‘So you won’t tell your friend he let you down? Because you don’t want to be a pain?’
‘I . . . I feel there’s a lot of pressure on me to be good, you know?A good daughter, a good friend, a good person. And being good sometimes means putting others in front of yourself.’
‘Sounds tiring,’ he says.
‘Don’t you care? About what others think?’
Ty shrugs. ‘To an extent, but not at a cost to myself.’ He hesitates. ‘And maybe I care too much about what Paul thinks.’
‘Who’s Paul?’
‘My dad,’ he says with a small smile. ‘Not that I call him Paul to his face.’
‘Why do you care what your dad thinks?’
He scrapes the toe of his shoe on the ground. ‘I don’t know. Because it’s so hard to impress him? Because he says he’s given us so much, we should make the most of it. I don’t know, but whatever his standard is, I don’t feel like I’m meeting it.’ His voice breaks at the end.
‘Has something happened?’ I say.
‘We’re arguing about college, whether I stay here or go back to the US.’
‘What do you want to do?’ I say.
‘I don’t want to leave Mom or Daze,’ he says. ‘So I want to stay here. And it’s not like I had a load of friends back home. I want to try from scratch here. And for all the complaining I did about Croydon’ I laugh at that ‘after my trip around this last week, I realised it’s not so bad. There’s more to it than I thought.’
‘I liked your photos,’ I say. ‘Thanks for sending them to me.’
‘Well, you’re the person who inspired me to go explore. I loved your “Hometown Glory” article, by the way. Why was your name not on it? I knew it was you because you used the same envelope I sent my photos in.’
‘I’m anonymous . . . It lets me be more myself.’
‘Anonymity is cool, you can start out like this and have a grand reveal later. And your article was really good.’
‘It’s nothing on your photos. They were really something! Iactually have no idea how you managed to make some crappy graffiti look interesting.’
‘Hey, they don’t call it street art for nothing!’
I smile at him. ‘Or maybe you’re the artist.’
He looks away, with a small smile. ‘And London itself – well, I still haven’t explored there yet. I want to try taking photos in central London. I bet it’s beautiful. When I was walking around Croydon, I was thinking there’s so much of the world I haven’t seen yet. Why would I want to go all the way back to California, to be miles away from my family? But Paul thinks it’s better if I go back home for college. It’s why I think I lashed out so much about the place. Because, y’know . . . what Paul says, normally goes.’
‘Sounds tough,’ I say. Ty’s angry persona, his walls, it’s starting to make sense a bit more now. If you feel like you’re constantly on guard at home, anyone would be like that.
‘Anyway, we were talking about your friend problem, not mine.’
‘It’s all right, there’s not much to talk about anyway.’ I shrug.
‘You know, Writer, you aren’t that bad when you’re being real.’
‘And you’re not so bad when you’re not being an arse.’
Seventeen
I want to know
What’s going on in your head
I want to comb through your mind
