“Nah.” Leo shook his head. “It’s good.”
He didn’t say anything more for a long while. Charlie entertained himself by clearing the last of the blood from Leo’s arm and inspecting the new damage. Despite the mess, he couldn’t see much, save a small tear in Leo’s elbow crease. Charlie was no expert, but it didn’t appear particularly deep, especially compared to the original wound. He stared at the mottled mass of scars and skin and pondered the horror behind it. There’d been a fire, he knew that, because Lila’s lungs were damaged from the smoke, but what on earth had happened to Leo?
By the time three o’clock rolled around, Charlie’s imagination had left him no wiser. He roused Leo with a gentle nudge. “We need to chip. I’ve got to get my bike from school.”
Leo raised his head and treated Charlie to a bleary gaze. “Where are we going?”
“Home,” Charlie said. “School’s nearly over. We can’t stay here all night.”
Leo looked as though he wanted to do just that, but he got to his feet anyway and rolled his sleeves down. He didn’t appear to notice that his arm was now clean. “How are you going to get your bike? What if a teacher sees you?”
Charlie snorted. “I might be a nerd, but Andy and Fliss went through that school before me, and they taught me every escape route going. Trust me, I won’t be seen.”
And he wasn’t. He left Leo on the canal path, slipped around the back of the food tech block, and retrieved his BMX. When he got back, he half expected him to be gone, but Leo was there, hands in his pockets, head down, and apparently in a world of his own.
They made their way home. Charlie kept a sharp eye out for Darren Stroud and his gang, but there was no sign of them, which was odd, but Leo’s silence distracted Charlie from pondering it much.
Charlie glanced at him and felt a little strange. He’d never bunked off school before, and though he reckoned it unlikely either of them would be missed, nerves still gnawed at his gut. Kate often saw right through him. She’d know the second they got home, he was sure of it.
Sure of it, and wrong. Kate greeted them both with an absent smile, caught up in a game of Uno with Lila. It was a while before she remembered it had been Leo’s first day at school and said she was going to check on him, and by then Charlie’s shirt was loitering at the bottom of the recycling bin, and Leo was fast asleep, fully clothed—coat and all—on his bed.
Kate came downstairs from checking on him. “How was today, Charlie? Is Leo feeling poorly again? He’s out like a light.”
Charlie shrugged. He’d never got to the bottom of what had been wrong with Leo the week before, and he couldn’t think how to explain what had happened under the bridge without incriminating both them.
Kate took a seat at the table and peered at the history homework Charlie had spent most of the afternoon staring at. “Hitler, eh? I liked studying Stalin better. We have a book somewhere about the siege of Leningrad.City of Thieves, I think. I’ll ask Reg.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. Kate and Reg were both bookworms—the house was full of them—but Charlie didn’t much care for reading. Comics aside, why read when he’d rather draw? “No, thanks.”
“I’ll dig it out anyway. You might change your mind. In the meantime, you can tell me what Leo did to his arm today.”
Busted.Charlie’s heart skipped like the tick of a broken clock. “What do you mean?”
“I’m putting my mother instinct together with the blood on his coat sleeve, and combining it with the shifty look you’ve had since you came home. Spit it out, Charlie. Whatever it is, I won’t be cross.”
Charlie believed that, for the most part, but he wasn’t so sure about Leo. Their time under the bridge had been spent mostly in silence, and grassing Leo up felt like an act of betrayal.
He considered his options while Kate waited, tapping her fingers on the table. A half-truth seemed the only way. “I think he pulled it a bit at lunchtime. I helped him clean it up. It wasn’t too bad.”
“Did he see the nurse?”
“He didn’t want to.”
And you walked home together?”
Charlie nodded. “Yeah. He was fine, just a bit tired.”
Kate appeared satisfied, for now at least. She left Charlie to it and got on with dinner, and when Leo appeared in time to inhale his supper and bath Lila, she made no comment, save a casual enquiry about his first day at Heyton High.
Leo didn’t come back downstairs after he’d put Lila to bed. Charlie let him be. Leo kept to himself most nights, unless Kate or Reg asked him to stay with the family.
Around ten, Fliss came home from work and summoned Charlie to the attic.
“What do you want?” Charlie hovered warily by the ladder. He wasn’t often granted access to Fliss’s lair.
“You need to tell Leo to stop flicking his spliff butts onto the garage roof. Dad’s going up there at the weekend to clean the guttering, and there’s going to be too many to blame it on next door.”
“Why do I need to tell him? Tell him yourself.”
