Chapter 127: Westbrook, Tuesday

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 127: Westbrook, Tuesday

Cole had not been to school in eleven days and had to sign in at reception like a visitor.

The woman behind the desk was about fifty and had worked there nine years and had signed in roughly eleven thousand people, and she looked up, and stopped, and then looked back down at her book and said, "Name," in a slightly different voice than the one she'd been using with the man ahead of him.

"Cole Vale."

"Right." She wrote it. "You'll want the — there's a form."

"Okay."

"It's — hang on." She checked a drawer that did not contain forms. Closed it. Checked the same drawer again. "Sorry. It's normally just here."

Cole waited.

She found the forms in the other drawer, and handed him one, and then said, to the ceiling rather than to him, "You've got very good posture," which was not a thing she had planned to say and which she looked instantly appalled about.

"Thanks?"

"Sign at the bottom."

He met Reeve by the lockers and Reeve took one look at him and started laughing.

"What."

"Nothing. You just — " Reeve gestured at all of him. "You've been off for eleven days and you've come back looking like that and there's about forty people in this corridor doing a thing with their faces."

"Doing what with their faces?"

"Nothing. Forget it." Reeve got his books out. "God, it's good to have you here. Do you know how much homework I've been copying off Priya."

The thing with the faces got explained to him in third period, by accident, because two girls behind him in Conviction Class had not accounted for how well sound travels in a room with a hard floor.

"—no, I know, but he's actually—"

"He's ridiculous. That's the problem. If he were just tall it'd be fine."

"It's the hair."

"It's not the hair, it's that he doesn't do anything. He's not trying. Nobody that good-looking is allowed to turn up in a hoodie eleven days late and sit there with his knees not fitting under the desk."

"Esi said she walked into a door frame in November."

"Esi walks into everything."

"She walked into that one because of him."

Cole, three feet in front of them, turned a page of a textbook he had not been reading and worked out, with genuine effort, that they might be talking about someone else in the room.

He looked round.

There were eleven other boys in the class. Two of them were on the rugby team. One of them, Torres, had a jaw like a shovel and a girlfriend in Year Thirteen.

Torres, Cole decided, and went back to his textbook, and the two girls behind him spent the rest of the lesson watching the back of his head.

Priya found them at break, and she was furious, and it was not about homework.

"Four," she said.

"Hello, Priya."

"Four, Cole. Four separate boys have asked Vesper out since the start of term and she turned all four of them down and she cannot remember two of their names." Priya dropped onto the wall beside them. "I said, Vesper, Dominic asked you out in September, and she said who, and I said the tall one from the library, and she said I don't think that happened. It happened. I watched it happen. He practised on me first."

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Cole blinked.

"Four?"

"Four. Five if you count Theo Marsh, which I do, because he asked twice." Priya rounded on him. "Do you know why it keeps happening?"

"Because they're—"

"Because she's beautiful, Cole. Because she walks into a room looking like that and then dresses like she's apologising for it, which somehow makes it worse, and every six weeks somebody with more courage than sense decides they're going to be the one." Priya threw her hands up. "And she is completely baffled every single time. Every time. Like a woman being handed a parcel she didn't order."

Reeve, very quietly, was eating crisps and enjoying himself more than he had in a fortnight.

"She's not baffled," Cole said. "She's — "

"She's what?"

He thought about eighteen months of hair shoved up off her neck and the same three jackets and leaving rooms without anyone noticing the exit, and did not say any of it.

"She's busy," he said.

Priya looked at him for a long moment.

"You are the single densest intelligent person I have ever met," she said, and left.

Vesper found him in the library at lunch, sitting at a table built for people six inches shorter than he was, with his knees up against the underside of it.

"You're back."

"Briefly. Halden says if I'm not enrolled somewhere I'm easier to file paperwork about."

"That's the most romantic reason anyone's ever come to school." She sat down opposite. Dark hair up off her neck with a pencil through it, sleeves shoved past her elbows in February, the notebook under one arm. "Priya shouted at you."

"Priya shouted at me."

"About?"

"Dominic."

Vesper's face did something complicated.

"Who?"

"The tall one from the library, apparently."

"There's a — " She stopped. Frowned at the middle distance for about four seconds. "Oh. Oh. That happened, didn't it."

"Priya watched it happen. He practised on her first."

"That's mortifying." Vesper put her face in her hands. "That's genuinely mortifying. I said something about a bus."

"You said something about a bus?"

"He asked if I wanted to get food sometime and I said the 47 doesn't run on Sundays." She looked up. "In my defence I was thinking about something else."

"You're always thinking about something else."

"Yes," she said. "That's the defence."

It was the next part he did not see coming, and neither did she.

A boy stopped at the end of the table.

Fifteen, maybe sixteen, in a blazer he hadn't grown into, holding his bag with both hands in front of him like a shield, and he had clearly been building up to this across the entire length of the library.

"Vesper?"

"Yes?"

"I'm Aaron. I'm in Year Eleven." He swallowed. "I think you're really pretty and I wanted to ask if you'd want to — if you'd — "

He got a proper look at who was sitting opposite her.

Cole was, at that moment, doing nothing at all. He was slouched in a too-small library chair with a book he wasn't reading and his hair falling forward the way it did, and he looked up, mildly, because someone had said a name.

Aaron's entire plan left him.

"Sorry," he said. "Sorry. Wrong — sorry."

And he went.

Vesper watched him go the whole way to the door.

"That's five," she said.

"That was fifteen seconds."

"That's five, Cole." She turned round. "And that one didn't even get to the end of the sentence, because he looked at you and gave up, which is the most annoying thing that has ever happened to me in this building."

"I didn't do anything."

"I know. That's what's annoying." She was going slightly pink and clearly aware of it. "You were sitting there. That's all you did. You were sitting there being — "

She stopped.

"Being what," Cole said.

"Nothing."

"Being what."

"You know exactly what," Vesper said, "and if you genuinely don't then I refuse to be the one who tells you, on principle, because Priya's right and you don't deserve it."

Cole looked at the door Aaron had gone through.

"He was about sixteen," he said. "And you'd have said something about a bus."

"I'd have said something about a bus," Vesper agreed. "Poor kid. He practised."

Mia found the two of them in the library and stood there for a second before saying anything.

"Aaron Kellow just told four people in the canteen that Vesper's boyfriend is about eight feet tall and looked at him."

"He's not—" Vesper started.

"I know he's not eight feet tall."

"That's not the part I was—"

"I know which part it was," Mia said, and sat down, and stole half of Cole's lunch with the practised motion of eleven years. "And I'm not doing that conversation in a library."

She ate the half sandwich.

"For the record," she said, "this happens constantly and neither of you have ever noticed, and it's been genuinely funny to watch for about a year. Esi Boateng has walked into two doors. Two. One of them was a fire door and she went to the nurse."

"That's not because of—"

"Cole." Mia put the sandwich down. "I have been your sister for sixteen years and I would like you to understand that this is not a debate happening at this table. It's a fact about the world that you are the last person to find out about, and you'll probably forget it by Thursday, and that's honestly the best outcome for everybody."

Vesper was making a sound into her sleeve.

"You're enjoying this," Cole said.

"I am having the single best lunch of my academic career." Mia stood up, taking the rest of the sandwich with her. "Also, Halden called the house. She's not suspended any more. She's reinstated pending review, which she says is worse, and she wants to see you both at four."

[End of Chapter 127]