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“It’s salmonen croute,”Alex reassured me.
Huh. Seemed it was a deliberate error on her part. I scoffed the lot anyhow, drowning the green stuff in ketchup, then helped him with loading the dishwasher—a first time for everything before trailing him up the stairs to his room. He began stripping off.
“I need a shower, won’t be two ticks.”
He hadn’t mentioned the surprise again. Was he going to invite me into the shower with him? Now there was a surprise I could get on board with. Sadly, he didn’t.
“Do I need to hide all the pens and paper this time, Matt? God knows what my mum thought of your artwork.”
He chuckled, then sniffed his armpit in disgust. “Christ, I stink. If I’d known that I’d be playing in the FA Cup Final at lunchtime, I’d have brought a change of T-shirt to school.”
“Sorry about Brenner,” I offered, sitting on the edge of the bed. “He’s a wanker sometimes.”
Alex shrugged. “Better me than one of the weedy nerds. Although I nearly shat myself when he called me over. That’s quite a gang you’ve got together, isn’t it?”
“It’s only Brenner you need to watch out for. He’s a jealous bugger. He likes to have me solely to himself.”
Which, all said and done, was the truth. As I mentioned, we were a tight unit.
“Don’t we all?”
A second of absolute silence. The world stopped spinning as Alex stared at me, a crimson wave flooding his neck and washing over his cheeks. Then, quick as a flash, he danced out of the door.
Don’t we all?Oh, shitting hell. Was I dreaming? Did he really say that? Blood surged to my groin and, hyperventilating, I forced myself not to overreact. We were good buddies, that was all. Normal, handsome, well brought-up boys like Alex Valentine didn’t fancy other boys. They had pretty blonde girlfriends who their mothers adored, who their pervy dads coveted, who they married in order to produce more blond kids. All with fantastic white teeth. They most definitely didn’t fall in love with homosexual weirdos like me.
As the shower hummed, I distracted myself from imagining Alex soaped up and naked by nosing around his room again. Doodling was too obvious, so I rummaged through his underwear drawer, unpaired all his socks and mixed them into a jumble before turning his boxers inside out. Being a perv myself, I brought a pair to my nose and inhaled the fresh scent of lavender washing powder. After that, I busied myself by flipping all his sports team photos around so they faced the wall.
“Yesterday was the closing day for uni applications,” Alex informed me as he wandered back. Annoyingly, he’d already redressed in tracksuit bottoms and another of his endless supply of polo shirts. “Did you send yours off?”
“Oh, yeah.” I shrugged. “Ages ago.”
I lay back on the bed and he sat up next to me. Fooling people so easily was a gift. “Which course did you put as your first choice?”
“Modern history at Sheffield.” History because I was a demon at it, and Sheffield as the brochure had mentioned the night life, and a club called The Leadmill, where Pulp had performed last year. A boy could have his dreams.
Alex looked thrilled. “Oh wow! I had no idea! I’ve put med school in Nottingham as my first choice—it’s like, only forty minutes from Sheffield on the train. We could meet up!”
I spewed so many lies, I almost believed them myself. Or maybe I just wanted to believe some of them so desperately that one side of my brain had convinced the other they were true. History buffs like me knew all lies eventually ended in tears —I’d studied Nixon and Watergate—for fun, not part of the syllabus, and had had an in-depth discussion with Cartwright about it afterwards.
Talking of Cartwright, he’d collared me yesterday and pleaded I reconsider, offered to phone my parents himself, even go round and visit them. From his interest in me, I sometimes wondered if he’d deduced that I fancied boys. Whether there was a thing we all had, like an aura or a special handshake or something, that helped homosexuals recognise each other. If so, then I’d have appreciated him letting me in on the secret, because I hadn’t a fucking clue.
With practiced smoothness, I steered the conversation away from universities and my depressing lack of a glorious future.
“Come on then, show me my surprise. Better still, let’s see if I can guess. You’re getting love and hate tattooed on your knuckles?”
Alex laughed with delight, shaking his head at my teasing.
“Okay then. You’ve bought some needles and half a kilo of heroin, and you’re sharing it with me?”
“No!” He chuckled, digging me in the ribs. “Don’t move.”
Leaping off the bed, he poked around in his desk drawer before his hand emerged, brandishing a plain white envelope. “My dad bought them for me, a reward for having worked so hard at school.”
I rolled my eyes at him indulgently. “Tickets to the opera?”
He grinned at me again, with such sweet dimpling I almost wrestled him onto the bed.
“It must be the ballet, then.”
