may, age 7
Spring was a fickle time of year but the weather held out on a glorious Saturday in the middle of May when Lucas’s aunt, Laura, and Asher’s cousin, Claire, had tied the knot in a quiet, pretty ceremony in a park outside Farnleigh. The sun had prevailed, beating the rain that had been threatening to fall for days, the spring showers eventually sprinkling down once the reception had begun and the two women had posed for photographs with their friends and family. There were several photos of Claire giving her cousin a piggyback; snaps of Laura dancing with her nephew, and Asher had a whole host of pictures that his mother had taken of him and Lucas.
They had both dressed up in white tuxedos with ties to match the brides: Laura had worn the same dress that both her mother and her sister had got married in, a beautiful white and lilac gown, and Claire had ordered one to match with fuchsia pleats in the pure fabric. Lucas’s purple tie had matched his aunt; Asher’s pink tie had matched his cousin. The guests had stood out from a mile off: the invite had instructed them to dress in every colour of the rainbow and many had obliged. Sarah had found a pair of pumps to match her rainbow dress, dressing Liliana in a multicoloured ensemble, and Ishaana had even added streaks to her hair. The pictures were brilliant, the sun bringing out every colour stronger, and the park had been in full bloom with fresh flowers in every shade of love.
When it came time for show and tell on Friday morning, a bit of fun each week for the children to talk to the rest of their class if they wanted, Lucas and Asher knew exactly what they would be talking about as a pair. Asher was armed with a whole folder of photos that his mother had printed out for him, an arsenal of memorabilia from the wedding.
Lucas held onto the fake flower he had worn in his button hole and a programme, nervously waiting until it was his turn to get up in front of the class with Asher. Ordinarily he hated to talk in front of people, or even to most people, but he had agreed to do show and tell as a pair when Asher had begged him to do the talk together. After all, they had both been at the wedding and they were basically family now, he had argued. Family stuck together.
“Alright,” said the teacher, Miss Franks, once Adler had finished talking about the family trip to Greece she had taken over the Easter holidays. “Asher and Lucas, were you two going to do something for show and tell?”
Asher nodded, taking Lucas hand to pull him to the front. “It’s not scary,” he whispered. “Claire and Laura had way more people watching them!”
Lucas nodded, nervously scanning the sea of his classmates’ faces. He couldn’t call them friends: more than one friend seemed like overkill and Asher had filled that spot for four years now, and he hoped forever after that. He had no backup, no insurance. Just Asher.
“We’ve just got a few minutes left before break time,” Miss Franks said, watching the boys over the tops of her glasses. Lucas warily eyed her. She was an immediate improvement on the woman he’d had last year, who hadn’t come back in September after the extent of her intolerance had come out when Lucas had wept to his grandmother over the summer, but she still wasn’t as good as Cora.
Lucas wasn’t sure what Maddie had done but when she had told him that his Year Three teacher was moving up to Year Four with the class, he had worked himself up into a panic at the thought of another year with her in charge of his class. When she had calmed him down enough for him to speak, he had told her how much he had hated the teacher who had never let him wear gloves, who had forced him into the activities he had despised as though she could somehow fix him by giving him no choice.
But she was gone now, her job snatched away from her when she had proved her inability to teach and her lack of empathy, not seeming to care much at all about the children in her care. Her replacement was new to the school, new to Lucas, but she was a good learner. She seemed to care. It helped that she had Maddie’s constant watchful eye just a few classrooms away, ensuring her grandson was treated right.
“What’s your show and tell, boys?” she asked, painting on a smile. Asher took out the photographs he was clutching, showing the first one to the class. After spending the first half of Reception as a bit of a nervous wreck, he had blossomed into his own over the past few years.
“We went to a wedding at the weekend,” he said with a grin on his lips. “Me and Lucas were bridesmaids.”
Adler wrinkled her nose. “Boys can’t be bridesmaids,” she said. “Bridesmaids are girls!”
Asher looked over at his teacher as though she had an answer, though her attention seemed to have slipped from the show and tell.
“I think you mean you were pageboys,” she said. Asher frowned: his cousin had called him her bridesmaid with a grin, never mentioning the term his teacher spoke of, but he let the thought drop before it confused him.
“Oh,” he said, shaking it off before he held up a picture of Claire in her wedding dress. “My cousin got married.”
“That’s lovely, Asher,” the teacher said. “She looks very happy.”
“She said it was the best day of her life!” He shuffled to find another picture, holding up one of him and his aunt swinging around at the reception. “She looked really pretty.”
“And you were there too, Lucas?” she asked. He nodded, looking down at the photos Asher had given him before they had stood up. One showed Laura beaming from ear to ear before she had walked down the aisle; another showed her hugging him once she and Claire had signed the register.
“My auntie got married,” he said, showing the photo to his teacher. She took it from him to show the class when he struggled to face them. There were too many eyes staring back at him, too many people paying attention to his every word. “My auntie Laura married Asher’s cousin, Claire.”
“They’re both girls,” Adler said, frowning. Asher nodded.
“They’re wives now!” he said, grinning.
“That’s weird,” she said, her nose crinkling. Lucas’s face fell at her harsh words and the look of disgust on her face.
“No it’s not,” he said quietly. “Why’s it weird?”
“Only boys and girls get married,” she said, leaning back in her seat as though she was the divine wisdom on weddings.
“Actually, honey, everyone can get married,” the teacher said. “You can marry people of the same gender or a different gender.”
Lucas couldn’t wipe the frown from his face, focused on the lingering distaste that riddled Adler’s features as though she couldn’t imagine anything more disgusting than a wedding that took place between anyone but a man and a woman. His words fell out of his head, stumped by his classmate’s disapproval.
“Carry on, boys,” the teacher said, but Lucas couldn’t. Stage fright gripped him. His eyes widened behind his glasses and he shook his head, teetering on the cusp of tears. Miss Franks stood and took the pictures from his hand, perching on the edge of the desk next to him. She sifted through the photos, holding them so the class could see. “Is this you and your aunt?”
He nodded, his eyes fixed on the picture of him and Laura.
“And this is your brother?” She held up a photo of him and Tom standing together at the altar while Laura had said her vows.
“My uncle,” he said. “My auntie Laura’s brother.”
“Tom’s mummy is Mrs Langley,” Asher said, stepping in when he noticed how scared Lucas looked. “She’s Lucas’s granny.”
Miss Franks chuckled and rolled her eyes. “Of course, I knew that. Sorry, Lucas. Go on.”
He glanced at Asher, a wordless exchange between them before Asher continued with the show and tell presentation and Lucas shrank back to his seat on the end of the row. The girl sitting two places down leant across the empty seat with a smile.
“Your auntie’s really pretty,” she whispered, one eye on the teacher to check she wouldn’t be told off for talking.
“Thanks, Mika,” Lucas said. He didn’t know Mika well: she had only moved to Farnleigh in the summer, joining the school eight months ago, but she always seemed to have a bright smile and he had deemed her to be harmless. She really was: though he didn’t know it, she was supposed to be in the year below, younger even than Tom, and it was merely a clerical error during her school transfer to blame for her having skipped a year. She had never pressured Lucas to talk or barged in on his space and he had learnt not to flinch when she got close.
*
After lunch, when the class was allowed outside to play for twenty minutes, Asher looked around after coming out of the bathroom before he spotted Lucas sitting alone on a bench in the shade. He was picking leaves up off the floor, arranging them on the top of the bench in size order, frowning each time a breeze disrupted him.
“Wanna play?” he asked, looking over at the wood chipped playground where Adler and her friends were doing flips on the bar of a little bridge. Lucas shook his head and Asher sat down next to him.
“Are you ok?”
He didn’t respond, contemplating the question. He wasn’t sure of the answer, so he answered Asher with a question of his own. “Is Adler right?”
“What about?”
“She said only boys and girls get married.” He kept rearranging the leaves he had already placed, adjusting them by the tiniest amounts.
“I think she’s wrong,” Asher said. “Miss Franks said she’s wrong. My mummy said you can marry anyone you want. I don’t think it matters if they’re a boy or a girl or something else.” He sat on his hands, swinging his legs, and added, “If they want to marry you too. Daddy said anyone can be a family, ’cause Claire used to live with us but she’s not really my sister but I pretended she was.”
“My daddy’s going to get married,” Lucas said, his feet scuffing on the floor every now and then. “He gave Cora a ring and she cried.”
“Can I come?” Asher asked, a grin growing. He had loved his cousin’s wedding, showing off his terrible dance moves with his brother until he’d had to take a break as his mother searched for the inhaler she knew was in her bag somewhere.
“You can come with me.”
“Awesome.”
Lucas smiled, his eyes on his lap. He didn’t see when a gust of wind blew every leaf off the table.
*
“Ready, boys?” Maddie asked as she logged off her computer and snapped her reading glasses into the case that she dropped into her bag. Lucas nodded, sitting next to Tom in Year Six. He was due to be spending the weekend with his father but Floyd was at work for a couple more hours and Cora was home alone with two cold-ridden infants so Maddie had offered to take her grandson home for supper. It was no skin off her back, she had argued, and she liked to spend as much time as possible with her daughter’s children. Audrie had moved on to Year Seven at St Matthew’s High School and it would be another two years before Liliana started school, so school with Lucas was often the only time she got to spend with any of them.
Lucas took Tom’s hand, walking with him through the school’s empty corridors behind Maddie. Tom held on tight as though they were walking through a haunted house, terrified that someone or something might jump out of every door they passed. The journey home was virtually silent as Tom kept his words to himself and Lucas answered his grandmother’s occasional question in concise words.
“What’s for supper?” Tom asked when they got home at almost five o’clock, the first words he had uttered since the school day had ended. Maddie pursed her lips, clicking her tongue as she thought and twisted her key in the lock, pushing open the front door.
“Anything you want in particular, baby?”
“A potato,” he said. He followed her into the kitchen, visibly loosening his shoulders once they were back in the comfort of his own home.
“With cheese or Tuna? Or beans?” Maddie asked. She nodded at Lucas while Tom thought about the plethora of options. “What do you want, hun? Same as Tom? I can do you something else if you want; I’ve got meatballs from last night or I could whip up some cheesy pasta.” She dropped her keys in the bowl by the door and shed her bag, her coat and her shoes by the time she made it to the kitchen with the two boys following her.
“Beans,” Tom said quietly. Maddie gave him a thumbs up and an encouraging smile, wishing he would talk more than he already did. He was almost seven and yet his vocabulary was about as varied as that of a toddler. She knew the words were in there somewhere: he devoured books as though they were nourishment, occasionally reciting passages from his favourite books. He could read; he could write; he could speak. He just didn’t.
“Lucas?”
“The same,” he said. “Can I have cheese too?”
“Of course. One with beans and one cheesy beans coming right up,” she said with a smile, taking a couple of baking potatoes out of the vegetable drawer and piecing them a few times before she threw them into the microwave for a ten minute blast. “Now, Tom, you need to go and get changed. When Daddy’s home from work, he’s taking you to speech therapy.”
Tom nodded. Maddie sighed. She wished he would at least say ‘ok.’
“Can you remember what time you’ve got to be there?”
“Six,” he said. There was no fault with his memory, which had always been exceptionally good.
“And what time do you get home?”
“Half past seven.” He loosened his school tie, taking it off and draping it over the back of a chair in the quiet kitchen. There had been times in the past that Maddie’s kitchen was a hive of activity, the house never quiet, but her daughters were growing up and leaving the nest one by one. While Sarah and Laura had permanently left, finding their own homes and families, the younger three were all at university. Anna and Ella would finish in a month while Sophie had only just started, and Maddie quietly hoped they would want to spend another year or two at home before they left.
Nick’s arrival home at twenty-five past five was with a sudden flurry of noise, swooping into the kitchen. He made a beeline for his wife, greeting her with a hug and a kiss. He had greeted her the same way for thirty-two years, a comforting predictability in Maddie’s life.
“Tom, my man!” he called out when he spotted his son, holding up his hand. Tom did the same with a smile, and he laughed when his father gave him a high five. “Are you ready? We’ve got to get a move on.”
“I’m ready,” Tom said, the two words not much but they formed enough of a sentence for Maddie to grin. She kissed the top of his head and squeezed his shoulder.
“Have a good time with Daddy, Tom,” she said. “I love you.”
“Love you,” he said back to her.
“Need anything, Mads?” Nick asked, only just having enough time to nip to the bathroom before he headed out again to take his son to speech therapy. “I can grab something for supper on the way back.”
“Whatever you want,” she said with a smile. “I’m pretty hungry, though. I might have a bite with Lucas while you two’re out.”
“Lucas?” Nick tilted his head. “Where’s Lucas?” He followed his wife’s indication and grinned when he found his grandson colouring in the conservatory. “Hey, Lucas. I didn’t realise you were here.”
“Hi, hara,” Lucas said with a smile for his grandfather, who gave just about the best hugs possible. He reached up for one and he wasn’t disappointed in the way Nick gripped him.
“To what do we owe the pleasure?” Nick asked, and at Lucas’s blank expression he asked, “How come you’re here?”
“Waiting for Daddy,” he said. “He’s at work.”
“Ah, ok, gotcha.” Nick grinned. As much as he loved that his grandson had four doting parents, it meant that he got to see him even less. “Well, have a great time with hammy, won’t you? You’ll probably be gone before Tom and I are back.”
Lucas nodded. “Hammy said Daddy’s coming at half past six.”
“Alright, well, I’m sure I’ll see you soon. I owe your mum a coffee.” He patted Lucas’s back. “Bye, Lucas. Love you!”
“Love you too, hara,” Lucas said with a smile. He liked spending time with his grandparents: they didn’t fuss over him too much, nor was there too much chaotic distraction. Both of his homes had got busy recently, with Liliana making noise and mess he struggled with as much as he loved her, and Isabella and Matilda were double trouble.
Once Nick and Tom had left, the drive going silent after the tyres crunched over the gravel, Maddie came into the conservatory with a steaming cup of coffee and a glass of water for Lucas. He hadn’t asked for one but he liked that she didn’t need him to say he was thirsty. She sat down opposite, careful not to get her coffee anywhere near his colouring book, and she smiled at the upside down page.
“You’re so neat, Lucas,” she murmured. “I can’t colour that neatly and I’ve been doing it for fifty years.” She chuckled and cross her legs, running one hand through her hair. Her occasional use of a box of dye did wonders for her age, sometimes looking almost as young as her daughters, and she had been mistake for Sarah’s sister – or Lucas’s mother – on several occasions. Neither was too improbably when Lucas was older than her son, and she was only twenty-five years older than Sarah, who had twenty years on her little brother.
“It’s not good if it’s not neat,” Lucas said, choosing exactly the right shade of green from the eight different green pencils in his different. “You have to stay inside the lines: that’s why they’re there.”
She couldn’t argue with that logic. It got a laugh out of her. “You’re a funny old thing, Lucas. How are you? I noticed you were on the bench at lunch time. Is everything ok?”
He nodded. It was now, thanks to Asher, but he wondered if his grandmother had a different view on the debate that had filled his head ever since show and tell. “Can I ask you something?”
“You can always ask me anything, baby,” she said, patting his right hand, which was splayed over the table as gripped his pencil in the other. “What’s up?”
“Can everyone get married?”
“What do you mean, hun?”
“Adler said only boys and girls can get married,” he said. “Not boys and boys or girls and girls. Me and Asher talked about Auntie Laura’s wedding and Adler said it’s wrong.”
Maddie’s expression turned into an instant scowl. “Well, Adler’s wrong,” she said, gritting her teeth. She couldn’t believe that a child could think that in a day and age of acceptance – supposed acceptance, at least. “Of course you can marry whoever you like, Lucas. Laura and Claire are both women and they got married, and Uncle Ryan’s married to a man, isn’t he?”
Lucas nodded. “Adler said it’s weird.”
“Adler’s weird,” Maddie said, before she covered her mouth. Thirty years as a teacher had taught her not to say that kind of thing, but twenty-eight years as a mother meant she often felt it and as her daughters had grown up, she hadn’t kept such a tight lock on her thoughts. “Don’t repeat that, Lucas. I didn’t mean to say that. Who is Adler, hun?”
“She’s in my class,” he said. “She has brown hair and brown eyes and she’s pretty but she’s not very nice.”
“What’s her last name? Do you know it?” she asked. Though she didn’t know every child in the school, she had an ear for names.
“Adler Jensen,” he said. Maddie’s eyes widened to hear the familiar surname.
“Does she have two sisters? Everly and Bryn?” she asked. Lucas nodded.
“They’re old though. They’re older than Audrie.”
“Mmm,” she mused. “They would be. You’re coming up for eight, right? They must be seventeen and eighteen. Wow.”
“Do you know Adler, hammy?”
She gave him a smile, nodding. “I used to know her dad,” she said. That was the understatement of the year. Peter Jensen had been her best friend for ten years, the relationship surviving from the first day of high school at the age of eleven until they had turned twenty-one. After a few too many drinks and following through with a terrible idea, she had lost her virginity to him. What she hadn’t known at the time was that he had lost his virginity to Ryan.
Of all the people to have a homophobic daughter, she had never thought it would be Peter. He had been with Ryan for a year as a teenager, a relationship that had lasted for another three years when the romance had been rekindled: she had thought it might be forever, until Ryan had turned up crying on her doorstop one day when she was pregnant with Sarah, weeping that it was over for good this time. She had a feeling Peter had never quite sorted out his feelings, dragging his feet for years, but at some point he had married. She had taught Everly and Bryn, two delightful young girls, though she had no idea how they had ended up.
“Is he your friend?” Lucas asked. She sighed and shook her head.
“We used to be friends, a long time ago,” she said. “I haven’t seen him for a very long time, though. Not since you were tiny. I forgot he’d had another baby.”
“She’s not a baby anymore,” Lucas said. “She’s seven and she’s rude.”
Maddie gave him a sad smile. “I’m sorry, hun. I’m sure she doesn’t mean it. She probably just doesn’t even know what she’s saying. I bet she doesn’t really think that.” She didn’t let slip that Adler’s bisexual father had spent the best part of five years with a man.
“How come you’re not friends anymore?” He took an orange crayon for the body of a fish in the underwater scene he was colouring in.
“Well, not all friendships last forever,” she said. “Sometimes they just … fizzle out. That’s just life.”
“I’m always going to be friends with Asher,” he said. “He’s my bestest friend.”
“He’s your husband,” Maddie added with a grin.
“Not properly,” Lucas said slowly. Sooner after the act, he had been saddened to learn that his Reception marriage to Asher hadn’t been real, but that hadn’t knocked his determination to prove his commitment to his best friend. “One day we’re gonna get married for real, like Auntie Laura.”
Maddie grinned and sipped her coffee, watching as he selected a slightly paler shade of orange for the fish’s fins. “I can’t wait.”
*
It was Cora who showed up at six forty-five with profuse apologies to Maddie , who brushed them off with a hug and a flap of her hand, seeing Lucas off to his father’s house with a tight squeeze and a kiss on each cheek. He got into the car with Cora, his eyes falling on the sparkling ring on her left hand.
“When’re you and Daddy getting married?” he asked. She followed his gaze, smiling at her engagement ring.
“I don’t know, hun. We haven’t decided yet.”
“Can Asher come when you do?”
“Of course he can! I’d love for Asher to come, Lucas. All your friends can come.”
Lucas looked up at her. “That is all my friends,” he said, his voice so utterly serious that Cora had to laugh.
“Well, that’s just perfect then,” she said, squeezing his knee. “Sorry I’m so late coming to get you but your dad was a bit late getting home and the girls haven’t been feeling very well. Did you have a good time with your granny? Was Tom there?”
There were too many components to the question for Lucas to answer simply. He broke it down in his head before responded. “I had a good time with hammy,” he said. “We coloured and I had a jacket potato. And hammy helped me with my homework. Tom was there but then he left.”
“He left?” Cora raised an eyebrow. “But that’s his home.”
“He went out with hara,” he said. “To the talking doctor.”
“Ah, ok.” Cora smiled. She was familiar with Tom: she had worked at St Mary’s for seven years now, joining the school as Maddie’s replacement while she was on maternity leave and eventually finding herself a permanent position in the lower school, so she was familiar with Tom. She had taught him in Reception and ever since she had been with Floyd, he had been a little bit more receptive to her being someone he could talk to.
“I want you to come back to school,” Lucas said.
“I want to come back too, hun,” she said with a smile. When she had taken a year off after her daughter Isabella’s birth, she hadn’t expected to fall pregnant while on maternity leave, her second daughter born eleven-and-a-half months after the first.
“When’re you coming back?”
“In September,” she said. “I’ll come back when you start Year Four … wow, you’ll be so grown up, Lucas!”
“I want you to be my teacher,” he said, shifting to press his cheek against the window. “You’re my favourite teacher. None of the others are as nice.”
Cora smiled. “Thanks, hun. Maybe they just don’t realise how special you are.”
He sighed, his breath fogging up the window. “You can’t have any more babies.”
“Huh?”
“You have to come back so you can’t have any more babies!”
She laughed, turning into her parking space outside the flat. “Don’t worry, I won’t have any more babies. I’ve got you, Tilly and Issy – I’ve got everyone I need.”
“And Daddy.”
“Of course, and Daddy. I think that’s just right. Don’t you?”
He nodded, undoing his seatbelt when she turned off the engine. “Like the three bears.”
*
Floyd was lying across the sofa with Matilda sprawled over his chest, sleeping on him as he watched television at an awkward angle. He lifted his head when the door opened and waved the remote at Lucas.
“Hey, Lucas,” he said, beckoning him over. When his son was standing by the side of the sofa, he pulled him down in an awkwardly angled hug with one arm and kissed his cheek. “How’re you? How’s your week been?”
“It’s ok,” he said. “Where’s Issy?”
“She’s in bed already. I need to put Tilly down too,” he said, his hand on his daughter’s back, “but she’s finally settled and I don’t really want to disturb her.”
Lucas stroked his baby sister’s dark curls, halfway between her father’s straight black locks and her mother’s brunette waves. “Hi, Tilly,” he said, watching her sleep. Across the flat, Cora arched her back in a yawn and dropped her bag on the floor, throwing her keys on the table before she sloped over to her fiance.
“Definitely time for beddy-byes,” she said, bending over to peel Matilda off Floyd’s chest. She cuddled her dozing daughter and kissed her head, swaying her as she carried her into the room that she and Isabella shared. The flat had proved perfect with its three bedrooms, the girls sharing one so Lucas could keep his room for the days he stayed the night. “Say night-night.”
“Night-night,” Lucas said, waving at the baby. Floyd stood and kissed Matilda before he kissed Cora.
“Want me to put her down?”
“I’ve got it,” Cora said, shushing Matilda when she began to stir. She had proved to be an easy baby, sleeping through the night almost solidly since she was about ten weeks old.
Lucas dropped onto the sofa with a heavy sigh and his father copied him with a laugh.
“I know the feeling,” he said. “What’s up? Something on your mind?”
Lucas shook his head and yawned, his glasses lifting up when he screwed up his nose. “I’m sleepy, Daddy.”
“You already ate with hammy, right? You’ve had supper?”
“Yes. A jacket potato with cheese and beans. And a yoghurt for pudding.”
Floyd smiled and put his arm around his son, hugging him side by side. “Sounds like a delicious supper to me.”
“It was good.”
“Well, there’s no use staying up if you’re tired. And if you get an early night then we’ve got even more weekend, right?”
Lucas nodded. “Can you read me a chapter?”
A slow smile grew over Floyd’s lips. He feared the day his son stopped wanting to be read to, when he would take himself off to bed of his own accord and sleep in late, but those days were a while off, he hoped. He couldn’t imagine Lucas ever turning into a typical teenager: he had a feeling he would never be the type to hole up in his room talking to friends or playing video games when he had one of the former and no interest in the latter.
“Of course I can. What’re you up to now?”
“The fifth book. The Order of the Phoenix,” he said, opening his school bag to reveal the huge book. He took it out, opening it to the page saved by a bookmark Audrie had made for him. “Truman read up to here yesterday.” He poked the page, the start of chapter fourteen.
“Alrighty. You go and do your teeth and get in your jammies and we’ll read the next chapter,” Floyd said. When Lucas hurried off to the bathroom to clean himself up before bed, his father poured two glasses of wine and handed one to Cora when she came out of the girls’ bedroom. “They’re both down?”
She nodded and took the wine with a grateful smile. “Cheers.” She clinked it against his. “Have you eaten?”
“Nope. I put the lasagna in though, from the other day. Is that alright?”
She nodded, folding herself against his chest. “Perfect. How long?”
“I’m going to read a chapter with Lucas and then we’ll eat. Twenty minutes, maybe?”
Cora nodded and sat down on the sofa, sipping her wine and scrolling through the channels for something to watch. When Lucas came out of the bathroom, she gave him a kiss and a hug goodnight and he crawled into the bed that was his for at least four nights a month. He scooted over to the side, his back against the wall, to give his father space to lie down next to him. As much as he ordinarily hated such an invasion of his bubble of space, he liked to feel safe and secure when his father read to him.
“Ok, ready?”
Lucas nodded.
“Pass me your glasses,” Floyd said, taking the frames from his son’s nose. He needn’t wear them when there were no pictures to look at anymore. He opened the book and began to read. “Harry was the first to awake…“
Lucas closed his eyes and listened to his father’s steady voice, smiling when he gave the characters different accents. Harry Potter had become his latest obsession ever since Bishop had introduced him to it, and he head made his way through the entire series twice since then, now on his third reread.
There was something strangely comforting about the story that resonated with him. As much as his family loved him and he loved them, he was the odd one out, the only one to bounce between homes. All four of his sisters were stable, two in each household, but he could never really settle. That had never bothered him and he loved to have so many people who cared about him but he still found a slither of resonance with Harry. Sometimes he felt like he was a wizard too, hiding in the closet.Â
+ – + – +
i’m so excited that HOH has just broken into the top 100 of general fiction! thank you so much to everyone who comments and votes and has got this story so amazingly far in so few days! if you didn’t notice earlier, i’ve been working on the casting for this book a lot recently. that includes recasting adult lucas and child tom, as well as adding child and adult casts for aaron and dylan and a whole new character. let’s give a warm welcome to mika, the newest member of the HOH family! and young adler finally has a face!
Comment