Authors: Patrick Ness
To the sound of a crunch beneath his feet.
Every inch of his bedroom floor was covered in short, spiky yew tree leaves.
He put another bite of cereal in his mouth, definitely not looking at the rubbish bin, where he had stuffed the plastic bag full of leaves he’d swept up this morning first thing.
It had been a windy night. They’d clearly blown in through his open window.
Clearly.
He finished his cereal and toast, drank the last of his juice, then rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. Still twenty minutes to go. He decided to empty the rubbish bin altogether – less risky that way – and took the bag out to the wheelie bin in front of the house. Since he was already making the trip, he gathered up the recycling and put that out, too. Then he got a load of sheets going in the washer that he’d hang out on the line when he got back from school.
He went back to the kitchen and looked at the clock.
Still ten minutes left.
Still no sign of–
“Conor?” he heard, from the top of the stairs.
He let out a long breath he hadn’t realized he was holding in.
– • –
“You’ve had breakfast?” his mum asked, leaning against the kitchen doorframe.
“Yes, Mum,” Conor said, rucksack in his hand.
“You’re sure?”
“
Yes
, Mum.”
She looked at him doubtfully. Conor rolled his eyes. “Toast and cereal and juice,” he said. “I put the dishes in the dishwasher.”
“And took the rubbish out,” his mum said quietly, looking at how neat he’d left the kitchen.
“There’s washing going, too,” Conor said.
“You’re a good boy,” she said, and though she was smiling, he could hear sadness in it, too. “I’m sorry I wasn’t up.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s just this new round of–”
“It’s
okay
,” Conor said.
She stopped, but she still smiled back at him. She hadn’t tied her scarf around her head yet this morning, and her bare scalp looked too soft, too fragile in the morning light, like a baby’s. It made Conor’s stomach hurt to see it.
“Was that you I heard last night?” she asked.
Conor froze. “When?”
“Sometime after midnight, must have been,” she said, shuffling over to switch on the kettle. “I thought I was dreaming but I could have sworn I heard your voice.”
“Probably just talking in my sleep,” Conor said, flatly.
“Probably,” his mum yawned. She took a mug off the rack hanging by the fridge. “I forgot to tell you,” she said, lightly, “your grandma’s coming by tomorrow.”
Conor’s shoulders sank. “Aw,
Mum
.”
“I know,” she said, “but you shouldn’t have to make your own breakfast every morning.”
“
Every
morning?” Conor said. “How long is she going to be here?”
“Conor–”
“We don’t need her here–”
“You know how I get at this point in the treatments, Conor–”
“We’ve been okay so far–”
“
Conor
,” his mum snapped, so harshly it seemed to surprise them both. There was a long silence. And then she smiled again, looking really, really tired.
“I’ll try to keep it as short as possible, okay?” she said. “I know you don’t like giving up your room, and I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have asked her if I didn’t need her to come, all right?”
Conor had to sleep on the settee every time his grandmother came to stay. But that wasn’t it. He didn’t like the way she
talked
to him, like he was an employee under evaluation. An evaluation he was going to fail. Plus, they
had
always managed so far, just the two of them, no matter how bad the treatments made her feel, it was the price she paid to get better, so why–?
“Only a couple of nights,” his mum said, as if she could read his mind. “Don’t worry, okay?”
He picked at the zip on his rucksack, not saying anything, trying to think of other things. And then he remembered the bag of leaves he’d stuffed into the rubbish bin.
Maybe grandma staying in his room wasn’t the worst thing that could happen.
“There’s the smile I love,” his mum said, reaching for the kettle as it clicked off. Then she said, with mock-horror, “She’s going to bring me some of her old
wigs
, if you can believe it.” She rubbed her bare head with her free hand. “I’ll look like a zombie Margaret Thatcher.”
“I’m going to be late,” Conor said, eyeing the clock.
“Okay, sweetheart,” she said, teetering over to kiss him on the forehead. “You’re a good boy,” she said again. “I wish you didn’t have to be quite
so
good.”
As he left to head off for school, he saw her take her tea over to the kitchen window above the sink, and when he opened the front door to leave, he heard her say, “There’s that old yew tree,” as if she was talking to herself.
He could already taste the blood in his mouth as he got up. He had bitten the inside of his lip when he hit the ground, and it was what he focussed on now as he stood, the strange metallic flavour that made you want to spit it out immediately, like you’d eaten something that wasn’t food at all.
He swallowed it instead. Harry and his cronies would have been thrilled beyond words if they knew Conor was bleeding. He could hear Anton and Sully laughing behind him, knew exactly the look on Harry’s face, even though he couldn’t see it. He could probably even guess what Harry would say next in that calm, amused voice of his that seemed to mimic every adult you never wanted to meet.
“Be careful of the steps there,” Harry said. “You might fall.”
Yep, that’d be about right.
It hadn’t always been like this.
Harry was the Blond Wonder Child, the teachers’ pet through every year of school. The first pupil with his hand in the air, the fastest player on the football pitch, but for all that, just another kid in Conor’s class. They hadn’t been friends exactly – Harry didn’t really have friends, only followers; Anton and Sully basically just stood behind him and laughed at everything he did – but they hadn’t been enemies, either. Conor would have been mildly surprised if Harry had even known his name.
Somewhere over the past year, though, something had changed. Harry had started noticing Conor, catching his eye, looking at him with a detached amusement.
This change hadn’t come when everything started with Conor’s mum. No, it had come later, when Conor started having the nightmare, the
real
nightmare, not the stupid tree, the nightmare with the screaming and the falling, the nightmare he would never tell another living soul about. When Conor started having
that
nightmare, that’s when Harry noticed him, like a secret mark had been placed on him that only Harry could see.
A mark that drew Harry to him like iron to a magnet.
On the first day of the new school year, Harry had tripped Conor coming into the school grounds, sending him tumbling to the pavement.
And so it had begun.
And so it had continued.
– • –
Conor kept his back turned as Anton and Sully laughed. He ran his tongue along the inside of his lip to see how bad the bite was. Not terrible. He’d live, if he could make it to Form without anything further happening.
But then something further happened.
“Leave him alone!” Conor heard, wincing at the sound.
He turned and saw Lily Andrews pushing her furious face into Harry’s, which only made Anton and Sully laugh even harder.
“Your poodle’s here to save you,” Anton said.
“I’m just making it a fair fight,” Lily huffed, her wiry curls bouncing around all poodle-like, no matter how tightly she’d tied them back.
“You’re bleeding, O’Malley,” Harry said, calmly ignoring Lily.
Conor put his hand up to his mouth too late to catch a bit of blood coming out of the corner.
“He’ll have to get his baldy mother to kiss it better for him!” Sully crowed.
Conor’s stomach contracted to a ball of fire, like a little sun burning him up from the inside, but before he could react, Lily did. With a cry of outrage, she pushed an astonished Sully into the shrubbery, toppling him all the way over.
“Lillian Andrews!” came the voice of doom from halfway across the yard.
They froze. Even Sully paused in the act of getting up. Miss Kwan, their Head of Year, was storming over to them, her scariest frown burnt into her face like a scar.
“They started it, Miss,” Lily said, already defending herself.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Miss Kwan said. “Are you all right, Sullivan?”
Sully shot a quick glance at Lily, then got a pained look across his face. “I don’t know, Miss,” he said. “I might need to go home.”
“Don’t milk it,” Miss Kwan said. “To my office, Lillian.”
“But Miss, they were–”
“
Now
, Lillian.”
“They were making fun of Conor’s mother!”
This made everyone freeze again, and the burning sun in Conor’s stomach grew hotter, ready to eat him alive.
(–and in his mind, he felt a flash of the nightmare, of the howling wind, of the burning blackness–)
He pushed it away.
“Is this true, Conor?” Miss Kwan asked, her face as serious as a sermon.
The blood on Conor’s tongue made him want to throw up. He looked over to Harry and his cronies. Anton and Sully seemed worried, but Harry just stared back at him, unruffled and calm, like he was genuinely curious as to what Conor might say.
“No, Miss, it’s not true,” Conor said, swallowing the blood. “I just fell. They were helping me up.”
Lily’s face turned instantly into hurt surprise. Her mouth dropped open, but she made no sound.
“Get to your Forms,” Miss Kwan said. “Except for you, Lillian.”
Lily kept looking back at Conor as Miss Kwan pulled her away, but Conor turned from her.
To find Harry holding his rucksack out for him.
“Well done, O’Malley,” Harry said.
Conor said nothing, just took the bag from him roughly and made his way inside.
Stories
, Conor thought with dread as he walked home.
It was after school, and he’d made his escape. He’d got through the rest of the day avoiding Harry and the others, though they probably knew better than to risk causing him another “accident” so soon after nearly getting caught by Miss Kwan. He’d also avoided Lily, who had returned to lessons with red, puffy eyes and a scowl you could hang meat from. When the final bell went, Conor had rushed out fast, feeling the burden of school and of Harry and of Lily drop from his shoulders as he put one street and then another between himself and all of that.
Stories
, he thought again.
“
Your
stories,” Mrs Marl had said in their English lesson. “Don’t think you haven’t lived long enough to have a story to tell.”
Life writing
, she’d called it, an assignment for them to write about themselves. Their family tree, where they’d lived, holiday trips and happy memories.
Important things that had happened.
Conor shifted his rucksack on his shoulder. He could think of a couple of important things that had happened. Nothing he wanted to write about, though. His father leaving. The cat wandering off one day and never coming back.
The afternoon when his mother said they needed to have a little talk.
He frowned and kept walking.
But then again, he also remembered the day
before
that day. His mum had taken him to his favourite Indian restaurant and let him order as much vindaloo as he wanted. Then she’d laughed and said, “Why the hell not?” and ordered plates of it for herself, too. They’d started farting before they’d even got back in the car. On the drive home, they could hardly talk from laughing and farting so hard.
Conor smiled just thinking about it. Because it
hadn’t
been a drive home. It had been a surprise trip to the cinema on a school night, to a film Conor had already seen four times but knew his mum was sick to death of. There they were, though, sitting through it again, still giggling to themselves, eating buckets of popcorn and drinking buckets of Coke.
Conor wasn’t stupid. When they’d had the “little talk” the next day, he knew what his mum had done and why she had done it. But that didn’t take away from how much fun that night had been. How hard they’d laughed. How anything had seemed possible. How anything good could have happened to them right then and there and they wouldn’t have been surprised.
But he wasn’t going to be writing about
that
either.
“Hey!” A voice calling behind him made him groan. “Hey, Conor, wait!”
Lily.
“Hey!” she said, catching up with him and planting herself right in his way so he had to stop or run into her. She was out of breath, but her face was still furious. “Why did you do that today?” she said.
“Leave me alone,” Conor said, pushing past her.
“Why didn’t you tell Miss Kwan what really happened?” Lily persisted, following him. “Why did you let me get into trouble?”
“Why did you butt in when it was none of your business?”
“I was trying to
help
you.”
“I don’t need your help,” Conor said. “I was doing fine on my own.”
“You were not!” Lily said. “You were bleeding.”
“It’s none of your
business
,” Conor snapped again and picked up his pace.
“I’ve got detention
all week
,” Lily complained. “
And
a note home to my parents.”
“That’s not my problem.”
“But it’s your fault.”
Conor stopped suddenly and turned to her. He looked so angry she stepped back, startled, almost like she was afraid. “It’s
your
fault,” he said. “It’s
all
your fault.”
He stormed off back down the pavement. “We used to be friends,” Lily called after him.
“
Used
to be,” Conor said without turning around.
He’d known Lily forever. Or for as long as he could remember, which was basically the same thing.
Their mums were friends from before Conor and Lily were born, and Lily had been like a sister who lived in another house, especially when one mum or the other would babysit. He and Lily had only been friends, though, none of the romantic stuff they got teased for sometimes at school. In a way, it was hard for Conor to even look at Lily as a
girl
, at least not in the same way as the other girls at school. How could you when you’d both played sheep in the same nativity, aged five? When you knew how much she used to pick her nose? When
she
knew how long you’d needed a nightlight after your father moved out? It had just been a friendship, normal as anything.