What the fuck did I do? Dad had warned him that Leo’s behaviour could get him sent away, butthis?
God no. I can’t be the reason he—
A harsh chuckle cut Charlie’s thoughts dead. He blinked and squinted in the direction it had come from. Four familiar smirking faces greeted him.Shit.In his hurry to escape, he hadn’t noticed the very same group of year elevens lurking by the skate ramps, a gang of no-good lads that even Wayne Murphy had the sense to avoid.
Darren Stroud got up. “Watcha doing over here?”
“Nothing.” Charlie got up too and shoved his hands in his pockets. Was he going to get decked now? Did he care?
Not really.
“Why don’t you come and do nothing with us, then? It’s fun, boys, innit?”
Charlie shook his head. The lads at Darren’s back sniggered, and Darren’s grin widened to reveal a set of crooked, brown teeth that would be rotten by the time he hit twenty. “What about this, eh? Want some of this, emo boy?”
Darren opened his hand. Two pills sat, ghostlike, in his palm. Charlie stared at them. “I’m not an emo.”
“Yeah? Prove it, faggy-boy.”
Prove it?Piss off.Charlie resisted the urge to roll his eyes, but the harder he stared at the pills, the more the urge faded, and instead, a different energy swept over him. A compulsion that fought the lingering, burning sensation of Leo’s lips on his. A compulsion that fought every instinct Charlie had ever known.
The compulsion won.
Charlie swiped the pills and swallowed them dry. They stuck in his throat, jagged and bitter, but he forced them down. Then he found Darren’s gaze and shrugged. “Thanks for the drugs, dickhead.”
What did I do? What did I do?
Leo sank back down on the bench as Charlie disappeared into the misty night. His heart screamed at him to follow, to pull Charlie back to him and kiss him again. To tell him, perhaps without words, that everything was going to be okay. But his heavy legs, hindered by too much rum and the cloud of hopelessness that was beginning to feel like his constant companion, wouldn’t obey.
He brought a shaking hand to his mouth and traced his tingling lips with his fingertip. They felt raw and burned with the best kind of heat, but something was off.
Charlie’s never done that before.
Leo tugged on his hair, knowing with a stomach-churning certainty that he was right. He’d recognised the fear in Charlie’s eyes, because he’d seen it in his own, reflecting back at him the first time he’d snogged Lee McKensie after football training last year. The first time he’d truly realised that he didn’t look at his friends the same way they looked at him.
Cold winter drizzle seeped into Leo’s skin. He wrapped his arms around himself and shivered. The terror he’d felt that day had stayed with him a long time before real nightmares had taken its place.I don’t want Charlie to feel like that. I lo—
“Leo!”
Leo jerked upright. His head spun. In his haze, he hadn’t noticed it dropping to his knees. Someone shouted his name again, and then Wayne appeared out of the darkness, puffing laboured breaths of steam into the frosty air.
“Leo, mate. You gotta come with me. Your brother’s dropped a bunch of disco biscuits.”
“What?” Leo jumped up and sprinted across the park, leaving Wayne far behind.Disco biscuits. Leo knew the term all too well, but as the trees flew past, he held on to the faint hope that the posh kids in Heyton called their mandy pills something else.
But that hope was obliterated the moment he rounded the front of the cricket pavilion. He saw Lucy first, then Jess, both of them on their knees, bent over Charlie who was curled in a ball on the cold ground.
Leo bounded up the steps and pushed them aside. “What the fuck happened?”
“We don’t know.” Jess elbowed her way back to Charlie and pulled on his hood, trying to uncover his face. “We found him like this. Wayne said he took some pills from Darren Stroud.”
“Who?” Leo looked around, but there was no one close by except Wayne, who was hovering at the edge of the grass.
“Darren Stroud,” Jess repeated. “One of the year-eleven scumbags. Do you think he spiked Charlie’s drink? Charlie doesn’t do drugs. He never has.”
“But he wasn’t drinking either,” Lucy said. “He said he didn’t have any money.”
Leo’s stomach churned. He’d been the one with cash, and he’d spent it on rum he’d known Charlie wouldn’t drink. Was this his fault? Had Charlie boshed a load of beans because Leo had been too selfish to share a few beers with him?
