VERY MILD SPOILER ALERT FOR A FOX OF STORMS AND STARLIGHT. It’s a minor explanatory thing that comes out in chapter 9 of Fox Book, which provides motivation for a major plot point that happens in chapter 12 (there are 49 chapters).
CONTENT NOTIFICATION: Kevin’s point-of-view scenes have a lot of swearing. Sorry-not-sorry. But maybe don’t read if the f-word offends you.
Also, this is an unedited draft. Feel free to let me know in the comments if you spot typos etc, but yo: unedited draft, so read accordingly.
Catch up on Chapter 1.
2: Sunny
I’m not used to being the centre of attention.
I mean, actually, I am, like, at home and stuff—my whole family babies me, even my sister Mina, even though she’s only two years older, like I’m made of fragile glass or something—and honestly, sometimes I believe them, that I am, sometimes I feel so brittle like I’ll break under the slightest pressure—I’m not strong, like Mina. Like Kevin.
But I’m not used to being the centre of attention outside of my family.
At school, the teachers pretty well ignore me; I don’t blame them. I’m pretty ignorable. Sitting in my seat in the front row of any given classroom, off to one side, head down, pen up, doing all the things that Good Girls are supposed to do—including being silent.
I’m in English, and it’s the middle of first term—so the class dynamics have kind of shaken out, you know how it takes a while for everyone to figure out who they’re going to be this year in this particular classroom?—and we’re reading Macbeth, and Jimmy’s over in the middle of the classroom with his big mouth and nondescript brown hair and nondescript white-boy face, having an Opinion that’s also, let’s be honest, nondescript.
Something about how Lady Macbeth is crazy, how it’s just like real life because it’s always a woman, always someone jerking the guy around and making him feel like he has to prove himself to her.
I want to stab him with my pen to make him shut up.
No.
I want to use my voice to shut him up.
But I can’t. I know the shape of the words I want to say, the feel of the idea I’m trying to catch, but I know as soon as I open my mouth the wrong words will tumble out, and he’ll have some smart-alec comeback, and I won’t be able to manoeuvre my train of thought fast enough and I’ll just come out looking like an idiot.
I hate him, but what I hate him for most is being able to articulately express his opinion.
Especially when his opinion is dumb.
I tilt my head and lean against the undressed brick of the classroom wall. It’s cool, and soothing, and I wish I could just shut my eyes and evaporate from this mess.
It’s moments like this that I understand Mina’s need to get out of here.
But where she wants to get out to the Big City, I just want to get away from the people.
Give me a log cabin in the woods with hot water and an internet connection. That’s literally all I want out of life.
Or, well, it’s all I thought I wanted.
That kind of—maybe—changed a month ago.
My lips twist a little as I hide a smile, eyeing off the tattered paper flower peeking out from the corner of my denim pencil-case. It’s the first one Kevin gave me—he’s given me nearly twenty of them now, enough for a whole bouquet in a little glass jar on my white dresser at home—one or two a week for the first two weeks of school, testing me, feeling me out. One a day for the three weeks after that.
I stare at the little paper rose, and all of a sudden, Jimmy droning on and on about how annoying women are—he says ‘women’, too, as though he’s not barely fifteen with a track record of exactly zero girlfriends—what’s the bet that’s where his frustration’s coming from—I snicker. Jimmy’s not important anymore. The paper rose sends something warm and sparkling through my chest, my stomach, and—as I run the very tip of my finger lightly along the worn-soft edge of one petal—even my hands.
Yesterday, Kevin handed me the rose. Handed, as in passed, as in our fingers actually touched when I took it from him—grid paper from his maths book, a couple of equations visible here and there in blue pen—neat handwriting—everyone misjudges him, thinks he doesn’t care about school, but I recognise the intent behind that handwriting, and he cares. He cares a lot.
And our fingers touched, and as I stay tuned out—it’s the teacher talking now, and I don’t even know if she’d trying to mitigate Jimmy’s bullcrap opinion or not because—did I mention?—I’m Just. Not. Listening.—as I stay tuned out I can feel the ghost of Kevin’s fingers on mine. Smell his deodorant—not the cheap crap the other guys wear (which, okay, Lynx smells pretty good, but still)—something a little more subtle, more complex.
I love it, and I want to taste it, and that absolutely terrifies me because that’s not something anyone should want, that’s not a normal reaction—but I feel like all my reactions to Kevin are beyond normal, now.
He touched my fingers.
He’s over the other side of the room right now, opposite side to me, back corner—we couldn’t be farther apart in the room—but I sneak a glance and see him watching me, chair tilted back on two legs, resting against the brick wall by the back windows, and he’s wreathed in shadows because of where he’s sitting and his dark, dark eyes still sparkle at me. He does that little nod thing, the jerk of the chin, an acknowledgement of equals, and as he does, his jet-black hair tosses a little, and I want to run my hands through it and caress him.
My cheeks go hot.
I stare at my copy of Macbeth, open on the desk in front of me, pages yellowed around the edges.
Ellie elbows me—gently—eyes alight. “You’re blushing,” she said. “What are you thinking?”
She glances underneath her elbow to the back of the room where Kevin is, and I whack her on the arm. “Stop that!” I’m trying to keep my voice light, playful, because she knows that Kevin’s been making me flowers—who couldn’t know?—but she doesn’t know how I feel about them, because even though she’s my best friend, I’ve never really liked a boy before, and I don’t want to talk about it in case… In case something breaks.
Brittle.
It’s one of those moments where I’m feeling brittle.
And I hate that feeling brittle makes me want to cry, because I know Mina feels brittle sometimes too, but her brittleness makes her strong. She’s a fighter, and when you push her, she just gets stronger, and I’m not a fighter, and when you push me I cry, and I hate that about myself.
“Come on,” I say to distract myself as much as Ellie. The teacher’s stopped trying to deal with Jimmy and has just given up, writing some pages on the board for us to work through ourselves—it’s one of those Shakespeare editions where you have the play on the right and activities and things on the left of each spread, and every lesson goes exactly the same: we start reading the play, with a couple of the kids in the class being given main roles because they can actually read Shakespeare aloud without sounded like mutilated cows wishing for death, and then a handful of enthusiastic kids who desperately want a turn reading but make the rest of us feel like mutilated cows wishing for death…
So we start every English lesson reading, and then Jimmy or his blond, tanned, glowing-gold mate Tom interrupt and derail the conversation with points that might actually be valid if they weren’t couched literally every. single. time. in really sexist language, and then the teacher tries to fight with them, or placate them, or sometimes delve through the language to the seed of intelligence buried deep within, and then gives up and gets us to work through a few activities on our own.
I’d say I could do a better job teaching, except the thought of having to stand up in front of us literally makes me feel queasy, so maybe she’s doing okay, all things considered.
Today, we’re working on… “Pages [] and [],” I say to Ellie with a nod at the board. “Come on. Focus.”
Ellie sniffs, eyes still sparkling like the sequins on her pencil-case. “Says you,” she says. But she picks up her pen, flips over a page in her copy of the play, and writes a neat heading at the top of a clean page in her workbook.
We’re halfway through the work—and three quarters of the way through the lesson—when someone stops in front of my desk.
I glance up.
My stomach drops into the floor before rebounding to the roof, and I’m thrilled and elated and terrified, because it’s Kevin, and he’s standing right in front of me, no pretences, no casual excuses for why he’s here—he just is.
Look, this is a Big Deal, okay?
I might have sixteen roses in a jar on my dresser at home—that I may or may not have sprayed with rosewater, shut up, don’t judge me—but every single one of them was dropped on my desk as he went on his way from one place to another.
And yesterday’s one, the one he actually handed to me? That one he offered me as we were both leaving the maths classroom, right in the middle of the sweaty, hormonal crush of teenaged bodies, all jamming out the door in a bid for lunch and freedom.
He’s standing in front of me.
At my desk.
With no excuse.
And… No rose.
My stomach hits the floor again. My cheeks burn.
Ellie is staring at us both out of the corner of her eye, I can tell because she’s gripping her pen in my peripheral vision, head down, staring at her page—and neither she nor her pen are moving.
Crap, I have to say something. He’s just… standing there. Staring down at me. His eyes are so dark they’re nearly black and I’m drowning in them, his mouth wide and soft, brown skin smooth and I just want to reach out and touch it and there is seriously something wrong with me, surely this isn’t a normal reaction to a person who’s just standing there, and it’s so awkward I want to die.
“Uh.” My voice squeaks. I clear my throat. “Um, hi.”
I don’t like this. Not at all. We had rules. Rules were easy. Rules were safe. He’s breaking every one of them by being here now without a convenient excuse, and he’s starting to attract the attention of other students because he’s still just standing there, though his eyes are lighting up a little, and oh God, never stop looking at me, I’m going to die because he’s looking at me like I’m the most important thing on the planet.
I’m not used to being the centre of attention at school, and I can feel eyes turning on me.
At home, my family stare at me all the time as though to check that I’m still okay. That I’m not… turning. You know. Like Mum.
But right here, right now, Kevin could stare at me for the rest of eternity, because in his eyes, I’m the centre of his world, and he’s not staring at me waiting for me to break, he’s staring at me like… Like he likes what he sees. Like he believes in what he sees.
I’m pretty sure my cheeks look sunburned by now, they’re so hot.
“Yeah,” he responds at last, eyes crinkled and smiling. “Hi.”
The rose he holds out is the most detailed one yet, layers and layers of petals, not scrappy notebook paper this time but beautiful heavy paper, ecru or cream or maybe linen, embossed with an ornate swirling sort of pattern, every petal individually arranged and the whole thing on a thick dark wire stem, and oh my God, it’s beautiful.
I can’t take my eyes off it as he passes it to me.
I can’t breathe.
It’s so beautiful.
“Make sure you read it,” he says, and I look up to see something I haven’t seen before: his expression is cocky and self-assured as ever… but his eyes? Lingering deep within is the first hint of uncertainty I’ve ever seen from him.
I nod, and he’s gone, retreating back to his side of the room, and Ellie is practically eating my shoulder she’s so impatient to get close, to see.
I twirl the rose around in my fingers, the metal stem cool and smooth.
“What’s it say?” Ellie hisses at me.
For a second, I’m not sure how to respond, because it doesn’t seem to say anything. But then I realise the bit I thought was a weirdly placed petal is actually supposed to be a leaf, close up near the sepal, and I fold it out from the stem—it’s on its own little wire, the whole thing must have taken forever to make—and in pencil around the edge of the leaf, it says:
Meet me by the cricket nets after school.
My fingers tremble as I fold the leaf back up again, like the words are too precious to be exposed to the air—like I’m too embarrassed to let anyone else see them.
But it’s too late, and of course Ellie has seen them, and she shoulders me—hard—and giggles. “Does this make it official?” she says.
I have no idea what to tell her—and I’m terrified of what Kevin wants from me—and I can’t forget that look in his eyes.
And that seals the deal: for the sake of the look in his eyes, of feeling like I’m something that matters to someone for my own sake, I’ll go. I’ll meet him at the cricket nets… And whatever happens, happens.
Keep reading: Chapter 3