PC’. At first I did not remember a street called ‘Harmony’ anywhere in Glasgow, but gradually my mind began to show memories of me passing by the small side street, and images of maps naming the place. It had always been there. I had just forgotten about it for a second.

Though how could I forget everything about such a notorious place was anyone’s guess.