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That didn’t sound like the Galen she had known. Still, because it was her job to anticipate, Roula hazarded a guess as to what might be upsetting a tech wizard. She took a black bag from her drawer, then made her way over. And, yes, she was curious, as with bittersweet chocolate still melting on her tongue her mind wandered back to long-ago bittersweet days...
Oh, how she’d hated school when she’d first started.
Hated it!
The noise, the teasing about her red hair, the games she hadn’t been invited to join... It had been too big, too scary, and Roula had started to wet her knickers.
Mortifying.
It had first happened in assembly, in front of the entire school.
Then again in her class.
Her peers had laughed and squealed, and she’d been scolded by her teacher and sent to change. A tall lady had wrapped her wet knickers into a paper parcel and told her off again.
‘Roula Kyrios, this has to stop!’
She had wanted it to stop.
Roula had been placing the parcel in the bag on her peg, embarrassed to go back inside the classroom, when tears had threatened.
The other children would tease her more for that, Roula had known. She’d taken a breath and bunched her fists, and had been looking to the sky, fighting not to cry, when she’d heard his voice.
‘It will all be okay.’
She’d jumped, because she had thought she was in the corridor alone, but it seemed Galen Pallas had been sent out of class.
‘I don’t want to go back in,’ she’d admitted.
‘I know.’ He’d nodded. ‘But you are brave.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Well, I think you are.’
And because the cleverest boy in the school had considered her brave, it had kind of made her so. At least enough to head back into class. Enough that a couple of years later, when he had again been beaten up and his lunch tossed away, Roula had left her little group and gone over to him, offered to share her lunch.
‘No!’ Galen had said sharply, without looking up. He’d been sitting on the grass, his knees pulled up, his head down as he’d plucked at the grass. But then he had added, ‘Thank you, though.’
‘Please,’ Roula had said. ‘I hate fig jam.’ She hadn’t—it had been her complete favourite.
‘Go and join your friends or they’ll tease you for speaking to me.’
‘I don’t care if they tease me. I’m sorry for what Nemo did to you.’
Galen had looked up. His eye had been swollen, his lip bloodied, and she had known that was why he’d been looking down when she had first spoken to him.
‘It’s not just your brother.’
‘No...’
After that, every now and then, they would share her lunch.
By then Roula had always asked her mother for fig jam on her bread. Galen would help her with her maths problems and let her practise her English, which Roula was good at, though she’d struggled in art and maths.
Of course he’d got older, and so too had she. Roula had become popular, and best friends for ever with Mia, and had started to skip and hopscotch her way confidently through playtimes.
And then it had seemed as if she’d looked around one day to find that Galen was gone. He hadn’t even said goodbye....
