“Hey, Brad.”
Amazing. I have precisely 2.5 friends (Sonam’s mate, Peter Herron, says hi to me sometimes) and here Bradley Graeme is, bantering with one of them right in front of my face. Is nothing sacred?
Mr. Taylor adjusts his glasses and claps his hands, interrupting my thoughts. “Right! The gang’s all here. We know each other, yes?” He points around the square of tables. “Brad, Celine, Sonam, Peter, Shane, Bethany, Max.”
“Donno, sir,” Donno corrects.
Mr. Taylor laughs in the face of this pretentious rubbish and moves on. “This is a small class, so I assume those of you who chose Philosophy are extra dedicated. Well, you’ll need all that dedication to make it through the year!”
Hardly. Philosophy isn’t difficult; just dull.
I slide a look to my right and watch Bradley twirl a pen between his long fingers. I can see the hint of a tensed bicep, half hidden by the short sleeve of his white shirt, and there’s a distinctly mulish set to his obnoxiously sharp jaw. If I hadn’t been forced to watch him go through puberty, I would assume he’d purchased his bone structure.
“We’ve a lot to cover today, but first things first.” Mr. Taylor puts a stack of papers on the table. “This is our syllabus! Take one and pass it round. As you can see, we’re beginning with arguments for and against the existence of the god of classical theism.” He natters on about omnipotence and the problem of evil and suffering with great enthusiasm. I would pay attention, but Bradley slaps the papers down in front of me like the table just insulted his mother.
It’s funny; I once read that the smell of fresh-cut grass is actually a chemical the plant releases when it’s in danger, which reminds me of this theory I’m researching about how veganism might be as bad as meat-eating because of the exploited migrant workers (valid) and the totally viable possibility that plants feel pain. So, long story short, Bradley Graeme smells like murder.
I lick my thumb, take a copy of the syllabus, and murmur, “Is everything you do a calculated display of masculinity, and if so, aren’t you afraid the constant pressure of performance will lead you to snap?”
He murmurs back, “One day you’re going to leave education forever, and you’ll have to face the fact that memorizing a thesaurus doesn’t make you interesting.”
I pass the papers to Sonam. “Fortunately, you will never be faced with that moment of reckoning because, after inevitably failing to accomplish all of your life goals, you will return to education as a teacher who harasses students in the hallways with wildly embellished stories of his glory days.”
Bradley’s eyes never leave the twirling pen in his hand. “I didn’t realize you looked down on teachers. Does your mum know?”
Ten years ago, our family fell apart and my mum worked two jobs to keep us afloat while she finished her teaching degree. “That is not— You know I don’t—”
“Settle, class,” Mr. Taylor orders, which is as close as he ever gets to Shut the hell up and listen.
“Yeah, Celine,” Bradley whispers. “Settle.”
Across the table, Donno snickers again. I grind my teeth. Don’t care don’t care don’t care don’t care.
Mr. Taylor tells us all about C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. The clock ticks on. I take deeply intelligent and wonderfully concise notes while Bradley highlights his textbook to death. I suppose that’s better than Sonam, who is doodling moths on a piece of scrap paper and writing absolutely nothing. Clearly, I’ll be sending her copies of my binder again this year.
“Off you go, then,” Mr. Taylor says with Teacherly Finality, and I realize I’ve missed something. Crap. I’m never going to get all As and a place at Cambridge and a first-class degree and an amazing job at a prestigious corporate law firm if Bradley Flipping Graeme doesn’t stop failing to take proper notes right next to me. I bet he’s doing it on purpose. He knows I can’t stand indiscriminate highlighting.
I go to glare at him and find he’s already staring at me. “What?”
He squints. “We can all leave once we discuss this passage in pairs.”
Well, that was a quick two hours. “Discuss in pairs? What, us?”
“Yes, us, Celine,” he says snippily. “Do you see anyone else sitting next to me?”
“I wish,” I mutter. Then a horrific thought hits me, or rather, a memory—what Minnie said this morning. “Where are you applying to uni?” I demand, admittedly out of the blue.
He taps the textbook. “Passage. Focus.”
“Just answer the question.” His mum and mine are unfortunately best friends, so I have been made aware—entirely against my will—that Bradley wants to study law too. And if I’m forced to spend three extra years in his presence while dealing with the pressures of my demanding degree, I’m liable to snap and push him off a bridge.
He flicks a dark look at me. “Applications aren’t due for ages.”
I should be relieved, because, no, most of them aren’t, but Oxbridge applications are. Except…“Why aren’t you applying to Cambridge?” I don’t want him to, obviously. But he could almost certainly get in, so why wouldn’t he try?
Bradley rolls his eyes. The sun is low and the windows in this room are massive, so he looks like the human embodiment of whiskey and woods and an ancient sepia Instagram filter. It’s honestly atrocious. “Why would I?” he asks. “Just to spend another three years being the only Black kid in the room?”
I scowl. “Hello, I’m literally sitting right here.”
“Hello, it’s a turn of phrase. There are six of us in the entire year. What, do you like that or something?”
“I’d like it better if there were five.” The worst thing about being a minority is occasionally needing to back Bradley up in public. Like that time last year when someone from a rival school said something vile to him during a football tournament and I had to throw a bottle of Coke at the guy (as a matter of principle). “Nothing changes if we don’t make it change.”
“It’s not my job to change their minds,” he says, which is all right for him. He has a soon-to-be-successful scientist for an older sister, and his little brother, who’s signed to the Forest Academy, will probably end up playing for England at the World Cup or some such rubbish, and both of their parents are useful human beings with a sense of duty and loyalty. Brad can afford to go to a second-or third-rate university and have a second-or third-rate career because he has a perfect family and zero single-parent pressure and no shitty absent father to shame into oblivion.
My older sister swears up and down she’s going to be the next Georgia O’Keeffe, but who knows how long that’ll take? Until then, I’m the only one who can prove our worth. I’m the only one who can pay Mum back for years of blood and sweat. (Bangura women don’t do tears.)
But all I say is “Hmm,” and then I focus on my textbook.
“Hmm?” he repeats. “What’s hmm?”
As if I’m about to explain. I needle him instead. “You don’t think you could get in?”
He scoffs at the ceiling. “Of course I could get in—”
“Well, it’s not exactly of course, is it?”
“If you can get in, I can get in,” he says stonily. “We got the same grades last year.”
“Almost,” I correct lightly. Like I said, our mums are best friends, so I know exactly what marks Bradley got last year.
And I know mine were better.
Clearly, he knows it, too, if his stormy expression is anything to go by. Good. He can take his shiny new friends and his star position on the football team; I’ll take my average exam score of 98.5. He left me behind in the hellhole that is secondary school, but when it comes to real life—when it comes to the future, when it comes to success—I’m leaving him in the dust.
“Celine,” Sonam says, nudging my shoulder. It’s a surprise, when I turn, to find her and Peter packing their stuff away. “We’re done. You coming?”
I glance at Mr. Taylor, who is studying a book almost as thick as my arm, the word DISTRACTED written on his forehead. “Yeah.” I’ll do the reading at home and discuss it with myself.
But Mr. Taylor marks his page with a bony finger and pipes up unexpectedly. “Hang on, Celine. Bradley.” His gaze pins us to the wall like bugs. “Since the two of you didn’t manage to discuss one word of your passage, so far as I could hear—”
Oh. My. God. Did Mr. Taylor hear that? I run back the entire conversation, decide it was, at best, utterly juvenile, and attempt to crawl into the earth.
“—you may stay on after class and write down your thoughts for me,” Mr. Taylor continues.
Oh, for God’s sake. I clench my jaw, and Bradley’s nostrils flare so hard I’m surprised he doesn’t whip a tornado into being. Mr. Taylor doesn’t care.