Chapter 7
Ronan could really play football, not as well as Kevin Sherry, but definitely better than me.
Not only was I bad, I had absolutely no interest in getting good.
When we had football for PE I hated it; it meant I’d have to go through the embarrassment of the captains picking their teams. Kevin was almost always captain and never picked me.
But when Ronan was captain he picked me first and positioned me in defence because he said that was where I was strongest, but I knew he was just being kind.
It worked, though. I probably played better because of that, or if not better then at least happier.
Running was more my sport and Ronan was good at that too.
Cross-country was where he excelled, whereas I was more suited to short distance.
So it was Ronan’s encouragement that kept me going through the muddy fields on those rainy cross-country PE lessons.
Kevin Sherry wasn’t a good runner. Ronan and me loved that there was a physical activity we could both beat him at easily.
The thing about Ronan, though, was that he didn’t care about winning, he just loved the challenge and doing the best he could.
He usually did finish first, but the times he finished second or third didn’t seem to bother him at all.
It was the same in lessons, he was the top of his class in most subjects even though he didn’t seem to study much.
He wrote imaginative stories in English.
He had a good head for numbers. He loved all the sciences and his French sounded fluent to my ear, especially since French was my weakest subject and I found it hard to speak without my Northern Irish accent underneath.
In third year there was a ski trip to Bulgaria.
I couldn’t go because it was too expensive but I wasn’t surprised when Ronan came back with stories of his trips down the toughest slopes.
He went on ski holidays with his family over Christmas most years too, and I’d imagine him like he was in one of those old James Bond films that were set in the Alps or somewhere like that.
Was there anything Ronan wasn’t good at?
Probably not, he was just that kind of boy.
I often wondered why he was friends with me because I definitely wasn’t that kind of boy.
But Ronan never made me feel like I was different because he was the one who picked me first in football, who gave me answers to maths questions, who read my stories in English and said they were really good, who teamed up with me as lab partner in Chemistry and sat beside me on the bus when we went on a school trip to the planetarium and shared a packet of space ice cream on the way back, who once did my French homework for me and, when we got found out, had to do detention and never told our parents, who made me laugh, who made me feel like a good friend, a good person, a better me, who ran with me and made me run faster, who ran towards his mum’s car on the last day of June, who disappeared, who never came back.