Chapter 28
For the couple of weeks after I’d been in Jonah’s bedroom, I barely saw him. Every few days I left another note with a silly reason to stay alive in his bag, but Mum had stopped driving us to school, deciding the exercise would do us good, so I’d no idea if he’d added any new songs to the playlist. The countdown to exams was like a timebomb ticking in the background as I struggled with practice test papers and daydreamed through revision lessons, from which he was noticeably absent.
Then, one lunchtime, I was walking down the busy school corridor to meet my friends when, out of nowhere, a boy called Davis Hammond appeared right in front of me. I tried to keep moving, but he reached out and put his hand against the wall, blocking my path.
‘Libby.’
‘What?’ I tried to sound bored and impatient. Davis was a genuine creep, and not in a hot way. After being paired up with him on a science project in the autumn, I’d occasionally caught him staring at me in lessons but had tried to convince myself he did that to everyone. Even when Katie and Alicia assured me otherwise.
‘Come to prom with me.’
I pulled back in shock. I’d done nothing to give the impression that I’d be interested in going anywhere with him, let alone prom.
‘Um… no, thanks.’
‘Why not?’ he asked, shaking his head in confusion. ‘Has someone else already asked you? Because I put the word out that you were off-limits.’
‘I’m going with my friends.’
He leant closer, reeking of cheap aftershave and sour sweat.
‘Alicia’s going with Luke Hughes. He already told me. What, are you and Katie a couple now?’
I tried again to step past, but he angled me further into the wall. He was tall and heavyset, and I was starting to panic.
‘None of your business.’
‘Of course it’s my business when you’re blowing me off after flirting with me all year. Messing around with lads only leads to trouble. It hurts their feelings.’
‘I haven’t flirted with you!’ I stammered. ‘I’ve barely spoken to you in months.’
‘Maybe not.’ His smirk sent chills across my skin. ‘But I’ve seen you looking.’
‘Back off,’ I said, hating that I sounded so weak. ‘I said I’m not interested.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Yeah, I think I can probably come up with something that’ll interest you.’
He stepped even closer, close enough to have grabbed me if it hadn’t been for the missile that suddenly knocked him to one side.
After I’d caught my breath, I turned to find Davis writhing around on the floor with Jonah.
Davis was spluttering, his eyes almost popping out of his head.
Jonah was like a wild animal. A jackal.
I vaguely registered the gathering crowd, but no one dared step in to save Davis. They probably thought he had it coming.
‘Mr Barnes!’ the crowd hissed, parting to allow our assistant head teacher through, where he wasted no time in yanking Jonah off Davis, a millisecond after Jonah’s elbow crunched into his opponent’s face.
‘My office, now,’ Mr Barnes yelled, loud enough for the corridor to instantly grow silent. ‘Everybody else, get the hell out of here.’
I would probably have remained standing there if it hadn’t been for Katie taking one arm, Alicia the other as they dragged me outside.
‘What the hell was that?’ Katie squealed, once we were safely in the corner of the field where we ate lunch on warm days.
‘Jonah King launched himself down the corridor, knocking half of Year 10 out the way, and tried to kill Davis,’ Alicia breathed, a little more discreetly. ‘I think he literally might have murdered him if Barnes hadn’t showed up.’
‘I… I don’t know what happened,’ I said, my teeth chattering as the adrenaline subsided.
‘Yeah, not true.’ Katie squinted at me. ‘We saw you. We were on our way to rescue you when the vampire got there first.’
‘That was totally Twilight,’ Alicia agreed.
‘Only Jonah King isn’t a vampire. Or obsessed with me.’ I rested my head on my knees, trying to steady my vision.
‘Oh, really? Can you come up with a better explanation, then?’ Katie said. ‘Because we’ve seen you giving him that longing look like you’re dying for the chance to save him,’ she replied. ‘It’s like when you got obsessed with Carlos in Year 9.’
I lifted my head, now seeming to weigh about twice as much as the rest of my body.
‘He’s my new brother.’
I think they’d have been less surprised if I’d told them he was a vampire.
They arrived at my front door later that afternoon in a flurry of excitement and pastel revision folders.
‘Hi!’ my friends called to Mum, jostling into the kitchen where she was plating up slices of home-made flapjack for Ellis and Billy, who were currently playing Pop Up Pirate with their brother in the living room.
‘Ooh. That looks good,’ Katie said, leaning over the tray. ‘Tests have shown that oats are great for memory.’
‘I hope you girls are here to revise, not to create another one of your videos.’
‘Ugh, Mum!’ I screwed up my face in embarrassment.
‘We shut down ALK Music at the start of Year 10,’ Alicia said, not the least bit ashamed of the shockingly awful lip-sync performances we used to film in the garden.
‘We wondered if Jonah might want to revise with us?’ Katie asked, her face a picture of innocence despite the black eyeliner and fake nose-ring she’d added for reasons that I could only assume revolved around my foster brother’s hotness.
‘Oh, well, that’s very kind of you.’ Mum picked up a tray containing the snacks and three glasses of juice. ‘I’ll see if he wants to join you once he’s free. Oh, and make sure you leave a piece of flapjack for Nicky. She needs as much help with her memory as you lot.’
We set ourselves up in the dining room. I’d have preferred the privacy of the attic, but it was too cramped for three people when the weather was this warm.
‘Did you see him playing that little kids’ board game when we walked past?’ Alicia giggled. ‘It was really weird seeing him smile. Like, he has teeth. Who knew?’
‘Well, clearly Libby did,’ Katie said, flipping open her ring-binder. ‘I have So. Many. Questions.’
‘If you’re going to be taking notes, then I don’t have any answers,’ I shot back.
‘Notes will not be needed. I shall be memorising everything.’ Katie gave a wicked smile that sparked a lurch of possessiveness in my stomach. My friends weren’t cool, but Katie’s confidence made her far cooler than me. More importantly, she wasn’t completely, utterly out of bounds to Jonah.
‘Does he talk, ever?’ Alicia asked, hunching over her notebook.
‘Ever?’ Well, that was an easy answer. ‘Yes.’
‘Like, making conversation or just minimal answers to direct questions? Is he moody, or does he get all polite with your parents? Ooh, does he talk to you?’ She went on and on until I had to give her something. I was paranoid they’d grow suspicious otherwise, and despite me having told them about every crush I’d ever had – the grand total of three boys, including Year 9 Carlos who, I admit, I did grow slightly fanatical about for a few months – this was far too dangerous to even hint at.
‘He’s quiet, but not rude. Unless he’s triggered about stuff to do with his mum, and anyone would get angry about that. We revised together a couple of times, so talked a bit then. Apart from that, I barely see him.’
‘Does he ever smile apart from when he’s with his brother and sister?’ Alicia asked.
‘Not really.’
Yes. But only at me.
‘Does he have loads of grey jumpers, or is it the same one?’
‘Okay, that’s enough. I know you’re my best friends, but he’s my…’
‘Temporary brother,’ Katie suggested.
‘Well, Mum and Dad have asked if he can stay with us. So it won’t be temporary.’
‘Don’t you have to wait for court?’ My friends had seen enough foster children come and go to have grasped the basics.
‘Jonah’s seventeen, so the judge won’t make him live with his family if he doesn’t want to.’
‘Libby.’ Mum appeared in the doorway, glowering. ‘You know that kind of information is private. Especially when Jonah goes to your school.’
‘Well, it’s kind of a done deal, isn’t it? We know Jonah can stay.’
She shifted uncomfortably. ‘We’ve told Jonah that we’d love him to stay. He hasn’t decided if that’s what he wants yet.’
‘What?’ There was no way he was considering going back to his mum. So if Jonah didn’t want to stay here, that meant he’d be looking at a semi-independent residential unit. I couldn’t imagine a single reason why he would choose that over living with my parents, who were known throughout children’s services for their phenomenal skills with troubled teens. Unless the problem wasn’t my parents, of course.
Like I told my friends, I’d barely seen Jonah since I brought him a coffee. He’d been in his room, or in the pupil support unit at school, or just wherever I wasn’t. He seemed to be timing his kitchen snack-raids for when I was out, or asleep. He’d said his door was always open, but when he ignored me all the time, it was hard to believe that.
A ripple of dread crept from my toes all the way up my body until it settled as a tight band of tension around my head.
I waited another fifteen minutes before telling Katie and Alicia I had a migraine, rudely shooing them out before Jonah’s sibling contact finished so I wouldn’t have to face him in the hallway. The second they left I sprinted upstairs and pulled out my journal.
I’m such an idiot. If Davis thought I was flirting, then what must Jonah think, when I probably actually was? I took Wagon Wheels to his room. Could I have been more lame or obvious? I sat on his bed and held his hand. That’s probably classed as sexual harassment. He’d be too scared to say anything because it’s my word against his, and if I kicked off he’d think no one would believe the damaged foster kid over me…
And now he’s hiding from me, and wants to leave a lovely home because I’m a loser with a crush on her foster brOTHER.
After pacing up and down in a panic for a few minutes, I added a list of potential options to undo the mess I’d caused.
Die of humiliation
Convince him that I hate him (which doesn’t explain the Wagon Wheels, and honestly, enough people dislike him without me pretending to be another one)
Be totally clear that it was just a sisterly hand-hold
Option three was a no-brainer. I decided the best way to convince Jonah that I didn’t have a crush on him was to pretend I liked someone else.
I put the plan into action at dinner that evening.
‘So, I was stood behind Carlos in the queue for lunch today, and he said, “Libby, do you think that curry is chicken or pork?” And I was like, “Um, well, the sign says it’s chicken korma, so I guess it must be chicken?”’ I burst into a peal of laughter that was irritating enough to me, so it only showed how patient my parents were that they merely smiled and nodded encouragingly.
‘Um, what?’ Nicky screwed her nose up in confused disgust. ‘Um, please tell me that’s not the end of the, um, story?’
‘Well, my guess is that it turned out to be pork,’ Dad said, with an expectant grin.
‘Or…’ Mum pretended to think. ‘Was it neither? That’s it – Quorn, and they’d fooled the lot of you!’ she said, pointing a triumphant fork in the air.
‘Er…’ The part of me that hated myself glanced over at Jonah, who was calmly eating his lasagne, absorbed in a book. I reminded myself that it was worth it, if it meant he chose to stay, and pressed on with acting like a simpering airhead. ‘No. It was chicken.’
Mum and Dad both sagged melodramatically into their seats.
‘Sometimes I genuinely think I must be adopted,’ Nicky muttered. ‘Either that or I should be.’
‘At least you didn’t embarrass yourself in front of Carlos!’ Mum crowed. ‘It’s a while since we’ve heard that name. I thought he had left Bigley Academy?’
He had, in what I hoped was a coincidentally short time after I confessed my undying love for him in front of our whole tutor group. I’d wept into my pillow about it for weeks. Jonah wasn’t at school anywhere near often enough to figure out there was no Carlos any more.
‘So, yeah. Once I’d reassured him it was chicken, he had the curry. With chips, though, not rice.’
‘And what did you have, Libby?’ Dad asked.
‘Let me guess,’ Nicky said, taking a strand of her now jet-black hair and twining it around a finger. ‘You had curry too, with chips, not rice! Because, like, um, you and Carlos have so-o-o-o-o much in common.’ She trailed off with a bat of her eyelashes.
I didn’t have to fake my flaming cheeks. It was harder to force my pasta into a stomach clenched at my own patheticness.
‘I’m done.’ Jonah closed his book and stood up, disappearing before Mum had finished asking him to put his plate in the dishwasher.
‘Carlos Romero?’
‘What?’ I nearly dropped my glass of water. It was almost midnight, and after yet another night of contemplating whether I was going to implement option one in my journal after all, I’d tiptoed downstairs and snuck outside.
Was I hoping Jonah might be there, smoking his last cigarette of the day?
I added that to my abandoned list of Reasons for Jonah to Keep Living: savouring the last cigarette of the day.
Well. Maybe not hoping. Aware of the possibility? I’d put a cardigan on over my T-shirt, just in case.
After all, it would be another opportunity to convince him that my heart belonged to Carlos.
He was sitting in the garden chair again, the glow of a cigarette moving towards his face for a mesmerising second as he took a long drag.
Stalling for time, I made a show of pulling out another chair from under the table – quietly, so as not to alert my parents sleeping above us – and spent far more time than was necessary getting comfortable in the wooden seat.
‘That… story at dinner was about Carlos Romero.’
‘Er, yes.’
He leant towards the table, his face all shadows and angles in the moonlight as he stubbed out the cigarette.
‘Funny. A Carlos Romero transferred to my old school from Bigley two years ago.’ He paused, glancing at me with a gleam in his eye. ‘I’m wondering what’s most implausible. That there’d be someone else with the same unusual name at the same school. Or that you would invent such a bizarrely boring story.’
I swallowed so hard he must have heard me.
‘What did you conclude?’ I asked, unable to resist darting a little closer to danger.
Jonah clenched his hands in a double fist and rested them on his knees, still leaning forwards. His hood was down for once, and hair hung over his face as he tipped his head towards his hands.
‘When I was fifteen, my mum came home early from the pub while I was smoking a spliff in my bedroom. I ran downstairs, grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat on the sofa, pretending to look shocked when she stumbled in. She went mad at me for stealing a can, but didn’t bother going in my room. Alcohol was one thing, but she’d sworn that if she ever caught me with drugs, she’d smash my phone up.’
‘I admit it’s a better story than the curry one. But is there a point to it?’
He angled his head slightly upwards to look at me, his face mostly obscured by unkempt fringe.
‘I guess if your parents think you’re flirting with Carlos in the dinner queue, it’s better than them wondering what you’re doing out here with me.’