There was a lens knocked out of Jonathan’s sunglasses. Whether it had fallen out or if it was an intentional fashion statement no one knew, but his left eye was forever obscured. His short black curls and deep-set frown made him look like the sort of kid who would argue back, but when teachers told him to take the glasses off, he would instead take a note from his back pocket and produce it like a cop did his badge. No one saw that note but the teachers, and none of them had given any indication of what it said.

Hari didn’t pay much attention to Jonathan. No more attention than anyone else, anyway. She spent most of her time with her head in her desk, drawing, trying her best to distract herself from the classroom around her.

An octopus’ tentacles curled around the edge of her notebook, and clownfish framed the date at the top of the page. In the centre, Hari was weaving flowers through the braid of an imaginary blonde girl, her loosely sketched smile nestled between two of the lines that littered the page.

“That looks like shit.”

She looked up. Jonathan was standing by her desk. His visible eye squinted down at her. He tossed down his textbook, slung his bag under the desk and sat down in the empty seat beside her. Hari watched him, her pencil hovering over a daisy she’d yet to finish drawing.

“Teach told me to sit here.”

“Why?” Hari said.

“I can’t sit by the window anymore.”

“Why?”

“’Cause.”

Jonathan nodded towards Hari’s drawing as he opened his textbook to a page they’d studied weeks ago. “Who’s that?”

“No one.” Hari closed her notebook and slid it under her own textbook. “Just something to draw.”

“You ought to give it up, you’re not very good.”

Jonathan hunched over his textbook; Hari assumed he was reading. She watched him take up his pencil and start circling random words dotted about the page. Then Mr Clark tapped his pen on the whiteboard, the lesson began, and all thought of the strange boy beside her drifted away.

“Who can tell me how many fish are in the sea?” Mr Clark began.

3.5 trillion.

Someone’s hand went up. Their answer was wrong. Another hand, and another wrong answer. The room went still, silent but for the light scribble of Jonathan’s pencil at Hari’s side.

“The correct answer was 3.5 trillion,” Mr Clark said. Hari lowered her head so he wouldn’t see her slight smile; she’d been chided for her silence before, so it was better to make out like she didn’t know the answers.

Hari glanced absent-mindedly over at Jonathan. The whole page of his textbook was scribbled on, leaving only the few words he’d circled. “Fish are just floating pebbles”, the words read. Hari didn’t know what it meant, but when Jonathan’s uncovered eye snapped up to catch hers, she knew it wasn’t meant for her to read.

*         *         *

Hari was drawing sea turtles. Their shells were wonky and misshaped. Their flippers looked more like flyswatters. She scrunched up her brow in concentration, but she couldn’t make the next turtle look any more convincing than the last. Her pencil laid motionless on top of her notebook long before Jonathan took his seat beside her.

“Why aren’t you drawing?” he said after surveying her.

“Nothing to draw.”

Jonathan dragged his textbook from his bag again and opened it on the table. Now that she was looking for it, Hari could tell that the first half of the book’s pages were crimpled, like they’d been scribbled all over. Jonathan opened it to an untouched page, and laid his chin on the book, his one eye darting across the words, his ppencil ready to single them out.

Mr Clark was still setting up his equipment on the teacher’s desk. Hari fiddled with her pencil. She didn’t know what to do if she wasn’t drawing, or answering class questions in her head.

Jonathan rose his head, but kept a hold of his pencil.

“Were you meant to be a boy?” he said.

“No,” Hari said. “Were you meant to be a girl?”

“Your name’s Hari. That’s a boy’s name.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Names aren’t gendered.”

“Yes they are.”

“My grandpa says all names are genderless. Like sea snails. They can be boys or girls.”

“Your grandpa’s wrong.”

Jonathan turned back to his textbook and circled another word. WRONG. Hari looked away. She didn’t want to read the rest of his words.

*         *         *

“My mum said I should apologise.”

Hari didn’t want to speak to Jonathan – she’d rather stare at the empty page of her notebook – but he persisted, his textbook left untouched in his bag as he spoke.

“I shouldn’t have said your grandpa was wrong. She said that was mean. And saying your drawing was bad. I thought it looked really bad, but apparently I’m not meant to tell you that.”

Hari said nothing.

“You’re meant to say thank you now.”

“Thank you.” She looked over at him, frowning. “Why am I thanking you?”

“For saying sorry.”

“You didn’t say sorry.”

“Well, I am.”

Jonathan took out his textbook and started on another page of circles and scribbles.

“Why do you do that?” Hari said.

He looked up. He’d just circled the word AMPHIBIAN. Hari knew what the word ‘amphibian’ meant, but she’d thought nobody else in her class knew.

“I like doing it,” Jonathan said, turning the page. “I like to make something interesting out of something boring.”

“It isn’t boring.” Hari pointed at a diagram in the top left of the open page. “That’s a plesiosaur. They don’t exist anymore. I drew a picture of one.”

Without thinking, she flipped open her notebook and pointed out the drawing.

“It’s not very good,” she said sheepishly, seeing the knot in Jonathan’s brow.

“Why do you draw badly?” he said.

“I don’t know how else to draw.”

“Why draw at all?”

Hari paused. She looked down at her notebook, its uniform lines coated in pencil grey.

“I like to make something interesting out of something boring.”

Jonathan smiled a little. Hari hadn’t seen him smile before, but this smile stretched up into his one visible eye and made it squint a little, just like it did when it caught the sun from the classroom window.

Jonathan turned back to his textbook, and Hari turned to Mr Clark at the front of the room.

*         *         *

Hari’s pencil curled around the smirk on a pirate’s lips. The pirate had short black hair and a patch obscuring his left eye. Waves spun around the base of his ship, which Hari had just started to sculpt when Jonathan slumped into the seat next to her.

“I forgot my book.”

“You can ask Mr Clark for a spare.”

“No, my book.”

Jonathan’s one eye was frowning. He slouched over his desk, half his face buried in his arms. He looked strangely lonely without a pencil in his hand and his eye scouring a textbook for words he could steal.

“You can use mine.”

Jonathan lifted his head as Hari handed him her textbook. His frown was lifting too.

“Just don’t use the aquatics chapter,” Hari said. “That’s my favourite.”

His gaze swept over her drawing, and his smile returned. “I know.”

Hari filled in the side of the pirate’s ship and gave it a sail. She drew fish in the ocean, a lighthouse in the distance, and a first-mate lurking on the deck who seemed to have the same dark curly mane and thick-rimmed glasses as Hari. The waves swirled like cursive letters. Hari didn’t know how to shade properly, but she mimicked Jonathan’s scribbling at the bottom of the ocean, where the crabs and seaweed lurked, casting dark shadows on the sea floor.

By the time class was over, Hari’s page was full. Jonathan smacked her textbook closed and pushed it over to her. She closed her notebook before he could comment on the jagged lines and uneven shading of her drawing.

“Thanks,” Jonathan said, and then he was gone.

Hari flicked through her textbook, looking for where lead was scribbled into paper. She found the wrinkled page in the reptile section, which she had neglected to mention was her second favourite. Her heart sunk as she saw the page on gharial crocodiles coated in grey. Even the title had been scribbled on, a few letters of the word ‘gharial’ snipped off either end.

But then Hari read the message nestled in the textbook page, and smiled.

HARI. IS. COOL.

*         *         *

Jonathan didn’t come into school the next day, with or without his textbook. The absence of pencil scratching on paper made it hard for Hari to concentrate on Mr Clark’s lesson. Instead she made scribbling sounds of her own, drawing crocodiles across the bottom of a fresh page.

*         *         *

Jonathan was already sat at their desk before Hari arrived, his head and his pencil already buried in his textbook. He didn’t look up when Hari sat down.

“Where were you yesterday?”

Jonathan screwed up his face and circled a word. “My glasses broke.”

“So?”

“I can’t leave home without my glasses.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t.”

Jonathan gripped his pencil tight. His sunglasses were a different colour than before, their frame blue where it had been green. The single lens was a reflective one; when Jonathan looked up at her, Hari could see her own face distorted in the space where his left eye should have been.

“What did you draw yesterday?” he asked her.

“How do you know I drew something?”

“You always draw something. What was it?”

Hari took her notebook from her bag and opened it on the table. The crocodiles were piled up at the bottom of the page, crawling over one another, webbed feet and pale claws scratching at scaled faces, jaws snapping at passing tails. Hari hunched in her seat. She noticed the crooked teeth of one of them, the unshaded belly of another, a tail too long for its body, a leg too short for its huge foot. But Jonathan was smiling.

“I like it,” he said. “Can you give it to me?”

Hari sat up straighter. “You think it’s good?”

“No, it’s terrible. That one looks more like a sausage dog.”

He pointed out the wiggly formation of a crocodile nearer the top of the pile and chuckled. Hari looked at the desk instead.

“But I prefer it like that.”

She thought he was joking again, but the sincerest curve of the mouth rested on his face when she looked up at him. The smile spread to her before she could help herself.

“So, can I have it?”

Hari nodded, and let Jonathan tear the drawing from her notebook.

It was only when class ended that Jonathan turned to her and said, “I forgot to thank you.”

“For what?” she said as she packed up her books.

“For the drawing.”

“Oh, ok. Go ahead.”

“Thank you for the drawing.”

“You’re welcome.”

*         *         *

Hari drew crocodiles every day for weeks. She practiced the same image over and over again, trying to get the proportions right, trying to keep her lines straight and not wiggly, trying to shade the right parts, until the drawings began to resemble the crocodiles in her textbook. She read the reptiles section of the textbook three times over and then ventured online, learning that crocodiles have the strongest bite of any animal in the world, and gharial crocodiles in particular are one of the longest types. She drew crocodile after crocodile after crocodile in every class except biology, where she alternated between sketching boys in sunglasses and books soiled in pencil markings.

When she was ready, Hari drew her final crocodile. It lounged in the centre of its own page on a throne of sand, beside a pool where the water rippled and glistened in sunlight. She folded up the drawing and hid it between the pages of her notebook.

Jonathan had his pencil gripped between his teeth when he sat down beside her. He got out his textbook and didn’t say a word to her. Hari didn’t know what she was meant to say, so instead she took the folded drawing out from her notebook and flung it over to his side of the table.

Jonathan flinched like he’d been attacked. He unfolded the drawing and stared down at it for a moment before turning to Hari. “What’s this?”

“I drew it for you.”

“Why?”

“Because you liked the crocodiles I drew. This one’s better.”

Jonathan considered the drawing for a few more seconds, then refolded the page and tossed it back at her.

“It’s boring.”

Hari sunk into her chair. “What?”

“I said it’s boring. It looks like any other picture of a crocodile.” He snorted. “I bet I could find the same crocodile in my textbook.” He flicked through the book’s pages until he found the part on gharial crocodiles. “See. It’s right there! They’re the same!”

Hari didn’t respond. She slipped the folded drawing back into her notebook and put the notebook in her bag. She watched Mr Clark’s lesson with distant eyes, forgetting every word once it was over.

*         *         *

Jonathan tapped Hari on the shoulder at the start of class.

“I asked my mum if I should apologise for yesterday,” he said, “and she said yes. I’m sorry for saying your drawing was boring. And mum already told me off for it so you really should forgive me. I’ve already been punished enough.”

Hari stared at the front of the classroom. Her notebook sat shut on her desk.

“So, do you forgive me?”

Hari screwed up her lips, then finally gave in and looked over at him.

“I’ll forgive you

“What’s the condition?”

“Tell me what’s wrong with your eye.”

“My eye?” Jonathan’s hand went up to his face as though expecting something horrible to be there. Then his confusion faded and he laughed. “There’s nothing wrong with my eye.”

He lifted his sunglasses for the first time, and the single reflective lens stared up at the ceiling. Beneath, his left eye was intact, unharmed, and the same hazel brown as the right one.

“You said you needed your sunglasses on all the time,” Hari said.

“I never said that.”

“Yes you did.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Why do you wear them then?”

Jonathan shrugged, lowering the lens back over his eye.

“I like to make something interesting out of something boring.”

Hari smiled. “You’re not boring.”

“Maybe not, but I look way cooler with my glasses. Right?”

“OK.”

“So does that mean you forgive me?”

Hari opened her notebook, and took out the folded drawing that had been left neglected overnight.

“If you make the crocodile less boring.”

Jonathan huffed. “You can’t add extra conditions.”

“I just did.”

“OK, fine.”

Jonathan took the page and drew a pair of sunglasses on its face, only the left lens shaded in. He curled the crocodile’s rigid mouth into a smile, then pushed the drawing back to Hari.

“See?” he said. “It’s so much more interesting now.”

Hari took the page back, and scribbled out the drawing until only its head remained. Then she slipped it back into her notebook and pressed her pencil to a fresh page, ready to draw something new.

Image via Pixabay

Richard was nine years old when he first brought home the angel. Her name was Annabella Stick. She chose the name herself because it sounded pretty but solid. She didn’t have wings, he said. She was still growing them. He saw the glance that passed between his parents as his mum dished up cottage pie, and he didn’t care.

When she thought he was out of earshot his mum said, ‘It’s unusual at this age, I grant you. I’ve been expecting it for years.’

His dad, who’d stopped sailing when his right hand stopped flexing, went to the pub.

His sister Beth called him a freak and ate the last slice of Richard’s birthday cake.

His brother Will, with whom he shared a bedroom, snuck him out of the window and on to the V-shaped roof where all the big kids smoked, and gave him a puff of his joint. ‘Your brain’s already tripped,’ he said, as they smudged the stars with dirty great clouds of smoke.

Annabella Stick the angel, stayed with him through senior school, her wings growing large pure swan-like feathers when he took a punch in his left ear for Brendon Bates who had Asperger’s, and spreading even higher and wider when he deliberately dropped the baton in the 400 metre relay so that Tommy Li who had scoliosis, could beat him to the finish line.

Convinced their paths were destined to intertwine, he kept his distance from little Suzie Bradshaw. His own path was so well-lit, he could already see the intersections where Suzie would bump into him, each time a little taller, a little more experienced, a little less admired. His brother Will however, older and more popular than Richard, with a path that shimmered like a motorway in the summer heat, developed a few secret habits along the way that he insisted on sharing with his kid brother. On Richard’s eighteenth birthday, when the pills he’d taken turned Annabella Stick’s wings blood-red and his heart to jelly, she cradled him through the night, waited for him to wake, and told him three things before she left.

‘Go outside and see the world, Richard. Protect the people you love,’ she’d said, scattering him with fragile feathers. ‘Grow your wings and fly.’

Thirty seconds later and he’d have missed it. The phone sliding out of view beneath the duvet as he came in. The echo of a smile that wasn’t meant for him. Bare legs folding beneath her like he’d not watched her sleep last night.

Thirty seconds. A few more indecipherable words from Psycho Med when he stopped him in the High Street; another foodie joke shared over the deli counter with Sally Jones, his favourite lady in Asda; a quick check-in on old Ted’s gnomes as he passed by his front wall. A heartbeat and he’d still be whole.

‘What’s in the bag?’ Suzie nodded at the carrier in Richard’s hand.

He tightened his grip. ‘Sticky toffee pudding. It was reduced.’

She glanced away, slid her legs over the side of the bed and pulled his T-shirt down to cover her thighs. Her hair, darker now than in school, honey-coloured, still smothered her shoulders and inched towards her waist, made her look like a teenager despite the dark smudges beneath her eyes and the tattoos on her arms. ‘So, what’s for main course?’

And he couldn’t help himself. He smiled. ‘Macaroni cheese. I’m making the cheese sauce from scratch, Sally told me how. I bought plain flour and everything and borrowed a dish from my mum.’

‘Right.’ She sat back down on the end of the bed. Apart from the two plastic foldaway chairs pushed under the half-moon table screwed to the back wall, there was nowhere else to sit. There wasn’t much room to stand in the bedsit either and if they tried to make dinner together, they’d be joined at the hips.

‘You do like macaroni cheese?’ He was unsure now. ‘I can rustle up beans on toast. I’m a whizz with a tin opener, you know.’

She shook her head and he pretended she didn’t roll her eyes at him. ‘It’s fine.’

‘I was going to pick up flowers for you, but they were a bit, you know,’ he shrugged, didn’t want to say expensive.

‘It’s fine.’

‘I didn’t know what flowers you liked. My mum likes carnations, but I didn’t see any. Only roses, red roses, and, well, they’re for Valentine’s.’

She studied him then. Unsmiling. And for an instant they were back in school, Richard sliding the single wilting red rose into Suzie’s tray when he was supposed to be tidying the glue pots. She’d known all along that it was him. He could see it in her eyes.

‘It was okay, that you believed it was Jonno. I knew it would happen anyways, at least that’s what I told my mum would happen, and she said, “Whit’s fur ye’ll no go by ye,” in her Scottish accent that she loved to drag out of the closet and pretend was hers when it really only belonged to her dad. My Papa.’ Richard sucked in air. Told himself to stop chatting shit.

He released the carrier onto the counter, wiped his palms on his jeans. He took a pint glass left by the previous tenant, from the cupboard, filled it with cold water from the hot tap and placed it on the table before he remembered he didn’t buy flowers. She was watching him, so he left it there like it had some place to be.

‘Job for you.’ He handed her a rusty cheese-grater and the remains of the cheese from the fridge and lingered over the bottle of Asti borrowed from his mum, missing the way Suzie rose slowly, holding the grater by her fingertips to avoid any contact with her baby-pink acrylics. ‘What?’ he faced her and smiled. ‘You do know how to grate cheese.’

‘Give me some credit,’ she said.

‘Sorry,’ he shook his head, his fringe flopping over his eyes. He needed a haircut. ‘I just thought. I don’t know what I thought.’ With a blunt knife he scooped butter into a small saucepan and turned on the hob. He couldn’t remember what order Sally had told him to prepare the dish. Was it: pasta first and then the sauce? He should’ve paid more attention, he thought he had, but it was difficult to concentrate now with Suzie wearing his T-shirt, her denim shorts and vest hanging above their heads, drying on the makeshift washing line. They looked slimy. He can’t have rinsed them properly and the more he studied them the more he thought he could smell the damp, like potato peel, oozing across the room.

Yesterday, she’d been alone on the bench overlooking the harbour when he spotted her. Earphones in, she didn’t hear him. Jumped when he tapped her shoulder. ‘Sorry,’ he’d said, hands held in front of him so she’d know he wouldn’t touch her again. ‘Hey.’

Suzie stared at him; eyes large with tears.

‘Richard. Richard Hope-Michaels, or HP sauce. Daddy’s. St Bon’s school.’ He raised his eyebrows at her, but she tipped her head back, closed her eyes, swallowed. He saw the bruise on her neck. Saw the colour bleeding through the makeup on her cheek. ‘Wait there. Don’t move,’ he said.

He ran all the way to the local Coop, knowing he’d catch little Andy on backshift; he owed Richard a favour after the whole ‘possession of illegal substances’ situation. When he returned, chocolate Cornetto in his hand, she was on her feet, bag over her shoulder. ‘Here,’ he said. She made no move to take it, so he added, ‘It’s what we give my sister when she needs a hug. Ice cream.’

She smiled then. Took the treat from him and unwrapped it.

‘Can I sit with you?’ he asked.

‘No.’ His heart fluttered and then skipped when she said, ‘Let’s walk, Richard Hope-Michaels from St Bon’s school.’

Two hours later, his lips dry and cheeks aching, he suggested a cup of tea at his and had to stop himself from jumping with joy when she agreed. Suzie wanted to talk. And eat. And sleep. And that’s exactly what Richard allowed her to do, no interference, no judging, a big grin on his face when he imagined how he’d tell his mum the following day. ‘Guess what! Suzie Bradshaw slept in my bed last night!’

But he’d put too much flour in with the butter and it wasn’t blending with the milk, and he’d not put enough water in with the macaroni so it was sticking to the bottom of the pan, the air clotted with the smell of singed pasta. His forehead was hot. His fingers shaky. And Suzie had grated a mountain of cheese so now there’d be none left for him to have cheese on toast for his breakfast. ‘That’s enough,’ he said.

She stared at him, right through his eyes and into his soul. ‘You didn’t say how much you needed.’

‘I know. I thought you knew.’

She sat back down on the bed, stroked her phone beneath the duvet. He wanted to ask her who she was messaging but his brain cells were tapdancing around his skull and confusing his fingers and Sally had said this dish was super-easy, but she lied.

They ate in silence. Well Richard ate, he’d not had a thing since breakfast and his jeans would be around his arse if he didn’t fill his belly, and Suzie made tiny sandhills with her pasta and stared at the tines of her fork.

‘You’re quiet,’ he said, his voice making her jump.

Tears squeezed onto her lashes like tiny snow-globes he thought. He reached for her hand, but she snatched her fingers away before he could make contact. ‘Don’t think bad of me,’ she said.

‘Why would I think bad of you? I…’

Her chair scraped backwards, scuffing the rug into clumsy ridges. ‘Don’t,’ she said. She reached for her clothes, his T-shirt riding up and exposing black lace. ‘I can’t stay. I have to get back. Jonno’s waiting.’

His eyes searched for her phone, invisible beneath the mountain of duvet. It had always been Jonno for her.

In primary school show-and-tell, Suzie had produced a bronze medal she received for Best Junior on the Nursery Ski Slope. They were nine, and Richard’s angel about to make an appearance. Miss Simpson, to Suzie’s tightened shoulders, had enquired about the different kind of snow in Lake Tahoe and it was Jonno who yelled, ‘Yeah, Miss, it’s yellow,’ to sniggers from the boys and eye-rolling from Suzie’s friends.

After, on the playground when Richard approached her from behind, intending to cloak her embarrassment with kind words, Jonno had spotted him first and pointed, called him a perv, and there’d been that look, like it was he, Richard, who’d pissed on her snow. And later, Valentine’s Day, when she discovered the wilting red rose he’d left in her book-tray, it was Jonno who walked out of school with his arm around her shoulders, his fingers sneaking towards her tits, his mates shuffling along behind them hoping he’d ditch the girl and head to the rec for a kick-around.

In senior school everyone knew they would be together. Destined for Prom King and Queen. If you knew them, you wanted to be them. So, when Jonno got caught sending dick-pics to Lilly Fisher, it was like a fairy-tale with the wrong ending. Suzie was seen sharing her earphones in the languages-corridor with Jonno’s best mate Zol. She stopped wearing Jonno’s coat and wrapped Zol’s Burberry scarf around her neck instead. She wore shiny red Doc Marten’s to school even though the headmaster set her detention every night for a week and her mum came in and complained. Coloured the ends of her hair witchy-green. But summer of year ten was pre-written, inevitable. They got back together at the rec where, rumour had it, Jonno took her virginity up against the twisted old oak tree Richard had climbed as a kid.

No surprise her bruises couldn’t keep her away now. They were wired together, Suzie and Jonno, like there was an unseen current passing back and forth between them.

Richard stacked their plates without scraping them, said, ‘Have pudding before you go. Please.’ He removed the packaging, placed it in the microwave on a cracked white china plate. ‘Is this microwavable?’ he addressed Suzie’s back. ‘I wish they’d tell you what’s microwavable and what isn’t. How is anyone supposed to know?’

She escaped to the bathroom he shared with the bedsit next door and returned wearing her own clothes. His T-shirt she left on the end of the bed. He stared at the revolving pudding, counting down the seconds. Ping.

‘Do you have ice cream?’ she asked.

He waited on the balcony while she applied makeup. It was more walkway than balcony, linking his bedsit and next door, and reached by the Gothic wrought-iron staircase that wound around the outside of the house. The building was crumbling but if you squinted over the roof of the Tesco Extra across the road, the sea stretched all the way to Ireland. Or the moon.

With his coffee he swallowed the pills bought earlier from Psycho Med. Tried to dim the pain in his heart, and in his shoulders. He twisted his neck from side to side, blinked to still the confusion of colours above the water at the end of the road. The fishing boats were fuzzy like his tongue, he thought. Shit that coffee must’ve been scalding.

He wished she wouldn’t leave. He didn’t want her to leave. Go back to Jonno, with his fists and his dick-pics. But, he understood, she was never really here. He closed his eyes, circled his shoulders. He wished he knew how to save her. Wished he’d been there sooner, where she might’ve noticed him beneath the oversized knitted sweaters and the home-trimmed fringe.

It’s an angel’s flaw, his mum always said. ‘Wrong place, wrong time.’ She never explained how she came by this information, but he’d accepted it as the truth. ‘Stick ‘em in the right place and there’s no crap left to fix.’

Suzie appeared behind him, all pink lipstick and wide eyes. She stood on tiptoes, kissed his cheek. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered.

He stared at the lights floating on the boats as she left. Watched the patterns like a kaleidoscope, twisting and spiralling, concentrated on the white pain in his shoulders, tried to imagine that she wasn’t running downstairs to the courtyard. Around the wall to the road where the BMW was parked up, out of view, with the engine running.

Away from him.

Go outside and see the world, his angel said. Protect the ones you love. Grow wings and fly. He’d done none of these things. He’d hibernated and slept, listened to rock music and played X-box. Closed his eyes and waited for Suzie to come to him. As the water blurred, a sparkling mirror of lights, he knew where he’d gone wrong. See the world, she’d said. Not travel the world. You needed money to do that, and Richard had never had money. Probably never would have. He sucked in the salty air, the peace that living so close to the water had always instilled in him, and he understood that this was his world, however badly he’d treated it. He opened his eyes wide and the world came into focus.

He couldn’t let Suzie go. Glancing down at her long bare legs, he saw the little girl starting primary school, blonde hair in a thick rope down her back, sparkly pink rucksack over her shoulder, wide eyes bright and accepting because she understood the world she was born into. Her purity of heart deserved better than the endless cycle of fights and lust and popularity she’d accepted as her lot. And he had to protect her.

His shoulders erupted with white-hot pain and, head down, he clenched his jaw as his wings broke free, unfurling and folding back in on themselves, heavy with the weight of a thousand glowing feathers.

Richard placed his right foot onto the lower rung of the railings. It was easy if you didn’t second-guess it, didn’t stop to weigh up the options. Left foot on the top bar, he barely breathed before he jumped.

Another thirty seconds. One mouthful of pasta chewed and swallowed, one sip of Asti to wash it down, one more glance at the messages on her phone and she’d have missed the snowy-white feathers from his broken wings as they scattered at her feet.

Denise wanted to write books when, aged four, her dad read The Song of Hiawatha to her. Her novella Devil on Your Back was published by Salt in 2014. More recently, she was longlisted for the 2019 Bath Novel Award with her YA crossover novel I am Winter.

Image via Pixabay