Chapter 9
Harry
Once again, Mathias is the first person to arrive in the classroom. He sits in the front row and casually scrolls on his phone while waiting for everyone else to catch up. Story of my life. He nods his indifferent greeting to us, and Pi and I take up our usual spots at the back.
Dan arrives next but doesn’t sit next to Mathias where he normally sits. Instead, he heads straight to the front and hovers around the desk Eksteen’s laptop rests on. It’s ominous as fuck, and an icky feeling stirs inside me.
I knew this was coming, though. I’ve had all weekend to process the information, but that still doesn’t make it any easier to digest.
Dan crouches in front of Mathias, and the pair have a hushed conversation. I want to eavesdrop, but Eggo and Snatch have just arrived, and slowly more of the team fill out the space, and well, rugby players aren’t typically known for their volume restrictions.
“Mate, what happened to you on Saturday night? Did you score with that rich kid?” Eggo says, noisily dragging his chair over to Pi’s left side.
“No, we didn’t hook up, I just—”
“Mmhmm,” Eggo cuts me off, scratching his chin like a detective in a TV drama. “Fine, tell me about it later.” He turns to Pi, his tone and body language instantly softening. “How’re you holding up? You okay?”
Pi’s silent for a few seconds. “No. Not really, but I’ve decided not to let myself think about it too much until the end of the season.”
This is a barefaced lie. I’d spent two hours and fifty minutes on the phone to Pi last night while he travelled through four of the five stages of grief.
Denial: “No, Georgie’s made a mistake. She didn’t mean any of that.”
Anger: “She’s horrible, she’s selfish, I hate her.”
Bargaining: “I could change. I could be the guy she wants me to be.”
And depression: “Fuck her. Fuck everything. Fuck my life. Can’t I just stay here on my couch forever?”
A lot of time was spent here at the fourth stage. We’ve yet to reach the final stage—acceptance—but I’m sure it’ll come.
Before yesterday, I wouldn’t even have been able to explain what the five stages of grief were. In fact, I didn’t know they existed, but I’d had quite a lot of time to research the theory. Almost three hours, to be precise.
“I’m going to go back to Perth for the summer,” Pi says.
It’s the first I’m hearing of it, but I guess he’s started to make a dent in “acceptance.”
“Well, British summer, not Australian summer. I just need some time to process.” He turns to me with raised brows and a quiver to his bottom lip. It’s a question . . . “Is that okay?”
“What are you going to do with Trekkie?” I have no idea why those are the first words to fall from my lips.
“I’ve booked him into a kennel for five weeks.”
“No,” I say.
Pi laughs. “What do you mean, no? It’s a great kennel. There’s a big open space for the dogs to run around, and they get twice daily walks.”
“No fucking way is my baby Trekkie staying in a kennel for five weeks while his bastard owner ditches him for another continent. He’ll come stay with me.”
“Really? Are you sure?”
“Of course. What else will I do all summer with you gone?”
“He’s such a pain in the ass, though. You’ll have to walk him at least twice a day, and he chews everything. Hide your sliders, those are his favourite. And he stinks. His farts are lethal.”
“Anosmic, remember?”
“Mate.” Pi smiles dopily at me. “I just really love that little fucker. I owe you one.”
“Yes,” I agree, because admitting how nice it’ll be to have something love me unconditionally for five weeks would leave me feeling way too fucking vulnerable for a Monday morning.
“Dearly beloved,” Dan bellows from the front of the classroom like a vicar at a wedding. The Cents quiet down immediately. “I’ve gathered you here today because . . . I have an announcement to make.”
Dan glances over at Mathias and my stomach flips.
“But first, a massive congrats to Gadget and his wonderful new husband.”
There’s whooping and cheering. I clap because I’m not a total cunt.
Or at least, I don’t want people to think I am.
Mathias smiles, hides his face, looks uncomfortable as fuck.
“Honeymoon’s in the off season, so it’s back to work as usual for you,” Dan continues.
“But we all had a roaring time at your wedding. Some of us more so than others.” There’s more cheering and even a few boos thrown into the mix.
“Seriously, though, I need to apologise for getting so pissed. That was . . .” He never finishes his sentence.
“At least I wasn’t throwing up in the koi pond. Hey, Pi?”
Pi groans, pulls his baseball cap over his eyes, and slides down in his chair.
“Right, so . . . some of you may have heard a few rumours about the capt—”
“We wouldn’t have heard them if you weren’t shouting your fat mouth off!” Snatch yells through cupped hands.
“Well, whatever you heard is wrong,” Dan says.
Some guys start playfully protesting.
Dan waves them off, then holds his palms flat, surrendering. “I got it wrong, okay? I’m sorry. You may have heard that I told Gadget he had the position of captain, but well . . . Gadget has withdrawn himself from consideration.”
Gasps fill the space, followed by murmuring as everyone relays this to their neighbour, and begins either a “never saw this coming” speech, or an “I told you so” one.
I’m too stunned to speak, or even digest the words. I’d spent the entirety of Saturday and Sunday paralleling Pi’s grief process, and had been very firmly in the acceptance stage for a while now.
“I’m not going to go into too many details,” Dan says, his booming voice shushing us once again.
“But just so you all know, Gadget will not be the next Cents’ captain, through his own choosing.
But Eksteen and I have been chatting, and we .
. . have someone in mind who we’d like to test out over the next few weeks, and if all goes well, we’ll announce it at the awards ceremony at the end of the month. ”
Dan looks over at me, and I think I might be sick. My stomach flips, the room catapults itself into sub-tropical temperatures, and my sweat glands dive straight into overdrive.
“So,” he continues. “We were thinking . . .”
He’s still looking at me.
Holy shit.
Holy fucking shit!
Somebody starts a drumroll by slapping their thighs. Other people join in. I can’t. My adrenaline is making it impossible to move my body in normal ways because Dan is still looking right at me . . .
No, wait a minute . . .
He’s looking at . . .
“Aiden, we’d really like you to give the captaincy a shot. What do you say?”
Pi. My closest friend.
I’m second best again. Well, third best because Mathias would have been given the role without any contention.
Everybody around us is whooping and Catherine wheeling their fists. I cheer along, but I know my face is giving me away.
Pi looks over at me, and I plaster on the biggest, cheesiest, I’m-happy-for-you smile I can muster and give him a thumbs up. I am the world’s shittiest friend. Officially.
“Bloody ripper,” Pi says.
Translation: “Yes, I would love to be captain. Fuck my best mate and fuck his feelings, even though last week I didn’t give two shits about the position.”
Dan holds up a hand for quiet. “But we were thinking maybe you don’t have to do it all on your own, Aiden. A lot of teams these days are opting for co-captaincy. So . . . we were wondering if . . .”
I squeeze my eyes shut. Hold my breath.
“Finn, you fancy being Aiden’s partner in crime?”
Someone cups their hands around their mouth and yells, “Eggo!” and the room spins at my feet like I’ve been slamming tequilas all through the night.
I’m not even third best.
“I won’t let you down, boss!” Eggo says, getting to his feet and saluting, then twerking.
I don’t drink on a school night—a school night being the night before I have either training or a game—but thankfully tomorrow is media day, and therefore doesn’t count as a school night.
At least, that’s what I tell myself as I crack the lid off another bottle of Estrella and down half in one swig.
My flat doesn’t have a garden, it doesn’t even have a balcony, so instead I’ve pulled the Georgian sash window up as high as it’ll go, and I’m sitting on the ledge of my third-floor central Bath apartment, looking down into the pokey back yard my basement neighbour owns.
They have a dog, a noisy little King Charles Spaniel named Luigi. It’s fucking cute. I want to keep him for myself. The sun is getting ready to disappear over the horizon, and Luigi’s shadow is about eight times the size it should be.
I puff out a heavy sigh and take another long swig of my beer. Two weeks ago, the captaincy wasn’t even something on my radar. Now, I’m devastated I got overlooked again. And for my best friend of all people.
I should be happy for him. It’ll be a good distraction from his breakup but . . .
Why does everything come at my expense?
Out of habit and a need to interrupt my thoughts, I take my phone out and scroll through the same two apps I waste hours and hours on—Tik Tok and Instagram.
I ignore all my messages. They’re mostly from Pi anyway, and I’m already bummed.
I don’t want to end up spiralling further into depression with him.
I know I should be there for his breakup like he was there when whatever I had with Lando ended, but I can’t bring myself to deal with his happiness right this second.
Instead, I find myself mindlessly typing the first few letters of Lando’s IG handle into the search bar. I’ve searched for his profile so often since our breakup that it comes up automatically.
@sugar_kanes_ukulele.
His profile loads, including all of his posts, and I almost fall out the window. I grab my bottle of beer before it plummets onto Luigi’s head and wipes him out.
Lando’s unblocked me.
Not only has he unblocked me, he’d never removed me as a follower in the first place. And now I’m looking at a year’s worth of unseen Orlando Oakham-Goodwin content.
I’m not a creeper, don’t be stupid, but I still slide down the wall next to the window and sit with my back to it so I can look at them all completely uninterrupted.
His bio is the same as it was a year ago.
Lock up your daddies, the diva of diarrhoea is in town.
I start with the most recent post—a carousel dedicated to Mathias and Owen’s wedding. Weirdly, there are only photos of the happy couple, random bits of decor like his table setting, and a couple of bathroom-mirror selfies. There are zero photos of Daisy.
The caption reads: Congratulations, guys. What a gorgeous couple! So happy you’ve found your Happy Ever After.
As I scroll back through the posts, there are more and more featuring Daisy, but there are also plenty of random photos—signs and posters he’s obviously deemed beautiful enough to capture, dresses from museum exhibitions, abstract plates of expensive looking food, blurry late-night bar snaps, scenery, and of course selfies.
He’s added music to all his posts, and nearly every one of them is Lana del Rey because .
. . it’s Lando. I think if he didn’t listen to Lana Del Rey for an entire day, he’d keel over.
Every time I glimpse a photo of him, my insides flip, like someone’s put a fishhook behind my belly button and is trying to pull my stomach out through my mouth.
He’s so fucking beautiful. Just the lines and angles of his face, and the way he holds himself. He rarely smiles in any of the photos, but I can see his smile in my mind.
They were always so easy to elicit. For me at least. I’d just have to make a cruel remark about someone we both disliked—which to be fair was pretty much everyone—and he’d throw his head back, exposing all his perfectly straight white teeth, then he’d lean forward and whisper, “You’re such a bitch, Harry Sebastian Eugene Ellis, and that’s why I love you. ”
I land upon a picture of him sitting on the grassy hill behind his house.
He’s picked “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” to accompany the post. It’s sunset, a yellow hot-air balloon floats above his head, and at first I think the balloon is the subject matter of the photo, the main reason he took it.
But he’s in frame too, and there’s an orange glow across half of his face.
His eyes are thrown into shade by something not shown in the shot, but . . . something’s not quite right.
I pinch the screen and zoom in on his face, ignoring the way my internal organs both rejoice and protest at his image.
His eyes are red . . . bloodshot. To anyone else, it might seem like he was stoned, but Lando hated getting high, so either he’d changed his mind and had been smoking or . . . he’d been crying.
The date of the post is the second of September 2026. It’s captionless, and it’s the first post after our breakup at the end of August.
@daisymerolling commented with the hugging emoji.
And @owen_bosley1980 wrote “Chin up, mate.”
Shit. Why does that hurt so much?
“This was all your fault, you cunt,” I whisper to my phone, and—
Oh no. Oh, fuck. I’ve accidentally gone and liked it.
No, no, no, no.
I bang the back of my head against the wall before unliking it, but it’s too late. He’ll receive the notification no matter what. He’ll know that I’ve searched his name, found his profile, and scrolled right down to nearly a year ago.
I skitter my phone across my apartment’s wooden floor like a curling stone, and scream towards the ceiling.
My phone vibrates with a message.
It’s going to be Pi, but I crawl across my living room to fetch the device regardless.
It’s not Pi.
Come over.
It’s Lando.