He shuffles the deck again, a simple dovetail shuffle, before fanning the cards out and then folding the pack in the opposite direction. He holds the deck out to me.
‘Okay, just because I can’t follow your hands doesn’t mean I don’t know how you’re doing this. Obviously you’re keeping tabs on the card somehow, either by your finger placement or some sort of counting I can’t see –’
He grins as I take the card from the top of the deck. I have a sneaky suspicion that, were she in possession of a consciousness, the Queen of Hearts would be smirking too.
‘Bammo,’ Joshua says with a smile.
I hand him the Queen and he nestles her into the pack again. ‘But, you know, I wasn’t always awesome at it,’ he says, tapping the pack distractedly on his leg. ‘The talking, I mean.’
‘No? Why do I find that hard to believe?’
‘Really,’ he says, laughing. ‘I was … awkward when I was a kid. I was pretty much a hermit and, like, horrendously shy. I was convinced the entire world was one big confusing trick that I was never gonna figure out. And, you know, I had the speech thing.’
‘You mean the lisp?’ I cross my legs, realising too late that I am mirroring his pose again.
He stops tapping the cards. ‘Noticed that, huh?’
‘Oh. Only a little. Most of the time it’s barely there, but sometimes, I think when you’re nervous or stressed?’
He leans his head against the couch. The fingers of his hand flutter over the deck; I can see him resisting the urge to shuffle. ‘Sometimes I slip when I’m not concentrating,’ he says with a quick glance at me. ‘It was pretty bad, when I was little. For a while I just gave up, and stopped talking altogether.’ He closes his eyes. ‘“Selective mutism”, my therapist called it. Dunno why it needed a name. I wasn’t unhappy, I just … preferred my own company.’
‘But let me guess, that wasn’t acceptable?’
He smiles wryly. ‘Nope. Got to learn to play with others. Thanks to a couple of years of speech therapy and a billion hours copying close-up magicians on YouTube, I don’t sound like Daffy Duck’s clumsy twin anymore. It still comes back though, sometimes. Sometimes it’s hard to focus.’ He twirls the cards half-heartedly.
‘It’s just a tiny flaw – no, forget that, it’s not even a flaw,’ I say as spots of colour appear on his cheeks. ‘You know Isaac Newton had a speech impediment? Charles Darwin could barely talk, he stuttered so bad. But no-one remembers that. Your thing, it’s irrelevant. It would have been irrelevant even when it was at its worst. It’s such a wasted effort, this need to be flawless –’
I look away with a sharp breath. For the briefest moment he managed to spin a spell that hushed the noise in the room and the clamour in my head. But when I look up, into the suddenly loaded silence between us, it hits me: there are too many people here, too much laughter, too many bodies pressed together like amoeba bumping in an alcohol-infused swamp.
I wrap my hands around my knees. And I try, desperately, to focus on my breathing. But I feel it coming, fluttering behind my belly button, building behind my lungs. When I dare to glance up, Joshua is looking at me, and I know, somehow, that he knows.
He stands up in one motion. ‘Come on,’ he says softly.
I follow him blindly. Joshua touches my elbow and points to the staircase that leads up behind the bar.
I move past him and take the stairs two at a time. It’s just a little quieter here, the party blocked from view. The stairwell is dark and blissfully empty.
My feet stop a few steps above him. ‘Can I ask you something?’ I say.
I turn around. He has paused behind me, his face in shadow. ‘Of course.’
‘When we first met – that day at uni – you said you weren’t surprised that I didn’t know what I wanted. You said that it made sense. What did you mean by that?’
Joshua takes a single step upwards. His face looks thoughtful, and torn. ‘I don’t know if I can explain it,’ he says eventually.
‘Well, I’ll just add it to my list of nonsensical things.’ My breathing is shallow, my stomach whirring.
‘This is going to come out all wrong. But when I first saw you – way back at the beginning of high school – you were excited about everything. While other guys were, you know, pasting their butt cheeks together or whatever, you were trying to …’ He shakes his head. ‘You were trying to figure out, like, the mysteries of the universe.’ He buries his hands in his pockets. Maybe it’s the lighting in the stairwell, but his eyes seem to glow, more light than dark.
‘I guess I wasn’t surprised that you would struggle to find somewhere to place all that … potential. I kept seeing you trying to shape yourself, Sophia, to squeeze yourself into everyone else’s boxes, and all I kept thinking was, what you’re searching for can’t be in any of them. They’re just way too small.’
‘Mysteries of the universe. That’s a nice thought. But I’m not sure it was ever true. Are you disappointed I’m not like that anymore?’
He looks at me quickly. ‘No! How could I possibly be disappointed getting to know you? And, you’re not not like that anymore! You have no idea – when you’re absorbed in something, your face has about a billion different expressions … maybe no-one else can see them, but I can. It’s something to witness, you know, you working through a problem … and you always look so calm when you’re with Elsie, like the tornado that follows you around just settles when you’re near her. You get all glowy when you talk about Doctor Who, which I don’t quite get, but I’ve never met anyone who sees the world the way you do. It was always the thing I liked most about you. It’s the thing I like most about you now.’
I feel for the banister with one hand. I move forward, down one stair and then another, until we are just about at the same height. I am still a handspan away, but I can look him directly in those weird changeable eyes now.
He’s looking at me with so many things I can’t read, like I hold the answer to a puzzle that’s been plaguing him. I want to bolt home to my bedroom. I want to punch him in his ridiculous open face and tell him to stop looking at me like that because I have no freaking clue what I’m doing. And most of all, I want to stop everything around me, just for a few seconds, so I don’t have to evaluate or analyse or think.
He’s not blinking. I’m not even sure that he is breathing. I can’t help but think that it’s going to be inconvenient if both of us pass out on these stairs.