august, age 17
The night before A-level results were due to be released along with confirmation of university places, Lucas couldn’t sleep. Despite going to bed at ten o’clock, he had tossed and turned all night and each time he had drifted off, his overactive mind had sprung into use again. His stomach was twisted by the nerves that sickened him, the chance that he wouldn’t get the grades he needed. Having taken an extra subject, he had a little leeway but that wasn’t good enough for him. It wasn’t an insurance grade: he wanted to be the best.
Or second best, at least. Mika always just about beat him to the top spot, the two of them constantly pushing each other to be better in English, the one class that they shared. Everyone else had given up trying to get the top scores by that point, accepting that there was no way anyone would ever beat either of them. Every now and then, someone inevitably made the easy jokes about Asian domination or accused them of having tiger parents, though the was true of neither of them.
Although Mika’s parents had encouraged her to stay in touch with her heritage by learning Japanese, they had never put any pressure on her to work harder than she did. She was an autodidact, her learning all of her own volition. Lucas, on the other hand, had never felt the weight of his parents’ expectations bearing down on him when they had insisted ever since he was a toddler that they only wanted to see him happy. It just so happened that he was happiest when he was learning, constantly improving his own brain.
There had been one incident when a student – or rather, a former student – had called them ‘a pair of bloody chinks, probably just bred to learn.’ Mika had kept her cool, something she had never lost, and explained that the term was incredibly racist and even more inaccurate. She had pointed out to the jealous bully that neither she nor Lucas were Chinese: she was one hundred percent Japanese and Lucas’s parents were Korean and Filipino, and that she was more offended by their ignorance than their racism.
Lucas had later pointed out that his mother was in fact a quarter Chinese. That had made Mika laugh.
After eventually drifting off long after midnight, Lucas found himself wide awake at six o’clock in the morning. University decisions were due to be released at eight am, an hour before he would be able to collect his grades from school, but Audrie, Dylan and Aaron had all said it was pointless trying to log in at that time, the site crashing with nearly half a million students trying to find out whether or not they had been accepted into their first choice universities.
He had already tried once, a futile attempt when it was so early. The page had been blank. nothing to show him. Nothing had been released. After almost an hour, he gave up hanging around in his room and headed to the shower. For ten minutes, he stood under the hot water as it ran into his eyes, worsening his already blurry vision. The stream pounded his scalp and trickled down his body as he rubbed every inch of his skin with shower scrub and a loofah.
The immediate future put him on edge, his entire body tense as he counted down the minutes before he could find out what lay in store for him. No matter how many deep breaths he took, he couldn’t shake the fear that things might not go as planned. His thoughts kept drifting to Asher, whose prospects were a little less certain when his grades had never been stable, and the thirteen years for which they had been best friends. The day marked the end of an era.
He thought of the years they had shared, from the wedding when he was four to the time that Asher had kissed him at midnight when December had turned to January; he thought of every sleepover when they had shared a bed; he thought of the weekend they had spent in London when he had realised the intensity of crush. He thought of Asher.
He spent another ten minutes in the shower with his back against the wall. His eyes were closed this time.
*
The kitchen wasn’t empty when he made it down at half past eight, dressed in dark jeans and a nice t-shirt. Both of his parents were up, his brothers too, and his grandmother was leaning against the counter with a cup of tea.
“Hi, hammy,” he said, not expecting to see her there so early.
“Morning, Lucas,” she said with a grin. “Big day today!”
“Yup.” He nodded. It was all he could think about, but he didn’t want to have to think about it.
“I just dropped Tom off at Mika’s this morning,” she said. “Poor girl was in a bit of a state though I’ve no idea why when she’s such a smart little thing.”
“When do you want me to take you in, hun?” Sarah asked, sensing her son’s nerves in his monosyllabic responses. She was sitting at the table with Harvey cradled in her arm, feeding him from a bottle while Truman simultaneously took care of Freddie and Julian. The boys were completely in sync, an absolute dream when they slept but a potential nightmare when they were hungry.
A little over four months old, the boys were still incredibly difficult to tell apart and the family had taken to colour coding them: Harvey wore blue; Freddie dressed in yellow and Julian was purple, living out of their sisters’ hand-me-downs. Sarah didn’t care if people thought her sons were girls based on the patterns on their onesies or the colours of their babygroes. It just made no sense to splash out on entirely new clothes when money was tight enough.
“School opens at nine.”
“We’ll leave in twenty minutes,” Sarah said. She looked down at her baby as he suckled from the bottle. Harvey was the smallest of the three, having spent much of the pregnancy nestled under his mother’s ribs when the space had got a little crowded, but he had a mammoth appetite.
“Thanks.” Lucas took a banana from the fruit bowl. He wasn’t particularly hungry but he felt the need to do something, if only to try to convince himself that today was a totally normal day. Except it wasn’t. Today would decide the next few years with him.
“Lucas, could you give me a hand?” Truman asked. He sensed when his stepson needed a distraction and he nodded at the bottles in his hands. He had got it down to a fine art, feeding two of his children at once, but he also knew how to read them: Lucas needed something to do.
He nodded, taking a seat opposite his stepfather, and he picked up Freddie to hold him as he fed him. Although he had spent the best part of two months with his father after his brothers had been born, only popping home for the odd weekend or after school, he had bonded with the three boys he had at first been terrified off. He was learning their quirks and habits, beginning to be able to tell them apart. It wasn’t easy: for non-identical triplets, they certainly looked identical.
“Sar?” Maddie set down her teacup. “Do you have a minute?”
“Sure,” Sarah said. She headed into the conservatory, stroking Harvey’s foot. When she sat down on the sofa, she curled her legs up beneath herself and propped her elbow up on a cushion to give her arm a break.
Maddie dropped down next to her. “I want to talk money.”
Sarah grimaced, turning her face away. “Ugh, Mum, no. I hate talking about money.”
“I know, baby, but I just need to talk to you. Trust me, Sar, I have plenty of first-hand experience when it comes to kids and finances and how the two are pretty much mortal enemies.”
“Mum, this just makes me uncomfortable,” Sarah said, her eyes on her son. “I don’t want to think about money.”
“And you shouldn’t have to,” Maddie said. She was no fool: she had seen her daughter scrimping and saving even more scrupulously ever since she’d found out she was pregnant with the triplets, cutting back wherever she could. “I just need to make sure you know that you’ve got Dad and me. You know, there’s no shame in coming to us if you ever need a hand. I don’t want you suffering in silence.”
Sarah sighed. “Mum, I’m nearly forty. I’ve been married for twelve years and I have a virtual football team of children. I really need to be able to stand on my own two feet. If we get ourselves into something, it’s up to us to get ourselves out.”
Maddie looked at her then down at Harvey. She reached out for his hand, smiling when he wrapped his hand around her finger. “You’re definitely my daughter,” Maddie said. “You’re strong, Sarah. You and Truman are such an incredible couple, and I really do admire your strength. I just wanted to make sure you know you have support.”
Sarah smiled, lifting her eyes to her mother. “I know. Thanks, Mum. But we’re going to be ok. Yes, this has hit us hard. Yes, we’ve had to make a lot of changes, but we’ve been looking into things we can do.”
When Harvey emptied the bottle, she sat him up on her lap and rubbed his back, bouncing her knee. “We’ve been thinking about moving, possibly. The market’s good right now and we could get a lot more for this place than it would cost us to put a down payment one of the new estates, especially now that Audrie’s living with Cooper and Lucas is heading to uni.”
Maddie frowned. “Wait, what? You’re thinking of selling up?”
Sarah shrugged, a little hopeless. She’d had many a sleepless night with her sons, overthinking every little thing. “Maybe. If we have to,” she said. It was the last thing she wanted to do. She loved where she lived, the little house everything she had ever wanted. “If we don’t move, we can remortgage.”
“Didn’t you pay off the mortgage?”
Sarah nodded. Truman had lived in the house for twenty years, ever since Audrie was a toddler, and he had bought the place when the property market was in a major slump, his mortgage less than half of what it would have been now. After two decades of hard work, he and Sarah had only recently made the last payment, now official owners of the pretty property.
“God, Sar, you’re not remortgaging.” Maddie shook her head fiercely.
“It’s the best option, Mum. We’ve looked into it. We could release the equity and that would help us so much right now.”
“No. I won’t let that happen, Sarah. It doesn’t need to come to that.” Her eyes were hard and determined. “Dad and I have both cashed in our pensions, baby, and Dad just sold the pub.” She and her husband had recently come into quite a substantial amount of money, long after it would have been most appreciated back when they’d had five children under the age of eight.
“That’s yours. You’ve spent your whole lives earning that.”
“You’re my life, Sarah. You and your sisters and Tom and my grandchildren. What’s the point in having money if I can’t help you out? Sar, baby, I can’t enjoy it knowing that you’re struggling. Raising kids is hard enough; raising triplets is just ridiculous. The last thing you need is to be worrying about money.”
She took Harvey, cuddling her youngest grandchild. Sarah had nothing to do with her hands. She laced her fingers together and looked up at her mother. She would be lying if she said that money didn’t worry her, that she didn’t lose sleep wondering how on earth she and Truman would get by. Her stubbornness slipped for a moment, touched by her mother’s sincerity. She knew she wouldn’t offer it if she didn’t really mean it, if she hadn’t seriously discussed it with her husband.
“Thanks, Mum,” she said quietly. Maddie beamed. She had won, even if all that meant was that Sarah would think about it, that she would count her parents as a more valid option than borrowing against the house.
“Now,” Maddie said, kissing Harvey’s soft hair as she cuddled him on her lap, “which of my grandsons do you want me to be in charge of? My youngest or my oldest?”
Sarah smiled, glad to change the subject. She adored her mother and she knew she meant only the best, but it was the kind of conversation she wished she didn’t have to have, especially four months after giving birth to her three boys. “You keep Harvey,” she said. When she stood, she bent down to hug her mother and kiss her son’s forehead. “I’m going to take Lucas to get his results.”
*
Lucas felt like all of his organs were about to launch themselves out of his body by the time his mother pulled up outside the school gates. It was busy, almost two hundred students tipping into the school hall to collect their AS and A2 results before the grades were due to be released.
“You’re going to be absolutely fine, baby,” Sarah said, squeezing his hand. “Don’t look so worried – it’ll be fine.”
“I feel like I might throw up my entire stomach,” Lucas said. “Not just my breakfast – the whole organ. And probably some of my intestinal tract.”
“I know the feeling. But I know you’ll have done great, Lucas. You just open that envelope and get it over and done with. Don’t overthink it.” She gave him an encouraging smile and he nodded as he unclipped his seatbelt.
He knew his mother was right. He knew that the chances of him catastrophically failing were incredibly low. His AS results had been top of the range, predicted to achieve a full board of A*s this year. His offer from Cambridge required him to get two A*s – one of them in English – and an A.
“Just take a deep breath,” Sarah said. He did as he was told, filling his lungs that felt as though they might explode. “I’ll be right here, hun. Take as long as you need.”
“Don’t you need to get back home?”
She shook her head. Her husband was off work for a few more days after taking two full weeks in August and her parents had been incredible ever since the triplets had come along, their spare time devoted to giving their daughter a hand. Truman and Maddie were in control all day, a day that Sarah had set aside as Lucas’s, whatever he needed.
He checked his phone. Five minutes to go, and a text from Asher asking where he was. “I’m going in.”
“Good luck, adeul.” She gave him a one-armed hug across the gap between their seats before he got out, flexing his fingers as he walked across the quad to the hall.
He spotted his friends immediately, standing in a cluster in the corridor. Tom and Mika stood hand in hand against the wall, silently supporting each other. Although Tom was homeschooled, he had taken all of his exams through the school and the two of them looked nervous despite being the cleverest people Lucas knew: Mika had hardly ever dropped a single mark, let alone got less than an A* in any piece of work, while Tom’s intelligence had shone through even stronger ever since he had left traditional school. Under his mother’s tutelage, with the help of a handful of private tutors he had grown comfortable around, he had excelled.
Asher looked a bit of a wreck, wringing his wrists as Mawar tried to comfort him. He looked up when he saw Lucas, a flicker of relief crossing his features. He ran both hands through his hair and let out a tired laugh.
“There you are,” he said. “We were beginning to think you weren’t coming.”
“I’m here,” Lucas said. “How’re you feeling?”
“Like I might shit out my heart,” Asher said. “God, this is literally the worst I’ve ever felt.”
Lucas didn’t feel the same way. As painfully nervous as he was, he had felt much worse in the past. Although he had moved on from the torment Adler had put him through, she still took the biscuit for making him feel worse than anyone or anything else ever had.
“It’s going to be fine,” Mawar said, rubbing his arm. She tried to hold his hand but he pulled away to scratch the back of his neck. He always did that when he was nervous.
“You don’t know that, Mar.”
He was right. While it was pretty much guaranteed that she would get the A and two Bs that she needed to study politics in Manchester, Asher didn’t have that certainty for himself. He could never predict how he had done in exams, often coming out of them feeling great only to find out he had bombed.
“I think I’m gonna throw up,” he said, letting out a dry laugh though he wasn’t joking. “God, they need to just open the fucking doors already, this is ridiculous. They know we’re all shitting ourselves out here. Come on!”
As though the teachers on the other side heard him, the doors swung open. The clocks had just hit nine.
“We’ll meet out in the quad, shall we?” Mika asked. Everyone else nodded. “I’m going to get my envelope and go out to the quad. I don’t want to be in there any longer than I have to be.”
A swarm of students poured into the hall that was split halfway for AS and A2 results, a few different tables for the alphabet. Lucas made a beeline for the table marked: A2 – A-F. A handful of people made it there before him, pushing their way to the front to collect their envelope from one of the two teachers manning each table. Within a minute, it was in his hand.
He didn’t look around. He just headed out of there as fast as he could before the nervous crowd could overwhelm him. Gripping the envelope in his fist, he pushed his way out of the hall and down the corridor, bursting out of the heavy door to the quad. He was the first one out.
Tom emerged next, shortly followed by Mika. The two of them hurried over to the picnic bench Lucas had claimed, taking a seat on the same side as him.
“This is horrible,” Tom said. He stared down at the envelope. “This is a really big deal, isn’t it?”
“Kind of,” Lucas said. “How did you feel your exams went?”
“I felt fine. I thought they went fine. But that doesn’t mean they actually went fine.”
Mika slipped her hand over his. “You’ll have done fine. I know you will.” She nodded at the envelope and linked her arm with his, nestling close. “Open it.”
Tom took a deep breath and pushed his nail under the seal, the paper snagging as he tore it open. He slipped out the sheet of paper inside, Lucas and Mika holding their breath as they waited to see how he had done. Lucas could feel his uncle’s nerves radiating off him until he looked down at the sheet and the four grades it displayed. He had taken maths, chemistry, biology and physics: he enjoyed the puzzle, finding the patterns and working out equations and formulae.
In each, he had scored an A.
“Oh my gosh, Tom, that’s incredible!” Mika cried out, throwing both arms around him. A proud beam broke out over his lips, his cheeks turning pink. “I’m so proud of you!”
“That’s amazing, Tom,” Lucas said. He put his hand on his shoulder and smiled, waiting for Mika to let go before he hugged him too. “Congrats.”
“Thanks,” Tom said quietly. “Wow.”
“You should be the poster child for homeschooling,” Mika said. “You’re amazing. I love you so much.” She cupped his cheeks and kissed him, short and sweet. His cheeks went a darker shade of pink and he smiled against her lips.
“I love you too,” he said. He dropped his eyes to the unopened envelope in Mika’s hand. “How did you do?”
Lucas looked up at the door, watching the students spilling out as he waited for Asher and Mawar to show up. They hadn’t come out just yet. Mika nudged him.
“Open yours too,” she said, halfway through opening her envelope. As Lucas started, she finished. She took out the sheet, laughing her relief when she spotted the grades. She needed three As to fulfil her offer to study linguistics at Callaghan University.
One column listed the subjects she had taken: English, politics, art and maths, as well as Japanese. The next column listed her grades, though it might as well have just read that she was a genius. Despite taking two more courses than most people in the year, she had outperformed every other student in the school. Five A*s stood proudly beside each subject.
“You did it,” Tom said with a grin. Mika clasped her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide. No matter how much she had dreamt about getting a straight set of perfect grades, she had never let herself really believe it would happen. Tears sprung to her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. Tom wiped them away and hugged her, kissing her cheek before she turned to meet his lips.
Lucas grinned and comforted her with a hand on her back, bumping his shoulder against hers. “Congratulations, genius,” he said. She laughed and took a shaky breath.
“Thanks, Lucas. Oh my goodness, I can’t believe it.”
“I can,” the two boys said in unison, laughing when they jinxed each other. Across the quad, Asher and Mawar finally appeared, rolling their eyes at the crowds as they pushed their way out and headed over to the bench where their friends were sitting.
“Christ alive, it’s crammed in there,” Mawar said. “Oh, hey, are we celebrating?” She looked down at the two opened results on the table and gasped when she saw the grades addressed to Mika and Tom. Or rather, Sumika and Jung-min. Most people didn’t realise Mika was short for anything, or that Thomas was actually Tom’s middle name as a result of an error when his father had filled out his birth certificate.
“Holy shit, you two are, like, the most powerful of power couples!” Mawar cried out. She stood behind them to hug them both and her gaze fell on Lucas, whose envelope was open in his hand but he hadn’t taken out the results yet.
“Go on,” Asher said. He sat opposite Lucas, his own envelope creased in his hand. After the torture of waiting, he couldn’t bring himself to open it. He had a fairly lenient offer, only needing to get two As and a B to study geography at Callaghan, but part of him knew there was a chance he wouldn’t make it. No matter how many A grades he had got over the past couple of years, he had got just as many Bs.
Lucas closed his eyes when he took out the sheet. He lay it flat on the table, letting his friends see before he dared to look. Mika gasped. Mawar let out a shriek.
“Holy shit,” Asher said. “You’re fucking amazing, Lucas. Can I just have your brain, please?”
Lucas opened one eye and then the other, looking down at the sheet and the four subjects listed on it. He had already received his level four certificate in British Sign Language as an independent qualification. Down one side stood the options he had taken, toiling his way through two years of English literature, physics, history and French. The effort had been worth it, it seemed, earning a proud A* for every single subject. He had to stare at the letters and asterisks for a moment before they sunk in.
“Oh my goodness,” he muttered. He had done it. His offer stood: he had done what he had needed to get into Cambridge, the university of his dreams, and more. “I did it. I got in.”
Asher joined Lucas on the other side of the bench, wrapping his arms tightly around him. “You fucking genius,” he said with a laugh. Lucas inhaled the musky cologne he had worn for a few years now, the intoxicating scent that did something funny to his insides, turning his knees to jelly and setting his heart beating a thousand times faster. “I knew you’d do it. Shit. You’re going to Cambridge.”
“I am,” Lucas said, the words hard to push out when he could hardly breathe.
“Sure I can’t persuade you to hang around Farnleigh?” Asher grinned and let go at last, his hand lingering on Lucas’s shoulder for a moment. Lucas paused for a moment. Cambridge was his dream, but so was Asher. He didn’t answer.
“Shit,” Mawar said, frowning at her phone. “Mum’s here. She said I’ve gotta go.”
“Where’re you going?” Mika asked.
“We’re off to France for the week,” she said. “Our flight leaves in about two and a half hours. Ash, come on, let’s just rip the plaster off.” She tore open her envelope without a second thought, praying for the ABB she needed to head to Manchester to study politics.
“Mar?” Asher asked. He looked over at her, trying to read her face. “How’d you do?”
“I got in,” she said with a grin. She had made it with a grade to spare. In politics, English and history, she had got two As and a B. Asher slung an arm around her waist and pressed his lips to her cheek.
“Congratulations,” he said. He’d never had any doubt that his girlfriend would make it. He couldn’t say the same for himself, sick with nerves that grew with every second that passed.
“Come on, come on, open yours. I’ve gotta go any second.” She hopped on the spot, imploring him to open his envelope. Lucas sent up a prayer, hoping that Asher would get what he needed. There were times that he felt something akin to guilt for the ease with which he read and learnt and retained knowledge. While Asher had proved himself to be a phenomenal artist with a natural skill when he had a paintbrush or a pencil in his hand, academia didn’t come naturally.
His hands shook a little as he opened the envelope, slowly pulling out the solitary sheet of paper inside. When he dared to look, his heart soared to see the first grade: an A* in art, an unachievable grade for most. He had poured all his effort into his portfolio, constantly documenting the journey of his art, and it had paid off.
That elation dropped to the floor and shattered when his eyes shifted down the page. Slightly below his grade for art was the one for Design and Technology. A B. Below that, a C in geography.
It wasn’t enough.
Even though the A* and the B balanced out to the two As he needed, that didn’t excuse the C. Worse than the fact that he had a C was that it was a C in the subject he had applied to study. It didn’t take long for the rest of the group to notice the grades, to work out what they meant.
“Ash,” Mawar said, her voice small. She went to take his hand but he pulled away.
“Don’t,” he said. “I didn’t get the grades.”
“You can ring the university,” she said. “Maybe they’ll still take you. You got an A*!”
“In art,” he snapped. “They’re not going to accept me for geography just because I got an A* in art.”
“You could go through clearing,” Mika said. “Those are still really good grades. There are loads of places you could go.”
“I don’t want to go to loads of places,” Asher said. They were interrupted by Mawar’s phone ringing, her mother asking where she was.
“Ash, it’ll be ok,” she said when she hung up. “There are loads of things you could do. This doesn’t mean you can’t get in anywhere.”
He gritted his jaw, staring at the piece of paper. Mawar hugged him but he didn’t react, standing stiff when she looped her arms around him. The five of them had dropped from riding on the high of their own grades to despairing with Asher over his own.
Mawar’s phone rang again. Asher looked down at her.
“You need to go, Mar,” he said. “You’re going to miss your plane.”
“Ash…”
“I’ll see you next week,” he said. He hardly responded when she kissed him goodbye. Lucas averted his eyes when their lips met.
“I love you,” she said as she let go of him.
“You too.”
As she left, an eager photographer bounded over, taking photos of happy students to promote the school’s exam results.
“Hey, guys! Can I get a piccie of you all with your results?”
Asher glowered at him. “Fuck off,” he snapped. The wide-eyed photographer scarpered, skittering off to find someone a little happier.
For several long seconds, Lucas didn’t say a word. Tom and Mika stood frozen on the spot: Tom’s words shrivelled up in awkward situations and it could take Mika a little while to find the right ones, cycling through the millions in her head.
“You have loads of options,” Mika said. “Mar’s right, you can go through clearing. There might even be a different course at Callaghan that you can get onto. Those aren’t bad grades at all, Ash. You don’t know unless you ring, they might accept you anyway.”
“Look, I just want to be on my own,” he said. He shook his head and crumpled his grades in his hand. “”I need to be on my own. Just … leave me alone.” With that, he stalked off in the wrong direction, towards the field behind the physics building.
Lucas floundered. He didn’t know what to say or do, how he could help when he had no idea how his best friend was feeling: he had even rejected Mawar. He never did that. He looked over at Mika, who wore her anguish all over her face.
“What do I do?”
“Go and be with him,” she said. “Tom and I need to go. My mum’s waiting. You should go and be with him, Lucas. And congratulations, by the way – you did absolutely amazingly.” She reached up to hug him. He caught a whiff of her tea tree shampoo. He had to wrinkle his nose to stop from sneezing.
“You too,” he said. “And you, Tom. You should ring hammy, she’ll be over the moon.”
Tom smiled and nodded. “I’m going to. See you later, Lucas.” He waved as he and Mika left, their hands slipping together. Although he was almost seventeen, Mika only recently sixteen despite being in the year above, the two were the most innocent couple Lucas knew. They were perfectly content with each other, no pressure to move beyond holding hands and kissing despite having been together for almost a year. Lucas knew Tom wasn’t ready. He had expressed that before.
A full minute passed. Then another. Before the third could come to an end, Lucas headed down the path to the back of the building, folding his own results into his pocket. He heard Asher before he saw him; he heard an angry sob and the smack of a fist on brick, the thump of a shoe kicking the wall.
“Hey!” he cried out, grabbing Asher’s elbow to pull him away. “Stop it, Asher, you’re going to hurt yourself. Stop.”
Asher writhed away from him, anger bubbling out of him. “I worked so fucking hard!” he yelled. “I worked my fucking arse off and for what? What the fuck was the point? Why did I bother?”
He swung his fist at the wall but Lucas caught his hand before his knuckles could crack against the red brick and he pulled him into a hug, holding him tight to stop him from throwing himself against the wall. Asher was stronger than him, but his rage melted into despair and when Lucas held him, he wept.
“I fucked up,” he said. “I fucked it all up and now you guys are all going off to do what you want to do and I still don’t know what the fuck I want to do.”
“Did you want to do geography?” Lucas asked, his brain ruled by pragmatism rather than emotion.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled.
“Then it doesn’t matter that you didn’t get in.”
“I’m just going to be stuck here forever while you go off and graduate and you’re all going to move away and I won’t see you again.”
Lucas frowned. “Don’t be stupid. You’re going to figure it out. Come on. Just go home and talk to your parents – they always know what to say.”
Asher slumped against the wall, running both hands down his face. “Come with me.”
“I thought you wanted to be alone.”
“Since when has that ever applied to you?” Asher asked. Lucas felt a flower blossom in his heart, thrusting the thorns into the shade.
On the way to Asher’s car, Lucas stopped off at his mother’s. She leant across the seat when he poked his head through the passenger window.
“I was beginning to wonder where you’d got to,” she said. “Everything ok?”
He nodded. “D’you mind if I go over to Asher’s?” he asked.
“Um, ok. As long as you tell me how it went. Your face isn’t giving much away,” she said, smiling to lighten the slightly sombre mood she was sensing. “Are you alright, hun?”
“Oh, yeah, fine. I got four A*s,” he said, passing her the sheet of his results.
“Oh my goodness, Lucas! That’s incredible!” she cried out. She raced out of the car and around to his side, pulling him into a hug. “That is so phenomenal, baby. You’re so smart; I’m so proud of you, adeul. You should tell your dad, I know he’s been dying to know how you did.”
“I will,” Lucas said.
“How’d Asher do?”
“He didn’t get into uni.”
Sarah’s face fell, her hand over her chest. “Oh, no. That’s awful. Is he ok?”
“Not really. I’m going to go home with him,” he said. “Is that ok?”
“Absolutely, baby. My amazing boy.” She smiled up at him and kissed his cheek even when he grimaced. “You’re such a wonderful friend, and I am so, so proud of you.” She hugged him again and kissed his other cheek before she let him go, reading over his results with pink, pride-filled cheeks.
Lucas got into Asher’s car, not a word shared between them as Asher pulled out of his spot and headed home. He hooked up his phone to the radio, blasting music the whole way home. It was far too loud for Lucas, whose ears were sensitive enough without the extra volume Asher needed, but he said nothing and made no move to turn it down himself. Asher wanted to drown himself in the music and he wasn’t going to do a thing to interrupt that.
Both of his parents were home when they arrived fifteen minutes later. Bishop was reading the paper at the kitchen table while Ishaana was whisking up a cake mix. Sadie was sitting on top of the counter to help the baking, which seemed to consist mostly of dipping her finger in the bowl while her mother wasn’t looking.
She spotted the boys first, her face lighting up when she spotted her big brother. “Ashie! We’re makin’ a cake!” She clapped her hands together, still holding a loaded spatula, and splattered her mother’s shirt with a clump of batter. Ishaana looked up with a bright smile for her son, unfazed by the mess around her. Although her sons were grown up, she had slipped back into the role of mothering a toddler with ease and enthusiasm.
“Ash! How’d it go? How did you do, hun?”
Asher threw down the crumpled sheet on the counter. It landed on a smear of cake mix. “I fucked up.”
The lump in his throat tripled in size and he stormed out of the kitchen to the garden, pushing through the door without acknowledging his family with any more than the three words that had shocked both his parents. Ishaana stood wide eyed with her hand over her mouth, a blob of cake in her hair.
“Oh my God,” she said, turning to Lucas. “What happened?”
Lucas picked up the sheet and uncrumpled it, passing it to Ishaana. “He didn’t get in,” he said quietly. “I’m going to go and talk to him. Hi, Sadie.”
“Hi, Luca.” Sadie scooted across the counter to hug him but he backed away when he saw the state of her.
“Nuh-uh, you’re a mucky pup, Sades,” he said, wiggling his finger at her outfit. “I’m gonna talk to your brother, I’ll be back in a minute, ok?”
Ishaana stared at the sheet and she grimaced. Bishop joined her, wincing at the results that weren’t terrible by most standards, but they weren’t enough. Only just.
“God. Poor Ash. I should go out,” he said.
“I want to talk to him,” Lucas said. “I just … I want to try.”
Bishop nodded. As close as he was to his son, perhaps the closest of his four children, he knew that Lucas and Asher shared a special connection. He watched Lucas leave before he turned to his wife, the two of them sharing a look of anguish. Ishaana stroked Sadie’s springy hair, shaking her head to herself.
“I can’t believe they’re done with high school,” he said, gazing out of the window before he looked back at his wife. Ishaana put her hands over Sadie’s ears.
“You have the shittiest timing,” she said, tutting at him. “I know you won the fucking bet and you can have the money, but your son is hurting out there.”
Bishop frowned. “I … I wasn’t talking about the bet. That was a genuine sentiment,” he said. Ishaana softened, dropping her shoulders and sinking against him when he put his arm around her shoulders and kissed her forehead.
*
Lucas headed out of the French doors. Asher was lying on the grass, his hand over his eyes. He was crying. It killed Lucas to see him cry, the one person in his life who hardly ever let his emotions get the best of him. Sometimes he got mad but he rarely cried, his usual response being to make light of any situation.
Lucas’s hatred of seeing his friend was almost matched by his hatred of grass. He hated the feel of it beneath his feet; he hated to sit on it; he hated to touch it. It was dirty and he never knew what had been there, especially out in the countryside where the foxes roamed at night and there was the occasional inexplicable chicken in the garden. But his best friend was hurting, his shoulders shaking, so he sucked it up and he sat down before he lowered his head. Lying next to Asher, he had to take a deep breath or two to stop himself from overthinking.
“You know what?”
Asher said nothing.
“This isn’t the end of the world.” Lucas shielded his eyes, squinting up at the sky. It was a hot mid-August day, just a couple of weeks before his eighteenth birthday. He wasn’t too fussed about suddenly being of a legal age to drink when he had no intention of drinking outside the home anyway.
“It might as well be,” Asher said, wiping his eyes.
“But it isn’t. So you didn’t get into Callaghan. You don’t even like geography that much. Do you really want to spend another three years studying it, just to come out with a slightly better understanding of rivers?”
“I think it’s more than that.”
“Asher.” Lucas looked over at him. Asher didn’t look back. He still had his hand over his eyes. “Maybe this is the best. My stepdad’s always saying that everything happens for a reason. Sometimes I think he’s crazy – I’m still not a hundred percent sure what the big reason is for him and Mum having triplets when a new prescription breaks the bank – but sometimes I think he’s got a point. And right now, I think he’s got a point.”
“What’s the point?” Asher asked. He looked over at last, his eyes wet and his cheeks streaked with tears. “Seriously, Lucas, what the fuck is the point? What’s the reason for this? I don’t get it. You know I worked hard. I tried so hard.”
“Now you have more time to figure it out.” Lucas clasped his hands over his stomach so he didn’t risk accidentally touching the grass. “Maybe geography wasn’t for you. It’s not even your favourite subject.”
“No,” Asher said quietly.
“You love art, Asher. If you add up all the time you spent on your portfolio this year, I bet it’d be weeks. And you’re amazing at it. Your art is stunning, and you got an A*. Do you realise how rare that is?”
Asher seemed to have lost his voice, holding back his words as he listened to Lucas and watched him talk. It wasn’t often he had so much to say, usually clamming up when emotions came out and he struggled with his own.
“You don’t have to do just a straight art degree,” Lucas continued. He took out his phone, pulling up a list of courses in the area of art and design. “What about graphic design? Or illustration? There’s so much you could do. You’re seriously talented. You could be, I don’t know … you could be a book illustrator, or a tattoo artist, or an animator.”
“You think I could do that?” Asher asked, genuine amazement in his voice.
“Of course you could! You’ve got an amazing portfolio from sixth form and you’ve got four or five months to reapply. You can build it up even more and have an edge on everyone else.”
“I’ll be a year behind.”
Lucas shrugged. “Who cares? Mika’s doing a four year course; Tom won’t start until next year. Maybe I’ll do a master’s. It’s only an extra year. It’s worth it if you get to do something you actually want to do than suffer through a degree you don’t want.”
Asher let out a shaky breath. He dropped his hand from his face at last and he sat up. His fingers found Lucas’s, wrapping around his hand and pulling him up too. The two of them sat so close they were touching, their hands entwined for a silent moment. Lucas felt as though his heart would give in and his lungs would collapse, that his stomach would set on fire.
“Thanks, Lucas,” Asher said, his voice a murmur. He laughed, short and dry. “What the fuck would I do without you?”
He wrapped his arms around Lucas before he could respond, gripping him so tightly that his fingers dug into his back. Lucas felt Asher’s nails denting his skin through his thin shirt but he said nothing, fearing that opening his mouth anymore would lead to word vomit, spilling out everything he was really thinking and feeling.
“Your life would probably be easier,” he said after a long moment. Asher shook his head.
“It would be shit.”
Inside the house, Bishop and Ishaana were watching the two boys as though they were the most captivating TV show. They watched when they lay down beside each other; when Asher took Lucas’s hand; when they hugged. They watched them talking and they saw Asher smile. Ishaana nudged her husband, who held their daughter on his hip.
“You can take the hundred pounds,” she said, “but I’m willing to make another bet.”
Bishop glanced at her. “You’re really desperate for them to get together, aren’t you?”
She sighed and tucked herself under his arm, her hand on Sadie’s back. “I just … call me old fashioned but I believe. I believe in them. I believe in love.”
+ – + – +
throwback to the day my brother got picked to have his photo taken holding his results for the local newspaper but he didn’t actually get the grades he needed so he photoshopped the jumping for joy picture to one of him jumping off a cliff
i hope you enjoyed this chapter! i must say, i love writing #lusher scenes like this, the purity of their friendship. Yesterday I received my accommodation assignment for when I move to Canada for my third year of university and it hit me that I leave England in a month … crazy. Here’s hoping I’ll still be able to write as much over there!
also i decided to get graphical today and i made a new profile picture – ryan! i am so excited to write little spoon, i’ve even started daydreaming about it. i have a very important question for you guys about the book, however. (catch up for those of you who may not be aware, little spoon is ryan’s story set in 2020 in which he and his mother move to a cute island for the summer and ryan befriends a misfit group of ice-cream parlour employees and falls for a charismatic trans man)
would you rather little spoon was mature or not?Â
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