Foxes (11 page)

I take my phone out of my pocket and, not letting myself think too hard about it, text Micky.

Where are you?

This is my phone not the one I used yesterday
, I text a few seconds later.

My phone rings…

And immediately turns itself off. I growl at it in frustration.

“You okay?” Donna lets go of Vinny’s hand and steps outside the bus stop. She tucks her hair behind her ears. “You’ve got a phone now?”

“A stupid phone,” I mutter, waiting for it to turn itself back on. I rest my shoulder against the Perspex side of the bus shelter.

Vinny presses her face against the other side and pulls a face. Donna laughs. It perplexes me how they got to this point, this easiness with each other—it’s so far away from how they were acting the other night when Vinny was dumped in the road and didn’t want Donna to call the police.

My phone lights up.

Don’t call me
, I text as soon as the screen lets me.
Stupid phone turns off.

Where are you?
Micky texts back immediately.

Where are you
? I send back.

It’s like we’re playing a game again, and right now I want to play this game with him. I was wrong the other day. So wrong. I want to pretend. Micky’s eagerness makes it easy, makes me less afraid of reaching out to him.

Micky sends me a smiley face.
Arches.

I’ll come find you
, I text, finding my worry and my need to see him are overruling my decision to wait here by the park until I see Dollman. I’ve never seen Dollman out here before one o’clock in the morning anyway. I can come back.

Micky sends me a smiley waving its arms.

“I’ve got to go,” I say to Donna.

“Okay.” She sees me looking at their once-again-joined hands and smiles.

MICKY IS
sitting on a fallen-down brick wall below the arches, swinging his legs and shivering. Another boy with hair like jagged shadows has his arm around Micky’s waist, his head on Micky’s shoulder.

I stop in the darkness on the other side of the street as a different kind of sadness swells within me, grows large in the cage of my ribs. The sort of sadness that comes from knowing it’s never going to get any easier to see someone who makes your heart beat faster being affectionate with someone who’s not you.

Micky’s wearing hot pants again and a thin jumper over what looks like a see-through top. I try not to notice. My stupid heart gallops away, faster and faster, even though my chest hurts.

I don’t want to
want
anyone.

The coward in me suggests I turn around, walk away, go back to the park. I’m not sure my heart can take seeing Micky love other boys, and I know this is what I’ll have to take if we’re friends—if friends is what we’re becoming. Micky sees me before I can reconsider. He disentangles himself from the other boy’s embrace, jumps off the wall, and jogs across the road.

The boy with the shadow hair grimaces, slips down the wall, and heads down the street away from us. He’s skinny and dressed in black. I’m not sure if he glitters—I can’t really tell from here. Some part of me hopes he doesn’t.

“Be careful, Jack,” Micky calls over his shoulder as he slows to a walk.

Jack waves his arm dismissively and disappears into the night.

Micky turns and grins. “Hey.”

He’s so beautiful, I can’t look at him.

“Hey.” I can hardly get the word out.

For a moment everything is so quiet, I’m sure I can hear him breathing. I watch the gentle rise and fall of his chest. He’s always shivering because he never wears enough clothes.

“I thought you might sneak up on me using your superpowers,” I say, because I have to say something. I was the one who broke the game, and now I’m the one who has to fix it.

“Think I might have lost my superpowers.”

His hair falls in his face as he tilts his head to look at me. He gives me half a smile. I’d give anything for a full one.

The rain has stopped and there is no wind tonight, nothing but cold, quiet stillness.

“Want to maybe help me get them back?” he asks. “I think it’s something only a supervillain shark hunter can help me do.”

My smile is the helpless sort. “Okay.”

“You’re not wearing a coat,” he says, biting his lip.

I’m so tired of lying. I don’t want to lie anymore.

“Nor are you,” I say.

“I left it behind the wall over there. Don’t know what I’d do without it. It reminds me of you, you know.”

We walk across the road to get it and I change the subject. “How do we get your superpowers back?”

“We have to go to the park on the other side of the river, sit in the Pagoda, and meditate.”

THE PEACE
Pagoda is a Buddhist temple you can see from the river. Even as we’re walking over the bridge, I’m thinking,
There’s no way I’m going to get back for one o’clock to wait for Dollman
, and for the first time since Dashiel’s death, I’m not fighting the sick swell of guilt at not doing enough. For the first time, I feel as though I’m in exactly the right place, doing exactly the right thing.

“This is my favorite place in the whole of London to come and sit,” Micky says as we walk up the pagoda steps. “Especially at night.”

“I’ve never been here,” I say, looking around.

The sky is black, the grass is black, the trees are blacker.

The only brightness comes from the few dim streetlights that are dotted through Battersea Park, shining like a string of broken fairy lights. I always bypass this park—it’s somehow darker than the rest.

With my hands tucked deep in my pockets, I sit down at the top of the pagoda steps and stare out over the river. My eyes fix on nothing but the distant lights flickering on the water like tiny flames. The city seems so different from this side of the embankment. It’s so much quieter over here.

Micky crosses his legs and sinks down next to me. Out the corner of my eye I watch as he pulls the hood up and tucks his hands inside the sleeves of his coat. I’m hyperaware we’re almost touching, that his bare knee is only about half an inch from mine. His leg judders up and down, and all I want to do is to make him warm.

“You never wiped your phone,” he says quietly.

Drawing my eyebrows together, I look away from the river and stare at the steps.

No
, I think,
I didn’t
. I don’t know how it slipped my mind.

His expression is a little unsure as he takes the phone out of his pocket and holds it out to me. “Do you want to take it back with you so you can do it later? You probably want to save some of the stuff on there, don’t you?”

I shake my head. I can guess why he’s asked. There are about a hundred pictures of Dashiel on there. Countless texts too. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able look at them again, yet I can’t delete them either.

It’s funny, but it never consciously occurred to me Micky might look through my phone as I had looked through his. Maybe I wanted him to see it—maybe I needed someone to know how much I cared. Or maybe I just didn’t think at all.

“He’s beautiful,” Micky says, his finger on the screen, scrolling.

I nod. He was.

The pictures light up the dark around us, but I don’t even glance at them. I fill my head with other things, letting myself become transfixed by the slow sweep of Micky’s eyelashes as he blinks, counting the times they brush against his cheek, stroking the cool white stone beneath me with trembling fingers, and trying to connect to the thousands of people who must have stepped where I’m sitting. People who came here to pray, and to meditate, and to think.

Did any of them feel as I do now? How did they survive it? How did they carry on?

Micky turns to look at me. “Dieter told me he… he was killed a few weeks ago.”

“Yeah….”

“I’m sorry,” Micky says. “Were you and he…?”

“He was my best friend,” I say hoarsely.

“You don’t imagine it, do you, when you’re little, that you’ll ever feel so much hurt? If someone told you, you wouldn’t think you’d survive it.”

Micky’s right, you don’t. I wonder if someone Micky’s loved has died, but I can’t ask him.

I bring my cold sleeve up to my face and pretend I’m itching my nose so that I can wipe my eyes. My tears make my eyes sting, but I don’t find myself crying uncontrollably. It’s strange. Talking about Dashiel usually hurts more, but I just feel sad and heavy, and not as though my heart is gone. Not as though I can’t even breathe through it.

“You can delete everything if you want,” I say. I’ll always have the pictures in my head: pictures that aren’t so grounded in reality, but are no less real to me.

“No, I don’t want. They’re yours.”

I don’t reply.

“Do you mind me looking?” he asks gently.

How on earth can I mind? “They’re only pictures.”

Our words stop, but the river drifts on. Maybe it’s only because it’s dark and I don’t feel so self-conscious, but I’m completely comfortable sitting here with Micky, not saying anything, not doing anything. Just being. Minutes pass. Maybe they turn into an hour, half an hour. It’s hard to tell.

“I think I have my superpowers back now…,” Micky says softly. His teeth are chattering. He must be absolutely frozen. I know I am. “Come for a walk with me and tell me all the places in London you haven’t been?”

THERE IS
a whole world of London I’ve never been to, but my mind blanks and all I can think of are the London Eye and the Albert Hall. I’ve always been fascinated by circles, and the Albert Hall in particular. Sometimes if I pass that way and the night is quiet, music fragile and brief as yesterday’s rain echoes out into the streets.

Micky knows all the landmarks. He says London was the place that fascinated him most when he was at school. I wonder if it’s lived up to his expectations.

“I WONDER
what it’s like up there,” Micky says as we lie on the cold grass near the London Aquarium and stare up at the London Eye. The longer I stare up at it, the more the sensation that it’s going to fall down and flatten us increases.

I’m not sure if Micky’s wondering what it’s like up in one of the viewing pods or what it’s like up in space.

I go for the latter. “Cold and dark, or maybe beautiful and endless?”

“I mean the Eye.” I can hear his voice change as he smiles.

The London Eye was the closest so Micky insisted we come here. Micky also insisted on buying each of us an expensive hot dog from an all-night snack van, even though I told him not to. It was probably one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten.

“When I was twelve, my family visited New York and everyone went up the Empire State Building to see the view. I refused. I was too scared. Seems like a stupid thing to be scared of now,” he says.

“It’s not stupid.”

“Yeah, but now I know there’s worse things to be scared of….” His coat rustles as he shifts closer. “I thought as I grew up I’d get less scared of stuff, but it’s just the opposite… you find out there’s more things to be scared of. When you’re a kid, your world is so small.”

Yeah, I remember needing to keep it that way
, I think.

“Want to know a secret?” Micky must assume that I do because he hardly pauses. “Sometimes I do stuff to scare myself, dangerous stuff. I tell myself the more stuff I do, the less scared I’ll be, but it doesn’t work. I think I’m always going to be scared…. What are you scared of, Danny?”

The honesty of Micky’s admission startles me a little. That he would be so honest without really knowing me. It makes me worried for him.

The dangerous stuff he mentioned worries me too. I prop myself up on my elbow and glance at him. He’s laid out on his back, looking straight up.

There’s no one else around. The wind sings through the wires and metal holding the Eye in place. It’s eerie and beautiful, and I’m still convinced it’s going to fall over.

“I don’t know… everything, I guess.” It’s a stupid answer. I want to give him a better one. We’re not playing any games now—he called me Danny.

I think for a moment. “The people I care about getting hurt and not being able to do anything about it.”

Micky keeps staring up at the sky. I get the impression he doesn’t know what to say. The thing that scares me most came true—Dashiel is gone. I lie back down.

He’s silent for so long that his voice, when he speaks, surprises me a little.

“You know what the funny thing is?”

I somehow know he’s looking at me from the change in his tone. My skin prickles with electricity. My heart beats a little faster.

Out of the corner of my eye, I can see him making shapes in the air with his hands. Birds. His thumbs hooked together, his hands as wings.

This time he waits for me to say, “What?” before carrying on.

“Right now, I don’t feel scared of anything.”

I frown up at the sky, not sure what Micky is trying to say—if he’s trying to say anything at all.

The distant stars make me feel important and absolutely insignificant at the same time.

IT FEELS
as though we’ve been lying under the stars for hours. An ambulance lights up the far bank, its siren wailing distortedly. It disrupts our little pocket of silence. I like being quiet with him. I like knowing he’s there beside me.

“What did you want to be when you grew up?” Micky rolls onto his front. I can hear him plucking at the grass as he speaks.

“A fighter pilot.”

“Really?” he asks, sounding far too interested.

“No.” I shrug. “I don’t know. I guess I always knew it wasn’t worth wondering about.”

“Why?”

I don’t answer.

And I forget that this is a game too—the sharing-information game. I’ve not played it too often.

After far too much time has passed, I ask, “What did you want to be?”

“Makeup artist in a theater,” Micky says immediately. “Really theatrical stuff, you know? I love the way makeup can transform people, make them into somebody or something else.” The way he says this, all breathless and excited, I know this is something he wants so much. “I tried to get a job when I came to England. I must have gone to every theater in a five-mile radius, but….” Micky curls up, goes quiet. I count the seconds away. “It wasn’t as easy as I thought… I was naive, I guess. About a lot of stuff.”