Elijah hugged me so hard that I could feel the beat of his heart through his coat. “Don’t be sorry,” he said, releasing me. “Don’t be sorry at all. You’re talking sense, as always. So much sense. In fact, I don’t think I’ve met anyone who speaks as much sense as you. Which is strange considering how very little you speak, on the whole.”

  I sniffed again and wiped my nose with my coat sleeve. Not very attractive, but I’d let everything out anyway – it wasn’t like he would find me attractive after this. Not when he knew what a contaminated loser I was. “You’re being very kind.”

  “Not kind. Honest.”

  “I think I shut down after that night,” I told him. “I mean, I’d left it too late to make friends at school but I was still sort of myself. But last year, when she did that, it hurt too much and I died a bit. Ruby was the only person who knew what my family was like. Who knew the truth of what it was like to be me, and therefore why I am the way I am. She understood why I’m so quiet, so scared, so closed. And then she rejected it…she became like my dad…more interested in power than the truth.”

  The cold started to sneak in – finding gaps in my winter clothing and flooding through. I began to shiver. The only part of my body not freezing was my knee, which still had Elijah’s hand on it.

  “I’m sorry about your dad,” he said, with such honesty and intensity I almost fell off the bench. “And I’m here whenever you want to talk about it. It’s nowhere near as bad in my house, but to some degree, I do get how it feels when it’s your parent causing you pain.” He withdrew his hand to run it through his hair and my knee turned cold. “When it comes to my mum, I just feel constantly conflicted. I’m so angry at her for being such a hypocrite. But the moment I get angry, it hurts, because it’s my mum and I love her, and I want her to love me. I’ve read enough of her books to know that need isn’t something you can easily override…” He laughed even though he didn’t mean the laugh. “You’re trapped in this endless cycle of wanting more from them, and then hating them for not giving you more, and then feeling guilty and defensive of them, because you love them and don’t want to feel badly about them, so you want them to change, you want more of them…but then the circle starts again…”

  There will never be words to describe how much this landed. No adjective to adequately depict the feelings I got sitting on that freezing bench and hearing him say that. I started crying, and he teared up too.

  So much for mooching, I thought.

  “Things with your dad sound a lot worse than things with my mum,” he continued, wincing at the thought of my home. “But I do get it. Especially the fake thing. You know that my mum actually lectures in attachment theory? She’s considered an expert. She sits in labs all day, experimenting on kids to prove to society how important it is to be there for them, so everyone can give her a giant tick and a slap on the back and a well done, but at home, behind closed doors, she’s hardly there. She’s only Mum of the Year when she’s having one of her performative parties.” He took a long deep sniff. “I know why, too. It’s because I remind her of my dad. God knows what the hell he did to her to make her hardly able to look at me. She never talks about him. It. Their divorce. She’s supposed to be a psychologist, but we never go into the deep stuff. We never talk about anything that isn’t totally plastic…or wax,” he added, looking back at me and smiling.

  I smiled too, despite the huge sadness we both felt as we snuffled. I felt weirdly calm, and good, and freed. I might be a loser. I might never be perfectly carved from wax. But this…now…it was the realest moment I’d ever lived in. And the realness of it was so much more beautiful than a fake, perfect shine. The telling of the story of what it’s actually like to be you, and someone telling you their story back, and both of you realizing your story is kind of the same…it was the best few minutes of my insignificant life. And I only got to this moment because I’d told the truth about what it was like to be me. The imperfect, scary truth.

  I turned to Elijah and tried to be as nourishing and comforting to him as he had been to me. “I’m sorry about your mum,” I said, with full sincerity. “It’s a shame she doesn’t know you very well because you’re pretty awesome, Elijah.”

  In the coldness of the weak winter sun, his cheeks grew hot and red. “Well, I’d say the same for your dad too. And this Ruby girl, whoever she is. She’s missing out. It will take her too long to realize it, but she will realize it one day.”

  I rolled my eyes and he laughed.

  “So wise and yet so lacking in self-belief.”

  I could feel our moment waning and wanted to end it before it soured. I needed it to stay perfect and unblemished for ever. “This is hardly mooching,” I joked. “I don’t think mooching involves butt cheeks this cold.”

  Elijah laughed widely and followed my lead without question. “You’re right. Let’s go warm up somewhere. We’re letting the mooching side down. Lord Mooch is going to have to discipline us for crimes against Mooching and take us to the Highest Mooch Court in all of Moochland for a trial.”

  “What the actual hell are you talking about, Elijah?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got frostbite of the head. Let’s please go inside somewhere.”

  We descended into the depths of the tube network and were soon warm again. The blast of central heating mingled with the warmth of mushed-together bodies, and soon I was shrugging myself out of my coat, and taking my hat off to fluff my hair.

  “What is it?” I caught Elijah looking at me from where he was holding the pole. “Do I have hat hair?”

  “No, nothing.”

  He looked down again, smiling at the filthy floor. I added this to the hand-taking and the knee-grab and the arm-around-me on the bench – put it all together and came up with hope. But not enough hope to do or say anything about it. It would kill me to ruin the pearl of a moment we’d just shared.

  He navigated us to a part of London called the South Bank. It was right on the side of the Thames and teeming with people bundled up to enjoy the gorgeous day. Elijah pulled me to this open-air second-hand bookshop under a bridge and we searched for marginalia together. I found a battered copy of The Catcher in the Rye that was filled with pencil annotations and underlines. When I showed him, he honked with delight, and drew me in for a hug, before running over to the bookseller and buying it immediately – boring me by reading parts out loud as we walked down the river.

  It was packed. Street performers demanded applause as they tottered on stilts, food huts pumped out fragrant steam, and the hot chocolates I bought us cost a fortune. We perched on the bench, next to a grumpy-looking man sitting with his arms crossed, and slurped at our sugary drinks, staring out at the water. There were so many people here. So much life. I didn’t know a single person walking past us, whereas, back home, you couldn’t really even go get a milkshake at McDonald’s without seeing at least twelve people you’d grown up with. No one here cared about school or who got how many photos in the yearbook. I allowed myself to think about Adam for the first time in a while, and a word floated into my head.

  Perspective.

  Adam had left the suffocating smallness of our town, gone to Bristol, and met loads of people who didn’t know about our family and his school and our general lives. He’d realized how…unimportant he was, maybe, after years of Dad making him feel like a god. And that had given him the perspective to see what was really going on. Whereas Ruby had left our small town for somewhere even smaller and probably more suffocating and her perspective had got smaller, narrower. Her need to be important had been made greater by the fact that, in a tiny pond, you feel more important.

  I took a deep breath, the cold air hitting the warmth of my tongue from the hot chocolate, and felt my lungs fill to full. Maybe in time, I pondered, I could escape to a city too? I could live somewhere busy and crowded, filled with people who didn’t care about me in a way that was good for me?

  “What are you thinking?” Elijah asked.

  “How great it is to feel so insignificant right now, in this busy city.”

  He laughed. “Well, it’s funny you should say that, because we are moments away from the third stop on today’s magical mystery tour. The stop I like to call the ‘legacy’ part of the day.”

  I turned to him, confused. “Huh?”

  He smiled sheepishly, reached into the pockets of his long chequered coat, and held up two padlocks.

  “What are they for?”

  He pointed to the water’s edge behind me and I followed his finger. Chained to the railings were hundreds of locked padlocks, jammed onto every available space. It was the first time I’d noticed them.

  “What the hell?”

  I got up and wandered over to take them all in and Elijah followed. “They’re padlocks,” I said, unnecessarily, considering he had two in his pocket. I bent down to get a better look at the nearest one. A heavy-duty padlock, inscribed with the initials HT and WG and the date of only two days ago, had been clicked into place on the metal. It was one amongst a sea of padlocks, all carrying two sets of initials.

  “It’s a love lock,” Elijah explained, reaching out and looking at one. “I read about them online. People leave them on landmarks in cities all over the world.”

  “Why?”

  “They throw their key into the river afterwards apparently. It’s to leave proof of their eternal love. And it’s good content for social as well.” He rolled his eyes, smiling. “It made me think of the messages you left behind in books, and I thought you’d kind of like the idea.”

  I crouched down and examined more of the locks. Lots of them were pretty new, the date only within the last year or so. But some were at least ten years old. I wondered where those people were now, whether they were still in love, whether they ever came to visit the padlock they’d left here over a decade ago.

  My blood started sparking.

  “They’re great.”

  I felt Elijah’s smile on the wind. “I knew you’d like them. Now, I know we are not a couple in love, so I thought I’d buy two, so we can do one each. Does that break the rules, do you think?”

  When he said the words “couple in love” something lurched in my heart like it had just woken up from a lifelong nap.

  “It’s better than the rules,” I managed to get out – unsure of what that giant emotional sneeze was about. I levelled him with a determined stare to throw him off any potential scent. “We will be declaring eternal love to ourselves. Your psychologist mother would LOVE the idea.”

  Elijah laughed. “Oh my God. She really would. Careful now, otherwise she’ll get her laboratory rats to come up here with little rat padlocks and measure their serotonin levels afterwards.”

  “What a highly specific and very odd image.”

  Elijah bowed, then held out one padlock and a Sharpie pen. “Here to serve, as ever.”

  We returned to our original bench and each wrote our initials on our padlocks. It was beyond cold now, and getting darker as I wrote out PW.

  “Are you ready?” Elijah held up his finished padlock. He’d written his initials, the date, and then added, I exist.

  I held up mine, and we laughed when we realized we’d written the same thing. Two separate I exists on two separate padlocks. “Ready?”

  We returned to the railings. “Let’s stand close, so it looks like we’re just nuzzling,” Elijah said. “I think this might actually be a tiny bit illegal after all.” He enveloped me in his coat, his smell and his warmth and his Elijah-ness, and my heart sneezed again, but I closed my eyes to block it out. This moment was about me – not anyone else. I felt so much lighter after telling Elijah about Ruby and Dad, the shame of it lessening with his understanding and his hug. I turned my padlock over in my cold hand and thought about what it represented. The tiny pieces of myself I’d left scattered around my small life – scribbles in the margins of books, flickering images on a security camera, a scrawled message in the steam of a window. I was telling the world I was here, but that was all I was telling it. Maybe I needed to tell the world a little bit more than the bare minimum? I squeezed the padlock and felt the cold metal seep through my gloves. This padlock was the bit of me, deep inside, that knew my story was worth telling. That maybe it would be good for me to start telling it. If I could just find the courage…

  Elijah pulled his coat further around me. “Ready, steady, go.”

  We clicked our locks into place overlooking the river and the city lights and people who didn’t know who I was, or what it meant to be me. I pictured the years rolling past. My life changing. My hair growing. My face becoming lined. The journey of my life, constant flux, constant changing…and yet this padlock would stay put. And I wondered who that girl would be, all those years in the future, coming back to visit her padlock.

  I wanted her to be someone brave enough to tell her story. To have the lightness that comes with that.

  I exist.

  The sun was blobbing down, tucking itself under the river. I felt the winter wind lift my hair and the squeak of who I am became a roar. The voice that tells me I’m nothing faded to a soft whimper.

  I wiped my eyes with my coat sleeve, punctuating what had just happened, and turned to Elijah. He was holding up his padlock key and grinning. Always knowing when I needed time.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  And I was. Ready to become the person I felt I was blooming into.

  I nodded and, together, we chucked our keys as far as we could into the grey Thames water. They fell with unremarkable plops and were lost to the currents. I felt the hugest urge to rest my head on his shoulder – to breathe him in and take everything this meant deep into my lungs.

  And Elijah, oblivious, unwrapped his coat and acted totally normal. “Can we read old books the whole way home and share the best bits we find in the margins while eating mint Aeros please?”

  I nodded. Not disappointed. This moment had been about me, and him – not us. “Sounds perfect.”

  It was pitch-black by the time we got home, our breath frosting, my knees shaking under my jeans as we got off the train. The barriers swallowed our day tickets, and we stood facing one another.

  “Thank you.” I glanced up at the announcements board rather than him. “Today. It meant a lot.”

  “Right back at you. Seriously.”

  The way he said “seriously” made me look at him and he was staring at me. All laughter gone. A look of…intent on his face.

  “I’d better go,” I said, choking it. “I need to get my stuff from Polly’s before I head home.”

  “Me too. I’ve been pretending I don’t need to do my philosophy essay but I actually really need to do it.”

  We stood still, neither of us leaving.

  “So…”

  “So…”

  A robotic announcement bleated in the background. The barriers pinged with the noise of accepted tickets and the boosh of them flinging open. People rang taxi companies because it was too cold to walk. Still neither of us moved.

  “See you at school tomorrow?”

  Why was it always me breaking the tension, especially as I didn’t want the tension to break?

  “You will indeed.” Elijah opened his arms to hug me goodbye. The second I was enveloped in his arms, I found I couldn’t let go, even though we were in the middle of a train station. I squeezed him around his back, feeling his chest pressed to mine, his heartbeat thudding against my own. My nose was in his neck and the smell of him was like a tailor-made perfume. He hugged me tighter and I felt this feeling coming from him. An energy he’d only briefly danced with all day. He didn’t let go and neither did I. We hugged past the point of it being usual. It would take only one of us to tilt our chin and it would become a kiss. Was he thinking this too?

  …And, yet again, it got too much for me. I slackened my grip.

  “Better go,” I said.

  Elijah didn’t miss a beat. Or maybe there was no beat to miss in the first place. Maybe it was just a hug between friends and I was reading too much into it?

  “See you tomorrow.”

  He waved goodbye and walked in the direction of his house…not glancing back. And I watched him not glance back and, just like that, the hug became something less. A projection rather than a reality. A lovely memory.

  A memory that would soon be tainted because, of course, someone had seen us.

  Beware of anyone who tells you school was the best time of their life. Chances are, they are a massive psychopath. Anyone willing Year Eleven to slow down is usually the reason the rest of us are praying it will hurry up. The truth is, by Year Eleven, you’re tired of it, bored of it. You’ve had to cope with it all for so long. You want to be free.

  To some degree, things loosen. People are too tired to care. Exams take up so much mental anguish. Growth spurts settle. Braces come off. Tribes solidify. The end is in sight. We just want to get through to the other side. To drop the subjects we hate, and let go of the labels that we can’t shake.

  The labels we can’t shake because They won’t let us.

  They. The ones who don’t want any of this to go away. They. Who maybe know, on a subconscious level, that this is the best it’s going to get for them. They sharpen their fingernails and dig in, holding on tight, reminding us that it’s not over yet. It’s not over until the night of the Leavers’ Ball, where they will literally reign. Know your place till then. Don’t you dare mess it up. Don’t you dare, don’t you dare…