AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I snap a photo and send it with a text asking for confirmation. Then I slide my phone away and listen while the lowering sun paints the faces of these students in similar gold shades as the fields.
Luke asks them, “Could you even imagine this view from down there?” I wish I had Sol’s talent with oils or watercolours. I’d paint these kids all standing on top of crags as hard as their eyes were when I first met them in London, only I’d have to sprinkle them with this evening’s bright new wonder. Wonder that they work hard to hide like...
Hayden.
I’ve seen him do the same, haven’t I? Watched him work hard to hide his own reactions, like after getting praised, which I saw happen plenty at that wedding table. I notice similarreticence from these kids, but I guess Luke’s an old hand at staving off withdrawal. He crouches by a pile of stones at the highest point of this rocky outcrop and addresses it head on.
“You can see yourself from a new perspective, as well, if you give yourselves permission to start over. Mr. Raeburn will even help you to draw brand-new futures. Yours can be as bright as this evening is. All you have to do is let yourselves have it, but I know some of you want to walk away from this second chance. To run from it.” He nods towards Teo, who nods right back at him. “Or to pick a fight to avoid dealing with why you feel like you don’t deserve it.” Noah mirrors his next nod, his hair as fiery as his flush. “All those reactions do is weigh you down.” He picks up a rock. “The minute you drop them, youwillfeel lighter. Until then…” He taps his temple. “This is where that weight stays.” He pats his chest next. “And right here.”
I picture the book that changed my life then, see a small boy holding back a boulder, and I’ve already imagined Hayden as Atlas, haven’t I? Now I picture him in a different stance, shoving against one of those huge bales of straw, and I sketch that quickly on my phone while standing behind these listening students.
He comes to life in a few lines, and it’s so easy to draw his arms braced but shaking like his hands did after using his chainsaw. Even easier to be tempted to sketch a second person beside him, sharing that load with him, but I stop there and slide my stylus away as Luke continues.
“Pick one thing you’re sick of carrying. Work with us, and you’ll be able to leave it behind when your time at Glynn Harber is over.” He hefts a final rock. “Like mistrust,” he says, his gaze fixed on Teo again. “Or pain,” he adds while Noah rubs his own chest, which feels like an interesting untold story, only Luke reclaims my skittering attention. “Or guilt, which can be the heaviest weight of all to carry.”
He’s speaking to the students.
His gaze lands on me, and I need both hands to clasp the rock he hands me.
“Some of you carry guilt for other people.”
I’m on the top of a Cornish tor. I don’t know why I see that TV missing from my childhood home again. Or that empty fridge in our kitchen. The long shadows cast outside our front door by dealers don’t belong here where everything is so golden. Only the stone in my hand is real. So is the grit digging into my palms as I replay what it took to make a nightmare end for me and Mia.
End it?
You made it worse.
Fuck me, this stone is suddenly way too heavy.
Luke must be close enough to see that. He murmurs, “You can let it go,” but this talk is for students, not for would-be illustrators who can’t let wishful thinking distract them, no matter how appealing Luke makes dropping this weight sound by saying, “Imagine what youcouldcarry once you have both hands free. What you’d have the headspace for and more room for right here.” He taps his chest again. “Room for new friendships. For aspirations and achievement. If you want, you can close your eyes right now and picture those in your futures.”
I visualise my book right next to my mentor’s on the shelves.
That has got to be my goal, yet the grit on my palms pricks like burrs did once, and I hear this so clearly that Luke must be right beside me. “You’re allowed to want good things for yourself. You’re allowed to take this time to figure out what those good things might be. You can open your eyes and see it.”
I do, and then I have to blink.
That tractor in a distant field has been busy. Those bales don’t make a neat line now. They make a smiley face instead, and my surprised grin must paint its own picture.
Luke’s hand lands on my shoulder. “You’re allowed to want good thingsandlet yourself have them.”
That’s his refrain to the students for the next three days and nights—nights that I spend texting Hayden about everything and nothing. He doesn’t seem to mind. If he’s busy, he sends an emoji version of the smiley face he made with a forklift in that field.
For me.
He also sends photos of that woodland clearing. I wake to find he’s already been busy, squeezing in new additions between his harvest duties. He’s been busy too with that chainsaw; stacks of logs have been sliced into thin discs, and I ask why.
Hayden:Charles says they’re good for tons of learning.
He sends a photo of a toddler mid-jump between two of those discs. I roll over in my sleeping bag, studying that energy, that blur of motion, and something else in the background.
Rae:Who’s sitting on your throne?
Hayden:Charles. Think he’s regretting a few of his life choices.
His next photo shows why: Charles has borrowed Hayden’s ear defenders and holds twin babies, their little mouths wide open.
Hayden:Can you hear them screaming?
