“I can pay,” I tell him.
“Frecks.” He looks at me like I’ve just suggested handing over a spare kidney. “I couldn’t. This’ll cost eighty quid, easy.”
“It’s no big deal,” I say. “You can pay me back later.”
He looks all around, as if some other solution will appear out of thin air, before finally coming back to me.
“Iwillpay you back.”
I shrug and we head off to a cashpoint. When I hand over the money, he takes this big journal from his bag and tears out a yellow page. Then he unclips a fine-point pen, jots something in this beautiful swirly script, and hands the paper to me.
I, Ellis Maximillian Bell, swear by all the most secret and solemn traditions of the ultra-secret restricted place (AKA The Library) that I will pay back Frecks, AKA Dylan Lemuel Jasper McKee, all his hard-earned moolah.
Signed EMB xxxxxxxxxxxx
“You should feel honoured,” he tells me. “I never tear out a page from my Moodles and Doodles.”
“Moodles and Doodles?” I grin.
“Don’t you dare laugh! It’s what I called my first ever sketchbook. I guess I’m superstitious and the name’s sort of stuck.”
I smile and fold up the paper and put it in my wallet.
“How do you know my middle names?” I ask.
“Dylan.” He grins. “I’m your new gay BFF. I knoweverythingabout you.”
Later, hours after I’ve helped him scoop the rubbish out of his car, I lie on my bed and read and reread the IOU. I know it’s crazy, but I even put it to my lips and kiss the kisses back, then roll sideways and say his name, just a few dozen times. It takes me a long time to fall asleep that night, and when I do the yellow page is still in my hand.
I’m not embarrassed. Taking out my wallet, I retrieve the IOU you gave me the day your car was vandalized and show it to Mike. It matches perfectly with the torn page I received in the mail this morning. While Mike turns it over in his hands, I squat down and graze my fingers through Beckham’s black and white underbelly. A deep, satisfied grumble rises up from the loveable old mutt.
We’re sitting on the double swings that Mike’s dad hung from the old beech tree in their garden a million summers ago. Mike’s an only child but his dad didn’t think twice about the second swing. I lean back and follow the creaking rope up to the sunlight, beams cutting through a cage of branches.
“Thanks for showing me this.” He holds up the side with my picture and your words. “It’s very special.”
I’m not sure what to say, so I mumble, “He loved you too, Mike.”
Mike nods, smiling. “Then we were both really lucky.”
We were, El. Even with you gone, I know it.
He turns my picture over and studies the Gemma-witch on the back. She’s levitating over your car, fingers twitching and twirling as her dark magic spews filth and rubbish through the broken driver window. In the foreground, and almost twice the size of the Nissan, lie the shattered remnants of the dashboard snow globe, Aunt Julia’s moving-in gift.
“He knew she’d done it,” I say. “She trashed the car as a way of getting back at him.”
“For what?”
I sometimes forget there are big parts of our story Mike doesn’t know. I wonder if this feels weird for him; we used to tell each other everything.
“For dumping her and chasing after me.”
I tell him the story of that day at Hug-A-Book and the library. Usually with something like this I’d leave out the parts that seemed intimate and special for us, because they were our treasures and I lived for the hours when we’d relive them, sitting in your car or cross-legged in your bedroom, sorting through our favourite memories, laughing and arguing and getting hot over the details. But I only have Mike now to share these things with, so I walk him through every moment, even us on the library floor.
“I never thought to link her with it at the time,” I say. “It just seemed like this random act. But something about what El said that day, about how he looked… Right from the start, I think he knew it was her. You should’ve seen the look she threw him at Hug-A-Book when he came over and started chatting to me.”
“Gemma doesn’t deal with rejection well, that’s for sure. Just ask Ollie.”
“What happened with her and Reynolds?” I ask.
