For all the sardines lined up on the road, I notice one that’s more than a

little quirky.

My fool’s cap is snug on my head, crows draw my curtains.

I am ready for my act.

Edgar
I’ve been staring at the blue ceiling of my room for hours, listening to the heavy thudding of Rodrick and
Leo’s feet as they chase each other down the hallway with the occasional thwack of semi-wet towels.
Other students buzz past my room, chattering about the rugby meet with a school in Ipswich, Chelsea’s
graceless defeat against Liverpool and some party that’s going to happen at Clacton Pier.

I lie there for what might be hours, just the ceiling plaster and me, my body weightless enough I can
almost pretend that if someone barges into my room to ask for an extra roll of tissues, they’ll stand in the
doorway, taking in the empty bed and the partially open window and the curtains flickering in the breeze.
Then they'll shrug, turn around and leave.

There’s something itching at the back of my mind. A little pebble smouldering inside, burning a hole
through my skull. It’s the smell of burnt toast from the kitchenette two rooms away from mine— things
get pretty nasty at the start of the year because of all the unfamiliar hands. New boarders are terrible with
the toaster. I don’t blame them, that toaster crawled right out of hell. You either get it right between three
and four minutes or it’ll singe anything you put in it.

Boys here eat a lot of the burnt stuff anyway. I know lots of their secrets because I’m always tucked in
some corner soaking in the world. For example, Rodrick’s always going on about Whitney's tits but he
likes to sneaks boys in through the fire exit after big sport games. If you linger by his door you’ll hear
him grunting. Ferdinand’s the international guy who’s always playing music in the common room and
needs to be told off by the headmaster, Mr. Grimshaw, a firm believer that all music is detrimental to
education and growth in general.

The burning in my head gets so bad that I have to sit up and try to nurse it with an ice pack. The fridge in
the kitchenette is small and there’s very little space for ice packs between cartons of Magnum ice cream
and other disconcertedly shaped confectionary, but I try to make do. Blood thuds in my ears. Not great.
It’s not a migraine yet, but it might be getting to one in a few minutes. I figure this is a damn good time to
get in the truck to drive to Uncle’s farm.

I grab my bag, containing a book and my wallet, and throw the ice pack into the fridge before leaving the
dormitory. The truck needs a couple minutes and a good pat to get going. After I pull out of the parking
space I lean over my window to survey the asphalt, frowning at the sight of a tarry puddle of oil. While
driving out of the compound I try to remember the opening times of the repair shop downtown, MacKenz
Mechanics. Leo’s sister pretty much owns the place after their dad died and she’s basically a car
neurosurgeon, so there’s hope for the Ridgeline yet.
Pete mans the security post. While I’m waiting for him to pull up the barrier, I see the reflection of
someone waving at me from the entrance of the dorm via my side mirror. I don’t want to turn around so I
just squint hard, trying to put a name to the dark skin and hair. The only person who’d wave to me is Leo
but he’d pop out like a piece of the sun, all blond and white.

“Remember, this Saturday!”

Ferdinand’s slight accent. I drive off without acknowledging him. It’s rude, but everyone knows that
about me by now. Guy with the books. Stay away.

Uncle owns a farm on the eastern coast of Essex. It’s a fine place, all places considered, but the drive is
too long for me to go often. He used to drive me over from home all the time so I could watch sunsets
drape over the field, but that stopped since I started boarding school. Nowadays me driving there is as rare
as Uncle not getting overdue bank statements. Today is one of those rare days.

It’s almost sundown by the time I reach Uncle’s farm. His two employees are packing up, one from the
stables and the other from the barn. They wave to me as I park by Uncle’s cottage. My headache has
eased and the ride softened me up so much that I wave back. Just half-heartedly, though. For all they
know, I could’ve been waving to the distant hills or the silver clouds perched on them. I walk through the
stable and barn, swatting flies as I cross the expanse. Those places are full of life, animals snorting and
whickering and clopping their hooves against the packed dirt. Nasty.

What I’ve come for are the crops behind the cottage, surrounded by trees small enough to be bushes from
a distance. Uncle and I get it, the compulsion to put things we cherish behind things we don’t so that it
feels like no one can take them from us. The crops are mostly barley and oat; Uncle’s still trying to nurse
the dying vineyard by his cottage, but he’s never had much success. The sea of crops sway like fox fur in
the breeze.

My phone vibrates in my pocket. I take it out and stare at the icon of a telephone ringing. I don’t save
numbers, but I’ve seen this one enough times to know that it’s Uncle calling. For almost half a dozen
rings I just stare at my phone like it’s an alien object. I look up and the sun is melting over the horizon,
spilling orange over the clouds and sky. Already an inky blackness is smudging the brilliance, signalling
dusk. I look down again. It’s still ringing.

Beep.

“Hey, Eddie. Heard from Mark that you’re on the farm," Uncle says. His voice is solid metal melted for
my sake.

Words coil up in my throat. I shake the hair that’s fallen over my eye aside.

“Well I’m sorry I’m not home right now. Had to do some grocery shopping for the hoolas.”

The hoolas are Betty and George, his pet goats. Those lucky bastards get special attention from him even
though they don’t do anything, not even produce milk. Betty’s obsessed with spinach in summer and
autumn for no reason and George follows her dietary obsessions all year round—Uncle knows when they
start braying like a pair of loonies that he’s got to go shopping for their treats. The legal papers are
misleading because these goats are the real owners of the farm.
“Eddie? You there?”

Talk, dammit, talk.

Some days I’ll freeze up like this. If I’m lucky it’ll happen while I’m alone in my room, and if I’m not it’s
in front of the class blackboard with two dozen pairs of eyes pinned on me. Uncle’s fine, though. When I
don’t respond after a while Uncle understand that I’ve slipped away. Sometimes I try to come back, most
times I don’t. George bleats by the cottage and the wind chimes dangling over the back door of Uncle’s
cottage peals after him.

“All right, Ed.” There’s no resignation in his tone. Just the same liquid patience that makes me want to
throw myself into the ocean. “I’m coming home in half an hour. I’ll bake cranberry pie if you’d like to
stay for dinner. Ask Mark if you need anything in the meantime. See you tonight.”

There’s a long pause veiled by static before Uncle hangs up. I walk around the perimeter of the crop field
for a while, rubbing the back of my arm as the sky morphs. Mom told me once that the sky is a lot like a
chrysalis during sunrise, when the blackness unfurls into dawn, showering a prism of light over the world.
But I’ve always thought of it the other way. That the butterfly is the night.

It’s about six in the evening when the sun fully sets, sucking all the light with it. There aren’t any lamp
posts installed back here so the crops are solid black, as flat as cardboard printouts of stage plays. I want
to stay for the subtler changes, but I know Uncle will be back soon and it’s not like I can hide in the
stinky barn attic for the rest of the night.

I return to my Ridgeline and coax it back to life. Betty gets a real kick out of watching me work it, though
I don’t notice her until after the truck is purring under my palm. I give Betty a stick of liquorice that I find
in the passenger seat compartment, God knows how long it’s been cooking in there, but she chomps it up
just swell and even licks my palm afterwards. She’s too smart for her own good. George comes around
too, but the liquorice is long gone by then and I’ve got nothing to give him except a pat on the head. He
doesn’t mind, though. George doesn’t mind anything.

I hunker back into the truck and drive off. That Mark guy—I think Uncle mentioned a month ago that
he’s the new stable hand—waves at me again. This time I ignore him. I take the long route back to the
dorms so that I won’t cross paths with Uncle.

It’s easy to drive down this highway at night, mostly because no one uses it. Once I spot the one oak tree
that leans towards the road I slam down on the accelerator. The street lights here have a tendency of
flickering on and off, an issue that’s been going on for over three months now. The ungodly silhouettes of
bush and bramble pass like lightning under the dysfunctional lights.The noise of wind whooshing past my
ears drowns out everything else. The croaking frogs vanish. The world rages around me, fitful light and
sound, but my heart stills.

After a while, the street lights return to normal. Calmness blooms inside me, tickling my belly, the roots
of my teeth. I take one hand off the steering wheel and hold it in the air for a moment. It’s stopped
trembling.

I’m really glad I came out here. Distance doesn’t solve the problem but it’s put it away, at least for now.

“Hey, please stop!”

I look in the direction of the voice up ahead. I’m moving so fast that I only glimpse a gash under the
canopy of a tree by the roadside. I quickly slow down and cruise towards the scene: a tame-looking BMW
and a guy standing next to it with his hands cupped around his mouth from hollering at me. He puts his
arms down as I shift gear to P. He steps towards the passenger side of my truck.

The street lights cast a jaundiced glow on his skin, the kind that makes people look like axe murderers. He
doesn’t, though. He looks...genial. And he’s not curling his fingers around the window’s edge or touching
any part of my truck at all, which a lot of people seem to enjoy doing. This pleases me absurdly for some
reason.

“Hello, thank you so much for stopping. My name is Gimley, pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

He reaches out for a handshake. It’s loose and languid enough that I don’t feel like he’s intending to
strangle me. I don’t take his hand, though, so it just dangles there for an indefinite period of time.

“Edgar,” I say, sounding a little more helpless than usual. It hits me that it’s the first word I’ve spoken all
day.

“Edgar, thank you. So I hope you don’t mind if I get to the point. That is—” he tilts his head at the BMW,
its windows rolled down, the key still stuck in the ignition. “—my rental car broke down. I’m afraid I’ve a
plane to catch in, ah,” he glances at his watch and his eyes widen into moons. A small breath escapes his
lips, “oh dear, half an hour. No, towing just won’t make it. Do you think you can give me a ride?”

A moment of silence settles between us. I regard him for the first time, the sweat beading down his
temples and his button-down dress shirt rolled up to his elbows. The furrow between his brows deepen
each second I stare at him.

“I mean,” he says, clearing his throat a little. “I really would appreciate it.”

“...which airport?”

“London Southend.”

It’s not far. I can probably get there in ten minutes and make it back to the dorm before curfew, so I nod
for him to enter. He jumps in and snaps his seat belt into place, bringing no rucksack or luggage. He
doesn’t look like he’s forgotten anything so I shift gear and drive off. And as tension fizzles away from
him, an awkward silence settles between us. The kind when two acquaintances who have gone out
together are left behind by common friends. The radio’s been dead since I first got the truck so there’s
only the whipping wind to listen to while I drive. I know from experience that it’s the kind of atmosphere
that eventually grows comfortable given some time, so I lean back on my seat and just focus on the road.

“Allen Powell High,” he says, eyes directed at the rear view mirror. I glance up to see the lump of my
school jacket draped over the back seat.

“I go there,” I mumble, words melting into the wind. He looks at me with that polite, half-conflicted
expression some people wear when they’ve seen my mouth move but are reluctant to ask me to repeat,
not because I wouldn’t but because it seems like it’d be a huge effort on my part. I say it louder again, if
more bitterly.
His face breaks into a huge smile. “I see! Would you happen to know one Ferdinand Mateo?”

“We used to be classmates.”

“Oh, how quaint.” Quaint, I think. Really? “Would you send my regards to him, please? I can text him,
but that’s never quite the same. We're old friends, you see, met two years ago on a skiing trip to the Swiss
Alps. Deadly cold there, but it was an absolute blast. I meant to visit him today but I couldn’t find the
time between my—I’m sorry, I’m rambling an awful lot. I’m rather nervous to make that flight.”

He chuckles helplessly. I realize for the first time this separation between us, my patchy pants and his dry
cleaned corduroys, the tousled mess of my hair where his bangs are slick and gelled back and wholly
proper even though he must’ve been stuck by the roadside for a while. There’s a faint sweaty musk on
him, tamped down by some piquant deodorant. But then I catch a glint of his wristwatch, too dull to be
anything but inexpensive and ordinary. It sticks out like a sore thumb on him.

I drive onto the main road where trees are sparser and light from cars and lamp posts make it easier to
see. But there’s also a bit of traffic. Not the kind that doesn’t move—those never happen out here. Instead
it’s the one that inches forth tyre squelch by tyre squelch. He does look a little nervous about it, though.

“So you’re an A-Levels student?”

I shrug. It's as low effort as the twitch of an eyebrow or a sniff.

“Mm, you’re a literature kid, aren’t you?”

I turn from the windshield to him. He’s not half as smug as I thought he’d look.

“Books,” he gestures to the back of the truck again. “Though it looks a lot more than the course load
could possibly warrant.”

“It’s from the local library. The one at my school isn’t great. And I don’t do well in lit class, I just like to
read.” Not doing well is an euphemism. I got a low C for it during AS last year and my teacher is
predicting it’s going to drop to a D. Not because she’s trying to make my life hard, it’s just the truth. That
makes one expectation I can fulfil though.

“Do you do lit?” I ask this just to get his attention off of me. I know he doesn’t anyway. See, I’ve a sixth
sense about books and people who read books. Unlike him, I don’t need to peep over the back of a car to
figure out a thing or two.

“I finished my exams this June, actually. But no, I’m more on the business and math side of things.
Though I've a great admiration for the artistic types,” he says. "Something very romantic about delving in
the thoughts of the deceased, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Not really. Sounds cryptic.”

He laughs. It’s a very genuine sound. The Ridgeline shudders under my palms like it too has taken notice
of this strange creature, words too long and plenty for his small mouth, eyes beady and quick as a crow’s.
A creature from a vastly distant world.
A few minutes later the traffic passes and I drive to the airport’s main entrance to drop him off. There are
a few other vehicles lined up in front of us. He starts jigging his right leg and I can almost see the strain in
the muscles of his neck. The speakers boom overhead, flights to Amsterdam and Dubai and Glasgow. His
eyes fly to the top of his forehead when that last one gets announced. Finally I pull to a stop. He unlatches
the door and turns to face me, one arm against the dashboard.

“I can’t thank you enough, Edgar. I’ll have to go now. You have a good evening, my good man. See
you!”

And then he’s off, sprinting straight through the entrance, a shadow diminishing in the horizon. I blink
slowly, unsure how real any of that was. His name is a distant memory at the back of my mind where that
smouldering pebble had been. Gimley.

Gimley
Father’s always been the voice of sensibility. He told me, after I’d fallen off the skateboard Mother
deemed was too roguish for my charm and the sunflowers I meant to deliver to our neighbour flew all
over the front yard, that it’s never a good idea to pack something into every waking hour of the day. See,
when I asked Mother about this over dinner the next day (the cut on my chin patched up by the house
maids), she praised me for my attempt to multitask leisure and work. She said I’d gotten it from her, the
nervous energy and an incorrigible obsession for checking things off a never-ending list.

You’ll only succeed if you learn to sprint. Runners, walkers, they end up in the fast food industry. Oh,
don’t be scared. One day you’ll be writing your thesis before delivering a presentation to the CEO of a
partner company—and you’ll still have the energy for golf afterwards.

So Mother is sensible too in a different way. I stare my hands, shaking wildly as the cab skids through
puddles of water on the street. I suppose I’ve grown up to adopt her school of thought. But I’m a slow
bloomer. Everyone in the family is painfully aware of my retarded faculties; this time last year I fell off
the boat during a rowing meet (actually fell off. Even I’m not very sure how it happened), I lost my
luggage bag in the Swiss Alps, and received last place at an interschool dressage competition after my
mare almost kicked me off. Not to mention that I got a B for Mathematics and now I’m an hour late for
grandma’s birthday party, the one that Nessie and William have come all the way from D.C. to attend, the
one that Mother arranged for me to meet my aunt Penelope, eleventh of the world’s hundred most
influential women.

God, I’m a living disaster.

I reach in my wallet for a packet of thin, oval-shaped pills and toss them down my throat. The cabbie
glances at me disconcertedly via the rear view mirror as he rounds a bend that takes us out of the city
centre. The time on the dashboard blinks furiously at me, counting down each second I’m late late late.
Mother’s going to kill me. Actually, that’s the best case scenario. What’s worse is if she decides to give
me the Silence, which is awful enough for me to think about shoving all the pills in my throat so I can
knock myself out but not awful enough for me to do it because that would destroy the Pellinore reputation
forever.

I close my eyes and lean back against the seat. The bitter taste of oxy linger stubbornly in the back of my
throat. I keep thinking of the word calm, deep breaths, monasteries on mountains in China and swirly Zen
sandboxes. Thank the universe for Persian poppies. The heavy tendrils of sleep begin to wrap around my
arms and legs and head, and I’m fast asleep before I even know it.
“Sir!”

Hours or years might’ve passed before I stir again. There’s a stinging pain on my cheek that reminds me
of the one time I rubbed myself down with whole green chilies at two a.m. because I was too nervous to
sleep but too tired to get any homework done.

Thwack. The pain scalds my other cheek and I snap into full consciousness. Ash falls from the cabbie’s
cigarette onto my newly bought Ralph Lauren shirt that still smells like the airport. I push the cabbie and
he flings his palm out to me, grumbling about capitalism or something. I hand him a wad of cash without
really thinking about the amount because now I can hear Mozart booming from the mansion ahead, which
means Grandma’s already cut the cake.

The cabbie pulls away from the entrance and heads back down the hill, exiting through the silver gates of
the estate. They’re flung wide open for Grandma’s party today. She likes to joke that any crook without
an invitation who dares to enter will be allowed to, even that she’d have guest rooms for them. But jail’s a
safer option than living with grandma and her six all female Afghan bodyguards, and anyway I think she
just misses have me around to talk to.

I take a deep breath and smooth out my clothes some distance from the raised doorway, nestled within a
haphazard maze of shiny cars, hoping that the invitees lounging by the balustrades won’t notice me.
There’s a lot more to catch their eye anyway, trees stretching and spiralling to the sky. Moonlight
fluctuates between thinner sheets of clouds, pouring soft light onto the dark wood that breathes against it.
The orb fixtures in bushes surrounding the mansion light up her exotic garden of snow white leaves, an
eternal winter against rubicund bricks.

The mansion itself is forged from limestone, each window glowing with violet and orange lights.
Grandma’s taken to feeling young these days. It has a kind of retro, lo-fi vibe to it in spite of the booming
Dolby music. I remember living here as a child, the ocean waves rolling up against the cliffs, beckoning
me when I woke up each morning. Lying in bed for hours reading books piled by my bedside, vacillating
between sleep and adventures to fantastical worlds until it was time for tea. The memories tug some
pining strings within me, strings imbued with the knowledge that my youthful pleasures are distant
dreams.

Now there are just people, plastic pounds and golden cufflinks. I consider climbing through the back
entrance that grandma I used to and pretend that I’ve fallen asleep in a bathroom, but then a steady hand
falls on my shoulder.

“Lil,” I sigh. “Don’t do that. You know I—“

“Am very strung up. Yes, Gim.”

Lily’s my younger sister and the only one in the family bequeathed with a typical name. Rumours go that
our parents had been thinking of calling her Wilhelmina or Eulalia when a lily floated in through the
window of the hospital room Mother was staying in, right before she went into labour, and that was that.
She sidles up to me, yellow-white gown rustling against my airport outfit.

“You ought to go in anyway, at least to say hi. Grandma is very upset that you’re not here.”

Saying hi in the Pellinore family is the equivalent of sitting at the dining table for five hours straight while
distant relatives discuss how Trump’s America is affecting the motherland (they actually call it that),
which stock markets to target and where new business ventures are blooming while I kind of just sit there,
pushing bits of bacon around my plate.

“I will,” I grumble.

“Now.”

Lily can be like Mother sometimes. So I nod my head and shuffle towards the grand marble stairway,
buzzing with nerves but determined not to let it show.

I go around shaking firm hands with relatives I vaguely remember, asking pointless questions I’ll have to
memorize answers of for the next time we meet. Lily hovers behind me, helping me out when the words
get stuck in my throat (still happens sometimes. No amount of Toastmasters can change that). There’s a
huge round table like that of King Arthur’s erected on the middle of the first floor where people must’ve
gathered for the opening celebration. Heavy plates off half-eaten cakes and champagne glasses litter the
thick mantle. Pellinore birthdays involve cutting cake right off the bat because that way people who are
busy are more likely to attend.

My toes practically bounce when I spot Grandma, jade clip in her curled white hair, forehead sagely with
the wrinkles of old age. She’s laughing with a group of friends on the second floor, backs rigid in spite of
the alcohol. Three bartenders have been hired and suited discretely to blend in with the shadows behind
the bar, only the rattling of ice in cocktail shakers and clinking glass giving them away. I brave the group
and shake hands with her.

“My lovely nephew,” she introduces me to the group of crimson ruffles, pressed dress shirts and square
heeled loafers.

Hellos are exchanged. I’m sure I’ve seen these people back in the day, but when and where are enigmas.
We tackle the same pointless conversations until eventually I feel it’s appropriate to excuse myself to the
restroom. I don’t miss the slight wink of Grandma’s keen eye. Lily appears in the corridor.

“Good job,” She pats me on the shoulder, a pleased look on her face. Then she sets off in Grandma’s
direction to take my place as the less boring Pellinore child.

I quickly clamber the mansion until I get to my old room facing the ocean. Once inside I throw myself
back on the bed and thank the universe that I didn’t see Mother. It’s bad to think that because I love her
and she means well, but every talk we have throws her into a fit of rage. Not the pots-and-pans kind but
the one that involves seething cuts of allowance and friends suddenly nervous to hang out.

“Hello, Gimley.”

I sit upright on the bed. The hard crash of a tidal wave thunders in my ears as I see the figure leaning by
the doorway, all six foot four of the father I haven’t seen in a month. I think of the photo Devlin had taken
of him when they went to Mount Kilimanjaro, his silhouette a gash in the garden of meteorites, light from
the dusky sky and cliff spilling onto his concrete form. He enters and sits on the armchair on the opposite
side of the room, chest rising and falling with the surety of tides.

“Evening, Father.”

He is: the king of the Pellinore family. Thousands of lives hinge on the scrawl of his fountain pen. His
throne is perched on the highest level of Urbplan Corp HQ, an internationally acclaimed architectural
firm, his falcon eyes nailed on the affairs of minor people. I am: the nervous output of an airport restroom.
My face is practically naked with oxy and no hastily sprayed deodorant can mask that.

Father turns, sighing softly at the open window. His breath falls out of him like a train whistle.

“How’s your gap year going?”

“Good. I just met with the program leader in Essex earlier today and he welcomed me right on board. I’ll
be working in Orbitude for three months, maybe longer if they like me.”

Father bobs his head languidly. Then he tugs on the cuff of his left sleeve where it had folded against the
armchair. Everything he does is so completely different from Mother’s boundless energy. His is a sort of
deliberate slowness, a promise of his capacity to execute anything.

“I meant to ask, though, about your mental health. Are you still seeing a counsellor?”

Father’s always been frank; he gave me the whole sex talk before I was even twelve, and unlike Mother’s
lectures he doesn’t rinse them. You either heed him or bear the consequences.

I rub the back of my ear, then rub my palms together. “Not really. I don’t think they’re much help.”

“So you’re off medication?”

I shrug. “Yeah. I mean, I still take oxy and valerian, but nothing else.”

He bobs his head again. Up here the chatter of the party falls away and there’s nothing but the waves to
fill the silence between us. I glance out at the sliver of moon perched over the horizon, slitting the grey-
blue water like platforms of a retro pinball game or the hundred eyelids of a slumbering monster. Its
snores are the crashing waves. Its limbs, tendrils licking limestone.

“You know, Gim, you can always come back if you’re feeling homesick. You can do an internship under
me, even, just for the CV’s sake.”

I laugh. It’s definitely not laughing matter, but it’s the only way I know to react. My hand has found its
way up the back of my arm, rubbing, heating with friction. “I appreciate it, but I really think I’ll learn an
awful lot in London. Orbitude’s one of our biggest competitors, after all.”

Father sighs. Sighing is a bit of a permanent condition for him. A lot of the time he sighs even when he’s
happy. Like that time back in Year Four when I won mathletes, back when math made sense, of course.
This time, though, I can tell that he’s genuinely disappointed. He gets up from the armchair and walks
towards me, languorous enough that I have time to steel myself. He sits on the bed and we both stare at
the hat rack in the far end of the room. I remember using it to hang my clothes in the evening after I’d
splashed myself wet by the seaside. Grandma’s good friend, Illy, would gripe about the trail of sand and
water when she came by, about how she was spoiling met. This is the only time he gets to relax, was what
Grandma said, but I stopped because I didn’t like the way spoiled sounded when it applied to me.

Then suddenly Father has his arm around me in an awkward side hug, the kind that rugby guys share after
a game. I remind myself that he does this a lot behind closed doors, to Lily and Devlin and me, but it’s
been so long that it shocks me anyway.
“I’m okay now,” I mutter. Imagine the half-assed shower smell he must be getting from being so close to
me. “Honestly. Mr. Vance said that I could go off my meds.”

Father stares at me all strange, a thin lock of hair falling over his temple. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

I did some pretty dumb things back in June when the exam stress was really kicking in. In short I ended
up sitting for three papers in the hospital and Father came back all the way from a business meeting in
Peru just to be there for me. He bought these awful fried fish nuggets that were the only things I didn’t
refuse to eat while I was stuck there. He had them with me for breakfast, lunch and dinner until the
twenty-second of June, the day of my last accounting paper. He had to go back to Peru for something, but
he made me promise to keep him updated about my counselling sessions. I didn’t, obviously.

“I don’t know,” I mutter. But I do. I don’t want to disappoint him. Because, well, it’s inevitable. Someday
in the future I’m going to cock-up again and I’ll have gotten his hopes up for nothing.

Father lets go and ruffles my hair the way he did when I fell off my skateboard that day. He doesn’t say
anything for a while. His eyes are pensive, and even though we don’t talk much I feel so much closer to
him than I do with Mother. Sometimes it really is more about the silence than the words.

“Where are you staying?”

“The condo at thirty-three.” I’d discussed it with him and Mother a month ago while I was staying at
Joseph’s flat, afternoons spent standing in the midst of red buses and a never-ending crowd figuring out
what exactly I should do having rejected my uni offer and taken an unplanned year off. “I’ve seen it and
wired the deposit already. It used to belong to a writer, I think, thus a row of bookshelves installed by the
wall. Without the books, of course. But it’s lovely.”

“I’ll come visit sometime,” he says. This isn’t a trifle thing considering his schedule and the fact that he
means everything he says. Trust Father to remember promises to his friends from fifteen years ago.

“Okay.”

He smiles. It’s quick and small and wholly professional, but I can’t help but pretend that it’s a secret he
shares just with me. His watch bleeps just as he stands, red knuckles bulging against his papery skin. He
has these big hands that everyone think is why he’s so good at climbing, but it’s actually all in his
knuckles.

He leaves the room and I flop back, smiling giddily to myself. A day later, a huge shipment of books from
our family home arrives at the doorstep of my condo with a small golden card attached to it. The inky
words are written with a fountain pen in the distinct Pellinore cursive.

I thought you’d like to have these.

-R. Pellinore

And I swear to God, he’s the best father in the world.

Edgar
MacKenz’s Mechanics is a dump.
I suppose automobile shops have that in common, but I don’t mean it in a bad way. Lots of dumps have a
certain charm to them. Uncle’s farm used to be a dump when he first bought the land—it was the business
of some Welsh family that had been going downhill for decades, the barn knee deep in dung, home to a
flock of roosters that would crow ceaselessly once the clock struck midnight. The owners had even
warned him good-naturedly that he was going to go bankrupt with it because they knew he was that
adamant to have it.
Anyway, that’s a dump that really should’ve been unsalvageable. But Uncle salvaged it and MacKenz’s
has that same vibe going for its loose, screwed in zinc sheets, faded blue canvases nailed into the roof,
metal debris lying in a pile by the side of the shop. Next to the debris, tyres are stacked on top of each
other to form the only appendage of the shop that looks presentable and the noise of drills buzzing and
whirring thrum deep in the bowels of the garage.
A droplet of water plops on my head and slithers down between my eyes. I wipe it away before it can get
in my nose and sniff the back of my palm tentatively, recoiling at the stink of it. It reminds me of that
camping trip when I woke up with that baseball kid Aiden’s foot on my face. He has a perpetual issue
with athlete’s foot that’s always worse when he’s wearing sock. The problem is that he’s always wearing
them.
“Excuse me,” an old man says, jostling my shoulders as he struts to the other end of the garage, dodging
sparks of light and flying nuts and other automobile contraptions deftly. I huddle closer to the rickety iron
pillar that’s holding up the place while two of the younger employees toss soggy French fries at each
other.
Ruby Keenan, dictator and queen of the garage, peeks over the top of my Ridgeline. Our eyes meet for a
second before a whole McLovin’It burger, wrapped in oil-drenched paper, soars across the garage and our
eye contact snaps.
“Boys!”
Her voice shatters every other sound. Half of the shop’s employees turn to us and the two employees
scramble under their nearest vehicles, yelling Sorry, Mam! collectively. Some snickering rises briefly
before everyone gets back to work. Ruby gives me a thumbs-up with a completely nonplussed expression
and dives back under to check the Ridgeline’s leakage issue. Heat curls in around me and I take a few
steps sideways to avoid the water dripping from the canvas.
Thing is, people don’t come to MacKenz’s to be aesthetically pleased. They come because Ruby’s an
absolute car goddess. She’ll tell customers off the bat if a car’s just not worth repairing and if she says
she’ll get the spare parts in by Wednesday seven p.m. then it comes in at that hour of that day. She won’t
do all of these things because she cares about customers or money even, though it’s well-known that she’s
raising money for Leo to go to university. For Ruby it’s all about making sure cars go where they’re
supposed to, be it the scrapyard or back on the road. Everyone’s convinced she’s the reason why the
percentage of car accidents in town fell sharply since she took the mantle as lead mechanic.
My thoughts drift to the incident earlier this week. The day after I sent Gimley to the airport, I was sitting
in tutor with Ferdinand. We don’t talk often but we’re always the first two to arrive in class, so when I
opened up my copy of anonymous poems and started reading about foolish geese he pulled out an
adjacent chair and sat next to me.
“Hey, you met Gimley last night?”
I continued reading. Dust from the yellowing pages had gotten in my eyes but I didn’t make to scratch the
itch.
“He called me last night. He asked for your number but I figured I shouldn’t send it because, well,
privacy. He left a voice message.”
I put my book down reluctantly and saw that he’d already taken his phone out with the message ready to
play. It was preceded by a short fizzle and between his silences I could hear waves like those roiling on a
beach and I imagined he was standing there, a lone figure by the shore.
Hello there, Edgar, I hope you’ve returned to your dorm safely.
Oh, Ferdinand told me that. I called him last night. He was kind enough to let me know that your truck’s
leaking. I felt awful that I didn’t compensate you, frantic for my flight and all—yes, I’m in Glasgow now
thanks to you—so I’ve sorted it out with the proprietor of your friend’s workshop. MacKenz’s, I believe.
They’ll send the bill to me. I hope you won’t mind that I haven’t consulted you. This just feels
appropriate.
In any case, it was an absolute pleasure meeting you. You’re a life saver, and I think it’s frabjous that you
read. Have a good one!
For the rest of the day I couldn’t stop thinking about the meaning of frabjous. The hideous word replayed
in his voice over and over like the content of a broken cassette tape in my mind at lunch, after school, in
the shower, until finally I couldn’t resist googling it. Three days later I’m still thinking about how
appalling that word is and how I officially despise Lewis Carroll for it. Never mind that Alice in
Wonderland is a bloody wreck; he must’ve blindfolded himself when he smashed frabjous out on his
typewriter.
Fifteen minutes later, Ruby walks over to me while rubbing her greasy hands with a rag. She nods for us
to speak outside because otherwise she’d have to scream for me to hear her. Not that Ruby’s the kind of
girl to care about screaming, but I guess I look like I care about being screamed at.
We stand by an oak tree and she briefs me through a bunch of car jargon that I have zero understanding
of. It goes over my mind for a bit until she realizes that I’m staring blankly at the pigeons mating on the
tree on the other side of the road.
“In short,” she clears her throat. Lights speckles her through the foliage, shining on the red pendant
around her neck. Her face is smudged with dirt and I think that this is the kind of person who ought to be
running for parliament, though she’d be happier in her garage. “It’ll be done Monday night. You can
come pick it up then or I can get my boys to send it to you for a fee.”
“How much?”
“Tenner.”
“I mean the whole thing.”
She waves her hand. “The guy who’s paying said I’m not supposed to tell. He said it’s to be polite or
something.”
“…frabjous.”
“What?”
I shake my head. I think that there’s a crooked smile on my face that I’d hate to see.
Ruby returns to the garage, rejecting the tenner I proffer for the Monday delivery. Ferdinand pops up in
an SUV while I’m thinking of catching a cab. See, I do a lot of people-watching and I don’t mind people
who drive SUVs. They’re usually the practical, neighbourhood Samaritan types. Ferdinand likes wearing
bomber jackets and wasting himself at parties, but I bet he’ll settle down someday in a suburb with a
coffee machine and a lawnmower of his own.
I get in his SUV and he drives me back to school. There are only a handful of full boarders at Allen
Powell, him and me included, though I usually stay in whereas he takes a train to Cambridge on the
weekends (he dropped his ticket on the staircase once after he got back).
“So what did the car doctor say?” Ferdinand asks. He turns up the radio when Miss Jackson comes on and
I immediately have a little more respect for him.
“It’ll be done by Monday,” I say, and then after a pause, “Is Gimley from the nineteenth century?”
Ferdinand tosses his head back laughing. “That’s exactly what I thought when I first met him. We were
staying at Verbier during the half-term, part of a joint skiing program with his school. He bumped into
me, I dropped my skis and he literally jumped to grab them. He started saying things like pardon me, I am
ever so sorry my good man, please accept my humblest apologies.”
His impersonation of Gimley makes me burst into laughter. It’s not that it’s bad, but the pitching of his
gravelly voice is literally up there with cat scratches and nails along walls. Ferdinand looks a little
stunned for a moment as I keep laughing, barely able to contain my innards, and I’ve seen him doing
some pretty poxy stuff around school for five years now but this really tops the cake.
When I finally stop laughing Ferdinand says, “So about the party tonight, you coming?”
I shake my head. He doesn’t frown exactly but his lips twists into something like a lopsided pickle, “I’ve
never seen you at any party before, and I go to all of them. This one’s special. I promise you’ll like it.”
And yeah, I get what he means by special. Not a lot of people know about it but that’s because regular
partygoers are solely focused on booze and sex. Some people know by being in the scene itself.
Ferdinand’s the Schrödinger Party Animal.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m thinking about how this’ll be my last year of high school and that I’ll probably
end up cleaning toilets for the rest of my life (hopefully the toilet of a library). Mom and Dad are paying,
and though Allen Powell isn’t exactly a private prep school I at least owe it to them to experience
something outside of words on a page.
Ferdinand’s smiling now, a real smile. He can tell that I’m changing my mind about it. I suppose Thomas
Hardy can wait for one night.
*
They picked this Saturday for a good reason. On top of being on the first week back to school, the bi-
monthly fireworks are going off tonight and Den La Rosa, a nearby motel, is offering a ten percent
discount on bulk bookings. Guys interested in shagging have chipped in ahead of time to rent a dozen
rooms, which is a lot to pay for mere high school students and shoots the status of the party up from
annual tradition to a very classy and infamous meet-up even among faculty, who know to bring their
families elsewhere this weekend.
I throw on jeans and a T-shirt under my school jacket, which is lame but it’s not like I’m trying to hook
up with anyone. Ferdinand drives me and two others, Rodrick, Hugh and Hugh’s girlfriend Prajna to the
pier. I thankfully get the front seat, curtesy of Ferdinand who’s become chummy with me since the whole
Gimley thing. Meanwhile, Rodrick hisses and groans like a cat with a splinter in his paw while Hugh
makes out with Prajna in the back seat. Fall Out Boys mercifully drowns out most of their noises. I’m
really starting to dig Ferdinand’s taste in music.
Rodrick jumps out of the SUV once Ferdinand hits the breaks, not even bothering to thank him as he
skulks to the crowd by the pier’s entrance. I get off and wait for Ferdinand as he stuffs his keys in his
pocket. I lean on a post while staring in the black distance. The waves reflect Clacton’s neon lights,
oranges and reds spearing the idle surface, but I focus on the horizon where there’s nothing but the maw
of darkness. I think of Gimley standing alone at a beach again. It looks right in my head, like he belong
there.
Coming here is nostalgic. I close my eyes and remember Mom and Dad holding my hands, sandwiching
me in between them. Mom was responsible for the cotton candy—she made sure that I didn’t have more
than half, dental cavities or something, while Dad went on about his grand fly-fishing adventures that we
both knew were accounts exaggerated by his middle life crisis. We often got here around four when the
lapping water is still a gentle murky blue. I’d ask to see the SeaQuarium each time. Some days I spent the
whole hour before it closed just staring at a tilapia swim lazily across the green tank, emerald lights
coiling in its scales, slivers of violet sparking off them as it flicked around.
“You sure you don’t want to leave your jacket? The AC in the bowling alley is still wrecked from a freak
accident.”
Ferdinand’s in a black and white flannel rolled up to his sleeves. The others by the entrance are layering it
on though, likely for something to peel off before they go at each other. Ferdinand believes I’m sensible
enough to reason with.
“No. I’m good.”
He shrugs and we make our way into the building. Three Union Flags planted on it flutter in the breeze.
The only section of Clacton still open is the bowling and arcade centre. It’s good too, coming at night,
because it’s usually swamped with kids and families in the afternoon and that never clashes well with
teens trying to get wild. Ferdinand and I pay our admission tickets and enter Pavilion Bowl, which is one
of the homeliest bowling places in all of Essex, and because there are too many of us a handful split off to
the arcade first. The Bowl is furnished with black couches, some ten alleys and the lights outside are on
bright enough that we can see through the windows to the people walking by, lingering at times when
someone howls at a strike.
People start passing around baskets of Fish N Chips as Ferdinand and I settle on a couch at the far end of
the room, next to the table the students have monopolized. The only other bowlers around are some forty
year old dads who look pained by our noisy chatter but continue to play, adamant not to have their night
out spoiled. Pretty soon Rodrick’s in the limelight, not because he’s good at bowling but because he’s
very loud with being bad at it. Ferdinand leaves upon Hugh’s request to play for a while. I watch him
bowl like a pro, utterly destroying Rodrick with each flick of his wrist.
Ferdinand’s right about the AC though. As the minutes tick by the air cloys, reminding me of the garage’s
heat from earlier today. I stare at the sheet of white paper soaked in oil and mottled with bread crumbs,
feeling sick to the bone. It’s getting a little hard to breathe. Everyone else has taken their outer layers off
now, sex or not, and are indulging in Budweiser and Carlsberg among other dubious brands. I wonder if I
should’ve asked Leo to come along so we could sit together awkwardly, but Leo’s about as bad with
parties as I am.
Ferdinand’s still going strong with his third strike in a row. He’s driving the crowd wild when someone
starts catcalling.
It’s coming from a trio of the Allen Powell’s elite faction, lounging on a couch in their high heels and
Versace belts. They call themselves the Tackers, presumably after Tommy Commerford who was one of
the first gangsters to establish Britain’s international drug trafficking network. The current head of the
Tackers, Arabella, swings herself onto the arm of their couch. She strokes the fuzzy back of her boyfriend
Gabriel’s head, white painted nails glossy as her lips. Then, having gained our rapt attention, she nods at
Ferdinand. “Nice strike, pretty boy.”
It’s because Ferdinand’s got a thin waist and these long eyelashes like a cow’s that really does make him
pretty in an innocent way. If I said it I would’ve meant it as a compliment, but it’s clear from Arabella’s
intonation and the Tackers’ collective giggling that it’s not.
Peer pressure’s a bastard of a thing. Preston starts laughing with them. He slaps Ferdinand on the ass and
Ferdinand shoves him back hard, teeth bared, but what really shocks him is when Hugh jumps on board.
Hugh has been his best friend in D&T since last year. I glance at Prajna sitting behind a bowling rack,
phone frozen in her hands while she watches Hugh spout shit at Ferdinand.
“The Bella’s right,” Hugh says, grinning snottily, “Forget Oxbridge, you’ll go anywhere with that fag
face.”
Ferdinand whips his head around at Hugh with this hellish fire in his eyes. In a flash his fist is in the air.
“Ferdinand!”
Everything freezes. The rattle of bowling pins against reflective pine wood is the last noise before the
alley sinks into a menacing silence. Everyone has their heads turned to me, even the dads at the other end
and some woman walking past the Bowl outside, wiping marinara sauce off her wide-eyed child’s mouth.
I walk up to the boys, grab Ferdinand’s fist and yank him out of the Bowl with me. I drag him all the way
to the edge of the pier where there’s a strip of water in between two other stalls, where sparse enough in
terms of people that he can calm down.
“I’m sorry,” he says, arms folded across his chest. I can tell he means it.
“You shouldn’t be,” I mutter. “But he’s not worth sitting in a police station over.”
What I don’t say is that he could’ve ended up in a hospital. Ferdinand’s not a fighter while Hugh certainly
is. He’s got quite a record getting into scraps at school, more often than not to impress the Tackers as he’s
been trying to get in their group for a while now. Arabella seems to enjoy toying with him—everyone else
can see that he’s never getting in except himself. Point is, Hugh could’ve really messed Ferdinand up, and
that’s not exactly a great way to start the school year.
Ferdinand offers me a small smile. “You’re right. Damn, I still can’t believe that you yelled like that
though. I’ve never seen you riled up.”
“Now you have. It can get pretty ugly.”
“I’ve no doubt.”
It’s strange that this is what makes me feel like we’re getting to know each other now. Ferdinand hooks
his arm over my shoulders and drags me off somewhere. We pass by various figures as the chilly night air
blows our steam away. The blood bulleting through my ears slow down and I uncurl my fists by my sides.
There are no stars overlooking us and the moon is too shrouded to see, but that’s what gives me a sense of
infinity about this place. My parents and me here together, belonging.
I’m a little surprised when we bump into Rodrick by the entrance of the closed amusement rides. He’s
standing by the entrance with his hands in his pockets, eyes darting shadily around him until it lands on
us. He glares at me, then shoots Ferdinand a dark look.
“Why the hell is Edgar here? Just because he-“
“Hey,” Ferdinand says, bowing his head slightly to look Rodrick in the eye. “He’s one of us.”
I don’t like the sound of that. It’s very inclusive, and being included usually means being tormented in
some way when relationships inevitably fall off. Rodrick looks me head-to-toe like he’s seeing someone
completely new. His lips are slightly parted and his expression is rather judgemental, but he eventually
leans back and nods.
“Never would’ve figured,” he says. “I mean, thought you only fucked books or something.”
“Rodrick,” Ferdinand warns.
He shrugs and slaps Ferdinand on the back. “Dude, I’m just pullin’. Chill out and let’s go.”
The three of us head to the very back of the pier where the waters open up again. There’s a cluster of
about a dozen people chatting and eating stuff that looks a lot milder than the oily Fish N Chips, however
unhealthy. Tortilla chips and lemon biscuits and wafers, packets popped and passed around. Instead of
booze most people are drinking Dr Pepper, laughing and smiling, and the only thing they’re getting drunk
on is each other. Even the water looks a little envious in their presence.
Rodrick nudges me in the waist though his eyes are busy scanning the crowd. “Hey, you’d better keep my
secret or I’ll break your legs.”
Ferdinand rolls his eyes. “That’s football-jock for please-don’t-be-mean.”
I nod anyway. Rodrick’s not as discrete as he figures and when I glance at Ferdinand I see the smug look
on his face, thinking the same thing. Rodrick grunts and drifts into the crowd, seeking out this one boy
leaning against the white rails. They’re kissing before either of them utters a single word. On the other
side of the crowd a girl tucks the dyed lilac hair of her companion behind her ear, the looks in their eyes
too magnetic to show anything but love.
“Talk to someone,” Ferdinand says. “I’ve been organizing this for a while now. Trust me, there are only
good people here.”
Ferdinand approaches a woman I’ve seen him around with for a long time, but only on the first floor of
the boy’s dormitory where girls are allowed. She looks like she’s in college and there’s a monochrome
ring on her pinky with a single purple band, dull enough that it doesn’t attract unwanted attention. I think
about how cool they look together, a power couple of sorts. It’s not a crackling lusty gambit between the
two of them. They seem more like the one-in-a-thousand teen couple that’ll end up getting married and
having a stable home life, what with that coffee machine and lawnmower.
I stand by the rails, chin propped on my palm while I watch them. It’s enough for me to be here in silence.
I feel good, even, when I see how free they are in each other’s presence. Like I belong somewhere, even if
it’s just at the back of their small circle. Our circle.
“Edgar? Who would’ve thought.”
Someone hands me an unopened can of Dr. Pepper. I accept it and turn to see Cecilia Cordez, a little put-
off by her presence even though I shouldn’t be. She’s one of the Tackers, recently inaugurated by
Arabella, but I’ve seen her around school enough to know she’s not a generic one. Glancing around
before sneaking in the girls’ washroom, running off to rooftops on Thursdays, reading Rubyfruit Jungle
on her phone (very discretely. The book in her phone had been titled “unknown29” but I was familiar
with the passage she was on). It’s all very Sapphic, and she dates guys, sure, but her eyes linger
elsewhere.
“Are you bi?”
I pull the lid off the Coke, half expecting a torrent of liquid to fly into my face. It doesn’t. In spite of
Cecilia’s allegiance with the Tackers, Ferdinand inviting her means that she can’t be that bad. “Isn’t it
impolite to ask? That’s what the chat group rules say.”
She cocks her head to one side. “You really are stiff. Would it have killed you to respond to our hellos
when you were added?”
I shrug and she groans in response. I mean, shrugging’s what I’m known for so I don’t see why she has
any other expectation.
“I’m just trying to be friendly. Soon we’ll all graduate and go off to other places, so why not get out of
your shell for once?”
“It’s safer,” I say. “Being alone.”
Cecilia twirls around, her shorts riding when she hooks a leg around the bottom of the rail. It’s very
stripper-like. I think she made a joke about becoming a stripper before if med school doesn’t work out.
“You’ll run through your whole life alone, then? And when you’re plugged into a hospital those last days,
shivering from the excruciating pain, who’ll be there?”
“Books. Obviously.”
Cecilia laughs. “Man, you don’t know the first thing about death, do you?”
“Not really.”
“Well, it’s coming,” she drawls. “One day you’ll be at a rave and the next you’ll wake up in an oncology
ward, begging for it all to end.”
“You’ll be a lovely doctor.”
Cecilia laughs again, harder this time, like she’s trying to choke herself. She turns around again and props
her arms on the rail like I’m doing. I think about how the two of us are really similar—it’s the kind of
kinship I got with Ferdinand and his music but it’s different with her, a little too close to home for
comfort. She’s buried under inches of vegan-friendly powder and mascara, trying to hide the ugly thing
inside her. And I get that, I really do.
“Look,” Cecilia says. “I like you. I actually think you’re pretty cool, books up your face and all. Leo’s
right, you’re actually a funny guy.”
“You guys are friends?”
“Bit generous a term. My mom’s a fan of his, says he’s going to be a real star in the art world someday,”
she snorts. “Think she’d opt to have him than me.”
“So you’re jealous.”
“Nah, my mom’s a loon.”
I look pointedly down at the tattoo of a motorbike with skulls as wheels on her calf. “I can see that.”
This really gets her choking on her breath. We talk a while more though I know most of the things she
tells me about herself from word of wind, and there’s not much to say about myself anyway. Still, our
words roll off our tongues with the music, pulsing with the waters, some strange sense of unity tiding me
over. Later she moves on to chat with other girls, still flashing that radical motorbike on her bare legs.
The Dr. Pepper loosens my tongue as two other guys come along, not as probing as Cecilia had been. I
think maybe one of them is trying to sleep with me, but I make it clear that I’m not interested. The second
guy is much more amicable, but my mind drifts off once he starts talking about Britain in the medieval
times. Not the kind of talking that involves lore and legend, but the one with a lot of dates and numbers.
Mercifully, he’s from another school.
Low corny 80s music float in and out of my ears. And I’m happy for Rodrick, even though he threatened
to break my legs. He’s kissing his boy real hard, arms splayed on either side of him on the rail. It looks
better than when he kisses Whitney in school just in front of his bros. I remember seeing his face all
scrunched up in the washroom, washing lipstick off his mouth, but really my heart goes out for Whitney.

Gimley
I’m starting to think that Father was right about the internship.
The work’s a lot like math homework. Very uninspiring. But I suppose it’s better than staying at Joseph’s
all day, not that he’s not a wonderful host. Everything just feels so…lost these days. Not that I’m lost, but
the world itself seems unsolvable. It feels like I’m trying to fit the puzzle pieces of two different game
sets.
Imagine, though, that I’m working with Father. Him taking me to Australia, Italy, getting ready to hop on
an overnight flight at the beck and call of the company. I’d still be godawful and probably as useful as a
coffee mug holder, but I can see Father leaning back on his armchair after a long day, the two of us just
sitting quietly in the midst of stacks and files and the beeping of a pager. Then we’d go to a diner two
blocks down and eat something horrendous like those fried fish nuggets and see how many days in a row
we can stomach it.
It’s not like Jacklyn, CAO of Orbitude, isn’t remarkable at teaching me new things either. In just a couple
days I’ve learned how some of the ledgers and transaction documents are made from raw data, and she
tries to teach me even more advanced things way beyond my head after work hours in a small cubicle
with the glass whiteboard in the corner, though just fifteen minutes or so before she rushes off to oversee
some other task. She has Mother’s whole sprinting thing down pat, that’s for sure.
A few more weeks with her and I’ll rotate to the financial division, but I already have a feeling that it’s
hardly going to be life-changing.
The thing about Orbitude HQ is that it practically contends with The Shard. After work I’ll sort of just
stand in the middle of the ground floor, looking around me at the row of ID scanners that gives access
beyond the sixty-fourth floor, a Starbucks joint on the left next to the receptionist booth and the fern and
Devil’s ivy that spills out of a mini waterfall. There’s also this linoleum pyramid-like structure that tapers
with flora up to its peak, sporting benches that I’ve never actually seen anyone occupy. So because it
looks like someone put a lot of effort in it at some point, I make a point of drinking my coffee there. It’s
really quite dreadful—the coffee, I mean. It tastes like they put five shots more than they usual would at
any other branch of Starbucks.
The place has got a nice skylight. When I look up the tower goes on forever, adorned by the spiralling
escalators and a myriad of other tropical plants that turn it into a functional glass jungle. I don’t think
Urbplan Corp, the CEO and chairman of which is R. Pellinore and will ultimately be G. Pellinore (I
swallow and wipe my mouth with a recyclable napkin, taking a moment to compose myself at the
thought), has half the same grandiloquence as Orbitude. The last time I visited Urbplan Corp was March
last year. The glossy black block seemed like a cage, employees rats on an eternal mill. Somehow Father
manages to keep their productivity high. Probably via minatory the-boss-will-see-you-nows. Boy, does he
make one hell of a boss.
I’ve rented another BMW for my time here, the same shade of faded blue as the last one, just because I
prefer driving over taking the train. London nightlife isn’t much different from that in Newcastle but it’s
infinitely more packed and takes ages for me to get from one point to the other, HQ to my rented condo
included. Not to mention how I’m really chewing up my allowance with food, and the condo, I don’t even
want to know how much Father is paying for it.
The condo room has a fancy partition that leads to the living area. The bookshelves are on the right where
I spend most my time and there’s a low glass table and couch right by the partition that looks out to a
panoramic view of London. I can see the London Wheel in the east if I squint closely, though I always
feel a little silly searching it out because it feels like something a tourist would do while I’m English
through and through. Except for what I’ve read, of course, that’s a jumble of everything.
When I get back from work today I head for a shower then get to work with the books Father sent me. I
cut open a box and begin to put the books out on the floor. I section those alphabetically, open another
box and repeat the process. It’s really starting to look more like a law office here. And sure, it’s a drag
that I’ll eventually have to take the books with me elsewhere and re-do the shelving. But I need this right
now. Things have been kind of raw this year, me landing in the hospital, getting the family on edge and
being a general twat.
Generally malignant thoughts have been plaguing me. I know I ought to stay positive. Mr. Vance says the
good thing about me is that I actually try. Most people just stay in their dark, surly bubbles forever
because that feels more familiar and familiarity breeds comfort. He says that a lot of these people are
beyond him, that they’re so deep in their minds that they can’t see the tree for the woods. Miraculously, a
couple of these people snap out of it. Most don’t and end up in places he prefers not to talk about, though
I’ve never been anywhere near that severity.
Halfway through unpacking, my stomach growls and I shuffle into the kitchen before remembering that
there’s nothing but a tin of Ecuadorian coffee beans sitting on the countertop. I’ve been eating out at the
same Chinese for days now, and the thought of another pork dumpling makes me sick. I wrap myself up
in a pink muffler scarf that makes me feel absurdly galliard, hop into my car and drive to a salad shack
instead. They have this giant billboard hoisted up over the shop, neon and garish even amidst all the other
lights. Fruit juice bigger than you can hold or your money back! How can I resist the allure of that?
After I’ve assembled two plates of salad, a bowl of mushroom soup and jumbo dragon fruit juice on my
table, my phone vibrates, and I take it out thinking that it’s Jacklyn getting back to me on a question
earlier today. Instead it’s an unknown number. A voice message, actually. I don’t much like putting my
entire life on speaker so I rummage for my mono earphone. It’s clipped on the hem of my shirt, snaking
into my pocket, for calls on the road I shouldn’t make but do.
The voice is familiar in the fleeting way of a voice from a dream, the kind that’s forgotten after teeth are
brushed. I remember this one, though, along with the sneeze-inducing scent of old books and engine oil
and hay tucked beneath truck carpets. My slice of avocado hovers in front of my mouth, staked through
with a fork.
Hi. Um. This is Edgar from the other day.
Thanks for paying the repair bill. My Ridgeline came back yesterday and it’s swank as new.
There’s a very long pause. I look down at my phone thinking it’s finished but there’s still a short snippet
playing.
Frabjous is a really messed up word. I’m sorry you feel the need to use it. I heard from Ferdinand that
your family name is Pellinore. Gimley Pellinore? I’m so sorry.
“Oh god.”
I’m breathing so much I can hardly breathe. The single woman with a bob cut sitting in front of me turns
around, her mouth chocked full with lettuce. On her phone there are hundreds of pictures of her son horse
riding across a beach. I figured that she looked kind of sad but I guess I’m a tad more pitiful now, what
with laughing at my phone and drinking pitaya juice.
I put down my fork in an attempt to regain some form of composure. Mother would disagree with
recording voice messages in public spaces especially when the trio behind me are whining about their
mock beef strips and the fan is whirring so loudly above me that I think it’ll fly off and slice someone’s
head clean off. But I haven’t been insulted since grade school, days before people first saw my six foot
four father at a parent-teacher meeting and the crest of his diamond cut nose, and Edgar’s words are
breath of fresh air. I sip some more juice to wet my mouth and say to my phone:
I’m so glad I’m not the only one who feels bad for my name. Pellinore is an axe halfway through the
chicken’s neck but Father wanted to finish the job. You’ll find that he’s the kind of man who likes
finishing jobs.
But I’m not apologetic about frabjous. It’s not right to associate if we’re disagreeable about Carroll.
And anyway I never finished reading the sequel or remember much of the first book at all. Frankly
frabjous was the only thing that stuck out to my decade old brain, and I’ll admit that some childish part of
me wants to seem well-read to Edgar in the way a student wants to impress their teacher. Almost
dizzyingly famished by then, I begin scarfing down my salad. The opprobrium hits me much later when I
get back to the condo. I’ve finished sorting out all the As on my shelves and I’m positive that Alice in
Wonderland had been a library affair. So I look for a copy of the book online, download, and stay up the
rest of the night reading it.
 *
I meet up with Joseph on Thursday night. He lives alone right next to Big Ben, in a flat that his family
owns but never comes to visit. Joseph’s got a lot of family issues, the kind that involves drugs and fist
fights and NHS child protection services, but he’s a very don’t-ask-don’t-tell sort of guy who hates when
people pry. So I largely avoid the issue, but I’ve buzzed his doorbell five times now and the lack of
response is disconcerting.
He does come out eventually with that dopey look on his face. We spend the night catching up at a pub
downtown, talking about my internship and him leaving for Africa tomorrow (hopefully forever, he says
with a scowl) on a volunteering program to look after beluga whales. He was the last guy to stick around
after graduation, sharing my unplanned life dilemma while the rest of our peers tottered on about fresher’s
week at Imperial and King’s and the like. My stomach does a weird nervous flip when he bids me
goodbye and vanishes into the central train station. He’s got his whales, I’ve got my Devil’s ivy, and of
course I knew this was inevitable, but it’s upsetting nonetheless.
I don’t know. I linger in my car for a while before starting a call. Some five rings later the recipient picks
up.
“Gim? What’s up?”
“You think I can come by this weekend?”
There’s silence on the other end, a moment veiled by static and the whooshing of cars driving into
tunnels. Ferdinand’s a law-abiding guy, so he’ll probably pull up by the roadside in a second.
“To town? You’ve settled down now?”
“Yes and yes. I was thinking if you had some time that maybe you can show me around? I was only there
for a day.”
“Don’t think there’s much to see unless you want to go up north. I think there’s some festival there, but
it’s not exactly your thing. Loud music and bikes and all. Maple wanted to go but even- oh. Oh, okay. I’m
seeing it.”
“What?”
He’s snickering on the phone now, too low and bare for me to reprimand him for it. “Nothing, there was
this big ass crow on a tree. But yeah, we should catch up. Listen, we’ll figure out where to go after
brunch. I’ll send you the address of this café I really like. Meet at ten?”
“Sounds good.”
But what I think about when I go to sleep that night, the last one before I flick off my bed light, is what
kind of bird exactly Ferdinand saw.

Edgar
I suck in a deep breath.
It’s happening again. Every month I’ve to deal with this bloody rubbish.
Imagine this world in Ridgeline where there’s the Edgar in the passenger seat and the Edgar in the
driver’s seat. They might both share the same life experiences, an exact overlap of every moment and
feeling in time, but only the Edgar in the driver’s seat is real. Passenger Edgar is a phony, and people who
look in from the outside can’t see him because he just doesn’t exist. Real Edgar has reasoned and fought
with passenger for so long that he can’t see like everyone else no matter how hard he tries, how damn
hard he tries to see only himself, the sole proprietor of the Ridgeline.
It’s mine. The truck’s mine, and I’m not going to let passenger take it away again.
I’m driving on this long strip of road that’s headed nowhere. On either sides of me there are people
rushing around frenetic to reach their destinations but I know that one day they’ll find their lungs are
bated, backs heavy, and they’ll set their suitcases down on the grass and lie next to each other on the road,
tens and hundreds and thousands of human beings pressed against each other like sardines in a can. One
day I’ll suddenly feel tired and sleep with them too but for now I drive, on and on the dreamscape asphalt,
swimming across the sky. And an emerald tilapia floats above us all, each scale a chandelier showering us
in holy green light.
The sardines are for later. I’ve to deal with the bloody rubbish in my truck.
I kick passenger out, slam on the accelerator and run over him. His guts spatter against my windscreen so
I turn the wiper on its highest speed, cleansing it with gore, then I shift to reverse gear and run him over
again. Each successive time I do this his body starts to look more like roadkill, like the dog that almost
got Mom in an accident trying to swerve around. Just a spatter of blood and pus against the steaming
road, bones crushed into the viscous fluids. When it’s all done I put the truck on P, lean back and stare at
the greening gore. A flat spatter of the passenger, formless, non-living. The filigreed section of a tongue
squeaks down the windscreen and licks the hood before falling off.
Everything fucking hurts. My head and my stomach and my calves for no damn reason. I open the truck
door. The Ridgeline is an auto but it’s a manual here, so I turn the gear from three to six, put a rock on the
accelerator and step out in front of the twin headlights. The truck rumbles, engines whirring loud as a
rocket that’s about to launch into space. I lie down to get comfy. Then I’m a spatter too, and an hour later
when you come back to the road you’ll see two Edgar spatters the exact distance away from each other,
mirror images after all.

Edgar
Cecilia and I are both in history (she’s here as an IB kid). She’s the one always contributing to class
discussions while I sleep in the back seat and get textbooks slammed on my table by Mrs. Wendigger.
Since Clacton she’s been approaching me during lunch all week. I usually make quick work of my
muffins and cakes, but Cecilia can be a real talker for all the quiet listening she does in class. It’s like she
has some theory or opinion on everything in the world, from the history of sea monkeys to game theory,
and I figure she can charm her way into med school and probably to heaven if heaven exists. It turns out
she’s a pretty decent person. Kind of left wing, kind of an idiot for talking to me when she should be
hanging out with the Tackers, but decent.
Most nights are lazy ones, spent re-reading the same sentences a dozen times, listening and watching the
boys in the dorms hoot and holler and scuttle off to their rooms, whiplashed by the words of our wart-
faced headmaster (you are the only hope, he says to me like I am destined to save humanity, just because I
lock myself in after rollcall). I’m not always this unproductive but I’ve a good sense for when I need to
put my dick in the dirt, so to speak. On Friday most boarders go home, leaving the handful of full
boarders in tranquil silence.
Saturday mornings are the best. I cleaned up the stuff in my truck prior to sending it to repairs so now it’s
just me and that book of anonymous poets in my bag. I drive to Fleur-De-Lys downtown. It’s a French-
style café, and like most other places in town it’s been doing poorly since its inception. The owner tries to
keep it up, though, sentimental value or something, so it isn’t like one of those really grimy places with
nails sticking out of the floorboards and bugs swirling in minestrone soup. It’s usually just me and this
older guy, and he’s probably the husband of the owner seeing as he never pays.
I read a couple of poems that I’ve gone through this week. I mouth the words out quietly, careful to halt
or delay in time with the punctuation. Each word thrums in my bones. I close my eyes and run my fingers
along the page, hoping each time that the words will fall on my skin and into my flesh. And when I close
the book they’ll be at the forefront of my mind, whisking me away from my own thoughts to those of
others before me.
Suddenly the door bells chime. I don’t look up to see who it is, but while my face is buried behind my
book I give the wall clock a gander. Ten a.m. Usually a rowdy bunch of engineers down the block come
in during lunch, which is when I leave, drive around town and debate about whether I should visit Uncle.
They’re never this early.
Their low chatter starts to creep under my skin. A coffee machine whirs behind the counter. The old
husband gets into a hacking fit and someone makes a really exaggerated shushing sound that’s unlikely
aimed at the old man. But if it is, that might be why he coughs even harder. The traffic’s getting iffy
outside too as a series of honking noises pierce the pristine calm of my morning. It’s always like this with
the engineers, bringing the cacophony of the world with them and turning the genteel place into a frat
party.
“I’m telling you, he looks really pissed off.”
“Then get him to join us. Just go.”
I throw my book down on the table and announce across the room, “Ferdinand, what the fuck.”
The look at each other, eyes wide as moons. It’s Ferdinand and the frabjous guy, who ought to be in
Glasgow. The old man wipes tears out of his eyes with a snotty handkerchief and the waitress walks over
him, blocking the boys from my sight.
Normally I’d stick around to see if the noise passes, but I decide to pack up before Ferdinand and Gimley
can get me to join them. I think maybe I’ll visit Leo’s gallery show this afternoon, the one that no one
except Cecilia’s mom ever goes to and he gets really depressed about on Mondays. I don’t know why Leo
bothers with art, it’s like all it does is make him slit his wrists.
By the time I’ve strapped my bag down and I get off my chair, Ferdinand is right up in my face, cow’s
eyelashes and wisps of brown hair curled behind his ears. He’s holding the drinks that the waitress had
brought them, a tall one that’s foaming viciously and a mini cup of lethal expresso. Gimley stands next to
the window, blinking owlishly to the beat of an inaudible Morse message.
“Ferdinand. We’re cool, but I’m not interested in another party. Really. Maybe March next year, if you’re
having it then.”
“No,” Ferdinand says. He slides both his and Gimley’s drinks onto the small table, taking up almost all of
the space with his arms. “I’m not here to egg you on another party—yet. Gim’s come all the way from
London this morning and I figured it’d be nice if we had brunch together.”
He gestures to my seat. I squint at him, simmering as he nods at Gimley who takes the seat opposite to
mine and Ferdinand sits between us to complete the triangle. I never understood why these high tables are
surrounded by three stools when there’s clearly only enough arm space for one person. Likely why the
place is going under.
“Cassava cakes?” Gimley asks, gazing at the small sweets on my plate. “Isn’t this place French?”
Ferdinand hands him the food menu that he’s looking over. There’s a huge extension on the back written
in barely legible scrawls, listing various definitely non-French cuisine. He looks at me very seriously,
“There’s something called acorn bomb on it.”
I’m smiling so I put my head down and pretend to look at my shoe laces. “It’s really good, trust me. I
come here every week. Though it’s not like you don’t know that, seeing as you stalked me here.”
“That’s a little brutish. Ms., we’ll have an acorn bomb.”
“And I’d like to have the quiche pie, please,” Gimley adds. He’s wearing that same deodorant that smells
like mint thrown in a furnace.
It’ll take ages for the food to arrive. I think I’ve seen the chef sitting at the back of the kitchen before,
eyes bloodshot in the way only a drunkard can be. Somehow, though, his food’s always spectacular—
even intoxicating, though I figure it’s best that my two companions here aren’t aware of that. Gimley’s
eyes wander all over the place, from the tacky wallpaper to the ixora bushes outside where two tables are
set out on a porch and sheltered under an awning. The street’s in plain view, though there’s nothing that
warrants all his obsessive focus. Ferdinand downs his expresso, not paying any heed to Gimley’s nerves. I
have to kind of kick him on the shin to get his attention.
“Man, I’m so worried for uni.”
Gimley snaps to attention at his words. “Weren’t you top in your year or so?”.
“Not the grades I’m worried about,” Ferdinand mutters. “The whole talking thing—“
“I’ll ride kangaroos before you have talking troubles,” I grumble. Ferdinand rolls his eyes, but he’s
smiling.
“So Gim,” Ferdinand nods at my withered book. “You want to ask our local lit professor anything?”
“Not terribly,” Gimley says, a little too quick to not be forced. He sputters, “I mean, I haven’t got any
knowledge to be asking questions.”
Sunlight pours in through the window, gilding the fringes of his hair. It’s all dry and stiff, though, without
any sign of Ferdinand’s wispy attractiveness, and his bangs are gelled up in the same way it’d been when
he was by the side of the road. His eyes dart rabidly back and forth as if desperate to be somewhere else,
nerves are out of proportion with the situation. It’s not like he’s late for another plane, right?
“If you have somewhere to go, just go,” I say. It comes out a little harsh because of my rusty morning
voice.
“N-no,” he practically exclaims this, the sheen on his slick hair bobbing with him as he throws his hands
on the table. I lean back, glancing at his square palm, square fingernails, square everything. Ferdinand
explodes with laughter and Gimley takes his hands off the table like it’s made of hot iron. I’m starting to
think he’s got a couple loose screws in his head, maybe from jetlag, possibly from having Pellinore as a
last name.
“We’re not holding you custody.”
“I’m not being held custody,” Gimley says, at the same time Ferdinand snorts, “All saints.”
A monstrously loud motorcycle roars to life outside. I whip my head in its direction, KINGSMEN
ESSEX, and when I turn back it’s to the deafening crash of a chair, Gimley having fallen off. Ferdinand
and I both stare at him for a moment. In fact, I think the waitress and the old man and a trio of engineers
coming through the door are all staring at him. Then Ferdinand does what’s obviously appropriate: he
clutches his guts and bawls his eyes out. I don’t quite get the joke, but I suppose falling out of chairs isn’t
something a guy with the power to say they’ll send the bill to me does, at least not in public.
I feel kind of bad for Gimley now. I’m not arse, or at least I don’t try to be one, so I walk around
Ferdinand’s chair and help pull him up. He brushes invisible lint off his chinos and I notice his loafers,
the shiny new leather kind that Dad would only ever buy for me if I die tragically before I’m twenty. My
hand is kind of a ruddy brown against his. His knuckles are bloody and his face red, enough that it looks
as if someone’s slapped his face a hundred times over. The only way Rodrick would ever get like this is if
he’d been forced to run twenty laps under the afternoon sun.
I push my plate to him. “Cassava cake?”
Ferdinand tears up all over the table.
The food arrives, almost a mercy. The scarlet peppering Gimley’s cheeks vanish just as soon as it’s here
and Ferdinand gets the fright of his life when he pokes a fork into the acorn bomb and the odour of
Taiwanese stinky tofu goes right up his nostrils. He gags. I give Gimley a waggish smirk without even
thinking about it and he relaxes, grateful that Ferdinand’s now fool of the show. The waitress comes over,
vaguely apologetic as she tells us to keep it down. I look around and see how vivacious the shop is, full of
noise and people and life. Having friends and my anonymous poems stowed away is a nice change.

Gimley
Yeah, so our first encounter didn’t go so well.
It was even worse when I decided to head back to London right after brunch. When Ferdinand met me at
the train station that morning he was going on about how we could visit Colchester castle, not that he’s
the kind of guy who likes things like ancient castles and gardens, but he knows I have an appreciation for
architectural sights and he’s nothing if not a fabulous host.
I couldn’t do it. I probably could’ve, actually, but my heart was jackrabbiting against my ribs and I’m
going to die I’m going to die kept looping incessantly in my head while I decimated my quiche into
smithereens. I had enough experience with it to know I wasn’t really going to die, but then I was thinking
of how stupid I looked smashing the quiche and a bout of nausea hit me and everything went downhill
from there.
It couldn’t have looked bad though. I smiled a little wider than usual, but it couldn’t have been glaringly
obvious as I retained it for long enough to say goodbye to Ferdinand and Edgar. Then I bit my left cheek
hard enough to draw the rusty tang of blood, harder again on the other until all I could taste was the
metallic release. Then I called a cab to the train station and slept on the journey back to London.
When I got back to my condo I ran some five kilometres on the hamster machine and fell asleep again on
the kitchen isle. I had this dream about the Jabberwocky growing out of my tongue. There was a looking
glass in front of me and my face was so bloody red it looked as if my skin had peeled off. Upon waking
up, I resolved that Edgar was right about Lewis Carroll and that I loathe him after all.
*
We correspond a lot, mostly at night after I’m done with work and him with school. After Carroll we
jump to various other poets since he seems to prefer them over stories and dramas. The only authors I
know to any depth are Thomas Hardy and Shakespeare back from GCSE, but I quickly learn that he
doesn’t care about depth. At least not in the conventional sense. We talk about Keats and Plath; he quotes
stanzas and describes them with words like “poxy” and “super sad” and “ugh”.
But even though we talk a lot, most of what I know about him are from earlier conversations with
Ferdinand. First thing being that he’s a gravely private individual who, for the years Ferdinand has seen
him around school, has never been seen hanging out with anyone. Not even for projects, during which
Ferdinand says he works on whatever job his groups leave for him. He says Edgar might’ve been a
transfer student but that no one’s very sure, and anyway it’s not like he’s exactly the star rugby player of
the school.
I think it’s a shame. I never thought I could laugh so hard over text. On the nights our conversations are
slow or he fails to respond, I sift through my bookshelves, starting from the one closest to the panoramic
window. I work up instead of downwards so it goes from E to A, J to F and so on, climbing up my ladder
to reach the top rows, setting classics and non-fiction and unholy romance paperbacks with titles like My
Werewolf Boyfriend and Neighbourhood Jock from Father’s library because he’s impossible about them.
The hours fly by as I read the first page of every book, pushing my bangs up and rolling my sleeves up
when the air goes stagnant. Soon books are piled all around the foot of the bookshelves and I sit on the
ladder with my elbows propped on my legs. I gaze at the city outside, a panoramic grey slate, lights from
the buildings flickering skywards like remnants of fallen stars.
I think about how Edgar would like it if I take him to my house and fix us up with two ice martinis, olive
sticks through toothpicks and a tizzy more lemon squeeze than usual. We’ll read books by the low glass
table till dawn with only a window to separate us from the outside world. I run my thumb over the pages
of a biography about Edvard Munch and think, yes, he’d like that a lot.
*
Next week rolls along. I’m peering down at my phone in a lecture room while some bigwig is going on
about the nature, methodologies and goals of business management.
Edgar: Hi Gimley. So I went back to the café and they gave me your driving license. You’ll
probably want this back.
I stare for a while, uncomprehending. Then I’m shoving my hands in my pockets, searching for my wallet
and the cards all tucked into one of the open pouches. I swear. The lecturer glares at me for a split second
before getting on with goal number three and I slowly tuck my wallet back in my trousers. I can feel
Jacklyn’s eyes pinned on my shoulders. She went to university with Mother and they still keep in contact,
so I suppose I ought to put my phone away too. But all I can think about is how stupid I am.
Gimley: When can I get it from you?
He replies that he’ll be in his dorms the whole of Saturday. Ferdinand, who’s been informed of my
ridiculous butter finger slip-up, lets me know closer to the date that he’s going to Cambridge to visit his
girl and that I’ll have to correspond with Edgar myself.
Our meeting is much milder this time around. I sit on the waiting couch while the warty headmaster, face
folded almost like stacks of pancake, makes an announcement calling Edgar to come down. Edgar patters
down the stairs, dressed in an intense navy jumper that’s so garish that the only place my gaze can rest is
his face and his eyes.
He’s pretty. Not beautiful like Ferdinand, who’s broad, willowy and tan in a deliberate summer way.
Edgar’s olive skin makes me wonder where his family came from, a distant land that roils with sun and
heat, and he has this floof over his left eye that makes me think nevermore. Short, silent, a mini packet of
Oreos in human form. There’s a hue of sadness to his eyes, though, the way he looks down at his feet or
averts eye contact so often. It’s not like world ending depression. Just more of a perpetual dissonance, a
disinclination to participate for fear of its consequences.
“Here,” he holds my license so that my ugly, deer-in-the-headlights look stares back at me. I’d been
rushing before a flight again to a distant relative’s birthday and it’s got none of Mother or Father or Lily’s
composure for that matter. I ought to get that changed into something more proper.
“So why do you know so much about lit?” Edgar says. I’m genuinely surprised that he’s asking me a
question. “Business isn’t exactly its companion subject.”
“I read a lot as a kid.” He starts making his way out the door and I sidle up to him. Maybe it’s the way he
blends seamlessly in with the trees, his sneakers squeaking against the washed out red tiles and his unruly
hair tossing in the breeze that makes him look so honest and real, enough that I have to confess, “I’m not
very literary at all, if I’m honest. I like any book. Contemporary, mainstream, the like.”
His lip twitches and he glances from the thin trees planted between the windows to me. “I’m aware.”
I smile back. “Was it that obvious?”
“To me, sure. But I bet you’d have gotten away with it with anyone else.” Edgar sticks his hands in his
pockets and looks down at what I believe is one of the dorm’s housecats, a huge, fuzzy Norwegian Forest.
It’s a ferocious white thing pawing urgently at his slacks. “This is the housecat of the female dorms, but
she’s always hanging out here—big pervert. So why do you talk to me? I’m sure you’re busy, Sir
Pellinore.”
“Count on you to pull out Arthur’s knights.”
“Did you know that Pellinore bested him? High-King Arthur, felled to his knees.” Edgar picks up the cat
and hands me the entire thing. It looks somewhat sedate, but I step away slightly.
“No, thank you. I’m not very good with animals,” I push my sleeve up and show him a faint scar near my
elbow. It’s surrounded by a conglomerate of haphazard scratches that might or might not fade with time.
“What happened to you? Looks like a mess.” Edgar frowns. He puts the cat down and it ambles languidly
towards the entrance of the dorm.
“The mess was what happened afterwards. My Mother had the cat put down. It hadn’t been ours, even. It
was just a stray that I played with.”
“That seems a little excessive.”
Edgar stops walking. He gestures to an alcove furnished with a wicker swing and surrounded by a bunch
of potted bonsai, miniature leaves still scattered on the pots’ ceramic rims. I imagine they’re the only way
the staff can stay sane while giving pastoral care to a hoard of adolescent boys.
“Excessive is a euphemism,” I say, sour. I think I might’ve sat on a wet spot on the swing, and I try not to
let it show on my face. “She…means well though, truly. I love her, I do. It’s just very complicated.” I
laugh, acutely aware of my arms hovering by my sides and me being unsure where to put them. Edgar
leans against the side of the swing, watching me intently while a car drives by.
I’m thinking of the morning when it happened. My driver was loading my bags into his car, prepared to
send me to Grandma’s for the holidays. I’d woken up bright and early before the crack of dawn in my
excitement. I rushed out to the winding gardens of our estate, decadent with spiral pillars, pavilions
spangled in blue and gold dust, an architectural masterpiece privy only to our family. I’d laid down by the
hawthorn bushes, glaring red berries bobbing in the breeze, when a scraggly bald cat limped by looking ill
and diseased. I got on my knees, clicked my tongue, and it crept towards me nervously. Then Mother had
screamed and so had I. To this day I’m not sure whether my bleeding elbow had come after or before.
“Gimley,” Edgar says.
He reaches out to me and runs his fingers across the scar. They’re unusually calloused for a guy who
spends all his time reading books. His skin on mine jars me out of my seat for a moment, my senses
springing from my body in all directions. I’ve never heard my name in his voice before either, his low,
dreamlike tone, and I’m suddenly very aware of the brick wall next to me, rubicund against the gentle
bonsais snipped into a mini forest around us. Edgar and I are two giants nestled within them, big hearts
and tight throats and feet hovering centimetres above the baking ground. There are only a few cars parked
in the area while the rest of the residential area is stuffed with woodland save maybe the security post,
where a guy with a nametag that says PETE is probably flipping the pages of a newspaper, sipping coffee,
glancing back through a frosted window at our two silhouettes.
My left temple tingles, anticipant. It hits me that I don’t know the first thing about him, if he plays any
sports, what his family’s like, nothing. He is an enigma.
“You’re a lot different.”
Different from what? I think. From who?
But the charge in the air vanishes in a single, careless trip, invisible wires tightened. Edgar folds his arms
on his lap and turns away, the curve of his cheek catching a shaft of brilliant yellow light. His eyelashes, a
furtive flash beneath downy black hair. “Would you like some food while you’re here?”
“Sure,” I blurt. “Where? I can drive, if you’d like.”
“With what, the headmaster’s bicycle?” Edgar laughs. I’m burning up again. “No one drives my truck
except me. Now come on. I hope you aren’t too bad with goats.”
“Goats?”
There’s this wicked glint in his eye. He hops off the swing, leaving me to rock back and forth a moment
before I snap out of my thoughts and run up to him. He signs out with the headmaster, starts his truck and
we wave goodbye to Pete as we leave his school. Ruby even fixed my radio, Edgar says, and he plays a
local station that leaves me wondering why the only audial mediums I consume are updates on stock
markets and podcasts about the economy. It’s so habitual that half the time I shut my mind off while
they’re droning, and that, honestly, is no better than not switching it on at all.
On the way out I notice how the massive football field is strung up with poles adorned with lights and
garlands and a banner that says 22ND ANNUAL INTERSCHOOL FIELD GAMES. The jagged letters are
painted in a vibrant blue that a blind monster might’ve done with one gnarly finger. Edgar notices me
watching but doesn’t say anything. He rolls down both our windows as the school whooshes past, the
wind skiving past us reminding me of that first ride he gave me to the airport. The sun burnishes grass
with silver stripes of light, flashing like liquid mercury as Edgar speeds past. The nadirs of the hilly range
in the distance rise into the sky, breasts kissing the sun. It’s bright these days even with the neck of late
summer looming over us. A sudden pang of fear hits me, the anticipation of an end. Edgar, this shadowy
creature stark against daylight, cradled in a wreath of the cold bleak seasons. Tendrils around his throat
will sail him back to his solemn realm. Gone, for all summers to come.
*
Edgar drives me to a place tucked in nowhere. The closest grocery store is a half hour drive away and the
only neighbour it has is a stray pack of dogs that come around whimpering for scraps every week. It’s
quite exciting being on a farm, admittedly. I’ve never seen one in my life that’s not black and white in a
geography text book or a documentary. This one’s a whole proper farm, flanked by a sea of barley crops,
paddocks littered by Holsteins and golden brown Ayrshire cows flicking their tails. The noise of chickens
clucking in the barn is muffled. The wooden building has pockmarks all over that give it a vintage farm
vibe, though I can still smell the noxious VOC fumes off the newly minted red walls.
The goats, apparently, are Betty and George. George is very mild-mannered. Betty, not so. I’m guessing
this is why Edgar feeds George a liquorice stick as we head into a thatched, old-fashioned cottage built
out of stone. Betty bleats angrily next to him.
The man who greets us at the door of the cottage is old in a way reminiscent of veteran poppies and ships
set ablaze on frigid arctic nights. My eyes wander to a navy officer’s cap pinned between the stone wall
like an off-white ghost. There’s an eerie smattering of darts right in the centre of the weathered cap. He’s
not very tall, but his insidious glare gives me some pause.
“Who’re you?” he has this wolfish voice that makes me think him and Father would along swell. I can see
them across a table, chuckling while they pass a gun with one bullet in the cartridge between each other.
Your turn.
“A friend,” Edgar says. The man’s face softens and the arrow crease between his brows smooth out,
placated as Edgar ducks under the arm he’s using to block the entrance.
“You’ve never had a friend,” the man says. He’s looking me down from my wind-trussed hair to my
loafers, drenched tragically in mud.
“I’m friends with everyone in school. I’m like, jock number one,” Edgar turns around, placing a hand on
his hip with unusual sass. “Come on, Uncle. Lay off ‘im.”
He does. For a guy as territorial as that, I figure he must be real close to Edgar to oblige without further
interrogation. The interior of the cottage is modest, stripped of most frills and frolics of modern homes.
There’s a hearth in the middle for those long winter days, a portable electric heater next to a small TV,
and a yellow carpet leading to the kitchen that’s a lot more comfortable to toe than it looks.
Edgar curls up on one of the chairs and his uncle looks around. There’s only one other armchair and a
stool that he picks up, puts next to Edgar, and gestures me to. I sit more for fear of my life than anything.
His uncle seems satisfied by this as he trails off to the kitchen, switching on the TV on the way. It’s
automatically on mute. I guess silence is heredity for them.
“Cranberry pie please,” Edgar calls out. His uncle replies with a non-committal grunt.
I find myself embarrassingly enjoying the show. It’s an old 60s program about the wild west, complete
with sound effects that are a few seconds too late, train robberies and spangled boots that make me feel
better about my caked loafers outside. I don’t realize that his uncle’s been watching me over my shoulder
under the ding of an oven echoes and I turn around to see him hovering by the wall, approval glinting in
his eyes that I’m enjoying the program.
The cranberry pie does get made. For all the spooky barrenness of the house, the darts and the 60s
program, Edgar’s uncle is an adroit baker. We have it from the aluminium cask itself, pre-sliced into eight
pieces handed around on pieces of tissue but with heavy steel forks. For the unassuming simplicity of the
cake, it’s twisted with a citron hint, sourness that makes it quite heavenly. Next to me, Edgar wiggles his
foot in contentment.
After the meal, Edgar sets his book down and stretches, arms pointed skywards. I catch the sliver of skin
as his jumper rides up. His uncle clears his throat just as Edgar’s mouth parts to yawn and Edgar jerks,
gluing himself back against the chair.
I give him a weird look. “What?”
His eyes are pinned to the wooden floor next to me. “Nothing.”
Afterwards Edgar takes me out to the back of the farm where the crops are. I’m still thinking about what
happened back in the cottage as an idle craving whispers in the back of my mind, more (I’d really wanted
to have another slice, but it would’ve been terribly rude). Aside from the obvious social reclusion and his
eye dropping habits, it occurs to me that there’s something strange about Edgar that transcends the idea of
strange. A venture into vastly different waters I’ve no place dipping in.
Edgar doesn’t seem to notice though. He walks around the perimeter of the cropland, glancing at the sky
that’s a wafer of orange-purple-blue. Then he just kind of sits there, waiting for something.
I dodge a swarm of mayflies just hovering in the air and sit on the ground next to him. Edgar stares out
between two planks of the fence, squinting even though it’s not bright out anymore. There’s this splotch
of cranberry on the notch of his lip.
“Are you going to visit next week?”
I shake my head. “I’m working overtime. There’s a business in south London that I’m attending.”
He looks down at the sandy dirt path between his crossed legs. His chest rises and falls visibly and his
breaths come out laboured, more than it should for driving a truck, reading and eating some cranberry pie.
“Something the matter?”
I think I’m staring too hard. Edgar pinches the collar of his jumper and hunches over, shaking his head
just slightly.
“You look sick,” I insist, my voice wavering a little. His jumper’s slid off his shoulder a little and I notice
the black undershirt he’s wearing, normally appropriate for the cold wet climate. Not today, though.
“I helped out this morning, under the sun and all,” he sighs. “I mean those dumb interschool games. They
weren’t going to get everything done in time.”
“Poor health?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
But it’s exactly that. A breeze comes our way and everything dims suddenly, like a curtain’s been drawn
across the horizon. I reach out and put an arm around him, pausing while he stares at me, breath caught in
his throat. A good beat passes before he turns away, finally admissible to an inhalation against my grasp. I
help him stand; his arm slips backward and I grab a spot above his waist, ribs between the webs of my
fingers.
Edgar shoots me a mad look and pushes away with surprising strength. He scrambles against the wooden
fence, face turned away from whatever I’d done. Whatever? My mind winds backwards, hurtling through
what had occurred in that fraction of a second. The delicate nature of his frame, a lumpy bone. A
permanent wedge between us.
We return to the cottage. A surge of adrenaline pushes Edgar through the doorway and into one of the
darkened corridors that I dare not approach. Edgar’s uncle is still sitting on the armchair while he goes, a
contemplative chip of Doritos between his smashed-up fingers. I think for a moment that he might walk
up to me with his lumbering arms across his chest but all he does is finish the chip, wipe his hand with a
napkin and switch off the TV. He goes in after Edgar, and a rush of relief washes over me.
I go to the kitchen, permission be damned, and concoct a pitcher of slightly iced water. Just a few droplets
of water trickle on the outer glass surface, running together as they snake down my wrist. I leave it by the
corridor and wait by the hearth for a while. By the time I hear footsteps and turn around, the pitcher is
gone, leaving only a ring of water on the wooden floor.
Much later that day after I’ve returned to London I throw myself on the couch and lie back against the
fancy partition, gazing down at a world that’s a lot more lacklustre than I remember it. I message Edgar
with some reservation, not really expecting to hear back, but he replies an hour later that everything’s all
right. So I say the only thing I can: your uncle’s a spectacular chef, and toss around for a few good hours
that night thinking about what I’d done, or rather not knowing what that was.

Edgar
Some days I’m in the passenger seat.
I know I’m the owner of this Ridgeline. I know that it was manufactured in 1991, purchased by one Lina
Kim who used it for hiking until her patella slipped and she sold it to my uncle. Passenger Edgar knows
this too, and the problem is, not one of us knows it better than the other.
This month is really bad. Some are better—more are. It passes, it passes, it passes, I tell myself, but I
wish I’m the one who’s passing. Everyone will be sardine packed on a road someday, so I mean if at this
very moment a knife flew right through my window and lodged itself in my brain, I can accept that. It’s
better than limping around at the town square, naked and disoriented and seizing up in police custody. It’s
better than putting weird drugs in my body, disintegrating into a slurring lettuce that has to be shut down
by white coat men, Ferrari keys clinking in their pockets the last sound I hear. And like Cecilia said, it’s
better than having crabs rake the skin from my bones. It really is.
I know for a fact that the crabs are already in my belly. If, say, I go to the hospital this afternoon and wait
at the outpatient unit and the doctor comes up to me and I tell them, I have something in my belly. I need
you to cut it out, they will run me through a giant machine and card through the results. Hello kid, no,
there’s nothing wrong with you. You are a perfectly healthy, happy human being. I will then beg them to
do more scans. Radio, MRI, PET, because I can feel the pincers inside snipping me up into minced beef.
But they’ll say, please exit left, and I’ll be all scraped knees and bruised fists, tears soaping up the Clorox
tiles.
The only refuge is the green tilapia I’ve propped on my belly, soothing the pinching pains. I lie there
naked and look down and see the tilapia gawping back at me, eyes looney big, pupils fat smudges of ink.
Anyway, I take three or four pills of aspirin and go to school. I sit through all of my classes because I’m
very good at pretending to be healthy. Maybe not the happy part—that’s just too much to ask from
anyone. I keep taking aspirin throughout the day, falling off during lunch, getting scolded by some of my
teachers when I zip out. During the free period after lunch I coil up on the beanbag in the library and
don’t read, and I get away with it because our school librarian Samantha is the only manifestation of
benevolence in our world.
There are two books on the floor next to me when I wake up, plain covers but scandalous titles. I glance
up at the clock. It’s three p.m. and I’ve probably missed all my noon classes, which I’m definitely not
sorry for. This isn’t the reason why I’m rubbish at school, by the way, it occurs very occasionally and
most of the time I’m lucky enough that it happens only on the weekends.
I toss the books aside, almost acerbic with hate. Garbage.
Mr. Grimshaw usually hangs around in his office during after school hours, the first room on the
dormitory’s ground floor so he can eye anyone who passes. He catches me limping, probably half-dead
after crossing the garlanded football field to get here (if it’s imperative to know, the annual games was a
huge success. That’s what I was told at least). I don’t make eye contact and I keep hoping that he won’t
come out to bug me, but I think that’s what headmasters are paid to do.
“Not feeling well?”
“I can manage,” I say, and the thing about Mr. Grimshaw is that he listens.
“If you need the nurse, let me know,” he watches me head up the stairs before slinking back to his office
room. There’s a younger kid splayed out on his couch, grumbling and groaning and I’m almost glad for
how noisy this place can get sometimes because of troublemakers like him.
The rooms are distributed such that there are always two boarders in one. I’m the only exception to the
rule, thanks to my aunt’s MD. Each year Mr. Grimshaw sorts out the room plans, he always makes sure
there’s one spot arranged solely for me. And I think the parents of other boarders have complained about
this before, but his warty face probably gets them off his chest.
My old school, St. Anglus High, was never this accommodating. It was a single sex school because my
parents had both gone to all-boys and all-girls when they were children, and it wasn’t that they had an
objection towards mixed gender institutions more than that they were following familiarities. I didn’t
have to be boarding there to be miserable every second of the day.
I think it’s not bad to delve in those bad memories and remember a time when they were very real hells. It
gives everything some perspective. I toss my bag onto a chair and lean slowly back on my bed, sinking
into the mistress and the floor and the earth. It’s probably Leo knocking on my door because some
Thursday afternoons we go back to campus and sneak around rooftops so he can get a good look at the
girls—for painting, obviously. I’m not into girls and he’s not into anything but turpentine so neither of us
count as perverts, and they don’t really do anything but chat and eat sliced fruit anyway.
“Edgar.”
It’s Ferdinand.
I peer under the door to see slivers of black and red sneakers slipping around for a bit. He knocks again,
all persistent. “Edgar, can you open up?”
I wonder how many people he’s already told. How many people he told on that day he saw me getting out
of the pool at four a.m., eyes red-rimmed, teeth tingling with chlorine. To this day I have no idea what on
earth he was doing there. Actually, I think he was in the swim team back then, tending to vanish during
the afternoons because of meets and competitions and coming back to the last fifteen minute of class with
his hair all soaked and his eyes droopy with sleep. He’s taken it down a notch because between that,
Oxford and the meet-ups he organizes, he’s spreading himself too thin. In truth I shouldn’t have been in
that pool. I was the rule-breaker, and I suppose I got what I deserved.
“It got out,” Ferdinand says, his voice harder than I’ve ever heard it. “Rodrick and I need to talk to you.
That goddamn Arabella—“
My heart slams against my chest. It got out. I figured there was something odd about the way the Tackers
were whispering in the cafeteria today, glancing at me while they giggled. Cecilia hadn’t been around.
She knew and she couldn’t face me.
The taste of aspirin lingers in the back of my throat. I kind of choke on it, bile mingled with spit, but I get
up and open the door. Rodrick has his head down as he hovers by the entrance. I’ve never seen him like
that before, the guilt plastered all over his face, notches on his bottom lip from repeated gnawing.
I look at Ferdinand. His eyes fall anywhere but on me.
“You told?” I ask. When he doesn’t respond, I shove him back and a crunching noise rings out as he hits
my study table. My bag falls out of my chair, thumping hard against the floor. “You fucking told.”
“I asked,” Rodrick says, his voice defeated. He closes the door behind him and turns the lock. Outside,
two of the younger kids are going door-to-door asking about some shirt they’ve lost. “After Clacton, I
started paying more attention to you. I figured it out myself and asked him, and you know Ferdinand, he
can’t lie for shit.”
“So where does Arabella come in? The whole Tacker gang’s in it, are they?”
“We don’t know for sure,” Ferdinand sighs. He’s wearing this grey muscle T that just looks so
inappropriate for this situation. It’s sickening to look at, him, at Rodrick, at everything.
“She came up to me today after break and asked me about you,” Rodrick says. “She was going to call me
out if I didn’t tell her.”
That’s not fair, I think. Not fair that I’ve to pay the price because you don’t flirt discreetly enough. But
life’s not fair and saying that would’ve been far too petulant no matter how much I wanted to. Cecilia.
Arabella must’ve been seeing her around me so often that she decided I’d be her new damn scapegoat. I
step back and sit on the edge of my bed, just kind of staring at the two guys by the doorway. It’s my own
fault for getting involved in Ferdinand’s group. Things are always a mess when you get involved with
people.
“Get out.”
Rodrick leaves. Bless that one ounce of sensibility in his bones. Ferdinand tugs my bag upright, props it
by the leg of the table and sits on my chair, his elbows placed on his knees. He sucks in a long, winded
breath and lets it out between gritted teeth. “It’ll pass.”
I choke out a laugh. “Yeah. No big deal. It’s not like she can threaten you, after all.”
He narrows his eyes. My fingers and toes are getting cold from the AC. My stomach curdles, on and on as
the crabs continue to crawl and pinch and rip me to shreds. Everything hurts.
“You don’t mean that. I promise I’ll fix this somehow.”
“Great. Now get out of my room.”
When Ferdinand’s gone I shut the window, pull the curtains and crawl under the sheets. I’m thinking of
Gimley for some reason, as if there’s anything that spoiled arse can do to remedy this situation. Rodrick
could’ve kept quiet and let me walk into my own grave blindfolded. Telling me was the best thing he
could’ve done but I hate him for it anyway. Him and Ferdinand and Gimley and the thousands of sideway
crabs inside me.

Gimley
For weeks, I don’t get to visit Edgar once.
I’ve just been too busy, with the internship picking up into full gear and losing sleep over Devlin coming
home to celebrate Thanksgiving. Devlin’s the older brother I’ve always envied, not because he’s started
his own multinational company and cashed in billions of dollars or anything. In fact, one look at his
Belstaff Grandsen Jacket and his monster Harley-Davidson is telling that it’s quite the opposite. His
passport is full of stamps from New York to California to Australia, back-to-back travel as he hops the
classiest bars throughout the world, and there’s always the smell of beer or cigarette on him. He’s kind of
the family leech, and the thing about him is that he embraces the title, pompadours and sparkling
champagne and all. If I had half his balls I bet I could throw all my oxy into the Thames, watch them plop
like candy into the waters.
Before Thanksgiving is in full swing, Devlin says he’s coming to visit London for a while. Not really me
in particular rather than my condo. He’s locked in eternal warfare with Mother and because she’s the
Pellinore family’s Minister of Finance the cash flow’s been knotting up for him. What he spends is still
way more than what a guy of his age and occupation (professional wine taster or bike model, he doesn’t
update us very often) should, but we can always count on Devlin to transcend the realm of rationality.
My doorbell buzzes while I’m on my Mac, doing some research to answer a list of questions that Jacklyn
prepared for me. I get off the kitchen isle and take a deep breath before letting him in.
“Hey, little bro,” he chirps as he kicks his black boots off, his accent such an amalgamation of culture I
wouldn’t have been able to tell that he’s British. One of his boots skids and flies into the room, thumping
against the foot of an armchair that I’ve never sit in before. It scuffs the pristine leather. “Whoops.”
And here he is, Devlin James Pellinore in all his hedonistic glory. Where I’m fairly unassuming Devlin is
tall and slim, the exact replica of Father taken a wrong turn down decision lane.
“Hot damn,” Devlin exclaims. He shoots up and ruffles my hair. “You’ve really grown, kiddo. You’re
still a dwarf, but like, bigger now. You might even fit in one of my jackets from when I was thirteen.”
“Uh, I appreciate the compliment?”
“Good sport.”
Devlin saunters into my room. He kicks his socks off as he goes into the kitchen and I scramble to follow
him, fearful that he’ll set the entire complex on fire the second I look away. For all of Devlin’s
extravagance, going around the world on his perpetual Sabbath has made him very independent. I’m not
surprised to see him pulling drawers, searching for pots and pans to presumably cook something. He
opens the fridge and frowns.
“Where the hell’s the food? Don’t you eat, kid?”
“I eat out. I don’t know how to cook.”
“Eat out every day?”
I grimace. “It’s not like you didn’t when you were younger.”
Because of our crazy schedules, eating out is a norm in our family. Mother used to cook for fun, but it’s
like very year she gets sucked deeper and deeper into work and money and twenty second takeaways.
Devlin’s just being an ass to me because he can.
“No, that’s not going to work out,” he looks beyond my shoulder. My blood goes cold when I realize that
he’s looking at my Mac and all my scribbled papers. Hours of work. Each footstep he takes towards it is
sets an explosion off in my mind. I run up and try to stop him, but he just bumps into me and I get
chucked aside by the slight angling of his body and the sheer momentum of his weight.
“Devlin,” I warn, but my voice trembles. “You’re in my terf now. I rented this place, and you are staying
in my residence out of the kindness of my heart. Father and Mother don’t even know—“
He shoots this derogatory noise out between his lips. Ash-stained spittle sprays onto my cheek. He hops
onto one of the chairs and squints at my laptop screen. “A line graph? Dear brother, you stop needing
these when you hit primary school.” He closes the tab. And every other tab for that matter. I take a deep
breath and tell myself that I can just check the browser’s history later. But then he has to go and raise an
eyebrow at my wallpaper. “Casa Mila? What a nerd.”
“Most people end up working for one,” I grumble. His insult is enough that I stride up to him and collect
the papers before he can rip those up.
“Hey, give me one of that.”
I give one of the blank papers to him. Okay, I’ll admit I’m somewhat scared of him because brother
doesn’t just look wild and unruly, he is, and Mother would disagree but I feel that the only way to deal
with him is to give him what he wants. Father has no opinion on the matter because, of all the people in
our family, he blames himself most for how Devlin turned out.
Devlin starts scribbling on the paper. His bullet points look like brain aneurisms and his writing’s more
secretive than a doctor’s.
“So how’s life been?” he asks. “I heard you got knotted up in June. Sorry, you know, for not being there.”
“Yeah. Like sorry’s any help.”
Devlin shrugs. He puts the pen down, peels his jacket off and hooks it on the back of his chair as if it was
purchased at a charity shop. Then he taps his fingers on the paper and gazes at me as if anything on my
face resembles the way it looked when I got admitted, all pale, blood draining at the thought of writing
my next paper.
“Father was there, wasn’t he? Where was Mummy?”
I blink once, hard, and slide off the chair. “Do you want something to drink?”
He pauses for a moment before responding. “Two shots of expresso.”
I set up the machine and he starts scribbling again. The thing is I have no idea how to work this sleek
black mammoth next to the stove, the waiting filters and the sharp toothed ends, and where did I put those
Ecuadorian beans again? The only reason this kitchen can be called one is because I boil water here. It
functions more as a study room.
So I kind of just lean there thinking about that terrifying time in my life. It’s so easy to see it from a
distance now, a nightmare of unanswered differentiate this’s and fish nuggets.
Where was Mother? No one’s ever told me. Since the whole thing with Devlin sent us all splintering in a
thousand different directions, Mother distanced herself not just from Devlin but from the rest of the
family. She threw herself into a fashion business in France that’s spread like wildfire, blazing across the
whole of Europe and, by the end of this year, will have over fifty branches opening in America too.
Mother’s crazy that way. Her sadness generates money.
“Okay, never mind,” Devlin announces, cutting me out of my reverie. “Come here. I’ve finished the list.”
“The list?”
Devlin shows it to me. The only word that I can read is eggs, minced and 500g.
“Oh no,” I put my hands on my hips. “I am not your nanny and I’m not going to do your shopping for
you.”
Devlin rolls his eyes. It’s a little too American for my comfort. “We’re going together and by the end of
this week you’ll at least be making omelettes. What’re you going to do if you end up crash landing in
Vietnam during a flight? Restaurants there’ll give you diarrhoea for days.”
“Oh, like you’d survive. You’d probably slit yourself dry in a day without your adulating women.”
“Who says I don’t have chicks in Vietnam?” he gives me a smirk so arrogant I want to puke all over him.
We go down to the giant garage carpark where he insists that I get on his bike and I insist that he gets in
my BMW. We settle it with rock-paper-scissor like in the good old days, when Devlin was the star athlete
of Newcastle’s top prep school, a diving prodigy with an offer from Harvard, an all-round amazing older
brother who took me go-carting with his cool preppy friends, even when it made him the lame guy. I lose
and end up having to put on his too-large helmet.
“If we fall, I will die,” I warn him, tugging the strap down to show him how slack it is around my chin.
“You might as well wear it so one of us survives.”
“You kidding? Mummy would kill me if you died,” Devlin laughs. He kicks some metal protrusion of the
bike and the engine roars, reminding me of KINGSMEN ESSEX and Edgar. “And rightly so. You know,
if I were with a girl I’d drive at the very top of the meter, death be damned. But it wouldn’t be very funny
if you got hurt at all.”
“Oh, I bet you’d all miss laughing at me if I die. Who else is there to be the dumb Pellinore?”
He turns back as the roaring engine stabilizes to a low purr. “You know we love you, Gim. Honest to
God. Father and Mummy, me, Lily— you’re the best of us.”
And I don’t know what it is in his eyes, the dulling of harsh edges or the hardening of soft ones. I never
really figured out which end of the spectrum his rebellious fit had chucked him or what he was before it.
That one time he slapped Mother, the other time I found him on the benches of the racing track, his hands
shaking so hard he couldn’t even ignite his lighter, sobbing up a waterfall on his sleeve.
“Oh, get off,” I say. It’s all I can manage, because in spite of him taking off and not being there for me in
June, I love him and forgive him for everything he’s done.
Devlin turns around, twists the handlebars, and drives the slope up the garage. It’s all darkness and
ventilators whirring as I sit forward to press closer to him, hearing his heart beat around the back of his
chest. His voice at the front door echoes in my mind, I’ve had enough. Not even a goodbye as he tore off
with nothing but a three cards in his wallet and a copy of my godawful driver’s license photo tucked
inside it. He’d printed it out when I first showed him my license and he burst out laughing. He’d always
been one for pictures and memories. Maybe he’d known this would happen, that he’d revolt against all
the strict lashings Father gave him and run off on his own.
“Gim,” he says. I barely catch it over the distant noise of the metropolitan area. As he drives out of the
garage, dim light from the moon pours in through the parallel gaps striping us in light-dark-light. “I’m
really proud that you finished your papers. Really am.”
I curl my arms tighter around the waist of my lame brother, a single tear falling from one eye. I know. If
Father hadn’t been there, you would’ve.
*
Devlin first parks outside of a Waitrose complex just to taunt me. I swore to heaven and back when I had
that packet of Waitrose digestive biscuits, just that one time in primary school, that I would never
consume any of their products ever again if I could help it. Before I can start protesting, Devlin tosses his
head back and laughs. Just playing you. Because for all his bad boy toughness he’s got the most bloody
sensitive social detector in the world, and I don’t realize he’d riled me up to make me feel better until he
makes a U-turn and I glimpse the smile on him.
We go to a Tesco that’s around the block. He checks off the mysterious groceries on his list while I run
around like an underpaid Christmas elf scouring out the aisles. I half expect him to flirt with this trio of
girls at the cereal section but he just runs his fingers through his hair and gives them the I’m-too-cool-for-
you shoulder as if shopping’s a magisterial affair. Don’t be mistaken. He can be a right arse when he
wants to be, which is most of the time, but today’s a real, fresh start for us and neither of us want to ruin
it.
Unfortunately, having him live with me for a week also means he’ll be sleazing up the bookish morning
air with ethanol and smoke. I’ve the foresight to drop a lavender air purifier in the cart which he just
smirks at, his face reading as if that can defeat me. We buy just enough groceries for me to hold between
us. Much of it is already in the small back compartment that’s probably meant to hold things like jackets
and cans of deodorant rather than two cartons of milk. I curse both him for showing off at my expense
and myself for having so little practical knowledge that I couldn’t equate groceries with a proper car
trunk. He pushes it even further by stopping outside of a Gerry’s.
“I’ll wait out here,” I tell him. He looks at me like I’m a circus clown.
“Are you serious? It’s been what, two years since I left and you’ve still a squid? Don’t you party at all?”
“No. Father wouldn’t approve. And my liver thanks me for being a squid.”
Devlin rolls his eyes. “Nerd.”
He pushes the door and vanishes behind the glossy black glass. As expected, it doesn’t take long for him
to pick out what he likes and come back out with two bottles of liquor in hand, a Grey Goose and
Plymouth Gin. I’m familiar with both because on some nights when the anxiety’s right between oxy
overdoing high and pulsing distress, I find my way to a cabinet, grab a shaker and make myself a martini
to settle down.
Back at the condo Devlin lounges on the kitchen isle, being tall enough to swing over it, and scrolls
mindlessly on his phone while waiting for me to unpack everything.
“Do Mother or Father know you’re back at all?”
“No. I’m still living it up in Toronto as far as they know.”
“And how was it? Toronto.”
He sighs. I turn back and see him rubbing his phone over the thin shirt stretched tight around his midriff,
eyes affixed to the ceiling. “Like everywhere else I suppose. How many places have you been again?”
I bend down, plastic bag rustling as I rummage through it. “Europe. Have you heard of it? It’s got the
most fantastic weather.”
Devlin snorts. “Right, of course. Greenie. Let me tell you something corny as hell: it’s all about the
people. You can go anywhere in the world, but you’ll realize one day when you wake up with all these
girls in your arms that nothing will ever beat family. Honest.”
“You sound just like Father.”
It’s true. Father’s the biggest family man to exist in the twenty-first century, and for all the snapping he
and Devlin engage in, Devlin respects him. It’s hard not to admire and respect a man of his drive and
work ethic.
Devlin doesn’t acknowledge it though. A silence settles between us so I quickly grab and hold a skillet up
in the air. “What do I do with this?”
He sits up. “Can you not grab it like that? It looks very liable to doing dangerous things.”
I smile. “And aren’t you all about the high life?”
“Oh yes,” Devlin pries the skillet out of my hand and lightly taps it on my head. “I missed this.”
The dish of the night after a fair amount of tussling, clanking and bloody hell! is a moderately sized cake
shaped like a plateau. It was supposed to be a Korean vegetable pancake, but I ended up mixing the sugar
and salt (can you blame me? It thought he’d chop his fingers off while he was going at that lettuce). With
tedious recalibrations of butter and additional flour, we ended up making carrot cake instead. As we take
the first bites on the kitchen table both of our faces fall. His crinkles more than anything.
“Certain things even I can’t save.”
“So it’s all my fault?”
He sets the fork down, drinks some liquor and tries again. Same reaction. “Obviously. I’m glad I got that
cereal and this liquor.”
While he goes to fix himself up I linger at the table, trying to make sense of the cake in front of me and
appreciating for the first time the works of artisan bake shops and cafes, the existences of which I never
cared for until now. I think about Edgar, his uncle’s awe-inspiring cranberry cake. The bright navy blue
plaits of his jumper and the curve of his cheek turned away. My fingers on his ribs.
Devlin hands me a milky bowl bobbing with yellow stars. “Come on, you’re not getting down about this.
We’ll make something else in the morning. You’re washing up, of course.”
“Not this,” I shove a spoonful in my mouth. “I was thinking of a new friend I haven’t seen in a while.”
“Yeah? Life got in the way?”
“Sort of.”
But life didn’t, really. It’s true that I’ve been busy, but just last week I could’ve gone over at noon. Not
for long as I had to attend a function at night, but definitely enough time to meet with Ferdinand and
Edgar. We’ve been chatting, but it’s not quite the same as being together in person.
“You can invite them over,” Devlin says. “I’m so charming they wouldn’t dream of leaving.”
I hadn’t thought of that, but I don’t think it’d be a very polite invitation considering they’re full-time
students. “No, that wouldn’t be courteous.”
He splashes some milk on the table like a petulant kid. “Was that strictly to offend me?”
I wipe the splash with a napkin. “One more time and you’re washing up.”
Afterwards, when everything’s done and I’ve finished doing my research (it was getting late and if I
didn’t do it I’d be up all night), I search for Edgar on my messenger and think of what to type. Our last
conversation had been two weeks ago, starting and ending with three unanswered texts from me, before
things dropped off for good. I was merely following good etiquette by stepping back, but now I’m
wondering if I should’ve said something sooner to prevent this confusing silence between us.
“I’m crashing on your couch,” Devlin calls from the living room. I see the bare sliver of a towel as he
struts across my doorway.
“You can share my bed,” I say. We used to do it quite a bit because Devlin was frightened by thunder, but
at this he backtracks and gives me the stink eye. “What? I don’t take up a lot of space…”
“No.” He walks away. I look down at my phone.
Gimley:
Nothing. In truth I’d love to have Edgar over, not for the fancy partition and definitely not for Devlin, but
for my bookshelves. Just him, though, because Ferdinand isn’t capable of appreciating my makeshift
library the way he can. I mean, My Werewolf Romance is aching to be read by now.
I go outside and see that Devlin’s already asleep, his back turned against the breath-taking view of the
ever living city. He’s weird that way. I go to my bookshelves and take a few steps back for a full view of
them. I’m on N right now, with only a handful of books I’d chosen set aside by the foot of a lamp.
Just then I get a ring from an unknown number, +268. I shut off the call and google the country code.
Swaziland, Africa. My heart shoots out of my chest. Joseph.
Each beep has me on edge. I cross my arms and chew up my lip as I look out the window.
“Gimley, it’s me.”
“Joseph? How are you?”
“You’ve a friend from Allen Powell, right? My ex got decked in the face real bad by some loony guy.
Could you get the yellow teddy bear under my bed? It’s in a wooden box. Ask your friend to give it to my
ex. Please.”
“Uh, wait. Who got decked by what?”
Joseph inhales sharply. The clicking of firearms or a motion detector are relentless in the distance and I
can practically hear him breathing into the speaker. It sounds more like a warzone than a whale rescue
program. “You told me you had a friend from Allen Powell after the Switzerland thing. Fisher. Frigate.”
“Ferdinand.”
“That. You know that doll I was going out with? Arabella?”
“Sure, seeing as you ditched me for her every week.”
“Okay, well, some bastard smashed her nose in.” Joseph says this in a monotone voice. Their relationship
hadn’t ended poorly as far as I can remember. It was the whole distance thing that eventually did it for
them, and though Joseph had been the happiest in his life while they were dating, she got him hooked on
a lot of bad stuff. I was relieved for him when she left.
I pull the phone away from my ear when someone on his end yells in an African language. It’s so loud
that I hear Devlin squirm behind me. “Got to go,” Joseph says. “Do this one favour for me.”
“I’ll try. But who would hit her?”
Not why as she wasn’t very nice to me in the few months they hooked up together. I figure Ferdinand
might know the perpetrator, seeing as he’s always eyes and ears for school news. Half the time I think he
solves them better than the staff themselves. But it’s better to hear from Joseph himself.
Or I thought so. The floor falls out from beneath me.
“Some arsehole called Edgar.”

Edgar
In simple terms, it looks bad when a guy hits a girl.
The stereotype will change in the next millennia. That doesn’t make me an optimist, by the way. Just a
dreamer.
My ears are still ringing. It was gushing with blood and I could hardly hear through the pressure that had
built up, but it had faded and left this mock tinnitus in its wake. On the other side of the frosted glass door
two silhouettes are talking to each other, shifting their arms from their chests to their hips, tugging their
sleeves, coughing into their fists.
If you people watch enough, you’ll notice how truly fidgety we are. It’s one thing to hear from a factoid
that humans are constantly on the move and another to really observe it. It’s extraordinary the way we
can’t keep the same positions for more than a few minutes. Cant the hip, brush a shoulder, cross the legs,
uncross them, stand up, sit down. The thing about staying unnoticeable is that you have to relax into these
human tendencies. People notice you when you get too deliberate with staying still.
I look away from the door and face outside, gloomy autumn’s throat bared, begging to be slit. For a time
Mom thought it’d be better if she sent me off to Australia for the sun. Being an accountant, she pulled out
some sheets and clacked away for an afternoon while I watched telly. It took less than half an hour before
I heard the papers being crinkled and tossed in the bin. I’m the only kid unless you count Olivia, my
hypothetical sister who didn’t make it through the womb, and we generally don’t. In spite of that, Mom
and Dad don’t make enough for that kind of thing. So Mom settled it by buying a whole box of orange-
flavoured Vitamin D guppies instead.
A swirling of leaves flit across the window. Autumn’s terrible. It’s like the sky’s grown these yellow eyes
that shift and shake with the wind, and when a storm comes, which is practically once every two or three
days, all the leaves go kamikaze and end up littering roadsides, stuffing gutters, piling up on mail posts
and sticking like Band-Aids on windows. The road’s always sticky with, mud mixed in choppy bits of
leaves, puddles and dirt everywhere, all that. It’s absolutely wretched. Don’t let the dainty leaf swirls tell
you otherwise.
There was this one good time though, me sandwiched between Mom and Dad on an evening at a park
near our house. It hadn’t rained in a while and there was an unusual crispness to the air, like a day of
summer that had gotten lost during a great arrangement of the seasons. When I stepped over the leaves
they popped like firecrackers underfoot and the winds were calm, placated by the waxing moon. The
shadows it casted over the trees were soft-edged and fuzzy, caressing my shoes as I stepped over them.
Dad was going over another ridiculous escapade he had with his friends, whipping an imaginary gun out
of his belt and saying things like so I crept up to the bush and saw the bugger’s eye, red and bloody, and I
shot straight at ‘em! BLAM BLAM! while Mom leaned down to pass me some ginger lemon sweets, her
coppery hair poofed-up around her.
Thinking about Mom and Dad makes me want to cry. I don’t cry much, not because I don’t get the urge
but because there are never any tears. Mom said I kept the nurses awake with my bawling and when I was
a toddler I cried for hours each time I toppled over or spilled my bottle, that this is why I’ve used up my
whole life’s supply of tears. It’s really not great being unable to cry. It’s like everything’s choked up in
the back of my eyes, My heart weighs an anchor, falling, dragging my lungs down and collapsing into my
stomach. The wire frame of my skeleton folds and rests on the ground, to be picked on by scavenger
birds.
The door opens. Mr. Grimshaw enters, the dark look in his eyes either from the situation or his Happy-
Camper visor. He’s in charge of the camping ECA that takes place after school on Fridays, which is also
the day Mr. Gilbert replaces him for one night in the dorms. It’s the only day of the week that his
accordion face unfolds into something even vaguely humane and he smiles without needing to be in the
presence of a parent. He pulls out the chair of the table in front of mine and sits opposite to me, the hair of
his arms gilded in the stormy light.
“Boy,” he begins, and I’m not sure if he’s referring to me or his existential crisis. He leans back against
the chair, faded purple shirt sagging on him. “Did you have to go and do that?”
It was that or everyone finds out. It sounds a lot less like an excuse than it really is. Granted I still think
Arabella got what she deserved and maybe this’ll teach her to stop being such a prick. At my expense, but
also at my pleasure.
“Is it that bad?” I try to make myself sound remorseful, but it comes out completely bored and Edgar-like.
Mr. Grimshaw’s bushy eyebrow twitches. He sighs. It’s the hurricane rather than the breeze kind of sigh.
“You broke her nose.”
“Don’t those heal by themselves?”
“That’s not the point,” he raises his voice and his entire body inflates with it. “I need to write a report
about this so the school can decide what to do with you. You have to tell me what happened.”
I’ll never get out of this room if I don’t, so I tell him. I’d been in the library during free period and she
came up to me with Cecilia and one other girl. She said I ought to follow her to the girls’ washroom, so I
did. Then she and the other girl jumped me like I stole their lunch money or something, tearing my tie off
and grabbing at my belt like sex depraved lunatics. I gave Arabella a good fist in the face. Cecilia finally
stepped in and pushed us apart before I could punch the other girl. Then they left, and I went back to the
library and picked up my book. Resuming page sixty-four.
“Why?” Mr. Grimshaw asks. He must’ve heard it from Cecilia already because he sounds just as placid as
before. “Why did you follow them?”
I breathe a sigh of relief. Cecilia hadn’t said anything. In fact, I bet she tagged along Arabella and her
lackey just to stop it.
A few minutes later, after Mr. Grimshaw realizes that he’s not going to get any more information out of
me, he leaves the room to talk to the guy outside. They discuss for a moment more before allowing me to
go back to the dorms. Even if they call my parents, their ride down here would take over three hours and
it makes sense to phone them after the school decides what to do with me.
Back in my room, I look through a drawer where I keep my bottle of aspirin. We’re supposed to give
them over to Mr. Grimshaw and the other dorm staff so no one kills themselves but it’s not like they can
scan me out for it. The only part of me that’s kind of aching are my knuckles. It’s not a good reason to
down aspirin, but I kind of want to be knocked out right now, so I pop two, curl up in bed and do the only
thing I’m good at: sleep.
It’s around night-time when I wake up, brain-addled and thankful for it. Someone knocks gently on the
door, too gently for it to be a person I don’t want to see.
“Leo?”
Toes shuffle outside. He’s the only guy that walks barefoot on our level where the floors are always wet
with one dubious substance or another. I get up to unlock the door. Leo’s the only person in our year
shorter than I am. Only by a couple centimetres, but he hunches over so much that it appears like a lot
more.
“You want to go outside?” Leo asks, arms wrapping tight around a handheld easel. “The stars are
beautiful tonight.”
“Sure,” I say. Because it’s Leo. You don’t say no to a guy like him and not feel guilty about it for the rest
of your life. Plus, it’s always good to be friends with a car neurosurgeon.
We walk out to the field that separates the male and female dorms. There was talk about turning it into a
cricket field so that the cricket ECA students won’t have to travel one hour to the nearest stadium to hit
some dumb balls, but the project was suspended for budget-related reasons. Leo and I go across it to the
parking lot of the female dorms and we sit on the street ledge, facing mountains and forests that turn into
peppermint blackness in the distance. Girls passing by us whisper among themselves. Leo whips out his
mini Sennelier watercolor set and unlatches the lid of a metal canister clipped to the easel and pre-filled
with water. Then, brush dripping, he lets go.
I wish I had that ability to put my brain into art. When I’m too agitated I can’t focus on words, so I’ve
grown up to be dependent on aspirin. If I look at the raised scars on Leo’s wrist then obviously I don’t
mean that, but sometimes during nights like these when his eyes are soaked in the world and he exists
without being here, I wonder if it’s a good trade off. I wonder what it is that gets people slicing
themselves up, and if it’s any different from me shoving aspirin down my throat to achieve that same
state. To exist without existing.
Leo turns his wrist downwards. Normally he hides them under a wristband to avoid all the dumb oh my
god! and are you okay? You should see a counsellor bull. He’s staring at me. On his canvas, there’s a
formative shadow of my face, his brush dipped in ultramarine poised above it.
“You want to try it.”
A group of girls walking back to the dorm clack across the tiles, their sandals echoing in time with their
laughter. I’m unsure as to whether Leo had meant it as a question, but I shrug. Leo shifts his easel so that
he can face me. Being drawn by him doesn’t make me self-conscious. It feels good to be part of
something more important.
“Just make sure you clean what you’re using,” he says. “One of the girls got an infection from a rusty
cutter. Nasty.”
I’d heard of that. Before Cecilia started sitting with me at lunch I used to hop around empty seats and
tables a lot, just because it’s a lot like watching a film. I don’t think people appreciate that there are
snippets of films everywhere in life, from the cafeteria to the football field to the waiting room of the
principal’s office. Powdery remains of some amateur junkies, papers caught between lockers. Thousands
of films. There was one time a Year Eight kid dropped her razor while she was running out of school and
I watched her shove her stick thin hand into the drain to get it. I watched her go bonkers from the third
floor. Afterwards she got admitted to a mental institution and no one’s seen her since.
“I’m glad you hit her,” Leo says suddenly. “A lot of people are. Did you know that she burns herself on
her hips? That’s what Gabriel told me. It’s supposed to be a secret, though.”
“You’re pretty bad at keeping those.”
“Only to you,” Leo smirks.
I don’t feel any better or worse about hitting her. It’s just a phase that I’m sure half of us will get over and
ruin only the other half, people like that crazy Year Eight kid. Between drugs, cigarettes and self-harm,
the last is actually the healthiest option.
As Leo dips his brush in the canister I suddenly remember that he’s got a small road show with a few
other local artists this Sunday. He worries a lot about not making it in the art world, but I think he’s
business savvy enough to see it through. Till then, though, slit slit.
“Can I come to your art show? I’ll carry your bags or something.”
“It’s a small event.”
“Doesn’t matter. I want to go.”
“Will Mr. Grimshaw let you?”
I scrunch my face up. “He can’t keep me prisoner.”
“We’re all prisoners here,” he says. It’s so pop-punk emo that I can’t help but laugh. And then Leo’s
hiding his face behind his arm, shoulders trembling at his own tackiness. Freaks, whispers one of the girls
who’d been passing by earlier. She’s sitting on a bench behind her with her legs crossed, phone in hand.
MARTHA! The headmistress yells. She quickly stubs her cigarette and vanishes into the building.
Prisoner.
Leo finishes the picture with some quick strokes. He prefers oil painting much more, but it’s just not as
portable as watercolours (so he tells me. All I know is that oil paints smell like factories). He hands me
the finished product and I see that my face is all scrunched up into wrinkles and folds. It gives me one hell
of a fright to grow baggy and old like Mr. Grimshaw, a divorced man who is only Happy Camper for one
out of seven days and has apple crumble for breakfast to make up for the lack of fulfilment in his life.
Leo goes back to the dorms afterwards. I stay behind, glancing between the picture and the landscape
before me, peripheral slivers of bronze-red leaves soaked in blackness. My rubbery pancake face stares
back at me like the American Gothic, gravely unamused. Leo’s fantastic at rendering and even though this
isn’t meant to be more than a throwaway practice piece he puts a lot of contrasting details in the eyes.
More details than there actually are. All I need is a pitchfork to complete it.
For minutes after he leaves, the portrait makes me think of people in school who are always laughing and
smiling. It makes me wonder if it’s possible that even a single one of them is actually content. Like they
don’t hurt themselves and they like their friends and look forward to getting up the next day. It’s a wild
concept. I shake it off.
I check the calendar on my phone. Thanksgiving break starts next Wednesday, so whatever punishment
the school wants to dole out will probably start after that. A suspension right after would be cool, like a
holiday extension. I guess I should feel guilty for thinking that. Dad won’t be happy. But Mom will be
okay when I explain the whole thing. Heck, she might even pop a champagne bottle and cuss about
Arabella.
*
Saturday morning, Mr. Grimshaw returns on a bus with the other camping kids. He waves them goodbye
before unlocking the door to his office and slumping over his chair, sun-kissed skin fated to crack into its
snowy down. I’m curled up in the common room just opposite where there’s a ping pong table and a
bunch of soft couches, beanbags that smell like old socks and watered down Febreze. He can’t see me
because of the lanky snake plant in the corridor. I close my book and continue to watch him pick his nose,
wipe it carefully on a paper towel and squirt a few drops of hand sanitizer into his palms.
He makes an announcement for me to come down. It’s very familiar: a progression of ascending musical
notes followed by the sonorous tune of his voice. Edgar, I would like to see you, or if the assistant
headmaster is around, and he rarely is, Can Edgar please come down? Mr. Grimshaw would like to have
a word with you. I don’t get in trouble half as much as the other guys, but I get a lot of talking to about the
lack of effort I put in school. Things like how I’m supposedly very smart and how they know I can do so
much better. When the fake upbeat tone doesn’t work they’ll warn me that I’m digging myself an early
grave. I’ll regret not getting the most out of Allen Powell, I’ll end up working in fast food forever, all that.
And I’ll mumble just one word in response. Sardine.
I make my way to Mr. Grimshaw’s office and he says without a moment’s pause, “We’re going to visit
Arabella. You’re going to apologize to her.”
My jaw hangs slack. I brush my bangs aside. “Pardon?”
“This afternoon, we’ll be heading to her ward—“
“Ward?” I snort and lean against the office doorway. “She’s still in there? Seriously? It’s not like I threw
a truck at her.”
Mr. Grimshaw leans forward on the table. Even without having to sit directly in front of him his blue eyes
have this way of smouldering like hot coals, icy thread-like needles in them pointing dead centre at his
pupils, locking me in for the kill.
“This is the first time you’ve ever had a disciplinary issue like this,” he says it slowly so I can get it in my
thick skull. “I fought for your case, Edgar. This afternoon you’re going to show me I was right to do so.”
Teachers. They always know what to say.
So later that day I throw on the most hideous clothes in my closet, baggy slacks and a shirt that might as
well be a rag, start my truck and head to the hospital. Mr. Grimshaw insisted that we go together in his car
but under the excuse of “showing initiative” he permits me to go on my own. In any case, he knows I
won’t go back on my word. But I sure as hell won’t do this without being petulant about it.
The hospital that Arabella was sent to is a lot less grand than I thought it’d be. She’s always been so
intense at everything, breaking hearts and spouting shit and getting into the school press every other week
that I always figured she was a somewhat rich kid. But the hospital block is modest, no larger than our
dormitories combined and sprawling close to the ground. If anything it looks a little ramshackle as the
cacophony of construction presses in from the western wing and a cloud of dust obscures the label on the
block next to it. Obstetrics. Or something. The place looks miserable in the sleepy autumn and the first
droplets of rain plop onto my head as I get out of my truck. A crinkled leaf slaps me on the cheek.
I go up to Ward Three through a lift that rattles far too much for the comfort of its thirteen passengers.
Mr. Grimshaw said he’d be waiting by her bedside to watch as I humiliate myself by giving an apology
she’ll no doubt trample over. She’ll probably overturn a cup of hot tea at me while he’s turned away and
cry that I did it to frame her, or something ridiculous to that effect. The lift door doesn’t open when we
get to the third floor. The four doctors in white suits continue to click away at their phones or stare at their
clipboards while the other passengers look at each other in concern. The janitor steps forward and slams
the door with the back of her broom. Everyone heaves a collective sigh of relief as it opens.
I see Mr. Grimshaw’s feet under the curtains veiled around Arabella’s bed. He said that she’d be going
home today, which means I can punch her nose in again if it gets to that.
“He sent you?” I hear Arabella’s snotty voice rising above the din of respiratory machines and clanging
plates, meals being served to neighbouring patients. “Tell that jerk I don’t want to hear from him ever
again.”
I wonder if it’s my cue to leave when the curtains are drawn and the person says, “I’ll…let him know.”
He walks right into me. I fall backwards, grabbing onto the arm of some passer-by doctor who swears at
me like I’m the gum beneath her heels. She shrugs me off and Arabella’s visitor helps me stand instead,
steady, square palms holding on to my upper arms.
“You all right?” Gimley’s hands stay on my shoulders. I glance around at the doctor who ran into me. She
shoots me a bitter look before smiling broadly at her patient.
I clear my throat. Gimley’s face cards through a dozen expressions before he finally lets go. “Why
wouldn’t I be?”
“Your clothes…”
“That’s very un-Gimley of you.”
His instant tomato face makes it funny when he’s flustered, which seems to be quite a lot of the time. He
tilts his head down apologetically.
“Please forgive me, I was being—“
I smirk. I touch his cheek with the back of my palm, which I realize belatedly is kind of awkward,
perhaps a little out-of-bounds with social convention. His cheeks are warm as they’re red.
“I never thought it was possible to go red so easily.”
I let go, a little shocked when he grabs my hand before it falls. He holds it there to his face. A surge of
discomfort floods me and I pull away, stepping back this time minding that there's no one behind me.
Gimley fiddles with the ridiculously pink muffler around his neck. I can't help but notice his black coat
now, cashmere or something that sounds equally as expensive, sleeves with rose gold cufflinks and new
loafers. It's a little excessive for a hospital visit, but the pink muffler makes the whole ensemble very
dorkishly Gimley. I feel like I crawled out of a garbage dump standing here. Doesn't bother me, though.
Very few things do.
“What’re you two doing out there?”
Gimley turns back and I look over his shoulder at Arabella, sprawled on her bed in a manner a lot more
lackadaisical than she’d be at school, glossy pink lipstick and mascara and all. I guess she must be feeling
remorseful about what she tried to do yesterday because her tone is void of condescension. It also helps
that she's in crinkly hospital clothes and that there’s a spiffy yellow teddy bear around her arm. Strangely
enough I find myself not pissed at all to be here.
“Mr. Grimshaw is buying me strawberry milk,” she says it as if I really need to know her flavour
preference.
Gimley holds the curtain away for me. I go in and put a packet of wet tissues next to her bedside. It's the
only thing I had in my room to give her. “Sorry for hitting you.”
She looks down at the teddy bear, her expression stormy. “It's fine.”
I'd feel a lot better about this if she had a dozen lackeys here to bad mouth my rags. Maybe sparkly pink
balloons someone pops over my head or nail varnish sprayed over my eyes. Arabella things.
“I'm going, then.”
Gimley watches all of this with some degree of puzzlement on his face. Just then Mr. Grimshaw returns,
dabbing his wet hands on the sides of his shirt, his eyes nailed on my dirty rags.
“Why are you wearing that?” he says in his all too patient voice.
I cross my hands on my hips. “I had to dig in the trash for my humility.”
He rolls his eyes and gives Gimley a friendly pat on the back. Then he rummages in the blue plastic bag
hanging off his arm and hands him the milk. “Thank you for coming to visit her, young man.”
“My pleasure,” Gimley smiles, all white knight and shining armour, the pink scarf sticking to his neck
like a lolling tongue.
Mr. Grimshaw dangles another packet of milk in front of me like I'm a dog. “Have you behaved?”
“Woof.” This entire ordeal is a lot less underwhelming than I'd imagined it. He hands me the pack
nonetheless and settles down by Arabella’s bedside to talk to her.
Gimley and I leave a few minutes later. We sit on a bench on the first floor outside the wards, as far from
the noise of drilling and hammering as possible though it’s adamant to carry to us. There's a mild view of
some lanky birch trees, their yellow leaves unmoving in spite of the breeze. I remember getting lost
among them once, when I ran out of school and decided that I'd leave home forever. I had the whole thing
mapped out on my head, the train rides, alleys, what I'd use to wrap myself up with when the first winter
frost emerged. I thought about going to a laundromat and stealing a towel from an unsuspecting customer,
finding scraps to eat behind fast food joints, the whole thing. Then I saw the cluster of birch trees, black
eyes on ghostly white bark, and I broke down, sobbing.
“You like them?” he asks me.
“They're pretty. Weird place to grow, though.”
He cocks his head aside. “How so?”
“Don’t they show up in isolated places? Like away from buildings and people. They look like they
would.”
“Not sure,” he says. “A random factoid I heard from my Grandma is that they’re called widow-makers.
The dead branches tend to rot and fall without warning and hit people on their heads.”
A thought occurs to me that I don’t think I can share with him. I nod instead. An urgent need to change
the topic spurs me.
“So what are you doing here?” I ask. “And with Arabella no less.”
“Favour for a friend. I was hoping to see you afterwards.”
“After I punched her in the face? Aren't you the least bit disconcerted?”
It isn't just that though. It's also my dizzy spell at the farm, shoving him, ignoring his messages. That I
figured it'd be better if I stayed out of his life, and him out of mine.
He chuckles. “You're not exactly a bodybuilder.”
“I broke her nose,” I'm starting to get a little irritated, wishing that they hadn't patched it up so Gimley
could see the damage my knuckles left and say that again to my face. It's annoying how people think I'm
just a harmless bookworm. Not that I don't like being that, but that it's all I am.
Gimley seems to have sensed this. He tilts his head down, shuffling his feet a bit. “I'm truly sorry. I don't
know what got into me. It's just—I think I might have messed up the other day? Are we…”
“It’s better if you stop coming over,” I put down the milk. “I won't go that far to be friends with you, so
you shouldn't either.”
I don't know what kind of face I'm making, but I guess it's kind of transparent because his expression
doesn't change in the slightest. He knows I'm lying. That I've been thinking of asking him where he lives
in London because it's so good having an actual friend again, someone to talk to, colourful expressions
that don't come from black alphabets and off-white pages.
“And here I’ve been wondering,” he sort of squeezes the pack in his hands. The pink of it really
complements his scarf, though that'd be a weird thing to say. “If you would like to come over for
Thanksgiving. My family lives in Newcastle, and I figured we could take a train together if you’d like to.”
Even after all that, it's still an open invitation. There's a look of pity on his face reminiscent of the priest
Dad took me to, a warm summer noon trailing across pews, the kaleidoscopic eyes of the local church
glaring me down. Brother John’s lisping voice, Have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, let him cleanse you of
your foul sin and save you from the fire of hell. Then, Dad in the car telling me in a stern voice to stop
crying even though he was crying himself.
I leave the milk carton on the bench. I get up, shoving my hands in the frayed pockets of my pants, and
look him squarely in the eyes, “I’ll make myself clear. I don't want to see or talk to you again. Goodbye,
Gimley.”

Gimley
I rap the frosted glass and step back to wait.
I tuck my hands in my coat pockets but take them out when I remember how much Edgar does that.
Foliage spilling over the security post rustle when a bird perches over a branch. Bronze leaves stick to my
hair before I shake them off like a wet dog. I pick one out of my pink scarf.
Grandma once attempted to make me a quilt for my eighth birthday but it turned into a horrific mess of
scratchy cloth that actually hurt my neck to sleep in. Pellinores are exceptional at cutting the fluff and
admitting when they’re rubbish at something, so she bought me this pink muffler as an apology. There
was just this crummy old knick-knack store open at that time of day, and I think that’s why I love it so
much. It’s not like the rest of my wardrobe. It’s silly, jubilant, spontaneous, everything I’ve never known
in life.
Finally the door creaks open and Pete emerges from the security post. He scratches the back of his crew
cut. He has the honest face of a BBC newscaster, but I think from the way he’s smiling all the time that he
quite likes sitting alone in the security post, reading papers and watching videos and operating the barrier
gate. I bet a lot of jobs can be fulfilling if people just put a little more effort into them.
“You’re the London guy,” he waves at me. I come around the building, hauling the books in front of me.
“How do you know that?”
Pete stands aside, holding the door open for me. “You want to put that down first?”
“That would be very good,” I place the books, wrapped hastily in white papers, on the table next to the
main counter where there’s a monitor showing various surveillance cameras. Next to it is his laptop which
has several tabs about NASA and some article about deep space open. There’s also a thick physics
textbook to top it off. I suddenly feel a surge of admiration for this guy.
“Edgar told me about you. You’re friends, right? He’s a good kid. He’s bought me Christmas gifts for all
the years we’ve known each other. Him hitting that girl—I still don’t get that.”
I muster a smile at him. “Yeah. Me neither.”
“So what are those books for?”
“I was hoping you could give it to him,” I glance down at my watch. It’s rude, I know, but my sense of
time has been strange lately and I don’t want to miss my train. I booked it online yesterday just to change
things up. I don’t often enjoy changing things up, but sometimes it feels necessary.
“To Edgar?” he shakes his head. It’s unusually chilly in here, more so than outside. “I can’t do that. He’s
already left.”
“Left? Isn’t school still in session?”
Pete plops himself on his swinging chair. He scoops up a pencil and spins it between his fingers. “He took
personal leaves with medical slips and all. Don’t know how though, he seemed fine when his Mom came
to pick him up.”
I lean on the books, nauseous all of a sudden. It hadn’t been light carrying all these books down here,
though it’s more that I feel boggled by his disappearance. “Do you, ah, have his address?”
“I’m afraid I’m not allowed to disclose it.”
“Even just so I can mail these to him?”
“School rules. I could get fired for doing that.”
I sigh, a great big lug of air in my lungs falling out of me. “I understand.”
Much later while I’m on the train back home the sky is a purple-black bruise. I can hardly believe how
fast I’d gone home and back and now home again to hopefully get some sleep before work in the
morning. The exhaustion is setting in, though, the heavy rims of my eyes, the numbness of my spine. My
arms tingle, odd nerves sparking like firecrackers under my skin at my lack of sleep.
I pretty much flop over the floor when I get back to the condo, my cheek on the cool tile surface. The
shadow of a devil falls over me, tugging my bangs like cords attached to my head so that I’m facing him.
My face is slack and I probably look like the zombie extra of a horror film, but it’s Devlin and we’ve both
seen each other at our worst.
“Trouble with a girl?”
I can barely gurgle a response. He lets go and my chin slams hard against the floor. I groan while cradling
it. Devlin obviously thinks that having some bruises on my face will be an improvement to it as he stands
and leaves me to pick myself up. I do, reluctantly.
“Why aren’t you asleep?” I ask him.
Devlin walks into the kitchen and returns with a glass of iced lemonade. We keep a pitcher in the fridge
nowadays. It’s one of the few “dishes” I can make next to the scrambled eggs and cauliflower-potato
mash. Both involve a lack of delicacy. I glug it down while we go to the couch he’s monopolized. He’s
refused my spare blanket each night I put it over him, kicking it instead over the table or the floor. As I sit
down, Devlin drapes the pelt over me.
I put the glass on my forehead, feeling the cool glass ring on my skin. “Guy,” I mumble as he pours
himself some of that lemonade. “He’s a guy, a brilliant guy who loves books as much as I do and got me
to start reading again but is a bit of an emotionally constipated prick.”
Devlin nods sagely. “I take it he wasn’t interested in coming over. It would’ve been good. Mom and Dad
would’ve been too distracted with him to accost me. Can you imagine? Little Gimley in love.”
“I’m not…Lily’s the youngest.” I put my hand out and he pours me another glass. He snorts and draws an
imaginary ring on his forehead, which I’d roll my eyes at if only I could be bothered.
“So what’s the first matter of parliament?”
I lean back against the couch. London stares back at me. I’m beginning to see why Devlin doesn’t pay it
any attention—it’s the same thing every day, just light and darkness milling in a never-ending cycle, the
same office blocks and brick facets and the persistent sense of loneliness it gives. Small ants in a world
that washes us onto shore and back into the ocean, back and forth, push and pull. If anything it’s a little
dreadful.
“I snuck out of the resort one night, on the alps. I was freezing my bloody arse off, but I felt like I had to
do it. I walked some ways up the slope, don’t tell Father, until it was so cold I could hardly breathe. I felt
nothing earlier at the peak, with the other students, but when I trudged up the snow myself with the
darkness and snow all around me, I felt so happy I almost cried. The world was still, and I was nothing,
and I loved it.”
Devlin stares at me for a moment. “You still in therapy?”
I close my eyes, reverie having crashed all around me. Devlin’s very good at destroying things. “Not
funny. No wonder Father named you after the devil.”
“He meant for me to be devilishly handsome, which turned out to be very true. So are you?”
“No, I’m okay. I just thought about that because you mentioned love. That was the only time I ever loved
anything.”
“Snow and darkness? I’ll arrange an appointment in the morning.”
And Devlin goes off, doing whatever crazy brothers who go on indefinite sabbaticals do. I can’t get the
alps out of my head now, how I felt endless in the dark. The frost hadn’t fallen on my gloves; it was my
gloves that had gotten in its way. I wanted to sink into it, to take off the bundling of my coats, press
myself naked against the night and return to the world.
I think I know why I keep wanting to see Edgar now. We share it, our desperation to fill in the emptiness
with ourselves and vanish, leaving not a single pockmark or scrape behind in a world that has cut us into a
million pieces. Unapologetic, after all.

Edgar
This is what I had to say to Gimley:
You know what I think? If you really focus on the branches, just one branch, it looks like a slit up arm or
thigh.
I think I’ve always known this. When I got lost as a child in that outcropping of silver birches, I looked at
the way their barks and branches were all cut up in thin horizontal lines.
I was in a cage of white christened bones that pulled themselves over my head and blocked out the sky
with their canopies. Then I saw in clearer detail their formation. Standing there, I watched them slice
themselves around me, and when the sun bled over them it turned the white bones into flesh, the
branching of wrists that reached over the neck of the forest. And what were they trying to reach up there?
In the vast distance of this careless world, a sobbing gasp torn from their throats. Anticipation,
disappointment.
Somedays I’ll look myself in the mirror. I’ll really look myself in the mirror, run my fingers across my
neck, feel the notch between my collarbones and stop, right there, before I go down any further. I’ll turn
around, briefly wondering what Leo sees when he draws me. If I’m a quarter of a human being, just the
head and the neck like in his picture, is anything else visible? Do people wonder where the rest of the
body is or are they content with what they see? I fear passenger Edgar’s creeping back into my mind. He
plays some really smart tricks to get in there, smarter than the real Edgar, I’m afraid.
I run my fingers along my thighs. Not always while naked, or looking in the mirror. Sometimes I lock the
door, put on my shorts and trace all the birch trees on my legs. I touch the scars that are no longer raised,
the ones that are practically hills, but no gullies—the point is that there haven’t been gullies for years
since Mom hit Dad and he stopped bringing me to church. Brother John used to shove me onto my knees,
put a wooden cross in my hands and make me pray at the altar. I still remember its smooth surface against
my skin. When I asked Dad what it was made of in the car he told me it was walnut, and after making all
the birch trees on my legs I cried the whole night wondering how silly that was. Walnut. Then I went to
school and Helen baked walnut bread to share and I politely excused myself to use the washroom to
scream FUCKING WALNUT.
The days and nights that ran together, slacks chafing against my skin, the lumbering rise and fall of my
chest as I stared out the frost bitten window of my room. Ice ate into the world clear as titanium,
swallowing the pond I used to skip pebbles in, freezing the ragged ends of my hair after I cut them all off
until I was practically bald. You should’ve seen me back in St. Anglus. They called me Jo Jo after the pet
hamster in class 3B that had developed Cushing’s disease, raw pink all over after it lost its tawny fur. It
was nothing that got me out of school in particular. Eventually I just couldn’t stop crying, in my classes or
in the hallways or in the auditorium while God Saves the Queen but never gives half an ass about me.
I don’t know why I’m thinking of all those things that are over now. I figured before that it helps me gain
perspective on what I’m feeling right now, but that’s a load of bull. Sadness is the same, raw and cruel
both the first and the hundredth time. I suppose I just miss Gimley. We would’ve been really good friends
if I weren’t so cowardly.
Our house, the Sommers residence, is tucked in the far end of a suburban neighbourhood. Right behind
our home there’s a mountain range choked full of birch trees, and in the spring Dad comes out with a
brick in hand to kill the snakes “the old fashioned way”. But for the most part it’s a wonderful place to
live. There’s a cul-de-sac just a walk away that houses the Mendez family who hold these regular parties
for everyone in the neighbourhood to join in.
When Mom parks in the driveway, she kind of stares at me like she can’t believe I just left my truck in
school. I’d be stuck home for the rest of Thanksgiving break, or at least I’d have to ask her to take me out.
That’s exactly the point. I don’t want to go outside. I know it’s just a phase, though. Everything’s just a
phase. I don’t want to worry her, so I lean over and give her a kiss on the cheek. I’m too old for this, I’m
going to be a Grown Man in a few years, whatever. Mom’s the best person in the universe and she doesn’t
deserve to deal with my rubbish without some appreciation.
It’s nice being home for a change. It’s only been a few months since I spent summer break here, waking
up at three in the afternoon and climbing down the stairs for something to eat before slinking back into
my cavern of a room. I do dishes sometimes, but not often. Mom’s a saint. Dad, well, we try to stay out of
each other’s way.
My room’s only mildly dusty when I go in. Mom probably cleaned up after me when the break was over.
I spot a pot of cranberry yogurt on my table, a small bottle of cinnamon and an empty bowl. It drives
Mom crazy when I eat and slobber all over the place, but I think she secretly misses it when I’m gone.
Luckily for her, I have no plans of ever getting a job that lets me move out. I still believe that my birth’s
been nothing but a disability to her life.
I eat half the entire pot of yogurt before sifting through my cabinet. It’s filled with books. Fat books,
skinny books, books I haven’t even read yet. Dad’s an English teacher, and when his school library was
sprucing up its catalogue he took all the books they wanted to dump and gave them to me. I made him an
awful BEST DAD bracelet that I actually spent several days doing. It was equivalent to rocket science in
my childish brain: I searched online for the meaning of every charm I weaved in there, gemstone
imitations and talisman feathers and even a miniature elephant clay model that I cut myself over trying to
make each curve perfect. Obviously he never wore it. It wasn’t “appropriate for adults” and probably too
feminine from a ten year old boy for his comfort.
Two days until thanksgiving.
I go skating at the park occasionally. It’s a ten minute walk away, and I think I go more for the journey
than the destination. The same pavements, asphalt road, nicks between tree roots. Neighbours raking
leaves, kids running into leaf piles, good day’s called back and forth. It’s not like at school where I’m the
freaky book guy. Here I’m just the guy in boarding school who smiles and seems normal. Some people in
the park even strike up a conversation while I’m breezing through the ramps.
When I get back from the park that day, Dad’s Yaris is parked in the driveway. It’s a small car that meets
his practical needs. I remember every inch of the back seats. Curling up there, peering at Dad as he drove
down the streets with the bulging cords in his arms. Each vein in his neck strained to striking definition,
his words running over my head. The strange thing was that he never went all Lord Jesus on me like
Brother John did. It was always things about how I’d regret what I was doing to myself and that Mom
was being an idiot for supporting me. I think the fact that Jesus didn’t save me is the reason Dad stopped
going to church.
I prop my skateboard up against the willow tree on our front yard, its tawny hair flicking my forehead and
curtaining around me. Dad’s humming a pop song—they say he’s cool with the kids, and that literally
every student in the school loves him. On teacher’s day he gets mounds of presents Mom helps him
unload, anything from cards and mugs to mountain bikes. I used to help him unload them too and make
snippy comments about how someone would hand him presidency one day, but I stopped since those
church trips.
I watch like a bog monster under the willow leaves as he gathers up his bags full of test papers and files.
Dad’s a workaholic who gets his kicks off bragging about how little sleep he gets. I bet if I applied myself
in school that he’d have bragged about me too, but I failed him on that front too. He sets all his stuff
down by the front door, unlocks it and lumbers the rest of the way in.
I decide to go for another walk.
*
The whole family comes over for Thanksgiving. Cousins and nephews I have a hard time remembering,
new spouses of aunts and uncles. Thanksgiving tends to be a bigger deal than Christmas for us because
the Juliens, my mother’s side of the family, pack up to go back to their country home in Ireland. Mom is
the only person who stays back under the pretense of not having that extra dough, but everyone knows it's
an excuse.
Uncle doesn't come over. He's the only visitor I care about but he really acts up on holidays and goes to
see his therapist more often. That one time he did come ended in him wrestling dad and smashing the
ancient Chinese urn Mom got from her work colleague. I realize, not for the first time, that dad gets hit a
lot and that most of the time it’s related to me.
“So how's school, hun?” Aunt number unknown asks me while spooning a dollop of mashed potato onto
her plate.
“Great,” teachers are predicting CCD and I'm going to be suspended for punching a girl, but it's all great.
“Lovely,” she gives me the practiced smile of someone proficient with these faux conversations.
I try to finish my plate as soon as possible so I can crawl back into my lair and read something. I found
this book last night about medieval court figures and I'd just gotten to a court jester called Will Sommers
when Mom asked if I could take the trash out, after which I got distracted watching some gunslinger
program on TV (I thought about how much motion picture had improved since the 60s and how mad that
made me for no reason).
As the celebration continues, breathing, as it tends to, becomes more difficult. Mom and the keener of our
relatives understand, so no one says anything beyond whispers when I excuse myself to my room, rip my
shirt off and lie half naked in bed. I think about being quarter of a human being again but find that the
festive music and cousins being idiots to each other had put me in a better mood.
They’re just about to release all hell on the house when someone yells Twister and I can hear the thudding
of tiny footsteps, kids scrambling to slide their grubby bodies over each other, when the doorbell rings.
It’s not the ringing of a sane man. For one it lasts over a minute while people continue to sing and dance,
not noticing until there’s a break in a music. There’s not a single knock. The ringing just drags on until
someone has the sense to walk to the door (probably Mom) and I look out over the window to see a rusty
truck identical to my Ridgeline.
I throw my shirt back on and crawl under the bedsheet. This is clearly the most effective coping
mechanism.
Uncle comes up, though. He probably skipped through all the food and lardy conversation and just asked
to see me. I don’t know why he avoids the family but cares about me so much. I haven’t done anything
for him. Not a day of milking his cows or cleaning the muck. All I do is leech off his cranberry pies.
He folds himself into my beanbag. With the way his eyes stare into the vast distance, I get this feeling that
he was very similar to me as a teenager.
“You hit someone,” he says. It’s not reproachful or curious. It just is.
“She deserved it,” I say. Then I tell him everything I said to Mom on my way back from school—she got
quite annoyed that she had to go up to procure some slips from my aunt.
He listens carefully to all of it. I’ve never had reason to lie before and now’s not a particular time to start.
“Hey. You want to go to the pool?”
It’s getting so noisy down there that I’m itching to be anywhere else. I figure Mom would love to come
with, but she’s a family woman and she’d never just bust out in the middle of a party like me.
Uncle doesn’t like the pool. Any large body of water makes him uncomfortable, but he used to drive me
to the stadium and just lie back on the benches, watching nostalgic old films to pass the hours while I
swam dully back and forth. That was before I stopped going to public stadiums. Eventually I started going
to the gym near our house, pretty silent on most days, but I always rang up the receptionist to ask about
the body count in the pool to be sure. One time I didn’t care, though. There were some three or four
swimmers around but I went in anyway and shut myself off. A few people gave me weird looks when I
climbed out, eyes leering through me. The worst part was how it felt like my skin was peeling around my
ribs and something rotten beneath my flesh was showing, something incurable.
“Not terribly,” Uncle says. But he’s smiling, and then I’m smiling.
He drives me and by the time we get there a light shower is pelting down the windshield, coating his truck
in the thin snot of grey clouds. Once I get through the goddamn bathroom, good riddance, I throw myself
into the water and forget everything in the world. That’s a lie. I remember, in fact, but it all comes back to
me through a lens. I see myself standing up by the school pool all wet and shaggy and looking across to
find Ferdinand’s huge, startled eyes. I see my Mr. Grimshaw face in the painting, a coppice of birch trees
folding around a fallen harpy, all from a safe distance. Because nothing really matters when I’m in the
water. It’s just hands and feet moving, staying afloat, the rain kissing my skin gently from above.
I’m not completely inconsiderate, so afterwards I go with Uncle to a film rental store. Like his farm and
MacKenz’s and Fleur De Lys, everything in town seems to have the persistent quality of stagnation to it,
like we’ve fallen off a cliff but remain suspended in air, the ground a distant dream beneath us. Uncle
rents an unholy bundle of films. I tell him he’s going to go bankrupt and that I’ll pirate some titles online
for him. He stares at me for a long moment, Japanese missiles and Pearl Harbour flashing behind his eyes
before he slides the top five copies off his bundle and hands the rest dejectedly to the cashier.
We sit in the rental shop staring at The Terminator playing next to Princess Bride. They sell popcorn here
and swimming makes me so hungry I want to eat a bus, but for some reason I want to feel that way for a
moment. To listen to my stomach gnaw into itself, my limbs weak and wobbly, body tossed by the bench.
“Can I ask you about something?”
Uncle grunts.
“It’s about me,” I say, because obviously everything’s about me. I’m joking. Sometimes Uncle talks to
me about his issues too, but without expecting advice. “Living in the dorms. What do you think would
happen if I told everyone?”
I’ve imagined it a couple times. Striding into the common room during rollcall while Mr. Grimshaw
drones on about late attendances and telling everyone, Hey, I’m trans. If you make dick jokes I’ll cut yours
off. Most of them would go huh? You’re a who? and then I’d have to explain myself like I’d contracted
some rare illness they’ll never need to study in science because no one cares. Rodrick would look up to
me for braving the icebergs head-on; Ferdinand would call me dumb and Ferdinand would be right. Some
of the boys will approach me and try to pull off what Arabella did, and they’ll probably succeed.
“I’m with you all the way,” Uncle says, his eyes trained on Princess Bride. “But you have to understand
teenagers your age aren’t the most…sensible.”
“So I’m not sensible?”
He pauses for a moment. “You’ve done a lot of bad things to yourself.”
“You’re right, but it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. People would get over it.”
Uncle nods. “Sure. But would you?”
I focus on eating my popcorn for a while. It’s really annoying how he and Mom are always right about
things.
“It’s just—I feel like I’ve messed up on a really good friendship.”
“It’s that guy you brought over the other day,” Uncle says.
I nod. “I think he knows.”
“Ask directly if it bothers him, and if so, chuck him.”
“It’s too late.”
“It’s always too late with you,” Uncle sighs. “You give up on things before you’ve even tried. You’re
afraid of a lot of things, but you can’t let that hold you back forever. You’ll set yourself up for a very hard
life if you do so.”
I think about Uncle’s words, the framed picture of his fiancé in his bedroom and his lone figure watching
old films, waking up each morning to a farm that’ll never amount to much.

Edgar
The month passes without event for a long time. The whole detention thing is made better by the fact that
Cecilia is in there with me for a completely unrelated reason and the fact that Mrs. Alyssa, known for
splashing hot water onto the principal’s trousers and for being disinterested in student affairs, is helming
the ship. Mostly I read books in detention while Cecilia works on homework. We eventually begin
passing notes to each other when we realize that Mrs. Alyssa never looks up from her laptop.
One time she writes to me:
I’m sorry for the other day.
And I scribble back:
Not your fault.
We hang out after school too. I appreciate her company. It’s very different from what I get with Ferdinand
and Rodrick. I guess what Uncle said really got to me, the fear that’s kept my nose in books, more
because I’m afraid of what’s outside of them than because I want to be reading every waking moment of
my life.
We go shopping one day. I expect to be watching Cecilia from the side lines and commenting on her
choice of dresses, but to my surprise she takes me to shoe and hat shops where we can look around
together. I buy a kilt-patterned beanie for Mom for Christmas while Cecilia gets a set pair of trousers for
her parents, one a vibrant red and the other blue. That makes me feel guilty for not getting anything for
Dad, so at the cash register I hastily swipe a belt that’s on sale. I don’t feel bad for not spending more on
Dad even though he still buys me books each year. I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive him for the things he’s
done to me.
There’s nothing good enough for Uncle, though. I think I might write a bad poem about him lusting for
old films or buy him a new set of darts, but it all feels underwhelming. It’s not like I’m loaded anyway, so
I end up with just the beanie and belt, and liquorice in the candy store next door.

Gimley
As promised, Father arrives at the condo on an inauspicious Sunday. He definitely has a preference for
scheduling visits with specific dates and times at least two months beforehand, but I suspect some little
bird must’ve twittered in his ear that one Devlin James Pelinore had taken shelter in my abode, after
which Father would’ve cracked his knuckles and strapped himself promptly to his private Bombardier,
sailed across the great Atlantic and listened to the condo’s jazzy elevator music up to the 103rd floor, and
here I am, looking out of the fish eye lens at the muscle ticking in his jaw.
“You really ought to hurry,” I say to Devlin.
A minute ago I had gently nudged his shoulder and whispered in his ear, an angel of omen, Father is
here. I stepped back. He exploded out of the couch, legs traipsing through the air, slamming into the tiles
before bouncing off to the nearest toilet. All manner of profanity was yelled as he scavenged my
toiletries, dousing himself in perfume and combing his head with a bottle he thought was gel but had
actually been shaving cream. Meanwhile I tottered back to the door and stared at Father through the door
while he stared back. One of us is more unnerved than the other.
“Why didn’t you tell me he was coming?” Devlin shrieks over the low drone of a radio channel I’d been
listening to. Not listening to stock markets for a change turns out to be quite enjoyable.
“I didn’t know it’d be today,” I respond. I walk over to pick up a stray sock that had been flung across the
room and toss it into the dustbin. The condo’s walls are supposedly soundproof, but I can’t help but feel
like Father is hearing everything Devlin drops and smacks with his spindly limbs.
Finally, after Devlin has freshened up to the look of an average office worker and I’ve ensured that the
toilet is locked, I let Father in. Unsurprisingly, he pays his surroundings no heed. He doesn’t even glance
at Devlin—just nods vaguely at his feet and says to me, “And how is everything?”
Father saunters into the room. I follow by his side, catching the slight crumple of Devlin’s face. Regret,
not disappointment, that he’d even tried to look presentable. “Good. Last month at Orbitude. Have you
been?”
“On a business meeting, yes,” he gives the hastily cleared couch a flicker of a glance. Then, as I’d
expected, steps past it to the panoramic window. His eyebrows twitch in satisfaction. Somehow Father
never grows sick of the sight, of standing above the rest of the world and gazing down upon small people
and small things, everything at his feet. “Red Ginger hanging off the sills. Notoriously difficult to
maintain during the winter, and a horrid contrast to the rest of the plants.”
I hadn’t thought much of them, but I’m sure I’ll form an opinion tomorrow. And it’ll probably be the
same as his because Father’s never wrong.
Father turns to gaze at the bookshelves. Devlin shuffles somewhere between us. I keep gesturing behind
Father’s back for him to come over, but he stays where he is, eyes nailed to the floor. He must be wanting
badly to leave and I’m frankly not sure what’s holding him back.
Father runs his fingers between two books. A while ago My Werewolf Romance had been slotted between
them. It’s frightening sometimes, standing next to a man who catches the noise of a kettle being switched
on, a car crashing two streets away, a nail loosening in a ceiling fan.
“I gave it to someone,” I say. Father turns cryptically to me, the lapels of his suit still smelling fresh off
the ironing board. “Someone who matters,” I add helplessly.
“Someone who matters,” he murmurs, hand falling to his side. I see the question forming on his lips and
am ready to shoot myself in the foot by blurting a bunch of nonsense about Edgar like his uncle makes
great cranberry pies and he doesn’t use a phone case, but Father says nothing.
We spend a while just chatting while he peruses the rest of the books, pulling a few out just to run his
hand over the covers. He used to swear exclusively to romance novels but said that he stopped reading
upon starting university. I can tell he’s glad I’m not falling to the same fate, as evident from the books
I’ve read and placed on the low glass table. I imagine when Father grows old and stops hiking so often
that he’ll be a shut-in who reads books on the porch all day. Growing old seems an impossibility for him.
“I applied to a company in Norway,” I tell him, a little sheepishly. “Might be a little far-fetched, but
Jacklyn recommended them to me. She thought it might be good to get some exposure outside of home.”
Father doesn’t look all that surprised. “You’ll be there alone, though?”
“I guess so.”
“Your mother and I will see to the funds.”
Father turns and looks straight at Devlin now like he just appeared out of thin air. Devlin stiffens visibly,
childlike again. Memories of Devlin in lower secondary school fitting pictures of baby Lily into his photo
album return to me. Him and me sitting by the fantastic quayside of Gateshead, the water like a brittle
sheet of aluminium shivering in the breeze as he tells me all about how Lily’s birth had been (he waited
with Father at the hospital while I’d been at Grandma’s. I was apparently too young anyway not to be an
obstruction). The insecurity bubbling into Devlin’s eyes ripple through me and I’m upset all of a sudden
that this is what our family has become.
Leave us, I can see Father saying.
“Leave us,” Father says.
But he says this to me.
I reel myself in before the shock can manifest on my face. Devlin, however, is outright flabbergasted, his
jaw unhinged, his eyebrows flying to the top of his forehead. Father clears his throat and nods genially to
the door. “I’ve to speak to your brother in private. Could you come back in half an hour?”
“Sure,” I pick up my keys, wallet, and am out the door in a flash.
I linger by the corridor for a while as I close the door behind me. The neighbouring resident struts past
with her chin pointed to the moon, not even glancing at me in the briefest acknowledgement. My palms
are sweating even though it’s not like I’m the one caught alone with Father. The sensation that a
monumental event is occurring in that room, witnessed by all of London, runs through me. A king
exacting justice on one of his own knights.
I take the lift downstairs and inspect the various facilities of the condo I’ve only seen on screen until now.
They pass by me, vague pictures, distant daydreams. I time the thirty minutes on my watch. Each second
slips by like oil through a sieve plate, gooey and flexuous the way time had gone by during the hours
before my math exam. It felt like I’d sat in my bed for days back then, staring at the woolly blanket,
remembering again how I’d planted all the oxy in my stomach. Twenty, thirty pellets. I promised Father
that I hadn’t wanted to die. It takes certain character for a father to believe their son after he almost
OD’ed.
Time is kinder to me now as thirty minutes pass by as it normally does. I take the lift back to floor 103
just as Father emerges from my room, staring at his wristwatch.
“You’ve done a good job keeping the place up.”
“Devlin helps. He’s teaching me how to cook.”
Father hums intently. “Yes. I’ve to go now. Take care of yourself, Gimley.”
“See you on Christmas.”
“Yes.”
And then he melts into the corridor, fading, nothing like the pompous woman who’d cat walked past me
earlier. I enter the room, half afraid I’ll find Devlin smashing my Mac, shredding up my research papers
or jumping out the window. Instead he sits on the couch, something like a smile on his face.

Edgar
On Christmas Eve I end up giving Uncle the best thing I can think of: an evening at his farm, watching
Sex in the West which is decidedly not from the 60s and not about sex. In the last episode, a man dies for
his apparently platonic best friend and I end up crying a mess of myself. The funny thing is, Uncle starts
crying too. Just tears on the corners of his eyes though. I bug him for the rest of the night for denying it
while we bake two pans of cranberry pie.
It’s twelve a.m. when I message Gimley. I’m drunk on two shots of rose wine, sprawled on my bed while
Jesus Christ is being born in the Yaris’s speakers, the beat of drums and jingle bells echoing in the night.
It doesn’t take a lot of alcohol for me to loosen up. I’ve helped Mom with the dishes and general
housekeeping after her friends left, having stayed too long for the karaoke (they enjoyed the cranberry pie
leftovers). A bundle of books wrapped hastily in white papers lie on my table, the pages touched by
familiar, square palms, not too long ago.
Edgar: Merry Christmas Gimley. I hope the New Year will be good for you.
It’s a little formal for all the banter we’ve had. And a tad unoriginal, but it’s sincere. In truth I want to tell
him how much I miss all our conversations. The way his skin burns like wildfire at the slightest thing, his
sadness so much like mine. We understand each other without pages or words.
I close my eyes and bury my head in a pillow.
Gimley: Happy Christmas and New Year to you too.
I’m very glad to hear from you again.
I fall asleep for twenty minutes before my phone vibrates and I wake up with a start, wiping the drool
from my chin and pillow.
Gimley: Did you get the books? They’re the ones I loved as a kid. Or at least I think so, I had to go
through quite a lot to pick them out.
I don’t know why I do it, but I lift the phone up to my ear and call him. It rings for a while. I can’t be sure
of anything while I’m drunk.
“How are you?” I ask him when he picks up. A long beat passes before Gimley responds.
“All right. I’m feeling a little sick though.”
“Actual sick? Or booze sick.”
He chuckles, and the sound tugs something inside me. I’ve missed it.
“Martini. Just one glass.”
The noise of fireworks spill over from the other end. I can imagine them blooming in the sky, flowers
spiralling to the night sky like the simultaneous firing of a hundred bullets. Suspended in the air, fading
into the indifferent night. Christmas, New Year, darkness yields the same comfort.
The words I’ve been untangling in my throat for days now knot again. Passenger Edgar had been very
real, but the point is he’s dead. I’m scared of how Gimley will react anyway, scared that I’ve been wrong
about him, that he’s not a good guy in the end and that all of our conversations will be eclipsed by this
one moment. I glance at the books on the table. There’s so much discussion we haven’t had about My
Werewolf Romance.
“Do you know that I’m, you know.”
I hate how I still can’t say it out loud. Unless it’s to Mom, the word just vaporises in my lungs.
“What?”
“You…you’re aware, right?”
“I’m sorry?”
I make a noise that’s only vaguely human. And then it all comes rushing out of me, the words drenched in
alcohol, exhaustion and something I’ve been feeling for Gimley for a while. “A guy with boobs. I wear a
binder. I was on hormones for a few years but it made me really sick but at least I got a lower voice out of
it, and my chin, my mom says it’s more. Boyish. But she probably said that just to make me feel better—“
I’m breathing really hard now, wondering how all of that left me in one breath. There’s so much more.
The exhaustion I felt all the time even though I was eating well and going on runs, ridiculous palpitations
that made me think I was getting heart attacks. It was utterly humiliating that even with T, my body
seemed to reject who I was. It was like I could hear Dad’s voice in my head telling me how he was right
about everything, that I should’ve prayed harder to be saved. But Mom and Uncle were there every step
of the way, doing everything they could to help. Watching the night drape over Uncle’s barley field,
feeding Betty and George liquorice and having them approach me like I was real and right. I got held
back and my grades need a lot of work still, but I’m proud of how far I’ve come. Even if it’s miles behind
everyone else.
Gimley doesn’t say anything for a long time, long enough for all the fireworks to fizzle out in the sky and
leave behind an ashy silence. I put my fist against my heart, pain twisting inside me.
“To answer your question,” he says, his voice magisterial and Pellinore-like. “I didn’t know. I…can’t say
I’ve ever been friends with anyone like you. And I mean that in the best way.” He pauses, gulping. “If this
is why you didn’t want me around, I’m sorry I wasn’t trustworthy enough. But I’m also glad we’re
talking about it. Now.”
“After a whole month?”
I can hear him smiling. I think about how that looks in the smoky night, the slight quirk of his thin lips.
“It could’ve been longer. I was beginning to think that meeting you was a fever dream—yes, I’m
coming!”
For a while I listen to his footsteps falling hard against the ground. I can hear him talking to someone
called Lil about some tent she ordered from France. Yes, for the last time, I promise it’ll be in the mail by
tomorrow…that’s what the sales rep said. Don’t fuss about it. And then Lil, in an icy, demanding voice, I
need it. I don’t want to be stuck here with…Mother…while you’re all away.
I stand up, push open my windows and lean out to watch Dad move around the front yard with a ladder
under his arm. He’s quite the insomniac. Most nights he shuffles around organizing groceries, reading
insurance papers and other household matters. Putting up the Christmas decorations is probably cathartic
for him.
“Pardon me,” Gimley says after a few huffs of air. “We’re headed for a trip tomorrow to Helvellyn. My
siblings are camping but Father and I are just going to hike. Have you been?”
I laugh. “I’m not much for mountains. You’d have to drag me up there and stop every minute.”
“I wouldn’t mind. The thing is, I’m leaving next year. To Norway, on a paid internship this time. I won’t
be back until April.”
“So this is our last chance to meet before then?” My voice drops to a whisper. I should’ve known this
would happen. Someone like Gimley wouldn’t stay put for long.
“I think so. You don’t have to worry about physical strain, we’ll work out an agreeable pace,” There’s a
pause, the sound of water rippling. “I’d love to see you before I go. I really would.”
“Okay,” I murmur. I walk out of my room, down the stairs to where Mom is hooking her apron over the
cabinet knob. There are only two lights on in the kitchen. It’s a very lonely house, even with the tree
sheared and laden with decoration. And I’m about to ditch it.
Before I leave in the morning, I kiss Mom and sneak the beanie in between two champagne glasses she’ll
take out to wash in the morning. I put the belt in the fancy bag it came in on the kitchen table with a
Merry Christmas note taped on it, signed Edgar, as if Dad and I are strangers. I see his practical Yaris and
all the folders inside the back seat and think that we really are strangers, that I don’t know him beyond the
Best Teacher Awards and the cruelty in the back seat of his car. Maybe one day we’ll patch things up, but
it’s not going to be anytime soon.

Gimley
Dawn rolls over the railway station. I watch people bustling about, fumbling over untied shoelaces and
checking their wristwatches every few seconds. It’s the morning rush, people scrambling to make it home
for Christmas. Steel trusses arching over the skylight cut the brightness into rectangular sections; the
station seems to glow from inwards, pulses of cool light roiling against the heat of electrical engines.
PENRITH STATION. 08:48:21 in glowering red.
You’ve got to be more aware, Devlin had said when I told him about Edgar’s participation. Things aren’t
free for some people. Your friend probably spent all his Christmas money for the tickets here and back,
and don’t you dare try to reimburse him. I can see you’re thinking about it. You are a very silly child,
Gim.
It’s quite annoying when adults call me silly or tell me that I’ll understand things in the future. Mother
loves pulling those cards and I guess he got it from her. He’s probably right, anyway, and I’m just sulking
because I want another chance with Edgar.
“Let’s get some sandwiches. There’s a Starbucks nearby,” Lily suggests. She’s standing behind me,
clicking away at her phone while Devlin talks to a poster blonde some distance away from us. Father
stands next to me with his eyes pinned on the railway, every fibre of his being poised to rip my incoming
companion to shreds. He has that bloodthirsty look he wears to fire his employees.
“You can go with your brother,” Father says. In spite of the constant steam and the noise of cars honking
beyond the station, his voice cuts through like a diamond edged blade. “Gimley and I shall wait here for
our…guest.”
Lily shrugs, completely neutral about my sudden announcement at four in the morning because I couldn’t
sleep and she was fretting over her camping equipment. The French one didn’t come in time but she
settled to share Devlin’s tent. Staying alone at home with Mother is a worse fate. It is terrible of us to
leave her behind but she’s likely booked her own flight out to Shanghai or Japan anyway to start another
business venture. Working on holidays are always advantageous according to her.
“Dev,” Lily yells. When he tosses his head aside (pompadour undone, he’s going for Natural Beauty to
suit the occasion today), the girl he’s talking to presses against him and tilts his head up. He leans forward
and wraps his arm around her waist, fully willing to ravish her right in the middle of the train station. I’ll
sneak over to write his name on his butt cheeks while they go at it. Meanwhile Father will pluck out his
ID card and cut the Pellinore out so they can’t associate Devlin with him.
“She’s taking your wallet,” Lily exclaims. Devlin manages to pull away fast enough that she doesn’t get it
out of his pocket. The girl smacks him with her purse before running away. A police officer pushes
through the crowd towards Devlin and Lily, which Father notes with a mild degree of clinical interest.
Then flicks his eyes back to the railway as the train we’ve been waiting for arrives in the distance.
“Devlin,” Father sighs.
I give him a little smile. Yesterday’s Eve meet-up had been a lot tamer than I thought it would be with
Devlin around. Perhaps Mom just couldn’t recognize Devlin as her son anymore, from preppy coats and
corduroys to black leather jackets and chains on his skinny jeans every day of the week. It had certainly
seemed that way from how they avoided each other, like charges of two magnets repelling. And in the
instances where she snapped at him about his eating habits—not putting the fork in the right place even
though it was perfectly true to the British table etiquette—he just put his head down, yielding. Whatever
anyone has to say about his eternal Sabbath, Devlin’s really grown up. Or given up. They’re not very
different in practice.
“So this friend of yours,” Father says. The train has stopped and my hands are tingling with nervous
energy. “You met him when?”
“September. Day before Grandma’s birthday, he gave me a ride to the airport.”
“It hasn’t been very long, then.”
“He’s lovely, Father. I promise.”
To my surprise, the ghost of a smile appears on his face. His bared canines are a blood-curdling sight to
behold. “Lovely enough to bring to a Pellinore family function. I shall be the judge of that.”
I don’t care, I say in my head. I don’t care what anyone thinks about him, I don’t care. I’ve to do this
right.
The train door opens and out comes a torrent of people looking for familiar faces, rushing to the next
station. Couples convene on the platform. Families collect their relatives and rush off home for their
celebrations. The Christmas spirit whistles low through a wireless speaker someone is playing not far
away. I glance at all the doors, getting cold feet resolutely not because of the snowy flecks in the air.
Then I spot him. When the crowd has petered out, a figure hovers by the train door, unmoving. A tousled
fluff of black, skin the shade of raw peanut shells. He sticks out like a sore thumb, looking lost and
confused, eyes full of daydreams. He notices me running towards him, my backpack rattling behind me.
The first thing I do is give him a hug.
It squeezes this little ep sound out of him that makes whatever reprimand worth it. I hold him close for a
while, rejecting the suddenness of my passion, the idea that what I feel for him should be skirted around
like cheddar in a mouse trap because my family is around. A surge of delight swells in me when he,
however hesitantly, puts his hands around me. We both start laughing when we realize that he can’t get
his arms around the sides of my backpack.
“Are your parents all right with this?” I ask when we finally let go of each other. Silly echoes in the back
of my head.
Edgar shrugs. “My mom understands. She said I ought to get her a souvenir, so I brought a jar.”
“I’ve got a cooler we can put it in. Only the freshest snow for the Mrs.”
We smile conspiratorially at each other.
That’s when Father clops forward. Even in an insulating jacket, hiking pants and trail boots, he sports a
regal mien that intimidates all but the people closest to him (and even then). Serious dark eyes and dark
hair that belongs in sky-scraping offices, steel-clad facilities. The trick is to not be intimidated. Somehow,
Edgar doesn’t seem to think much of his imposing presence. They go in for a handshake. Then Edgar
steps back and looks up at him. “I like the My Werewolf Romance reference.”
Father blinks slowly. He pries the cap off his head, his hair impossibly immaculate, and rubs a finger over
the golden pin of a wolf with the words Never to Be on its flank. His face falls, melancholy close to the
heart. “Alden Wallace…should have never left her.”
“No,” Edgar says. I watch in utter amazement. “He shouldn’t have.”
Father puts the cap back on again. He nods approvingly at Edgar before striding off to gather Lily and
Devlin.
I walk up to Edgar, who looks rightly smug. “That was. You just felled the mighty Pellinore dragon.”
“I’ll need a beast bigger than that to keep in shape.”
“Oh, that was just one of his three heads.”
A knowing beat. Edgar shows me a plastic bag containing, to my elation, a whole cranberry pie packed in
an aluminium cask. “It’s a little too early for dessert,” he says. “But I hope we can share this later.”
“Is that cake?” Lily squints at the plastic bag, her hand a visor over her forehead even though it’s a dim
day. “You’ve found a saint, Gimley.”
Devlin and Father watch as Lily approaches us, shaking hands with Edgar while sneaking glances at the
pie. Impolite and wholly un-Pellinore, but no one gets in Lily’s way when she’s craving sweets. I think
they’ll find each other in good company on that front.
*
We ride on separate cabs to Glendridding village, the mountain range like behemoths towering over us.
From there we’ll head along Greenside Road, pass by an inn and begin the trail over the cattle grid. Father
sits in the passenger seat while Edgar and I maintain a respectable distance from each other in the back,
not that we wouldn’t if he weren’t in attendance, but it’s apparent that we both find relaxing a difficult
task in this atmosphere. At least I do. My shoulders are raised, my breaths hitching, afraid that I’m going
to say something that ends in an argument.
Edgar doesn’t mind the silence, though. He looks out of the window as the car glides through the empty
streets, families gone to crowd streets of busier cities for the festive spirit. It’s better coming out here than
sitting around listening to carols and indulging in lavish dinners. I just feel bad that I can’t be with
Grandma, the only other person in the family I care about beyond necessitated conversations. An ordinary
day out in nature to remind us all that we’re just fragments of a giant world. It’s the ideal celebration by a
long shot.
“Why aren’t we skiing?” Edgar asks all of a sudden. His eyes are pinned on the snowy tops of Raise Fell.
The white peaks vanish into the glossy sky, an invisible divide caused by our distance. “I remember
Ferdinand said you went to the Swiss Alps for that.”
“We had been planning on it,” I say, glancing at Father’s mirrored shades through the side mirror. He
faces the windshield, not the slightest indication that he’s listening in on his face. “But the journey up
there can be treacherous for someone with no experience.”
Edgar contemplates this. He gazes out the window again for a moment, at the rocky green-brown rocks
tapering to the snowy crests. “…I skied before.”
“How long ago was that?”
Edgar purses his lips. He probably hadn’t been expecting to win that one anyway.
We wait outside of the inn for Devlin and Lily’s ride to come down the road. The sky is a lapping blue,
clouds jagged from the buffeting winds. The appearance of The Rake is vicious, its surface toothed and
craggy as it squats ominously behind the inn. Vicious to the non-hiker, anyway. In truth it’ll take just
about two hours to clear. Edgar stares at The Rake with a glassy look on his face, betraying not fear or
excitement, just a means to an end.
“Norway, huh?” Edgar breathes into the air.
I rock a little on my heels. “Yeah. Until April. I suspect you’ll be in the midst of exam revision.”
“Exam revision,” Edgar grumbles.
Father is walking over to Devlin and Lily, an ugly crease between his brows at the way pie crumbs are
still stuck on her face. Devlin watches, nonplussed as he sips on his cold nitro brew. We’d divvied the
slices at Starbucks; Devlin was the only one who ordered coffee. Lily hadn’t even bothered when she
started digging in the pie. You won’t understand what that pie can do to a person until you’ve had a taste
of it.
I sidle up closer to Edgar, whispering under my breath. “That conversation on the phone…I need to ask if
there’s anything I should know. If there are certain ways I should address you, or if you would prefer in
social settings—“
“No,” Edgar smiles at his feet. “Just don’t tell anyone about it. Not your family either.”
“I won’t, but I promise they’re a progressive lot. Even Lily, young as she is.”
Devlin catcalls us. We join them as a signpost for the trail appears: Glenridding Dodd, 442m. Upon
ascension the grey ridges are broken by interludes of wilted grass, tawny in its effort to stave off the
winter. It lasts only for the first leg of the climb before sheets of snow swallow the fell. Sparse bracken
pockmarks the landscape and even though Glenridding isn’t England’s Mount Everest, the fells and peaks
breaking the ground all around us turn it into quite a homely place. Other gargantuan mountains I’ve
climbed give me only a sense of power when I stand on top of them. Father enjoys this, but it only makes
me feel lonely.
“Should we stop?”
To my surprise, it’s Devlin asking this. He’s not the fittest guy but mountain climbing is basically the
Pellinore sport, and I can see that he’s not breathing hard or breaking out a frenzied sweat anyway. Father
and Lily stop and look over an edge together in silence. I turn to Edgar. He shrugs.
“Do I look like I’m dying to you?”
But I spot the black undershirt he’s wearing and can’t help but remember what happened at his Uncle’s.
He notices me looking and pulls his clothes over. “I’m fine,” he says. “I’ll let you know if I’m unwell.”
So we continue, having passed the halfway point, for the last hour long leg of the journey. No one pays us
any mind when I linger back a bit with Edgar.
“You want to know more,” Edgar says.
“Not if you’re uncomfortable.”
A short pause after, he scratches the back of his head, face scrunching as he explains. “It’s not discomfort.
I just…what do I say? Getting treatment was a tough time. Especially with my dad, but I lucked out on
the family side of things. I don’t get called out when we meet. Some of my aunts think I’m just going
through a phase.”
He looks over the fell at a stream of pale blue water, wide and vast next to him, and it’s like he’s being
sucked someplace else. Carding through memories, reliving them. “I hate how I am, though. My therapist
told me I’d see changes a few months after I started T, but my body rejected it. I get worried about the
future sometimes, not knowing if I’ll pass or if I’ll just look like a teen forever. Or worse, if I go back.
God. Anything but that.”
I stare at him like a complete idiot, honestly having understood not more than half of his words. Instead of
getting angry or frustrated, Edgar gives me a light pat on the shoulder. “Usual thoughts. It’s nothing I
should bother you about.”
“I don’t think it’s good. To hate how you are when you’ve fought so hard.”
If there’s one thing I heard, it’s that. Edgar sighs softly like it’s something I just can’t understand. And it
is, but at least I’ve tried my best to.
“You’re a lot kinder about it than most people,” he says after we’ve caught up with the others a bit. “Do
you know why I hit her? Arabella?”
I’d heard a rundown from his headmaster, the whole affair of tugging his pants and pulling on his shirt,
but I never made sense of it until now. “I ought to have punched her myself back there. Why didn’t you
tell anyone? Why didn’t your headmaster report it to—oh.”
Because it’s a secret, of course. Mr. Grimshaw and probably everyone else at Allen Powell doesn’t know
about it. I can’t even imagine how difficult it must’ve been for Edgar’s parents to sneak the paperwork in,
or if the principal just can’t be bothered to wonder if each incoming studenet is male or female or
anything in between as long as their parents are paying the fees.
“Let’s not talk about it anymore,” Edgar tugs on my pink muffler. “That’s hideous.”
I grimace while shifting it back into place. “That’s not very nice to say. Grandma bought this for me and I
love it very much, thank you.”
Later, we reach the top of the fell with a flourish. Namely, Devlin throwing his bag down and doing a
cartwheel across the snowy ground. Lily takes a picture and threatens to blackmail it to his future wife, to
which Devlin screams NEVER! on the top of his lungs. When he’s picked himself up, we all group
together in a corner to gaze down at the pass between Glenridding and another fell called Heron Pike. On
the other side there’s a view of the village veiled by snow, the lake curled around it pale with the snare of
ice. The last breath of autumn had been stripped; the trees in the village are barren black bark, worrying
for the whims of winter storms.
“Let’s go to the summit,” Father suggests. Everyone turns their heads in the direction of the cairn just a
tiny bump above us.
It’s not as clear as it would be in the spring but the view of the peppery white land and black sprawls is
breath-taking in its own, small town kind of way. The thing about coming here during the holiday season
is that it’s noisy in a way filled only by nature. The episodes of howling winds, feet crunching over twigs
and sticks, our path unencumbered by thoughts of civilian chaos. I think of nature’s chaos itself, the
vastness of the world that can crush us here in an instant, and the world would remain exactly as it is.
Then I notice Edgar’s hand pressed against mine, his glove curling around my mitten, surreptitious. We
are standing together by the cairn, looking down rather than at each other, our backs against the world.
We continue down to the village after we’ve had a short break at the summit, gazing over the still metallic
waters. In spite of Edgar’s assurance, his breathing grows more laboured as we trek down a steep decline.
I lend him a steady hand as inch down. Lily, assistant head of her school’s orienteering club, deftly paves
the footholds. Devlin follows with a drunken stumble while Father’s shadow hovers over us all like a
perching raven. I look back when I hear Father clearing his throat.
“I think I might trek up Hole,” he says. He’s half glancing at his watch while waiting for Edgar and me to
move forward.
Hole in the Wall is quite some distance away, accessible through Mires Beck. It would take several hours
to get there from Glenridding and would be exhausting for a beginning hiker but Father’s walked through
Helvellyn dozens of times. In spite of having traversed hundreds of other mountains, Chinchey to Rams
Head to Ben Navis, Helvellyn is special to him because this is where he met Mother. The legend is that
she’d been sitting outside an inn, clacking away at her laptop when Father’s tin of coconut juice rolled
over to her feet.
The original plan had been for him and I to go up Striding Edge, but that’s not a trek Edgar can do.
“We’ll meet you at the inn, then?” I ask Father.
He shakes his head. “I’ll go back myself. Lily, take care of your brother out there.”
Lily offers him a peace sign. A few miles forward where there’s another sign post, she whips her compass
out and she and Devlin bid us goodbye. One trail leads down Ullswater and a pavement to the village
while the third one points to the Hole. Father shakes hands with Edgar who’s cooled down considerably
since the steep decline.
“It’s nice having made your acquaintance. I apologize for being a rather uncourteous host to leave you so
soon,” and here he glances at me like he knows exactly why Edgar is here at such short notice, that it has
to do with Norway and a requited desire to spend time together before I leave.
“It’s fine,” Edgar says. “Thanks for having me today. Merry Christmas.”
“Happy Christmas,” Father returns. Then he departs, setting off at a medium pace towards Hole to think
over memories of a love long lost.
Edgar and I return to ground level together at a small juice shack in Glenridding. The air is still,
punctuated without a single breeze. The thin clouds earlier have puffed out into bruised welts in the sky.
We stand by each other’s side with our eyes on the stark houses and silent roads. Distant wind chimes
rattle in the bone cold air. Edgar takes off his glove and puts his hand on my mitten. I imagine that they’re
cold, metal touches of a kettle left in the snow.
Everything is right like this. It’s not like charged like when we were sitting on the wicker swing, the air
skinny, my recognition of the thousands of layers of skin and bone that make up my arm and weave
together the scar that Edgar touched. Strange creatures seen through frosted glass, static, the crackle of
flint against steel.
This is different. This is the warm middle ground of a slow-burning torch, a falling leaf frozen in mid-air.
Ripples of water paused in time, lakes empty of duck feathers or slivers of pondweed, of existence as a
whole. Hands groping in the night, we are swallowed and lie together in endless sleep, his fingers against
mine.
I take my mittens off and intertwine my fingers between his. I hunch over a little, the bridge of my nose
hovering over his, a feeble veil of warmth between our lips. His dark brown eyes are focused on mine and
I wonder if he can see everything in them, my anxieties crushed beneath impregnable desire. To know
him for who he is and not what anyone sees him as, not even himself. He leans in closer, breath ghosting
my upper lip.
Thunk.
The branch of a birch tree falls onto my head. We move away, examining the solid black branch between
our boots. The pond explodes with life and we are distant again, separated by years of sea and tide. Edgar
laughs, but the sweet sound fails to reach my ears.
Widow-maker, I think.

And this is the end. The exhalation.

When two people stand against each other, one turns around and sees the
back of their companion. When they look forward again, their
companion turns. And it continues like this, on and on, neither ever
seeing the face of the other.
I want to turn around. My breastplate is cleaved off my body, sword
skidding away from me throwing ambers into the air. Tassels dye the
rooted earth, tiny pools of red.
I cannot save us.

Edgar
After Christmas, I see Gimley off at the airport. There’s a heaviness in my chest unlike anything I’ve ever
experienced before. I don’t think this is bad necessarily but unease coils in me nonetheless. The ghostly
villi of his pink muffler lingers on my cheeks even after I’ve watched his plane fly off into the chilly
night. The weather is good for a winter day; a snowstorm had ravaged the land yesterday, leaving the
skies clear for safe flight. It’s a good day. The pink muffler caresses me again as the overhead ventilator
blows harder, turned up a notch by an unseen hand. It’s like a last memento from him, a final goodbye.
Confused by my restless nerves I try to rub the tingling off my cheek.
I don’t have any opinion on the supernatural—I’ve never had any reason to. But there was one time I
woke up in the middle of the night, bone soaked right through with sweat, my palms throbbing where I’d
cut into them with my nails. I saw my grandfather on his hospital bed packed into a giant cardboard box,
the type they use to package factory products. The box was falling through a drain pipe with no end or
beginning, whooshing noises pulsing in my ears as he went. Then Mom pushed into my room, shawl over
her shoulders, her eyes faraway. She shook her head and said in a hollow voice, grandpa.
Remembering about grandpa keeps me awake when I get home. I’m packing my bags, clothes and
toiletries to go back to school soon. I’ve signed up for history revision classes because that’s the one
subject I need to bump up to a C. I look through my school notebook and see all the work I’ve done for
Language this year. I bet I can get an A by the skin of my teeth if I stop sleeping in class and actually take
notes. The predictions are kind of skewed anyway, as most tests I don’t try very hard in.
When I’ve shoved everything in my luggage bag, I plop down and search for Gimley on my phone. He
should have landed in Oslo now, after a two hour flight, and is probably standing in immigration ogling
the words and letters that don’t mean anything to him.
I call him, but there’s no response.
Days pass. I call him in my truck while I’m waiting for Mom to pick up some groceries. I call him in a
darkened corner of the town square while fireworks are going off and people are screaming Happy New
Year! all around me. I give Mom a kiss in the packed throng. She wraps an arm around my shoulder and
leans her head on top of mine, murmuring the same wish every year for all three of us to be well in
happiness and health. Dad stands on the other side of her, giving me that quick smile he musters for
celebrations and birthdays. It’s an act of courtesy, but sometimes my mind tricks me into believing it can
be something else. A bridge to razed territory.
Like every other year, I turn away and expect him to do the same. Mom’s usually sad about it, but this
time around she looks absolutely miserable when I avoid Dad’s eye.
We’ve walked out of the central town area to a record shop. Dad is standing outside, probably with a
cigarette between his lips. He’s a very occasional smoker but it’d undoubtedly be a huge shock if any of
his students found out. I watch him move in the periphery of my eye, a shadow flickering between the
bushes.
“You want to go to the park?”
It’s the park we used to go together. I’m not thinking of the autumn night where everything was perfect
for us. I’m thinking of the birch trees a little ways off—on the outskirts of the park that look out to a hilly
forest area. Back in the day when I was the school hooky, I would go out to arcades and shopping centres
and heavily trafficked areas so I could stand in the middle of them and just watch the world pass by. Busy
office workers and college students, people who didn’t necessarily have their lives together but had
enough in them to appear so. It sickened me so I left in search of nature, a change of scenery to calm my
nerves.
I used to hurt myself there, in the midst of the birch trees. A diseased little thing curled up on the ground,
all shredded up.
“Why?” Mom asks. She seems unsure, her arms wrapped around her thin frame. She’s so much thinner
than Dad or me, ribs visible under her collarbones. If I can sneeze in her face she’d topple right over.
“Now, today?”
I realize for the first time the implications of my invitation: first what Arabella tried to pull on me, then
the whole heading-out-with-a-friend on Christmas. Now I’m asking her to come with me to a park that
bodes nothing but foul memories for her.
I stuff my hands in my pockets. “What’re you worried about?”
“Your mental state?” Mom hisses. Every time I ask what’s bothering her, what’s causing the ugly creases
between her eyes or what’s scrunching up her features, she’ll respond with your mental state. It shouldn’t
be funny, but I laugh anyway.
“I’m the same. That girl won’t bother me again and I’ve made a really good friend. I’ve gotten a good
start this year.”
Mom smiles. We hug each other while the shopkeeper sighs behind the counter. The man certainly looks
harrowed enough to want to work on New Year. When we pull away, she draws a Bon Jovi record out of
a rack to support the shoddy man (we don’t have a record player at home). He glares at Mom like he’s got
a personal vendetta against her. I really don’t like that.
“Excuse me, Sir,” Mom says while staring at the bills in her hand. She touches the notch between her
collarbones. “I handed you a hundred pounds. This is fifty.”
“Yeah?” the man responds in a thick Scottish accent. He crosses his arms on the table. “It’s fifty pound
change.”
I put my hands on the table, taller than him only because he’s sitting. His scalp reflects the bright white
LED overhead. We stare at each other for a long time, not saying a single word. Noise of the New Year
celebrations spill into the shop, remixes of dreadful top hundred pop songs reaching a crescendo. Pull-
string firecrackers torpedo into the air while the giant leaf of an African palm tree watches us from the
shop wall.
“Let’s go,” Mom sighs.
I’m not the violent type. Most bookish people aren’t. But no one messes with my mom.
Before I can seriously book this guy in, though, he picks his nose and rummages in the cash register for
her change. His face reeks while he does it. Mom adjusts her beanie to pull my attention towards her and
we walk out of the store, the black throbbing sensation fading from my chest. Dad approaches us and
Mom makes idle chatter with him about Bon Jovi and what he missed at the cash register. I stand aside,
scuffing my shoes to try to get a dirt spot off.
There’s this general sense of malaise as I drive us back home. Mom says I’m a little more responsible
than most teenagers but I only ever feel like I’m a burden to her. I think she used to be plumper when I
was a kid, redder cheeks and more flesh over her bones. I hate that I didn’t punch that guy. I guess
Gimley leaving and never answering my calls is bothering me more than I’d like to admit.
*
Boarders file into the dorm the night before school starts. It’s a usual scene, luggage bags being yanked
up and down stairs, thrown over beds, the doors flung open wide to invite the intermingling of exotic
scents in the corridor. I throw my clothes into my closet and go looking for Ferdinand.
Rodrick and Leo are swatting each other in the corridor again. They’re the only weekday boarders who
shower every night they get back. Rodrick’s the only guy who can get Leo chatty and excitable enough to
run around half-naked in public like this and I bet he’s been secretly pining after Leo since he saw him. A
shame he’ll have to find out that Leo only gets sexual for art.
“Hey,” I stop him in the corridor. He’s guilty enough about telling Arabella that he quits bugging Leo for
a moment to regard me. “Have you seen Ferdinand?”
“No, but I heard Fall Out Boys playing downstairs. He’s probably doing homework in the common
room.”
I nod and look at Leo. “Did you have a good break?”
He shrugs, “As good as it gets.”
I head downstairs in search of Ferdinand. True to Rodrick’s word, Just One Yesterday is booming from
his speakers. He’s basically the only guy the entire dorm has to be proud of, great grades and
extracurricular involvement plus he’s the house captain, so he gets the special privilege of blasting his
music on Sunday nights so long as he keeps the common room door closed. Let’s be real. No one else
studies on a Sunday night anyway.
I enter the room. He continues singing along with the music and bobbing his head while he clacks away at
a calculator. The wireless speaker on the table is probably blocking his peripheral vision of me, and he
remains oblivious until I drape an arm over it. My shadow falls over him and he goes wide-eyed at the
sight of me.
“Dude, what’s up?” he asks.
I stare at him.
“You’re still mad at me,” he says. He puts his pencil down and turns the volume knob down. I’d quit the
chat group after the incident with Arabella, which is probably when he figured we were done with each
other for good.
A small smile cracks on my face and I punch him lightly on the shoulder. Relief spills over his features
and he knocks me back, a little harder than what I was prepared for.
“So are you and Gim still hanging?”
I frown, rubbing my shoulder. “He off for another internship. Didn’t you know?”
He blinks blankly at me. The female dorm’s Norwegian Forest Cat stalks past the building, its fuzzy
silhouette slithering across the ceiling-to-floor window. “No. We haven’t talked in a while. Life and all.”
“All right then. Good luck with all…that,” I gesture vaguely at his various mathematical scrawls.
Ferdinand knows better than to make amends for Clacton and Arabella but he calls me out before I leave,
one arm hooked over his chair.
“We good?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. He’d only meant well. “By the way, I heard that Prajna dumped Hugh. Crushed him.”
“Serves him right for buddying with the Tackers,” Ferdinand nods. “Good for her.”
Back at school the next day, the first thing I notice is that the school lockers are purple. Purple vibrant
enough to shock any student awake while they’re scrambling through the hallways half asleep in the
morning. Posters for an upcoming show of Romeo and Juliet are pasted all over the walls, depicting a
knife laid next to an elixir of radioactively-coloured liquid. I shove my hand into my locker, carding
through dusty papers and files all wrapped up in cobweb in search of Language papers that will help kick
my grade up. There isn’t much to go by that doesn’t date over two years back.
While I stand there, debating whether I should get on my knees and beg my Language teacher for notes,
something rams against my open locker. The force is strong enough that I get shoved against the reedy
girl standing next to me. I grab the edge of my locker before I can fall over and murmur an apology to the
girl. She glances at me once before rushing off, her mouth agape, pupils black and wide. I watch her
almost trip over thin air as she sprints away from me.
And then I notice. I notice the way people are looking at me, over their shoulders with their arms crossed,
uncertain expressions on their faces. When I meet their eye they turn away, whispering under their
breaths. My stomach drops at the familiarity of it, a reminder of my time at St. Anglus.
Cecilia grabs my hand without saying a single word, barely giving me time to shut my locker or gather
my books. She pulls me up the back stairwell leading up to the rooftop, our footsteps clamouring against
the aluminium steps. The cacophony numbs my mind as we run up to the metal door, secured by chains in
a plastic sleeve and a padlock the size of Leo’s mini paint set. Cecilia fishes a key out of her bag, an
imitation set that a few of the lesbian girls have to access the rooftop on their Thursday hangouts. How
the original key got into their possession is anyone’s guess.
There’s a view of the entire school from up here: the snow-washed football court where all the games are
held, the fifty by twenty-five pool that’s closed during winter (renovations were underway to build an
actual stadium over it, but again budget cuts got in the way), and the plain, grubby dorms in the distance.
A gust of wind blows towards us and I shiver, wondering how I got here and why. Cecilia pulls a
crumpled paper ball out of her bag and smooths it out for me.
I freeze. The wind continues to howl around us as I stare at the small slip of paper, A5, sporting a matt
sheen. It’s the kind of paper that the Tackers use to spread gossip, slipped between textbooks and
unzipped bags, sometimes taped to boards and left there for the disciplinary master to rip off. Usually
accompanying words are laid out by the pictures like in a magazine cover—they threaten some girls from
the digital media club to do it for them.
This one is just a picture. Long black hair and puffy, bloodshot eyes. An unsmiling face against a deep red
backdrop; remembrances of the canvas flapping as people swarmed the auditorium to get their pictures
taken for the school magazine. SMILE! Light sears into his eyes. Unmistakably feminine cheeks. Boobs.
Passenger Edgar.
Where did you get this? I can’t get the words out of my mouth. They’re choked up inside me. A sudden
spike of adrenaline taps against the back of my head. My chest tightens, lungs shrivelling to peapods. My
toes are tingling and the urge to run off the roof hits me. Why does this exist?
A hand rests on my arm to steady me. I tear my eyes away from the picture to Camelia’s mild face. Mild.
Just about everything seems mild now.
“Edgar. Let’s sit down.”
I’m thinking that’s a damn good idea.
We shuffle to the ledge of the roof walled in by bricks and mantled by soggy grey snow. I sit, back
against the bricks, just kind of gawking at the picture. Everyone’s kind of ugly at the age of twelve,
myself included, but I can see the constant torture in my younger eyes. An out-of-focus attempt to push
through despite the BB guns they shot me with afterschool. Getting cowed in the locker room after gym,
screaming through my tears the one thing I needed them to understand. A guy in an all girl’s school.
On the bottom of the slip my name is printed in bold letters. Edgar Sommers. A jester, a phony, a fool.
How far has this spread? When did you get this? Where’s Arabella so I can slit her throat clean off?
I open my mouth, but there are no words. These kinds of things can’t be controlled. They’ll spread like a
miasma, they must already have. Just a single moment of desperation and decision to swim in the pool
and this is what happens. And the teachers. What if they find out? Not all of them will take this very
kindly.
“I have an idea,” Cecilia says, slowly, to accommodate the thoughts buzzing through my head. “You’re
not going to like it, but there’s an open slot for the Wednesday Lunchtime Lecture. You can explain. Give
yourself some visibility.”
“Visibility?” Blood heats under my skin; I rip the photo with my bare hands. The matte film resists me
and my ash white fingernails but I pull and pull, putting my entire body’s force into it until, with a carnal
grunt, the photo gives into two halves. Then the words are flying out of me as I keep tearing them into
smaller pieces, “You want me to go up there and tell everyone, have boys come up to me after the lecture
asking to see what’s in my pants? You think those guys will be as considerate as you are? Visibility,” I
snort. “Fucking visibility.”
And the worst part is that it hadn’t been too long ago that I had an echo of this conversation with Uncle.
An idealistic breath held close to my heart that people will react well to it. That I can inform everyone of
this big thing in my life so that they’ll go on to meet more people like me and not hurt them the way I was
hurt. For the people who aren’t like me who don’t have the means for HRT and the people who are, but
whose bodies shit out the hormones we try so hard to give them. And every single other person on my end
of the spectrum, stealth or not.
Cecilia runs her hand over my arm again. I shove her away but her face doesn’t change. It’s the same
concern and respect and I almost hate her for it, for showing me a world where people can accept me but
have me face up to the fact that it’ll never be a reality in this century or the many centuries after.
“Think about it,” she says. The first bell of the day rings, loud and clear through the buffering winds and
the snow that’s melted against my jacket.
After she leaves, I’m thinking. I’m thinking of birch trees and train stations and a very dark blot of time
and space.

Edgar
There’s this alcove behind the school gym that everyone misses.
It’s a very small corner, blocked by a tree and a garishly red fence coiled up with bracken. Only the worst
students know of its existence. Cutting class and killing time by smoking, packets of weed exchanging
hands, more sinister dealings with older men of scraggly beards and off-rocker eyes. There’s something
about winter that depresses people and makes them hang around here more often, where the snow piles up
and creates a bed wide enough for three or four people to lie down with their hands behind their heads,
wasting their hours away.
I know this place because I listen. I’ve never dabbled in weed or smoke, which is evidently rare for a
teenager of this time and age. But I think I’ve done enough other things to go without.
I check the time on my phone. It’s about three in the afternoon, right after the day’s last afternoon period.
Today’s been relatively lax. I tried to get some actual revision done, but even in the darkest corner of the
library it felt like eyes were constantly falling onto me, mouths moving in curiosity, disgust.
I pinch the bridge of my nose, reminding myself that I don’t know that. The mind has a way of blowing
everything out of proportion, a fight-or-flight instinct Cecilia had gone on about during her cafeteria
ramblings. The thudding of a dodgeball against the inside wall of the gym startles me; I look up and he’s
right in my face.
“Hey, love.”
It’s not as frightening as you’d figure. Gabriel has a tendency of calling everyone love, though that never
bothers Arabella. It is intimidating that he’s almost the height of Gimley’s father, and his buzz cut frames
every sharp plane of his face in a way that makes him look like he’s cut from a block of limestone. A
necklace glints around the collar of his coat, the pendant tucked into his undershirt.
“Where are the fliers?”
He leans against the persimmon tree stripped of leaves. Earlier this morning the weather had taken a grave
turn, the snow falling hard in an endless torrent onto pavements and blanketed grass, pelting windows,
forcing teachers to crank up the heating. Gabriel runs his long, slender fingers into his jeans and pulls out
a packet of cigarettes. He was known as the cigarette kisser prior to joining the Tackers; he often shared
them with people he fancied and when the cig burned up he’d lean in for a kiss.
“Fliers?”
A long moment passes as clouds of wispy grey smoke continue to spill over the air like miniature clouds.
He looks me from head-to-toe. It’s not annoying or unnerving. People have been eyeing me my whole
life, before, during and after transition. It’s a terrible thing to get used to, but I have. I stand by the alcove
and watch him just as intently.
“I haven’t all day.”
I seem to have passed some test as he steps forward and proffers his cigarette to me. I smack his hand
away.
“You’re a tough one,” Gabriel says, and I’m almost positive that he’ll follow it up with but I like that.
Instead, he sucks one more lungful of cigarette ash before throwing it to the ground and stomping it in the
snow.
The dodgeballs continue battering against the gym wall. In the distance some swimmers stare longingly at
the pool, or rather their inability to get in it without freezing up. Gabriel finally digs in his coat for a
pouch, a larger variation of the kind they use to put sunglasses in. He stretches the drawstrings and reveals
ten or fifteen photos of the same picture Cecilia had shown me earlier.
I look right. He looks right. And in a snap of motion I yank it out of his hand.
He shoves me back against the wall, his grip unwavering as he laughs. A sick, coyote noise.
“You want these fliers? Earn them. Party at my house tonight. I want you to come as a girl.”
“I’m not,” I start, but the words die off my lips. I know the response: more laughter. I see you, he’s
thinking. I know you.
“These are going up on notice boards by tomorrow morning,” he fans them before throwing them in my
face. The sharp edge of one jabs me in the eye, causing me to stumble back, cursing. Gabriel’s laugh only
rises above the dodgeballs. “Wouldn’t make a difference if I gave them to you. I’ve got you in my laptop.
I’ll only stop spreading this if you come as a girl tonight.” Then, a cruel smile stretches across his lips,
“E—a.”
I’d been prepared for this, hours since I slid over to Hugh at a lone table and told him that I needed to talk
to Arabella. He came back again a few minutes later and whispered in a low voice, behind the gym after
school.
“Won’t do it,” I mutter.
“What’s that?” Gabriel cups his ear while I pick the soggy photos off the ground. A force slams against
my chest as I stand up. It sends me into a coughing fit and I realize belatedly that he’d punched me hard.
“I said I won’t do it. You can tell Queen Elizabeth for all I care. We’re done here.”
“Fucking pussy.”
My stomach curdles and bile rises to the top of my throat. I swallow, folding all the photos in my hand as
I turn and leave the alcove.
Later, back at the dorms, I’m lighting the papers up one by one with a matchstick from the kitchenette. I
do this by the cricket field filled in by snow. I crouch under the awning outside the common room where
the chairs and tables are stacked up for the winter, striking a matchstick and shielding the papers from the
wind with my whole body, hunched over like a millipede, a dead sardine on shore. The matchstick only
works once so I light each bloodshot picture of mine with the last photo until there’s just one left, and for
that one I let the flames lick higher until it scalds my fingers and the heel of my thumb. The pain is brief,
sharp and exhilarating. Nothing compared to birch trees, but it’s a tantalizing start.
It’s seven in the evening when I sneak out of the dorms. Not even in my truck. I stride right out of the
security post while Pete is busy reading about astrophysics.
Gabriel’s house isn’t far away. He’s crazy about parties, so ask any guy in our year who’s even vaguely
social and they’ll point it out with ease. I’d input the address I got from Rodrick into my phone which
shows me a ten minute walk.
I think about Alden Wallace, pink mufflers and cranberry pies. I look in phone, the last text I sent Gimley
yesterday night and how there’s still no response. I’d called him again today, after Cecilia left me on the
rooftop to mull over the shredded photo. Desperate to hear his encouragement, his advice, his voice. I
know he’s not doing this on purpose. I feel a little better when I think of his silly tomato face and his
stuttering apologies. I’ll figure out a way to contact him once I settle this thing with Gabriel.
My hands are turning to ice in my gloves. A bunch of cars are parked outside of Gabriel’s house. He’s the
only guy in the whole school who can pull off a party of this scale during the freezing cowl of winter. I
hover by the sidewalk of his neighbour’s house, watching boys and girls throw their coats off at the
doorstep to reveal scanty shorts and strapless dresses. The heating must be turned on max for the door to
be open like that, throwing a square of yellow light onto the paved front yard. The party must’ve just
begun because Gabriel is leaning by the door, greeting guests like some member of parliament with the
cigarette between his lips like an extra appendage.
There’s a flickering of light inside the house followed by a resounding cheer. Gabriel’s eyes suddenly
flick my way, not to the lamppost next to me or to the premature snowman lump behind. They gleam as if
he’d caught sight of some new, exotic pet and he curls a finger, gesturing for me to come over. I feel the
weight of my phone in my back pocket. I think briefly of calling Mom or Leo or Ferdinand. But in the
end it’s my battle to fight. I can’t keep depending on Mom or my ephemeral friends.
So I go. I cross the road, the eventual graveyard of sardines, years and years passing with each step. The
asphalt is wet and bitter. My feet take me across Gabriel’s front yard and onto his porch. He hands his
cigarette to a passing girl and stands upright, blocking my path in. White backlight shines a halo over his
head. An angel, cheeks red and buzzed. Behind him some people notice me, their arms falling from the
air, legs suddenly sober despite the booming music. Eyes. Me.
“Glad you decided to come,” Gabriel says. He steps aside to let me in.
It feels like I’m walking into a shark den.
They know. I keep thinking that while I walk, not sure where I’m going, my head tipped downwards
while people part like the red sea around me. The upbeat music is familiar, but none of the words register
in my mind. People are catcalling. I really can’t tell if it’s directed at me.
I walk towards an empty corridor, impenetrably dark, and feel a breath of relief rushing out of me.
“Beer,” Gabriel appears suddenly at the end of it and hands me a bottle of Heineken. The corridor had
seemed like the only refuge from all the bodies pressed up against each other, but I should’ve known
there wouldn’t be any tonight.
I take the drink, tilt it down my throat and swallow as much as I can at once. I’m gasping when I’m done.
Gabriel watches me with that sick smirk on him.
“Listen, I’ll tell you what I can do about your problem,” he tilts his head up a flight of stairs. “Shall we?”
It’s not like I’ve got a plethora of choices at this point. I drink again, more out of a need to wet my dry
mouth than anything. It pleases Gabriel as the smirk on him widens and he leads the way upstairs.
It’s a lot touchier and dimmer than on the ground floor. A couple gropes each other right by the entrance
and more still are writhing against each other on a couch draped in the darkness. Their faces are mostly
concealed but I recognize a few of them from around school. Gabriel leads me past a column of pillars,
each sat on by potted orchids. Their spring smell mingles with the hot and heavy booze.
“In here,” he says, entering a small room furnished sparsely by closets, bedside tables and a TV draped in
wires. Dust particles hang in the air, visible when he flicks on the light switch. He leaves the door partly
ajar and strides across the length of the room to sit by the window sill. I hesitate by the doorway. He
bends over and picks up a six bottle pack of Heineken hidden behind the TV set, dangling it by two
fingers.
“What do you think of my place?” he asks. It’s so conversational that it’s as if, having been removed from
the wild party and the reputation he’s built for himself, I’m seeing the real Gabriel for the first time.
“Big,” I say. “Extravagant.”
He chuckles, places the six pack on top of the TV and pops the lid of one bottle. He extends a hand while
foam drapes over the rim of it. “Well?” he drawls. “Come on, then. I can’t be waiting to get stoned. Life’s
too hard to be sober for very long.”
I walk over and clink our glasses, expecting him to pull something wild. But all he does is lean back
against the glass of the window, Adam’s apple bobbing as he chugs. I drink too, lured by a sense of lazy
torpor.
Gabriel gestures to the desk and chair next to me. I pull the chair out and sit there, swirling the last
portion in my bottle. He notices that I’m almost done with it and kicks a new one over along with an
opener.
“So those fliers?” I ask.
He waves his hand drunkenly. It really hasn’t taken long for him to wind down, though maybe he’d been
drinking long before I came. He pulls a cigarette out and almost puts it to his lips before pausing, for
whatever reason, and slipping it back into his pack.
“Yeah, I’m still going to put them up. Seeing as you’re—“ he gestures at me. “Not in the right attire.”
I want to tell him to eat shit but I’m not exactly in the position to make demands right now. So I pop the
second bottle and drink. Tired, sleepy, wondering why I stopped drinking after I left St. Anglus. Trying to
be a good guy, sleeping it off with aspirin. Laudable.
“But I’m here.”
“Tell you what,” he tears through the rest of the Heineken pack and stretches over to hand me two bottles.
He holds two of his own up, current one placed on the sill beside him. “If you can drink faster than me,
I’ll call the whole thing off. I can’t guarantee what Bella does but I’ll stay out of it.”
“And if you’re faster?”
He smiles again and taps his cheek. “You kiss me here.”
I’m both insane and desperate enough to say deal. On the count of three we begin draining the two
bottles, gasping between slight streams of alcohol that spill over our shirts though not too much to
disqualify either of us. I keep thinking that I need this, that it’s all down to me even though I don’t drink
much anymore and I can’t possibly keep up with a regular. The Heineken burns like acid down my throat,
scalding my stomach, warping it into a charred calyx. One last gulp and I slam my bottle on the table, two
down while Gabriel’s still slops the last drops of his.
He sets his bottle aside, walking over and getting on his haunches to inspect whether I’d really finished
before him. His lips part. A look of wonderment, maybe even respect accompanies it. A surge of triumph
runs through me.
“Impressive,” he says, standing with a sway in his step. I’m still a little bewildered by how light a drinker
he is. “Guess that’s that, then. You get to walk away scot free, no dress required.”
I get up, feeling no gratitude for Gabriel. The victory has run its course and dissipated in the heavy air. I
brush my damp bangs aside, thinking of where I can get a ride back to the dorm because I certain as hell
can’t be walking through the streets at night with nothing but a phone and a poorly filled in wallet. As I
walk towards the door, mind numb and distant, something slams against me.
In seconds I’m on the floor, my heart jackrabbiting against my chest. A wet, doggish tongue slops over
my clammy neck. Teeth dig into my neck and I grunt at the tearing of skin. He laughs lowly. I kick him in
the nuts, jostle him aside and run for the door. Not two steps away, a hand closes around my ankle and
I’m back down again, a fist hammering my face, knees pinning me to the ground.
“Get off me,” I gasp. But he’s so much taller and larger than I remember him, a gargantuan creature, an
impenetrable fortress. His shadow presses down against me. He grabs my arms, shoving them over
somewhere, and my legs, something heavy is keeping them down.
I don’t know what it is.
I don’t know what’s going on anymore, only that I’m yelling for help, trying to discern the various shapes
and shades spinning before me to no avail, my pleas growing louder and louder until my voice is lost to
my own ears.
And all I can hear is my own breathing, his laughter, the sensation of things being moved and displaced
on my body.
Buttons popping. Thumb on my stomach, snagging at my binder, touching flesh that is not mine.
Numbness wraps around me, the alcohol in my blood tugging me elsewhere.
Elsewhere.
Sick, his fingers move over my thighs. You are messed up.
I am messed up.
But not enough for him to leave me be.
He continues to press and prod, his body so heavy against me that I can hardly breathe. I look away. On
my left a broken Heineken bottle lies, jagged shards glinting, a litany of emerald barbs. A tilapia swims in
the ceiling, its scales reflecting the necklace thrown about my neck, a noose.
I promise I am elsewhere.

Edgar
Palms against the earth. Metal rolled over its side, playing dead.
Inhale, exhale. Hearing it in h-r ears. White hot anger searing through the snow, knuckles purple with
frost. Violence s-e inflicts on h-rself.
Himself.
I can’t tell what is true tonight.
The body is clockwork, an amalgamation of gears, screws and bolts. Inexorable it grinds through the
hours night and day, mechanisms chuckling and hooting, one breath of laughter, the calm after a
sweltering storm. Toothed appendages welding over each other. The seconds tick by, batteries rusting as
they are fed with oil and spill with blood.
Inhale.
Frost in lungs. The journey back is strangely lucid. I see each flake of snow as it withers against the
blanketed earth. Pines bending at their heavy weight. Houses vanishing into Allen Powell, the black
jungle and concrete promise beyond. I smell smoke in the air, a wintery barbeque on the cricket field
swarmed by g-s. Boys watching them through their windows. I am in my room. Breathing in the aspirin
air. Ill muck in my nails, dry crimson. The frost has melted and an ocean floods my lungs.
I change. There is no reflective surface in the room. I stare at the closet, the whorls and streaks of
deceased bark. Everything throbs lowly, warm blood flowing through my veins. I walk over to the table
where a few books are SPLAYED open. A long-answer question about the colour purple: why no
countries have purple in their flags. I decide to sit down and flip through the pages for a while,
compositions about tax reformation, Bloody Mary, fern growth. I pull the drawer and swallow some pills,
no water, there is enough water in my lungs. The aspirin bleaches my throat.
I pick up a pen and start on the questions.
Mr. Grimshaw comes up at ten to make sure everyone is in the dorms. He says good night and I say good
night back. I’ve completed five questions and marked two of them.
It’s a good night.
I take out my phone, fingers hovering over Mom’s number, but I don’t press it. I let my phone slip onto
my thigh and crash against the floor. I pick it up again, my hands shaking, jingle bells. It’s Christmas in
my mind, pink muffler caressing my cheek. I drop it. I pick and drop it until the screen cracks on the side,
after which I am finally content.
My phone has opened up to my messages with Gimley. I wonder why I never bothered to get his brother
or his sister or his father’s number. He’s not on social media, but we’re not in an age where losing contact
with someone is remotely possible. Yet here I am, setting records and exceeding expectations.
There’s nothing sharp in the room. This had been deliberate upon arrival but has become a product of
coincidence. I amble into the kitchen where I find Leo making toast. He talks about snow getting over his
canvas in the art rooms because some idiot had left the window open. Leo’s damn good at working the
toaster. He’s probably one of the only people who wait and watch over it. I open the fridge, finding
casseroles wrapped in plastic, slices of pizza, milk cartons that have been sitting there since last year. I
close the fridge, glance once at the long sleeve over Leo’s wrist and exit the kitchen.
That leaves the bathroom I use only after everyone else has slept. Three of the communal toilets are
occupied, water rushing out of pipes, odourless fart prolonged over a minute. I look over toiletries spread
haphazardly over the sinks, like interrogation tools, and pick up a shaving razor.
When I get back to my room, I lock the door and rake it over my skin. It’s warm in here, insulated from
the cold night. I don’t break skin. I just run over it with the blunt edge, back and forth, back and forth, the
way Mom used to rub my back until I fell asleep. Most guys aren’t very sanitary here. A golden thread
falls out of the razor.
AND THEN I SMASH IT AGAINST THE WALL
METAL IN MY PALM I AM
INVINSIBLE I
AM FALLING.

Edgar
I WISH I COULD TELL YOU
THE BURNING SENSATION, THE HEAT AGAINST MY SKIN, FIRE STORMING THE CASTLE
OF MY THIGHS. I AM A WITCH AND I WILL INCINERATE MYSELF BEFORE THE WORLD
CAN GLIMPSE A SLIVER OF MY GRISLY FLESH I WILL DESTROY EVERYTHING, THE SKIN
AND THE BONE AND THE LITTLE MARROWS THAT PULL THEM TOGETHER.
I WILL SMASH THIS CLOCK AGAINST THE BRICK WALL UNTIL ALL THE SPRINGS AND
GEARS SHOWER LIKE RAIN ONTO THE EARTH. BRANCHES OF BIRCH TREES SCATTER
AROUND ME, WIDOWMAKER WIDOWMAKER WIDOWMAKER I AM IN CONTROL OF WHAT
I HAVE THIS CLOCK IS MINE AND NO ONE WILL HAVE A SECOND OF MY TIME

Edgar
i am
crying
choking against the sheets tears eddies around me,
i don’t wish to tell you after all
my bracken field and fool’s cap
crows split my lips
their claws dig into my wire frame i am sorry,
after all

Gimley
I shouldn’t have let this happen to him.
It’s all my fault, detergent floors and blinding white lights. ICU, tubes worming out of machines. Death
on the lip of white bone. Instead of hanging out with my new co-workers, I should’ve bought a new
phone and called home to make sure. Heavy traffic at the Oslo Airport. I went back most nights after
work asking security personnel if they managed to find it. There are lots of important contacts in there,
Edgar’s included.
Second day I got here, Sales Representative Katrina Johansen took me under her wing. Kindly woman,
eager to teach me the ropes. Most things I had already gotten a grasp of at Orbitude. She helped me more
with the weather and settling in. There’s a Chinese on that street that has the best dumplings in Oslo.
Office is closing tomorrow for New Year Eve celebrations and we’re having a work outing—we’d love to
have you with us.
Her English was perfect. I felt so welcomed in a place I thought would be a frigid foreign land, office
workers in cubicles chugging the blackest coffee, muttering words blank to me. There was a man from
Ghana who changed the language setting on my designated computer.
I got a new phone around the time I knew Edgar would be back in school. I was thinking an awful lot
about him one week after I got here and decided I’d try to reach him via Ferdinand. I bought a sim card,
beating myself up about losing my whole phone while the lady at the counter tinkered with my
replacement. It’s certainly not the first time that I’ve slipped up like this. Take the time I almost lost my
whole luggage bag at the resort in Switzerland. Silly, Devlin’s voice echoed in my mind.
It rang twice. Devlin picked up. After the call, I puked all over the floor.
He called again later that night. He ought to have yelled at me or at least been exasperated by me losing
my phone, but there were just hushed updates laid softly upon my ears, like he knew he had cracked me to
the point of breakage.
He doesn’t have the time or energy to sweep up my pieces. No one does.
He sends me pictures, updates. You’ll never really appreciate brothers on eternal sabbaticals until
something like this happens, in which case he’s becomes the saviour, the sole reason for any semblance of
calmness in my head as I read the same sentences dozens of times. Confidence in their local economy is
down eight percentage points from thirty percent during autumn… Katrina Johansen asks me if I would
like some coffee. I haven’t told anyone about what’s happened. It is the Pellinore way to dive into work
when tragedies occur.
In truth I am afraid. I am afraid to go home, although I have instructed Devlin to call me immediately if
anyone should need me by his bedside at all. Even if it’s just to go down to the cafeteria to buy coffee.
But I call Devlin every night and every night he says in his raspy voice that there’s nothing new.
I ask Lily to look in my room for an old notebook in which I wrote the phone contacts of everyone who
went on the Swiss ski trip. I helped with attendances and organization for the trip back then, and after
several hours of searching she messages me with over twenty numbers.
I sit down with a classic Martini at a bar, silent on the Tuesday night. Strobe lights run over me and I get
the feeling that this is a wild place during the weekend, but today even the sleeping DJ would stir if I
dropped my cuff link.
There are so many exotic variations to Martinis, peppered by mint leaves or a pineapple ring. The ones
with umbrellas are particularly irritating—what am I expected to do, carry it out with me while the
snowstorm rages outside, pelting against the road, the windows, the blinking office buildings? I shift in
my seat, tucked away at a corner next to the bathroom, and tighten my pink muffler around my neck.
Dial. Sip. Beep. Beep.
“Hello? Is this Ferdinand?”
“Um, no. And you are?”
Beep. Dial. Sip. Beep.
I’m not very polite right now. I’m not even trying because I know once I tick off half of the list I’ll drop
the hello. It’ll just be, Ferdinand? At least this goes as predicted. Some people don’t pick up. I go through
the whole list and tick names off with the heavy fountain pen Father passed to me on my eleventh
birthday, encased in a box that says University of Cambridge. Inside, there was a card with his name
under the words “Top 10 in the World in GCSE Mathematics”, ironically the subject that I got my B in.
I didn’t understand the magnitude of it back then. Years later Grandma told me that when he first became
CEO, someone stole the pen and Father ordered a full security search of all his workers. It hadn’t been
very legal, but Father isn’t the kind of guy to yield to legalities.
I do a second run of the list a while later. One other guy picks up, Who’s Ferdinand? I go onto my third
run, but no luck this time. I lean back against the couch that practically sucks me in. I really need to talk
to him. I need it so desperately that I can feel for the first time tears pricking the edges of my eyes, all the
anxiety and frustration that’s knotted up in my chest snapping. I know no one’s looking at me, but I wish
I could melt into the woolly couch and come out on the other end by his bedside.
Time frays around me, the unripe petals of a flower dancing onto the earth. I think about getting drunk on
so many rounds of martini that I can barely stand, but I don’t. I carry my empty glass to another end of the
bar, trying to reorient myself with a change of surroundings. I peek through the window shutters at the
Barcode Buildings of Oslo across the street, goose flesh terrorizing my arms. In just these two weeks I’ve
seen so many crazy buildings, an office that looks like dystopian wreckage, the docked spaceship of
Tjuvholmen that I can pretend I am standing on top of as a friendly alien traveller. I think maybe I will
repeat my A-Levels in D&T and study architecture. Then I lean over my table and get back to calling the
list of numbers.
One of these numbers must be Ferdinand’s, but he never picks up. I try again the next night after work
and in between minutes of ringing I go on British Airways to book the exact same flight I’ve been eying,
set to fly off on a Saturday afternoon. But it never goes through. Devlin is at home taking care of him.
Father would be disappointed if I went home, he really would.

Edgar
I am insane.
Gabriel calls to me, love, each time we pass by each other in the corridors. We seem to be passing by
more often. For whatever unholy reason, seeing Cecilia’s dewy face makes me want to scream at her.
About what is a question I’ll never answer because I’ve decided to silence myself. If I don’t respond to
the questions, the shoulder taps in the hallways and the ogling eyes, I know it’ll either stop or someone
will shoot me dead before then, and both fates are fine.
It’s a high school thing, anyway. People will leave me alone once they find another scapegoat. I’ve only
got about seven months before all this is over. College will be better. That is what my endocrinologist
told me, but she’d been wrong about T too.
Physical pain is fleeting, it is removed from the heart of the clock that I try so hard to dismantle but
always finds a way to thread itself back together. I know, sometimes after a few long hours of removing
myself by reading or writing essays, that what happened is not going to destroy every stone I have heaved
over my back, the cairn I have built for myself. The nails I’ve cracked, knees scraped and bloody. I will
emerge from this alive, diving through a labyrinth of birches if I have to. If not for myself then for Mom,
Uncle and Gimley.
Some nights my mind screams at me, my blood swimming through my veins for aspirin. Gabriel or
Arabella striding along and flicking a lock of my hair, teachers narrowing their eyes at me, hovering over
my shoulder during tests. The fliers, true to Gabriel’s word, never gets out very far beyond those who ask
for it. But I go to school without a water bottle now and I eat nothing more than dry crumbs during lunch.
It’s even harder back at the dorms. Leo tries talking to me. I meet him but offer nothing but silence.
After school one day Ferdinand sprints up to my door, his red sneakers shuffling about behind the door.
He knocks hard and fast, not a single ounce of consideration as he screams my name. He’s been talking to
Cecilia more these days. Maybe he saw the bloody spots on my pants while on laundry duty and
remembered me crawling out of the pool, that he’s the reason people know now and that I am planting
trees on my thighs.
I open the door. It looks like he’d run a marathon up here, sweat pouring down the sides of his face,
drenching the front of his shirt in a way that should be impossible during winter.
“We need to talk. It’s about Gimley.”
I turn away.
“Gimley’s dad is in intensive care. He fell, about two weeks ago, hiking at Helvellyn. Brain injury. Coma.
Gimley says it’s not terrible, and he’s still in Oslo—“
“He’s still in Oslo?”
“He says that’s what his dad would want.” Ferdinand chokes on his own spit. He starts hacking, eyes
pinched shut as he knocks his fist against his chest.
“Give me your phone.”
Ferdinand fumbles in his coat and throws his phone at me like it’s scalding hot. I close my bedroom door
and walk along the corridor, down the stairs, out of the dorm. Ferdinand follows behind me until we reach
the cricket field. Garlands are strung up about the awning behind the common room, preparation for the
boys’ barbeque this Friday morning.
My hand itches while I wait for Gimley to pick up. I think about how it’d be if my Mom were the one
with the brain injury, if I’d left her to finish a hike and found that she’d fallen off a ledge and been rushed
to a hospital. I’d row my way through the fucking icebergs of Greenland if I had to.
“Two weeks?” I ask Ferdinand in the meantime. “It took two weeks for him to tell you?”
“He lost his phone, and I,” he shudders from the cold. “I didn’t know it was him. Persistent calls from a
weird Norwegian number. You wouldn’t have picked up either.”
I’m ready to punch him when Gimley finally picks up.
“Gim, it’s me,” I huff my words into the air. For a shock of a second I see a glimpse of Gabriel’s face
carved from limestone, breath of ash in the same air, scattered bottles of Heineken in a room clouded by
dust. Nausea shoots through me. I hold my head in one hand.
“…Edgar?” there’s a hypnotic echo to his voice, teeth chattering, buried in the snow of a foreign land.
“Edgar,” he says it again like he’s just starting to remember me.
“I heard from Ferdinand. Why are you not with your dad?”
I think of My Werewolf Romance, Rowan Pellinore’s fingers gliding across the metallic lustre of a wolf
pin. A sick feeling lurches through my stomach. I lean against the wall, peering as the snow howls against
Ferdinand and me, two ducks in the frozen tundra.
“I—“ Gimley sputters. “Edgar, you don’t understand.”
“You’re making a big mistake. He wants you by his side. You can work your ass off your whole life and
you’re never going to get a Father like him, Gim. I don’t even know him, but I can promise you that.”
I imagine that my dad had fallen off a ledge instead of Mom. Helpless on a hospital bed, all the apologies
and lost days we owe each other tamped on the ground. Light spilling through rose windows of churches,
a clay elephant moulded by little fingers. We stand amidst stacks of books in his study, inhaling the dusty
scent of a thousand graves. Waiting for the exhalation that we’d never share.
It’s too windy for tears to form.
“You don’t understand,” Gimley says. In just two short weeks since we’ve been apart, he sounds
completely different. A small voice in the back of my mind wonders if I am the same, if what happened
that night at Gabriel’s party and all the things since can be heard through the breathless pauses between
my words. “He’s. He’s not going to wake up.”
“What? Ferdinand said—“
“I lied to him. Just this morning, the doctors informed Devlin that he’s…”
Static veils our world, zoned into the speakers of our phones. They listen to us, indignant.
“…God, Edgar.”
His sobs wrack the silence between us. Wind rushes over the field persistently while someone rounds a
bend and gestures at us, a mere silhouette against the bricks of the school block in the distance. I nod for
Ferdinand to deal with them while I move off from the wall, walking off the nervous energy, the dread
spilling inside me at the soft sounds of Gimley choking on his ragged breaths. I run my hand over the
steel surface of the barbeque lid, black as nights over Uncle’s farm, nights spent staring out of my
window after carving birch trees.
“I am so tired,” Gimley huffs. “I am so, so tired, Edgar. Father slipped into a vegetative state this
morning. His injuries from the fall have been patched up, but there’s no point anymore. He slammed right
into a rock, sustained a direct crack to his skull, his head, he’s—“
“Gimley?”
He’s gasping hard into the phone. It’s not the sort of noise that a person makes after running, or sprinting,
or anything intentional. There are weird stutters between his voice, the coughing fit that follows a tongue
or cheek or lip bitten hard, blood spilling out of pierced mucosa.
“My chest, it hurts, it hurts,” he garbles, keening through snot and tears and I can see him somewhere
excusing himself from a meeting with high-collared executives, curling up in some darkened alley, his
back against the ceaseless winter fleece that wraps around him, strangling. “I’m going to die.”
“Gimley, listen to me. You’re panicking. You’re not going to die. Can you hear me? Tell me if you can,
Gimley.”
It’s shattering to hear him break down like this and not be there with him. These hands and feet and this
vessel of a body that’s worthless. If I were there, I could at least wipe his tears, put my arms around him,
let him know that I’m there to ground him. I only have my voice, a ragged prisoner that has broken out of
the wintery silence I’ve caged it in. My fingernails turn corpse white against the barbeque lid and behind
it I register, vaguely, the Norwegian Forest Cat glowering wide eyed at me, a harbinger.
“I’m going to keep talking,” I say, resisting the urge to slam my fist against the dome-shaped lid or kick
the impudent cat that melts right into the mantle of snow on the pavement. A hyperawareness presses
against me, the arrowhead of cranes mottling the sky in black spots, the cat swishing its tail as it steps
slothfully across the field. “I’m right here. Can I tell you what I think of you? Gimley, you’re amazing.
Your blush, your quirkiness, everything. You love books and you’re so incredibly sweet about it. I was
flattered when you pretended to be all literary. I missed you when you left.”
Gimley coughs even harder than before. My fists curl, nails cutting into my palms at the cacophony on the
other end.
“Follow me,” I say, raking my brain for other ideas. “Breathe with me. Breathe in, four counts, breathe
out, four counts. Come on, one…”
He doesn’t follow, at first. It takes a while to coax him into a flow. In front of me, of us, Ferdinand is
herding the person who’d rounded the bend. There are four others, kids if I can tell by their height, doing
jumping jacks and trying to dash past Ferdinand. I quickly turn around and begin walking aimlessly away
from the male dormitory and to the parking lot. Branches of a tree heave under snow above Pete’s
security post. The snow picks up from its languid fall, a storm pelleting my face, my jacket, numbing my
scalp and my head and the thoughts bursting from them. I know what I’m saying to Gimley, but I can’t
hear myself.
Eventually Gimley’s breaths cease hitching. He still breathes hard into the phone but I can hear how he’s
got some control over himself. I hear him swallowing, afraid that he’s just shoved a bunch of pills in his
mouth but knowing I’d only frighten him more if I bring attention to it. We continue breathing with each
other as I stroll back and forth across the parking lot, trying to keep my hands and legs warm. I’m wearing
sneakers and no gloves. Ice sneaks in through my extremities, freezing my lips and the peak of my nose.
Drifts and drifts of arid wind sting my skin. I dig the blood under my nails. Gimley’s anxiety spills over
to me, plaguing my thoughts with Gabriel, green lit tilapia.
“Can you speak now?”
Gimley sniffs. A car pulls up in the parking lot, headlights butting the dim noon. “Yeah,” he sighs.
I almost collapse onto the ground. The back of my throat is so dry that my voice cracks like the silver
surface of a lake smashed into a hundred fragments. The water underneath consumes them. All my nerves
collapse. I begin striding towards the swing, Mr. Grimshaw’s beautifully cropped bonsai withered to bare
twigs.
“Okay. Can you tell me where you are?”
Gimley responds after a short pause and a strangled gulp. “I…don’t know. Street somewhere. It’s so cold
here, Edgar. Please stay with me.”
I glance at the angry red sliver of battery on Ferdinand’s phone, barely containing myself from spouting
profanity. “I will. I promise.”
I run across the parking lot, ignoring Mr. Grimshaw’s watchful eye, to look for Ferdinand. Gimley starts
talking, far calmer now, about his dad’s condition. He says Devlin and Lily had camped for the night and
gone home, expecting to see him back at Newcastle. When his dad wasn’t there, a search team was sent
out, the first destination quite obviously being at Helvellyn. It didn’t take long for them to locate him.
They say he’d fallen quite some distance but that the slope was gradual. He would’ve been completely
fine if it hadn’t been for the rock at the base that he struck head on.
The kids are gone now. Ferdinand gazes at the awning, puzzled by where I’d gone. I shake him by the
shoulder and make a plugging gesture at his phone. We slink back to the dorm. Meanwhile the Norwegian
Forest Cat is sitting in the middle of the cricket field, its jaundiced eyes turned up to the sky.
“Apple crumble,” the kids shriek, reaching out for the pan that Mr. Grimshaw brought it. He eyes us as
we bound up the stairs. Rodrick isn’t in their room.
I spend over an hour sitting on Ferdinand’s bed, talking to Gimley about his dad and how Devlin’s
keeping watch. I tell him again, gently this time, that he should book a flight to come in. He says
something about heavy storms in Oslo keeping planes jammed in, and that might be true, but I suspect the
fear is elsewhere. A long time after he finally concedes. I stay with him until I’m sure he’s back in his
flat. Drink some water, get a hot shower and I’ll call you in a bit. After the call I add his number to my
phone, thank Ferdinand for his time and return to my room.

Gimley
Termination of life support.
Please shut off all electronic devices.
I shut my phone off and pull the muffler over my face. If there’s one thing true in this world, it’s that you
should never read medical articles online when an accident happens. If there’s also another thing that’s
true, it’s that you’re going to do it anyway.
I think about Edgar’s voice. Bawling, slipping onto the ground and curling up there right next to a vibrant
orange wall, the vague recognition that I was being watched by every passing pair of eyes. It’s a sin that
there are so many happy colours in the world when somewhere there’s always someone aching and
grieving. If all the noises in the world coalesced into one, surely cries would cut straight over the laughter.
I am lucky. Ridiculously, absurdly lucky that I had Edgar to keep me calm.
I won’t miss Norway. I won’t miss the strange foreign words and the loneliness that plagued me during
my stay. I’m not Devlin. I’d never survive a month away from friends, home, family.
My eyes are still red and puffy, the packet of two remaining oxy pellets tucked away in my bag. Next to
me a pregnant lady is talking to her husband about how lovely their marriage is going to be. They’re
going to travel the whole of South America, gaze upon Fitz Roy, pamper themselves with volcanic mud
facials at Bueno Vista, go bar hopping in the heart of Argentina. The air stewards warn us about
emergency exits. Someone blows their nose behind me.
Later, the plane rattles and roars to life. Snow thunders against the airplane, a metal bird keening and
whirring. I close my eyes and imagine the lights suddenly going off. The tail of the plane exploding in an
alveolar fit, sizzling as snow swallows fire. Mayhem. Tiny strapped people flying off like dice,
plummeting into sub-zero waters, my ears glugging as the water wraps its tendrils around my throat.
Within seconds I am dead of asphyxiation.
Good evening, this is your captain speaking. We have now reached Manchester Airport. The local time
is…
I rub my eyes and lick the stinging sore on the inside of my mouth. A briny taste lingers on my tongue.
*
I don’t think much when I arrive at Father’s room. All the machines and wires are so different when
they’re not seen through a screen. Giant white and blue snakes digging into Father’s body, squiggly
yellow lines, monitors beeping softly into the silence. There’s a framed picture of ocean waves against a
sheer cliff. Sour against the bliss at Grandma’s mansion, holidays nudging driftwood on shore. It’s a
horrible thing to look at in a room like this. I can see Father falling off the edge and smashing against
jagged rocks, even though there are no rocks in the picture and the waves are almost soft as bedsheets.
A teddy bear won’t save him.
*
Devlin and I sit outside for a while. It’s not like Father’s going to go anywhere.
Devlin proffers me a cup of black coffee. I can’t stomach this thing even though I really want to. I want to
feel the pain and the inevitable heartburn afterwards. There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’ve
failed at hurting even yourself.
“So you came back,” Devlin says, his leather jacket nowhere in sight. There’s a coffee stain on the white
shirt that he might’ve been wearing for days now. I think Father bought it for him while he was in
Borneo, though I’m sure Devlin doesn’t remember something like that.
“Not like my coming here changes anything.”
“It does. I promise you.”
Devlin is too weary to explain and I’m too weary to argue. So we just sit side by side on the bench, my
coffee growing cold in my hand. He tells me I’ve really grown up, but that’s what people always say to
make me feel better.
The thing is, Mother comes every day. Just for a while at daybreak, when she knows Devlin and I are
asleep. Whatever arguments we may have, she’s still our mother, and mothers are psychic about these
things. The night before I had stayed up to talk to Edgar, my low voice droning in the room amidst the
beeping machines, laughter occasionally sneaking out between my lips. He has a way of doing that—
catching me when I least predict it, my lips quirking before I even catch the joke. At daybreak, the lull in
our conversation prompts us to nod off.
That’s when the door creaks open and Mother comes in, fur coat shifting. No high heels, her ruby
earrings are off. She walks up to Father. She touches his face like they’re twenty-something again,
picking up that can of coconut juice in one hand while she continues to clack away at her keyboard. I
don’t dare to look up too much, but even so I can hear her sniffing quietly into the back of her hand. She’s
organizing for private specialists to come in, though according to Devlin there hasn’t been any breaks.
Each doctor had paraphrased the same thing and yet Mother keeps sending them in, paying them, the
hospital, looking for options for him to be transferred to someplace more advanced. It’s all the same. No
one can do much.
She doesn’t stay long. Mother wouldn’t waste time on sentiments like these, not like Devlin and me.
She’s all about getting people in, producing results, and she focuses on those things enough that there’s
not much anyone else can do on the medical front. But then she stops at the doorway. Devlin’s quiet
snores fill the room.
“I’m trying my best, Gim.”
Then she leaves, the ghost of her presence hanging in the air. She says it because she’s guilty. Guilty that
she refused to come for our Christmas hike just as I’m guilty for letting him venture into Hole alone, and
Devlin and Lily are guilty for not searching for him first thing in the morning, or feeling the pulse in the
air from his probable shrieks, or me flying off to Norway without having him see me off. It’s the way
things are always done in our household. Guilt, guilt is preposterous.
That weekend Lily comes by just to sit like the two of us do, nibbling on roasted cashew nuts, staring at
Father’s limp body, his heavy arms and legs. There’s a cut on his cheek that will leave a definite scar and
a bigger gash on his arm, sort of matching the one on my elbow. Devlin leaves a little later to get some
breaths of fresh air and piece himself together, probably at a pub or a love hotel. Having sex while
Father’s a vegetable is something Devlin would definitely do. I’m pretty sure he’ll cry while they’re
going at it. Lily, already the capable visage of Mother, informs me that she’s rented a flat for Devlin and
me a few blocks off. It’s a modest place, but the important thing is that we’re close to the hospital.
It’s this afternoon that Edgar knocks on the door. Lily is doing homework while I’m trying to re-read
some old eBooks. He peeks in the room, eyes landing on my Father first before sliding towards me. I
slink off the couch (it has this compartment that can be pulled out as a comfortable footrest), and I hug
him. Devlin and I have been showering at odd hours and places so I’m sure I smell like a sack of wet
socks, but politeness isn’t the first thing on my mind these days. I wrap my arms around him, desperate
for the telling smell of old books and hay and finding it lacking today. Still.
Lily gets up and shakes Edgar’s hand. “Thank you for coming.”
Edgar hugs her too. She gasps, eyes widening, but eventually eases against him.
Edgar goes up to Father’s bed. He gazes at him with the same vague disbelief that I had, that a man of his
calibre could be prone on a bed, fully unresponsive. Next to his bed there’s a file of all the medical tests
doctors had done on him. There are so, so many. Black films with weird radioactive spots, papers lined
with words as small as ants. It’s like a magazine visitors can pick up and skim through just to feel like
they’re doing something for Father.
Edgar doesn’t make to pick it up. He pulls a book out of a sling bag and places it over the file. A young
black woman hugs the neck of a dignified wolf.
Lily twirls her hair between her fingers. “I’ll leave you two alone for a bit—“
“No,” I say. “Stay a while, Lil. I’d like to get some fresh air with him.”
She nods, even though the snow is blowing up outside like foam over roofs and skeletal trees and vehicles
are barely functioning over the snow roiled roads. She sits down to gather her algebra homework.
I hold my hand out to Edgar, who takes it after a flicker of hesitation. His hand is warm from the
insulation of his gloves, but there’s a removed look on his face that I can’t figure out. For that one
moment we stand hand-in-hand, I think of the last day I saw him through the oval window of the airplane,
his tiny silhouette by the glass pane as the engines clucked and wheels rolled over asphalt and he vanished
in a blur. My heart sinks in my chest. I clutch his fingers tighter.
“So what are you going to do now?” he asks. “I mean, while your dad’s in the hospital.”
“No plans yet. Devlin and I will visit him daily, for at least a week or two to see if anything changes.
The…the prognosis isn’t good. But they always have a way of phrasing those things to give you hope.”
I add that last bit with a quirk to my lip, a vague attempt at mirth. Doctors always say things like over fifty
percent of patients regain consciousness by a year after trauma or it varies wildly from person to person.
We can’t say how he’ll react to the medication, but it’s still early, and there’s still hope. It’s sad how
frenetically people like Devlin and I cling to those words when they’re stock phrases doctors are trained
to dole out. Buying defunct goods because they’re the only ones on the shelves; we cherish them anyway.

Edgar
I go every weekend. To see him as much as to hear the vacant updates during that one window of time in
the morning when doctors come to check on him. I stay over at the flat rented by the Pellinore brothers.
Saturday night I sleep on a rolled-out mat on the floor of Gimley’s room while Devlin sleeps on the couch
in the living room. The master bedroom remains unoccupied, as if waiting for someone auspicious to
arrive to use it.
Gimley doesn’t ask why I sleep on the floor. It’s better this way so I don’t need to explain the night
terrors.
They’re nothing flashy, anyway. Since the party at Gabriel’s I’ve been having the recurring dream of a
tilapia staked on the bark of a birch tree. Everything is backlit by a persistent green glare, and the sky is
sort of bowed like a dome, glued on the interior by a lattice of branches. Perhaps night terrors isn’t the
right description because I never feel afraid, even though it’s like I’m seeing everything as a corpse in the
dirt.
It’s always the last moment that gets to me, when the white noise is torn away and my eyes fling open.
I’m back in a dark room facing a shuttered window. I can’t lift a finger or a toe or even slide a muscle in
my jaw. The panic creeps up on me. I lay there until the sun goes up, anchoring myself to the thin
daybreak that peeks in through the shutters.
“Can we keep the shutters open?” I ask him one night while he’s going through what’s likely to be
another medical article or his dad’s documents sent to his phone. I’m sitting on the vaguely comfortable
mat, long pants and sleeves and all.
“Sure,” he says. He gets up and pulls the shutters up himself so that the night lights shower over me. And
I look at him, white glow outlining his nowadays dishevelled hair, a halo crowned on his head. Gimley.
Gabriel. I look down at my mat.
*
Ferdinand comes over to me during history one day, the way he had when he showed me that first voice
call from Gimley. Cecilia pops in through the doorway and they make me sit there and look through some
ideas they had for the lunchtime lecture I was supposed to deliver. They had snippets typed out on
Cecilia’s laptop.
It’s funny how they think a mute fool like me can talk in front of a hundred people. But I go along with it
to take my mind off things. Who knows, fate might play a cruel trick on me and decide to put a relevant
topic in the exam.
Soon I’ve the whole script written out. I’ve never gone over essay word limits before, but apparently I
have a lot to say about being trans and being in a shitty world where that has to be a problem to random
people. Cecilia asks me if it would be okay for her to omit some of the fluff, partly because it won’t fit the
thirty minute time limit and partly because I’ll probably break down while I’m “describing my life”. I turn
the whole laptop her way. Go nuts.
We hang out after school later in Ferdinand’s SUV, grab some burgers at a joint near school and drive
around Colchester Castle. But we don’t go down because, let’s face it, it’s not the most grandiose castle in
the whole of England. Cecilia buys us each a can of Dr. Pepper. Obviously.
When I’m not studying, being nervous about the speech or keeping up my silent streak against anyone not
Ferdinand or Cecilia or even Leo eventually because it hurts to be surly around someone who practically
represents the word, my mind strays off to Gimley and me lying in that fancy flat room that just turns into
my private hell when the lights are flicked off.
I tell Mom eventually that practically everyone knows at school now. This happens over the dining table,
during a night Dad is busy helping with festival preparations no one asked for his help with, and Mom is
spooning roasted potato cubes onto my plate. She said I used to put a truckload of sugar onto my potatoes.
Then, because this is my last year as a boy and soon I’ll be a “proper adult” (I set my fork down for a
moment attempting to digest that), she goes on this long, epic saga about every funny little thing I’ve ever
done in the past. It’s like she has a treasure trough of them.
“Everyone?” she pulls a chair out and sits across from me. I spoon some potatoes onto her plate, just to
get her attention off my eyes. I’ve this terrible feeling that if she looks long enough she’ll figure out what
else happened, the party and the dreadful winter walk back that I don’t think I can ever tell her.
“Not everyone, obviously. Most people in my year and a couple of teachers.”
Her eyes are wide and frenzied, mouse cornered by a snapping pack of dogs. “Has anyone done
anything?”
I shrug, stuffing my face with potato, trying not to make my thoughts so very transparent to her. “I mean,”
I mumble. “They haven’t been very polite about it. But no one’s drawing anything weird in my textbooks.
I don’t think I give them much of a chance, being a book troll after all.”
Textbooks are the least of my concerns. Mom doesn’t miss a beat. “Restroom?”
“Was bit of a pain, but Mrs. Wendigger lets me use the teacher’s restrooms now.”
She frowns, but I nod encouragingly at her plate. “Trust me, it’s even better in there. No helicopter dicks
pissing all over the floor.”
Mom’s lips quirk a fraction at that. She digs into the potatoes and the side of bacon salad that she’d
whipped up but doesn’t do more than nibble at it. I take huge mouthfuls myself even though it kind of
makes me sick. These days I’ve been eating more to compensate for some weight lost the first days after
the party.
“Does Uncle know?” she asks, after the long pause.
“I’ll tell him when I meet him next. It’s no big deal, Mom. I just figured I’d let you know.”
“Good,” she blurts. “If you need to quit boarding—“
“No, Mom. I’m okay. I’m sure people will find some other sad kid to whisper about in a month or two.”
She nods even though she’s probably not going to sleep tonight.
I don’t think things will ever be as bad as they were at St. Anglus, at least if I exclude the incident with
Gabriel. I find myself privy to doing that a lot, trying to see it from a distance and pretend that it hasn’t
affected me at all. But it’s still there, flecks of the ashes marred on my thighs. I can’t get them off even
when I break my skin. The ashes return to the places where they’d fallen, like hidden birthmarks
unravelled, stars blooming in deep space.

Gimley
When February half-term rolls around, Edgar stays more often. He brings his homework over and I
mirthfully pretend I know half a cow lard about Anglo-Saxons. In spite of seeing him more frequently,
doing groceries with him (in a car with a trunk this time) and watching his and Devlin’s face scrunch up
at my awful cooking, I can’t help this feeling of separation between us.
It’s not physical separation as in where we’re sleeping. He’s awfully private, after all, and it’s only natural
for him to want space. And it’s not about the restroom either, which I respectfully give him priority of.
One night when I’m getting ready to shower, I find an odd sight on the floor. Water that isn’t quite the
beige of the tiles, tinted red. At first I figure it’s just menstruation fluids—no, I’m not embarrassed to
mention that casually and I don’t think anyone else should be either. But then I look at where the rubber
water pipe is pointing at and I notice a vague print of blood on the wall where a hand might come to rest.
I peer out at where Edgar lies, sleeping soundly on his mat across the room. He’d been exhausted when he
arrived today, worn out from all the back-and-forth travel. I’d told him he didn’t have to come so often,
but somehow he’s mad enough to want to deal with me even when I can barely carry conversations
between the bouts of numbness that take hold of my body. And will continue to, at least until Father gets
better, even though there’s been no concrete sign of improvement. My stomach does a sour flip at the
thought.
The morning after I discovered the blood, we do a routine visit at the hospital and stay by Father’s
bedside until noon. Edgar is still bleary-eyed from the journey yesterday and he falls asleep on the chair
next to mine for most of the morning. On the other side of the room Devlin calls a girl for almost three
hours straight, humming and uttering a few noncommittal words between long stretches of silence. He’s
been going through girls like a hog these days, condoms flying out of his wallet and when he starts his
Harley and whatnot. It’s terribly embarrassing that Edgar tends to be around when that happens.
I ask when he wakes up, “Let’s go somewhere. Just the two of us.”
He nods like I just suggested we’ll do chores for the rest of the day.
After noon, I call a cab by the entrance of the hospital and we drive through the white nature of Keswick.
The mountains looming over us now make me sick. Each plane of rock and jutting boulder, cowls of
snow draped over them like cloth over furniture at a deceased man’s manor. I look at Edgar, pinned by
the door, the distance of an invisible body lodged between us. His eyes find particular interest in the
carpet of the cab and his boots.
I run over the facts. Conclude immediately how it’s impossible that he’s angry with me because I was too
absorbed by work and Norway. So why is it, exactly, that even though our hands are placed over each
other’s, no gloves or mittens or anything between us, that he feels further away from me than he ever has
before?
The weather picks up with a vengeance. Our cabbie says that the storm is getting so bad that we might
have to stop for a bit. I think that they probably did a forecast of this. There should’ve been a forecast for
what happened to Father too, something like, YOUR DAD IS ABOUT TO TURN INTO A LETTUCE.
It’s so funny I almost scream.
Eventually the cabbie reels us in by the side of the road, desperate for the one reprieve we might have at a
knickknack store in town before we’re all found dead and encased in ice. He goes down to ask the shop
owner if the three of us can hang around until the storm passes. Edgar and I watch as he sprints towards
the door before the gusts can blow him to Africa.
There’s just silence, red lights glittering in the street up ahead, vehicles desperate for shelter. The cab’s
windows are christened by whiteness and the snow continues to howl, oozing through gaps in the glass to
bite into the cab. Edgar glances up at me. I wonder if he had really hugged Lily and me at the hospital or
if that had been a wile of my delirium. It’s as if each time he laughs, I’m watching a memory from the
past.
He intertwines his fingers in mine, light, living flesh, and I reciprocate by curling my fingers between his
to show him how glad I am for his presence. There’s something about the silence that reminds me of that
first time I hopped into his truck, seeing the lump of his jacket on the back seat, my anxiety running over
his school, his friends, his books, everything. It feels like I’ve always known Edgar, like we’ve always
been meant to sit like this. My mind begins to run on its own, acorn bombs and cairns and birch trees, an
orange Norwegian wall, ocean bedsheets.
“Do you really think I’m sweet?”
He glances at me. There’s a hint of fondness there, but it swallows itself, and vanishes in a blink. “You
were panicking like crazy. Of course I said you were sweet.”
“So I’m not?”
“You sent me a pile of books. I’m practically diabetic.”
We both chuckle under our breaths. But I don’t miss the way his face falls after, back to the stormy
unknown that’s been tugging the strings inside me.
“I don’t think I’ve properly thanked you for that time, me panicking like crazy, as you put it,” I squeeze
his hand. “I really do feel less awful being here, even though I’m not doing much. I wouldn’t be back if
you hadn’t encouraged me to. It’s just…I feel like I can be braver with you around.”
I turn to look at him. My breath hitches in my throat. His eyes are red-rimmed and a soft choking noise
falls out between his lips, so small and helpless that I sit up, shocked. What’s wrong? I want to ask, but
the print of blood on the wall flashes in my mind and silences me. I rub my thumb over his in silence.
“Don’t say that,” he mutters after a pause, his voice shuddering. “You don’t know anything. I’m not…I’m
not good for anything. Don’t put those expectations on me.”
“How do you mean? I just…I’m just so grateful that we met,” I blurt my words, high-pitched in our
closed-off world. It echoes off the metal walls and the digital clock on the dashboard continues to blink at
14:49, never rising or falling. The silence is loud against the stone throw of my words. It muffles them.
He laughs. Laughs. “You’re not. You’re really not.”
“Stop that,” my voice rises inexplicably. A sudden surge of anger at all his deprecation. “Edgar, what’s
wrong with you? Why are you so being so—difficult?”
“Hey boys.”
A gust of wind fills the cab. I glance at the cabbie squinting through the snow. He’s holding the door open
for me. I realize belatedly, having gotten out, that Edgar had pulled his hand away from mine, slick as an
eel used to swimming through and being trapped between rocks and corals. The moment of rage falls out
from under me, a hollow detachment taking its place. I rub the front window and peer at the time glowing
on the dashboard. 14:54. I blink slowly at it. Impossible.
Upon entering the knickknack shop, Edgar strides straight through the columns of exotic urns and bone
white statues of owls and dragons. He talks to the cashier for a bit before entering a floppy wooden door
that I can only presume to be the restroom.
“Had a little row?” the cabbie asks, all light and cheeky. I mustn’t be wearing the friendliest of faces as he
quickly glances elsewhere.
I stand by a life-sized sculpture of Hercules, thumping my foot against the ground while casting side
glances at the restroom door. The cashier shoots me a hard glare, her hands all mucked up in clay. There’s
a formative pot in front of her and I figure she was one of those kids in school who yelled at the whole art
class to shut up. Through a high pane of windows, the snow shows no sign of letting.
Edgar’s composure is completely restored when he returns to the main room of the store. He
acknowledges me only once before venturing past shelves furnished with intricate vases sporting spider
lilies, dusky black snow globes, and a ship in a bottle with a flank that says American Brig, 1968. I see
him slipping in and out of sight between curves and corners, feeling sore for scrutinizing him like the
reason for his achiness will suddenly become clear if I do so hard enough.
Instead of moping about it, I lean back against the Hercules statue and card through my memories for any
way I might’ve upset him. Our last conversation had brimmed with humour. I asked him some time ago
about how school has been and he’d responded that he was working harder on revision. I figure that
maybe he’s just having a bad day somehow, an episode with his family. His family? It’s jarring
sometimes when I realize just how little I know about him. It’s not that I don’t ask more than how he has
a way of saying things that lure the mind away.
I walk up to the nasty owner of the shop. She eyes me with distaste, glancing between my wristwatch and
my pink muffler like something about that combination is gravely offensive to her. I lean in anyway,
careful not to disturb the meticulous arrangement of mini clay teacups on the table.
“Do you have anything cheery around here?” I ask and glance back at Edgar. He’s standing with his
shoulders bowed, looking down at a mysterious wooden chest. “A gift for him. Something small.”
The woman wrings her caked hands on a rag. She throws it over her shoulder. “Yeah, well it’s a
knickknack store. Of course there are gifts.”
I figure she’s going to gesture to the whole store and go back to her spitting pot, but she stands up and
starts sifting through a rosewood cabinet next to the washroom door. There are at least thirty drawers and
she stares at the whole thing for a moment, eyeing each yellow stickered label like there’s a secret code to
be unravelled. I glance back when I hear the cabbie talking about the rubbish weather, thinking about
what on earth had spurred him to strike up a conversation with Edgar who obviously does not look
interested in conversation. His eyes are pinned on a series of antique pens and it turns out he’s only
chatting on a phone.
Eventually, the woman leans forward and pulls out a drawer. She returns to me with a miniature crow
model that’s too shiny to be a stuffed model yet too feathered and realistic to pass as a toy. “Not exactly a
gift more than a gag. Here.” She tugs a short string hanging from the crow’s tail feathers and a spray of
confetti explodes out of the crow’s beak. Then she swipes the confetti onto the edge of the table and
returns it into a cartridge hidden under the right wing. “Press the red tab for a caw. It’s not for sale, by the
way. Your friend just looks like he has a donkey stuffed up his arse.”
I’m a little overwhelmed by her kindness. She rolls her eyes and shoves the crow at me. I spend a moment
getting to know the string and the little tab by its flank. I thank her. She waves me off and plops back onto
her stool, returning to the role of the crouching gargoyle sculptor.
The cabbie has drifted off to Hercules, running his hand up his magnificent, rock hard abs. I walk towards
Edgar, a nerve in my right temple twinging to signal an incoming tide of anxiety. What if it pisses him off
more? Each step I take starts to seem sillier. But just as I’m about to chicken out and likely get smacked
in the balls by the cashier, Edgar turns.
I hold the crow up to him. He studies my expression warily for a moment, as does the plastic Buddha
sitting on the shelf and the cab draped in a downy coat of snow outside. I muster up some semblance of a
smile, enough for Edgar to feel sorry for me and reach out for the crow. I think he might take it from me
but he ends up just placing his hand over its curved head, halfway to a patting motion. And the look on
his face is so pained, fragile as a sheet of ice, that I can’t find it in me to do anything.
“They had fliers of my school picture when I was younger printed out,” he says, his hand still on the
crow, his eyes far away. “Someone, Gabriel, threatened me with them. And I was stupid, so stupid. I went
to his house alone. Got drunk. Then.” He gestures vaguely with one hand in the air, his laughter hoarse.
“Then.”
For a long time my mind attempts to assemble his words, the fliers and house alone and drunk, and then
my mind gets stuck at the name, Gabriel. Wondering where I’ve heard that name before, if ever, and what
form a human being with that name would take.
“Then?”
His face twists, lips purging into a thin line. “Don’t be stupid.”
And when it all comes together it does so like a supernova, mass sucked and sucked into a core so tightly
packed that the entire star collapses, light and stardust bursting into a black vacuum. My fingers jerk on
their own accord. CAW! the crow cries, followed by a spattering of confetti. The wall of Edgar’s face
doesn’t change. Not a single muscle twitches. He stands in front of me, completely still, ruffling the
feathers on the neck of the crow. He is so far away and I am so sorry that I can’t stop thinking about how
it happened, how some Gabriel could’ve gotten over him, and when, and if it had been after Ferdinand
picked up, or before, as if any of these things matter at all.
I can’t say anything. I don’t know what there is to say. They don’t teach you how to deal with these
things, not like they teach you to say my condolences at a funeral. Resentment swells around the dull
throbbing in my head. It seems absurd that there is sex ed but not help-your-friend ed, that I should be so
foolish to have needed so much of my mental faculties to put two and two together.
In the stunned silence I take to pull myself together, Edgar crouches down to sweep up all the confetti,
words bleeding out of him.
“It was my fault, anyway, for going. I figured I should handle things myself. I don’t blame Gabriel for
what happened, I really don’t. And I’m probably blowing things out of proportion. It’s not like he went at
me for hours. I mean,” he laughs again. My skin crawls. “Never mind.”
Edgar takes the crow from me, fiddling around with it but being unable to locate the cartridge. I stare at
him, wondering if he’d actually said those things or if I’d heard it in some warped version of reality in my
head. We are standing right in front of each other, but I don’t know him. The hair, the eyes, olive skin all
the same yet wholly alien. Who is this? I think.
And besides the stoic lines, there’s nothing different to his face. He looks fine. In fact he might’ve just
been griping about the weather. If there are two Gimleys and the other one phases in here through the wall
and asks Edgar if he’d been complaining about the snowstorm, I would’ve said yes. Yes, other Gimley,
we’re having some foul weather at the time. Oh shush, it’ll clear up.
“Well?” he shoves the crow in my hand along with the confetti. Most of it flutters back to the ground. If
anything his voice has gotten harder, steadier. “Say something.”
I kind of set the crow down by the shelf. I place my elbow against it, hand over my forehead, fingers
twisting between locks of sweaty hair. “You couldn’t have told me this sooner?”
“It took everything I had to tell you at all.”
“And is there anything else?” my fingers are numb with anger, heat, fire blazing under my skin.
Imagining how it happened. Seeing Edgar, a pot newly manufactured, smashing as I let him go. “Any
other tragedy?”
He narrows his eyes, teeth bared in the makings of a snarl. “Don’t fucking patronise me.”
“Patronise? I am bloody worried about you, your silences and your secrets, all the things you apparently
aren’t telling me at all. Why was there blood in the restroom yesterday, Edgar?”
“I don’t need to tell you anything.”
“You don’t trust me.”
“Maybe I don’t.”
He makes to leave but I grab his hand hard, harder than I’ve ever clutched anything in my life. He shows
nothing on his face, not sorrow or anger or anything. And I hate that he can be so calm while I’m on the
edge of implosion from being shoved away, tumbling into a ditch again.
“Dammit, why was there blood? What, did that Gabriel guy knock you up?”
He flinches visibly. I’m almost begging him to punch me. I want it so badly, to be hit senseless until
somehow a solution to my anger and guilt and inefficacy slide into place in the throbbing bruises and
welts of my face.
“You’re the same, then,” he meets my eye when he says this. “You’re just like him. Like the rest of
them.”
He makes a beeline for the door. I run after him, tripping over air, throwing my hand onto a shelf and
pulling down a variety of gilded statues, rosy vases and a set of champagne glasses that crash in black
harmony. Shit, I think, my whole lexicon reduced to that one word, shit shit shit, as I stumble through the
broken pieces and weave around the shelves to follow the wind wailing through the open door.
I storm through the winter eye, gaunt coppices and wrangled lampposts glowering at me as I trudge
through the quicksand of snow, the thirsty loam slurping my boots, staking my soaked trouser cuffs to the
ground. Edgar is several kilometres away from me, faster than humans should be capable of running,
gliding, a tail of snow flickering behind him.
I remember the long drive to his uncle’s farm, a recognition that Edgar is not human, that he is a creature
of vast distant worlds, a winter siren, the night harpy. And I am just a silly boy, a peasant in knight’s
armour.

Edgar
You will not see me.
My fool’s cap or my bracken fields.
A mirror for the darkness. I will show you what is in our world, this minor planet of an infinite system, a
little blue and green speck of life in the dirt of space. The centurion birch trees snapping their black
knobby branches, hundreds of fingers falling around me, a ring of firewood for the witch’s brew. From
my ashes what rises shall not be a thing of radiance, of legacy, but a disentangling, the eclosion of a sooty
black moth.
I will show you only what I have seen
*
the chrysalis of bubbles
i fear i am too scared not to
drown

Gimley
So I stop, eventually. I turn and plod my way back to the knickknack shop and before the shop owner can
scream at me I shove a credit card in her face. It isn’t even mine. I’ve the faint recognition of someone
telling me about it while I was half-asleep, slipping it in my wallet while I grunted noncommittally. I tell
her to take whatever and the cabbie stares at the kaleidoscope of shards, awe splitting his lips.
The reality of what I’d done sinks into me a little later. I look up at Hercules and figure that he wouldn’t
have done that to someone he loved. I know where the anger came from, a carnal need to stop the sadness
in Edgar’s eyes from overflowing, but where had the words even come from? I never fathomed that my
tongue could do that.
This is the end, I think. If I leave him now, again, we are done forever.
I’d be a right fool to leave a guy like him.
I run back out again, chasing the air from my exhalations, holding the little gasps of heat inside me. I run
through the battering of snow, cold scalding my face, sealing my eyelids together. I shove my way
through it all, a tiny human bullet of heat desperate to right a wrong that will haunt me forever. I am a
knight running from my roots, my tassels pulled out of the dirt, scrap metal nicked and cracked but erect
in my grasp.
I find him. Through the trail, a shadow cut into an acute corner of a wooden tool shed. He stands at a
corner, keeping vigil inside the flimsy heat. There is a blade in his hand. A trail of blood trickles down his
left leg where his trouser is rolled up, dappling his boot in crimson dark enough to be black. Drip. Drop. I
don’t move from where I am. He promises me that it is a small cut. He promises me he will be all right.
I step forward. Take the blade out of his hand, surprised by the weightlessness of it, the simplicity of the
plastic case it’s armed in. I look down at the blood eating into the edge of his trousers.
I drop the cutter. My hands are fumbling for oxy.

Edgar
When we return to the flat that night, his brother is nowhere to be seen. I sit down and he asks to see them
again just to make sure that it isn’t that bad, because that’s what I promised him.
You’re blowing this out of proportion. This is normal.
He gives me a strange look. He fumbles for the bedpost to keep himself upright and I think for the first
time that we are creatures from very different worlds.
I pull off my pants and lift my boxers a little. The fabric brushes against the new incisions, open wounds
amidst old scars. They’re smaller and shallower than the ones I made after Gabriel’s party. I’d done them
just to ground myself and warm my cheeks—the shed wasn’t exactly a sauna, after all.
The snowstorm eases a little. Gimley just sits on the side of my mat, staring at the square of white light
cast upon us. Two lights in the dim room.
I ask him, later tonight, after we’ve gotten changed and I’ve showered, if he’ll promise to keep it between
us. I tell him that my parents don’t know and that I don’t want Mom or Uncle to have to suffer again.
Cutting has always been more painful for them than it’s been for me. Gimley slides a plate of plain
bullseye eggs my way, twin suns, as he drinks martini straight from one of Devlin’s bottles. He says he
doesn’t know my family anyway, not the way I know his. This answer is more painful than if he’d just
said he would.
I tell him we can’t be friends if he doesn’t understand why I need this, at least for now, to bear with
school. He puts the bottle down and says to me, quietly, “I am sorry you feel that way.” Then he leaves
me and my uneaten suns.
*
Gimley’s father doesn’t improve. It’s been over a month now. People are still saying it’s too early to lose
hope, but I think Gimley’s losing more than that. Devlin has gone off to London, occupying the same
condo he and Gimley had, to stick himself right into the fire at Urbplan Corp. Their Mother has her eye
on him.
I do go through with the lunchtime lecture at school, Ferdinand and Cecilia backing me up, but they
might as well have gotten the counsellor to drone on about it. I keep thinking about how tired I am, that
even with all my encouraging talk of one day seeing trans people integrated with the rest of the world, I
will go back to being completely silent about who I am in university. That my words will only reach a
small handful of ears and that we are all small specks of the world that will never change.
Someday, I hope I will be different. Stronger, for those who cannot afford to be.
Surprisingly some people come up to me for hugs, telling me that they’re sorry for giving me nasty looks
and that I’m incredibly brave for talking about my identity on stage. My thighs sting when they walk up
to me. It stings even more when I see Gabriel leaning outside the auditorium, smiling in at me through the
broad window panes.
What Gimley and I have is difficult, but we’re both looking to see it through. One day he comes over to
visit me at the dormitory and we sit in my truck, talking about going to Fleur-De-Lys for an acorn bomb
or maybe to Uncle’s farm, where I’m supposed to give him a rundown of my entire speech. Spring is
blooming around us, in the balmy scent of early spring, mown grass and snipped bonsai. Distinct twitters
of birds soar across the parking lot but it’s a flock of black butterflies taking to the air.
“You’ll tell me when you’re feeling bad?” he asks abruptly through the silence. “When you feel like
hurting yourself. Call me so we can talk.”
“Okay,” I say, even though I know I won’t. I know he doesn’t believe me anyway.
And that’s how it is between us. Words gone unsaid. I want to tell him that I’m not worth his time, but I
know there’s no point. He’s not backing out and I’m relieved, admittedly. Selfishly, cruelly relieved.
I pull down the Ridgeline’s visor while Gimley leaves his up, letting the light pour all over him. Gimley
knows I prefer the darkness, but some days I think I can tolerate the light if he’s by my side.