2. So-Called ‘Best Buds’ #3
He hated that Seb didn’t want to go shooting with him, or visit Alexander and Hugo in London, or Do Rugby.
One of the only things Mr Wolfe ever talked to Seb about was his cross-country running (Seb was briefly a junior county record holder, basically by accident, before somebody knocked him off the top spot the next year because he’d completely forgotten to attend), and when he gave that up, the conversation dried up with it.
Seb always looked about three inches shorter when his father was at Grove House.
Because he knew he wasn’t interested in the right things, he stopped being interested in anything at all.
He’d show up wordlessly at Briar’s door in the morning on hard days, with the unspoken expectation that they’d be within touching distance until one or both of them eventually fell asleep.
None of Briar’s other friends ever tucked their heads into Briar’s shoulder and just listened, curled up and perfectly silent, to a half-hour story about one of the hobby hens getting her head stuck in a broken toaster.
Then again, Briar didn’t have any other friends that they loved as fiercely and unquestioningly as they did Seb.
Their mum had once explained the concept of must-haves and nice-to-haves in the context of job hunting.
Everyone at else at school was a nice-to-have. Seb was the only must.
As they staggered into the last year of primary school, Briar’s mum pulled them aside and said that it might be time for Briar and Seb to stop sharing beds and sofas and the back seats of cars the way they did, draped on top of each other, hands gripping each other’s ribs and wrists, inextricably entangled.
‘I’m just saying,’ she’d said, trying to neaten Briar’s hair as Briar jerked out of her grip, ‘that you’re getting older, and these things might start to mean something a bit different.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Louise, they’re just kids!’ Sean had said, through an explosive mouthful of homemade granola. ‘Let them have fun! They’re best buds! What a great thing, to have a best bud like that!’
Briar had run upstairs just so they didn’t have to hear Sean say best buds again.
The first part of that school year felt like one long, held breath.
Briar and Seb painstakingly completed their printed-out Temple applications lying side by side on the dusty floorboards of Seb’s bedroom during October half term.
They’d found an enormous spider inching out from under the bed halfway through, and there was a dramatic interlude during which Seb named it Olga and insisted on trying to catch it in a jar for further study, and Briar counter-insisted they should shoot it with a small gun and then set fire to the entire house, just to be safe.
When the spider was gently but involuntarily abseiled out of the window and the applications were finished, they’d swapped them to check for spelling mistakes, and Briar hadn’t said anything about Seb’s lacklustre personal statement, and Seb hadn’t said anything about Briar ticking the box that indicated a need for some sort of financial aid.
Sean’s farm wasn’t exactly making a killing then, and that was before he’d hurt his back.
He’d worked at a sprawling, soulless superfarm in his twenties, and then had some kind of spiritual awakening about cow sentience and decided to buy his own place, where the cows had names and were never hit with chains to hurry them up ramps.
It wasn’t very successful as a commercial venture, especially after Sean had invested almost everything he had to spare in a voluntary milking system, and while Briar’s mum worked in the café at a local garden centre, shifts were few and far between.
Briar didn’t know exactly how much Temple would cost, but they hadn’t held out much hope for a secret vault full of private school fees hidden somewhere under the Jones-Cox household.
Their mum insisted they reuse every teabag at least three times before interring them in compost, and Sean sometimes turned the kitchen light off out of habit while Briar was still sitting in there slicing a misshapen apple to dip in runny peanut butter, plunging them into darkness while they were holding a very sharp knife.
Briar hadn’t shown their parents the application.
All that mattered was getting in: afterwards, everything else would fall into place.
They knew this as they lay cradled in a basket swing with Seb in the village playground over Easter, huddling together for warmth when the breeze cut through their flannel shirts, making Temple plans that ran the gamut from midnight feasts to world domination.
They knew it every night, when they lay awake waiting for the time to tick over to 11:11 p.m. and then squeezed their eyes tightly shut and wished pleasepleaseplease in a painful rush until it was 11:12, and they could unclench their fists and go to sleep.
The letter that came for Seb in July had been neatly folded into a fat, midnight-blue envelope that felt silky to the touch.
Temple hadn’t bothered to respond to Briar at all.