Toby snorts. The windows of the Corolla have fogged up, the glow from the street light above us barely breaking through. It should be claustrophobic. But sitting here in the dark beside my friends and my brother – who, by all accounts, has been saving all his words since the beginning of time to unleash upon me these past few weeks – I’m filled with an inexplicable sense of calm. I’ve only experienced it a few times in my life. With my head inside an equation. Whenever I’m in Elsie’s presence. And, most recently, cocooned inside Joshua’s tiny bedroom. I ignore the sharp squeeze in my chest at this last thought, and unbuckle my seatbelt.
‘Guys, I’m the last person in the universe who’d have any useful advice.’ I run my palm over the windscreen, clearing a space in the fog. The school looms in the distance. ‘Yes, some of this has sucked balls. But, you know, not all of it has been that bad.’ I jab my brother in the arm, and then let my hand linger experimentally on his shoulder in a way that I hope might be reassuring.
Toby glances at the dead weight of my hand. He rolls his eyes, grinning faintly as I hastily pull my hand away and crank open the passenger door.
‘Anyway,’ says Elsie, ‘I suppose the alternatives are pretty bleak. If it’s a choice between this or some kind of Hunger Games scenario, that is. Though how much simpler would it be if our only goal was to not die horribly?’
‘Elsie, unless your dystopian scenario involves a race to solve a quadratic equation, or, like, a battle of the spreadsheets, all of us would be cannon fodder,’ I say. ‘I’m not sure the not-dying-horribly thing would be simpler for any of us.’
I swing my legs out of the car and slam the door shut behind me. Three faces peer thoughtfully out at me.
Toby winds down the window. ‘So, what? You’re saying we should just accept our limitations.’
I shake my head. ‘No. I don’t think I believe that. I think – well, say, take the Doctor. He has all of time and space at hand, and he still can’t anticipate every outcome.’ I ponder this for a moment. ‘I suppose if you knew for sure which battles weren’t winnable? You might as well just lie down and let the Daleks shoot you in the face.’
Toby laughs again, that thin chuckle that makes him seem both wiser and younger. He smiles at me, and I think – no, I know – that he means it.
Elsie casts one more glance at the school. ‘You sure you don’t want me to come?’
I lean in through the open window. ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll call you if I need you, okay?’
I turn around and walk away before I can change my mind.
As I suspected, the gates to the school driveway are padlocked shut. I look around, noticing that a small side gate has been left ajar.
There are no stars out tonight. I slip through the gate, pulling it closed behind me, and as I move into the school grounds, the light pollution from the street quickly disappears. The sole park bench on the wide strip of lawn sits abandoned under the blank, dark sky. For some reason, it makes me feel infinitely sad.
I hug my jacket close as I walk, St Augustine’s looming all around me. I recognise the pathways and the water fountains as I round the main building, following the path to the East Lawn. I pass the circle of benches that the year tens have claimed, and, just beyond them, I can make out the kitchen garden, the year-sevens’ guinea pigs peering suspiciously through the wire grate of their hutch. The science labs look particularly shabby in the dark – the squat bunker seems less a centre of wisdom and scholarship, and more a grey prison dormitory from a Siberian gulag. I recognise it all, in theory, but I can’t seem to regain my equilibrium; there’s an alienness to this place that daylight-me has mapped from memory. Odd what a little variation in light can do to something so familiar.
I walk beneath the covered walkways behind the main building. It’s even darker here, with the maples towering overhead. I suppose some people would label my current predicament – wandering through an empty school in the middle of the night, with the wind whipping a sole salt-and-vinegar chip packet around me – as maybe a bit creepy. Luckily I’m not foolish enough to be freaked out by a little darkness.
I pause at the edge of the path, the wide plain of the East Lawn stretching in front of me. The dark is so thick here that my depth of field is all off. I know it’s just a trick of the night, but the lawn seems larger than normal – and yet there, in the distance, at the very edge of the grounds, it remains. A blot on the landscape, framed by a backdrop of identical, featureless trees. The double-storey brick monstrosity that is the bane of my existence. The St Augustine’s Visual and Performing Arts Centre, the building that is either representative of everything dysfunctional and impossible in my life, or just a repurposed convent with leaky toilets and the pervasive smell of wet dog.
It actually looks kind of small in the dark.
‘What the hell am I doing here?’ I whisper into the empty air.
Come on, Sophia, my brain supplies helpfully. Stop ignoring the obvious. You know why you’re here.
‘Fine,’ I hiss out loud as my feet take me forward. ‘But if this ends with Joshua from the future coming to tell me I’m about to get hit by a bus, I am going to be so pissed off.’ Strange how I fail to hear the conviction in my voice.
I know this is hopeless. Between the two of us we barely make one functioning human; forget about being two halves of a whole or any of that nonsense. Together, I think we might be more akin to a gene splice experiment gone awry; the abominable creation of a mad scientist, with three left arms, and testicles where its ears should be.
But I can’t deny that there is something that draws us together. Let’s face it, if I can do nothing else, I can quantify data and weigh up evidence –
Fact is: I miss him.
This is hopeless. I have zero chance of being able to match someone whose heart is so open. I’m not that sort of girl. I will never cry in movies, and, even after a year of practice, I still cannot laugh on cue. Nothing about us makes any sense. And yet.
And yet and yet and yet.
‘There, I said it,’ I say out loud. ‘Are you happy now, brain?’
But the night air doesn’t answer me, so I walk on, feeling like a dipshit for talking to myself.
I have no idea where I am supposed to go, but instinct propels me towards the Arts building. I’m partway across the lawn when I catch a glimpse of something over to my right, in the middle of the overgrown grass, flapping gently in the breeze like a beacon.
A single red flag, shiny and bright, standing right in the centre of the decommissioned amphitheatre.
I step into the long grass and head towards it.
I think the last time I ventured out here was in year seven at that infamous production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, watching Sanjay Khan and half a dozen teachers trying desperately to untangle his pharaoh wig from the mechanised stage gears. Three shallow circles of steps lead to the round stage, a few weeds, black in the night, growing through the boards. The metal box that houses the controls is locked tight with a rusted padlock. It looks exactly like what it is – a useless, broken amateur stage with an incongruous red flag on a pole jammed into a cracked board in the centre.