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other end and walk out. I’m trembling with my own daring, ducking home to change. I’m just so
sure
someone will see me and ask where I’m going, and dob me in to Mum and Dad. But I make it over there okay. Pug is out, but one of the other guys, Joe, lets me in. I go upstairs, lie on Pug’s bed and wait.
    When he gets back he looks at me all cold and alien from training. ‘What’s happened?’
    I don’t mean to whisper, but that’s how it comes out. ‘Nothing.’ Then I try again and say in a proper voice, ‘Nothing’s happened.’
    He sits down next to me. ‘You don’t look too good.’
    ‘It’s the light through the leaves. All green.’
    ‘No,
sad,
not sick. What’s eatin’ ya?’ He takes my hands.
    And I just go to pieces. Him saying ‘sad’ is what does it. Yes, I
am
sad; yes, something
is
eating me. God knows what—everything! I cry and lie and say it’s all the sneaking around.
    ‘But do you really have to be sneaky?’ says Pug, lying down next to me. ‘I mean, we’re goin’ together, aren’t we? Are we?’
    ‘I guess … I guess we are.’ It’s the first time I’ve actually said it.
    ‘I’m not seeing any other girl. Haven’t since a while before I met you; you know all about that. And you’re not sneakin’ round behind some other bloke’s back, or anything. It’s just your parents.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Well, you could tell your parents.’
    Sure I could. You’d be delighted, wouldn’t you, parents dear?
What an oaf,
you’d say to each other in your room that night. Where’d she get
him?
    ‘What, they’d reckon I wasn’t good enough for you?’ His face is right up close to mine, our noses touching. His eyes are just a blurry sparkle.
    Aagh. Yeah, they would reckon that, but that’s not the problem. It’s something about
me,
and what
I’d
reckon. Eventually I just say, ‘Yes, something like that.’
    After sparkling for a long time, he says, ‘They’d be right, you know.’ His voice is really hushed, as if he’s telling me some terrible secret.
    He’s dead serious. He’s so serious and so close that my throat shuts off and I don’t breathe for a few seconds. I nearly say
I love you
—which I vowed I’d never say to anyone again! Instead I nod and stick out my tongue like a snake’s to touch his nose. ‘Wrong side of the tracks, boy,’ I laugh. A leftover tear sneaks across into my other eye.
    ‘I am. I am,’ he insists. ‘Is that okay with you?’
    ‘What d’you mean? I was just joking, you idiot.’
    He shakes his head. ‘Yeah, well, I reckon one day you’re not gunna joke about it.’
    I move my head back to see him better. ‘What are you on about?’ I say uncomfortably.
    He watches my mouth, speaks carefully. ‘I just reckon, you know, someone like you … you’ll, you know, move on and that.’
    ‘“Like me”? What’s that?’
    ‘Well … smart enough to stay in school. There’s that. And, well, your mum and dad, both working. With office jobs and that, I mean.’
    ‘My dad’s a salesman. An insurance salesman. That’s not exactly high class, is it?’
    ‘Higher than a car mechanic, like my dad. Higher than unemployed, like me. He’d wear a suit to work, wouldn’t he?’
    ‘I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘You’re judging
me
by who my
parents
are. When it’s about you and me, here in this room.’
    ‘No.’ He lies on his back. ‘This is nice, but it’s not everything.’
    ‘It’s everything we need to think about now.’
    He stares at the festoons of dust on the ceiling rose. ‘I’m not talkin’ about now. I’m talkin’ about later on.’
    ‘Why? What’s wrong with now, that you have to go glooming on about the future?’ Says I, the one who was just crying my eyes out about
everything.
    ‘Nothing,’ he says quickly, and faces me again. ‘Nothing, except … I don’t want it to finish.’
    ‘It’s
not
finishing!’
    ‘But it will.’ Finally his eyes meet mine and stay.
    I can’t bluster any more.