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“Sorry.”
“At least we won.”
“Like a dog with a bone, isn’t he?” observed Justin. “Kid yourself not, Hearst. If she didn’t know it already, she wouldn’t even remember your name.”
“I’m sure there are no complaints,” chuckled Mr. Timms. “Boys sometimes go into acting to kiss the pretty girls.”
Justin suggested sharing first-kiss stories: Will’s had been behind the bike sheds at school, Sun’s with a girl at age thirteen and then his own, also with a girl who cut his lip with her dental braces.
“And what about you, PhiPhiPot?” asked Justin. “You can press that button all you like. It’s not going to save you. How was your first kiss?”
I recalled the unfortunate event from childhood. “I was acutely aware that he’d been eating both sand and earthworms.”
Justin grinned and looked at Will. “Is this the other side of a story we’ve already heard? Did the same bike sheds feature?”
“No,” I said.
“Hey, Bevan,” said Will.
“I could believe you eat worms,” Justin told him.
The doors slid shut and we finally jolted upwards.
“Oh, before we’d got to the teachers,” complained Justin. “Or was it so long ago they don’t remember? Zolotov, squeeze a quick one in before we land?”
I squinted back, not wanting to look at Aleks fully if he was going to say terrible things that would make me feel jealous.
“First kiss that is mattering is on a train,” he said. “Is scary. I am shy, thinking she might not like me so much.”
“Changed days then, judging from the Ceilidh,” said Justin. He covered his mouth momentarily. “Sorry. Involuntary bitch. Just twitched out.”
I twitched out of the elevator and into the hall, welcoming smells of food ahead, Justin’s ponderings on whether he had Tourette’s Syndrome behind.
“Will and Phi snogged!” my loquacious friend announced to Michelle, who had returned and was at the staff table. Justin paused, and raised the back of his hand to his forehead. “I am afflicted, struck down in my prime. What a day of tragedy, Shakespearean and Justinean. Is that a word? It should be. One day it will be.”
Chapter 20
Thepost-competitionhighthathad run through dinner was gone, and an anti-climactic depression sat with Will and me in the television room.
“We need chocolate,” I said and set off for the kitchen.
Returning a short while later, a mug in each hand and a packet of chocolate biscuits wedged under an arm, I nearly collided with Aleks in the dark corridor.
“This is an amazing thing you do, Amalphia,” he said. “I see you change, become another person. Is wondrous, a gift. You did mention your acting before, but I had no knowing you were so talented in this.”
“Well, we haven’t actually known each other very long,” seemed a ludicrous and impossible declaration. Yet, it was true.
“Fifty-eight days since we first meet, in corridor like this.” He mimed his hands banging together. “Then forty-nine since…” He reached forward and touched my hair.
I tensed. “I’d better go.” I indicated the mugs.
“Yes – I also – am go room and read.”
We went our own ways in the foyer, the reason he’d been heading towards the kitchen perhaps forgotten in the awkwardness of the meeting.
My chest hurt as I sat down by Will and looked at the television.
It hurt more as I walked past the seven inches of open door later, and then I gasped in my own room on seeing my bed. Thermal garments like the ones I’d wanted to order, but had not, were piled neatly beside a pink cable-knit cardigan and matching socks. I held the soft clothes to my face before putting them on, and the cold became a little less keen.
