Mae
She can’t help feeling as if she’s stepped out of her life as quickly and thoughtlessly as you might a pair of jeans; it seems impossible that she could be sharing a room with a boy she met less than twelve hours ago.
“It’s not that I don’t want to go to uni at all,” he’s saying, and she hears a dull thump as he knocks a fist gently against the ceiling of the train. “I’m not a bloody idiot. And I quite like studying, actually. I just don’t particularly want to go to that one.”
“So why are you going?”
“Because I’ve got a scholarship,” he says in a voice so miserable that it sounds like he’s telling her he has some sort of disease.
She can’t help laughing. “What am I missing here?”
“I didn’t get it because I’m clever,” he says. “Even though I am.”
“Okay,” Mae says, amused. “So, what? Was it a safety school or something?”
“No.”
“Sports scholarship?”
He snorts. “Definitely not.”
“Let me guess,” she says. “You have a hidden talent. You can play the piano with your toes. Or juggle knives. Or wait…are you in a marching band?”
“We don’t really have those at home.”
“Then, what?”
“It’s because of my family,” he says. “I’m a sextuplet.”
Mae lies perfectly still for a few seconds, not sure how to play this. Because she already knows, obviously. It’s basically the only thing that comes up when you google the name Hugo Wilkinson. And there’s no possible way he hasn’t guessed that she knows.
“Wow,” she says, testing the waters.
“Yeah,” he says, giving nothing away.
“That’s…amazing. Do you guys look alike?”
“A bit,” he says, which isn’t exactly true.
Mae has seen dozens of photos online, and they look a lot alike.
All six of the Wilkinson siblings are striking on their own—with their huge smiles and matching dimples—but as a group, there’s something almost dazzling about them.
It’s easy to see why they’re minor celebrities in England.
Mae searches for an appropriate follow-up question. “How many brothers and sisters?”
“Five,” Hugo says, like she’s asked him what color the sky is. “We’re sextuplets. That means six.”
“I know. I meant how many of each.”
He laughs. “Oh. Sorry. Three brothers and two sisters.”
“Can you remember all their names?” she teases, and he laughs.
“Let’s see. George, Oscar, Poppy, Alfie, and…um…uh…”
This goes on for so long that Mae finally rolls her eyes. “Isla,” she says, and he leans down so his head is hanging over the side of the bed.
“I knew it.”
“Well, what do you expect? I had to make sure you were legit.”
“Fair enough,” he says, returning to his bunk. “I looked you up too.”
“Yeah, me and every other Margaret Campbell in the world.”
“What I’m curious about,” he says, “is how you managed to get yourself arrested for trespassing last spring.”
Mae’s mouth falls open. “You found that?”
“Oh, I found it all right,” Hugo says cheerfully. “Well done, you.”
“It was film related,” she says, and he laughs.
“Sounds to me like it was cow related too.”
She groans. “I swear that farmer is never around. And if the fence hadn’t broken, it would’ve been fine. But then we had to try to round them all up again, and the police showed up, and it was a whole thing.”
“The lengths we go to for art,” he jokes, and even after they’ve both stopped laughing, Mae can’t seem to get rid of her smile.
She’s not sure what it is, this electricity that’s buzzing through her right now.
Maybe it’s Hugo, or maybe not. Maybe it’s leaving her parents, or being on her own, or the fact that she’s on her way to college—so many changes all at once.
Or maybe it’s the train and the exhilaration that comes from being swept across the country like a tumbleweed.
But here in the dark, talking so easily as they rumble through the night, the music of Hugo’s accent filling the tiny cabin, she’s struck by the unexpected joy of it all.
After a few minutes, she clears her throat, not sure if he’s fallen asleep yet. “So that college…,” she says, and for a long time, there’s no answer.
“Right,” he says eventually. “The University of Surrey.”
“They gave all six of you a scholarship?”
“Not exactly. It was some rich guy who went there.”
“Seriously?” she says, surprised. “He just handed you a whole bunch of money?”
“Well, he died a few years ago, so technically he handed it to the university. And we had to get the grades first. But otherwise, yeah. He thought it would be good publicity for them. Which it will. Basically, we get a free education and they get to parade us around campus.”
“I’ve heard of worse deals,” Mae says.
Hugo sighs. “I know. That’s just it. What kind of prat would have the nerve to be ungrateful for something like that?”
“A prat who wants something different?”
“Did I mention it’s also in my hometown?”
“Oof,” she says. “Really?”
“And I’m the only one who seems to mind it. I love my brothers and sisters. I do. They’re my best mates, and it’s strange to imagine being without them—like losing an arm. Or five.”
“That’s a lot of arms.”
“And it’s not as if I didn’t know this would be happening.
It’s been the plan since we were born. Literally.
I thought I was fine with it, but then I started hearing about classmates who are off to new places, and Margaret…
” He trails off. “She’s going to Stanford.
And she’ll be meeting all these new people and doing all these exciting things while I’m stuck at home, about a mile from our secondary school, surrounded by all my siblings, like nothing has changed at all. ”
“Have you ever thought about not going?”
“And do what?” he asks. “We can’t afford anywhere else.”
“What about loans?”
“I can’t—” He pauses, frustrated. “I can’t just abandon them. That’s not how it works with us. We’re a unit.”
“But it won’t be that way forever,” Mae says.
He’s quiet for a moment. “Do you have brothers or sisters?”
“No,” Mae says, shaking her head, though he can’t see her. “It’s just me.”
“Then you can’t understand. It’s not that easy.”
Maybe not, she thinks. But they’ve always been a unit too—she and Dad and Pop and Nana—and she’d left them behind because it was time to go.
And because she has dreams that are too big to fit back home.
She suspects Hugo’s problem isn’t that he can’t bear to leave.
It’s that he hasn’t figured out where he wants to go.
“Most things are easier than you think,” she says. “It’s deciding to do them that’s hard.”
“I suppose,” he says with a sigh. “Though we can’t all be intrepid filmmakers who run headlong into a field of cows. Or whatever dreams we’re chasing after.”
She smiles at this. “Well, why not?”
“For starters, I don’t even know what my dreams are. All I know is that I feel…restless. And I’d love to do something different, you know? Something new.”
A few seconds pass, and Mae looks up at the bottom of his bed. “Hugo?”
“Yes?”
“Who ever told you that doesn’t count as a dream?”