Panic starts; the quickened bubbles in the bottom of a pan of boiling water. I freeze.
Laughter – muffled - sounds. A branch shakes and an apple falls, missing my head by an inch.
I make the noise I use as an alarm when Lennox has teased me too much and stomp off and then the bushes move again.
“We’re watching you!”
I hear the laughter in a boy’s voice, a boy that isn’t Lennox. A boy I don’t know. I should run, but I never do what I should.
“Maybe I’m watching you.” My hands perch on my hips. “Maybe I’ll have you locked away in a dungeon.” Because I am a princess and we do have dungeons, although they’re used to store things and not people anymore.
Laughter. Just one person.
“And I know where your balls are and how hard I need to kick you so you can’t pee for a week. Or do other gross things.” My teachers said I was best at learning through experience and I’d learned exactly where to hit Lennox so he didn’t tell mum what I’d been reading.
“That’s no’ fair. Little girls shouldn’t kick lads there.” The bushes rustle some more and a blonde boy with sticks in his hair and a tear in his T-shirt steps out.
He’s older than me and tall, really tall. He’s wider than Lennox but his face looks younger.
I’m staring at him when he reaches out to me and yanks my hair. “Thought that were a wig!”
No one pulls my hair. It’s blonde and long and thick and sometimes it curls and it doesn’t look Scottish so I run after him when he runs away, yelling cuss words and threats and listening to his feet as they hit the earth.
He pauses at corners and peers round, laughing and then running away and I’m laughing too, half-breathless, trying to catch him but he knows the shortcuts and I don’t.
I don’t know the shortcuts because it’s the first time I’ve been in the maze but he’s letting me find him before he runs again. I’m lost, chasing this boy I don’t know who’s as tall as a pine and as yellow haired as the fields in May.
When I see the centre of the maze, I stop. There’s nothing grand like I thought there would be, just a tree. An oak. An English oak.
He stands against it, half panting, half laughing, looking at me.
“Think you can find your way out?”
It’s a challenge. A dare.
“Of course.” I’m not sure I can.
“Before me?”
“Girls are cleverer than boys.” I stick my chin out.
He laughs. “Really.”
“Have you met my brother? Living proof.” I don’t feel bad for Lennox saying that. I get higher marks than him on the same paper and I’m nearly three years younger.
He’s quiet, watching me, trying not to smile.
“Are you the princess?”
“What if I am?”
“I didn’t think princesses would run. I thought you stayed in rooms with the blinds drawn and learned how to play the harp or something fucking stupid like that.”
I blink at the swear word.
“I don’t do anything that’s f… fucking stupid.”
“You’ve never said that word before, have you?”
