Vivaldi in the Dark Box Set

Chapter 4-2

“Just so you know,” Charley said on Monday afternoon, “I’m not stupid.”

Monday was more or less the only day that they left school together. Charley was everything Jayden was not at school: outgoing, confident, and involved. She wasn’t afraid to join all the clubs she wanted. But then, girls didn’t get bullied for joining the dance club.

“I never said you were?” Jayden hedged. “Want to come over?” he added. “Mum took the day off to sort out the garden.” Which meant she’d broken off at lunchtime to obsessively bake, like always. For being so young, Jayden suspected Mum was secretly a 1950's housewife.

“Yes!” Charley beamed, then promptly punched him in the arm. “Come on. You’ve been distracted all week, and you won’t stop going over that stupid storyboard of—oh don’t give me that look, I’m sure it’s great, but you have to admit that you’ve been obsessing.”

He had, a little. He was supposed to have it finished by now so they could hold auditions and start costumes and learn lines—Mum’s side of the fun, not his. But Darren ranting about the virtues of Holst over Vivaldi and whether you could perform Mars (or whatever) with an orchestra comprised entirely of string instruments…it had triggered Jayden’s inspiration. And now he had to work out something to shove music in the play. He had to. What if it was what they’d been missing all along?

“What’s your point?” he asked, instead of admitting to it.

“Why?” she demanded flatly.

“I had some inspiration.”

“Exactly,” she said, squeezing his arm tightly as they walked past the bins and out of the gates. For once, the smokers ignored them. Canning wasn’t among them, and Jayden felt a twist in his gut. Something was going to happen. Canning wouldn’t take being threatened by a private school boy lying down. It was just a question of when. “So what’s inspired you?”

“Nothing.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Really.” He knew better than to tell Charley about the fact he’d spent most of Thursday afternoon trying to guess the exact shade of Darren’s eyes while paying more attention to his fractured composing than his own homework. He knew Charley. “Just out of the blue.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “So it’s nothing to do with what April told me in French?”

April Hamilton had to be the biggest gossip in the year, and Jayden suddenly, violently didn’t want to know what she had to say. And yet he asked anyway.

“April told me that Shannon told her that Ross and Jade saw you in the Costa on Bright Street with some Johnny boy on Tuesday. And I told April to tell Shannon to tell Ross and Jade that that couldn’t be right because you don’t know any of them—except Mike, obviously, but Mike doesn’t count, and anyway, Jade apparently said he was cute and I love Mike but he is so not cute, and anyway, I said she had to be wrong but now,” Charley stopped to breathe, and smiled at him with all the warmth and friendliness of a hungry shark, “I think I might have been wrong.”

“Um…”

“Were you in Costa with a Johnny boy?”

“Well, yes, but I don’t know him, I just…”

“So why were you in Costa with him?”

They had reached Attlee Road; Jayden suddenly regretted asking her over. “Because…look, he was at the theatre, okay? St. John’s string orchestra use it on Tuesdays, and…”

“Oh, my God, Jayden, this is not allowed!” Charley shrieked, loud enough that Jayden winced, and as they neared his house, the front window opened and his mother leaned out with a bemused look on her face.

“I thought I heard the two of you,” she said.

“Hi, Livvy!” Charley said cheerfully.

Mum insisted on Charley calling her Livvy. Charley and Jayden had been best friends since the first year of primary school, and anyway, “Mrs. Phillips makes me feel old!” She was anything but old. She was thirty-five, much younger than Charley’s Mum, and she looked even younger, with her long red hair and love for jeans and colourful T-shirts. When people said that they’d seen Jayden with his older sister, it was a genuine impression. And right now, leaning out of the window and rolling her eyes at the pair of them, she could have almost passed for sixteen herself.

“How was school?” she asked. Jayden shrugged; Charley launched into an enthusiastic recounting of her day, and Jayden managed to abandon her in the front garden long enough to zip upstairs, change, and return to steal the first of the promised cookies on the counter-top before either of them noticed he was gone.

Standing in the kitchen destroying the cookie, Jayden was forced to admit the other reason he didn’t want to tell Charley about Darren: her complete lack of sense. If he told her that Darren was not only cute but had put his hand on Jayden’s knee and then cracked a s*x joke, she’d march right over to The Brightside on Tuesday afternoon and tell him about Jayden’s crush. And not having a problem with gay people was completely different from being okay with one of them crushing on you. One hundred percent different. He’d run a mile, and Jayden wanted someone to talk to who didn’t hear all the things he got called at school, and didn’t care if he was gay.

Even if that someone was too attractive for Jayden’s own good.

“There you are. Ooh, chocolate chip. Now,” Charley snapped, muffled a little by the cookie. “Come on. This isn’t on. You’ve gone and had a summer romance, haven’t you? While I was in Madrid for three weeks, you went and found yourself a cute Johnny boy, didn’t you?”

“No, I did not,” Jayden said sharply. “I met him on Tuesday. I told you, he’s in the orchestra. I met him at The Brightside, and he went to get coffee, and I went with him. That’s all. I’ll probably not see him again.”

“What’s his name?”

“Why do you—Darren.”

“Darren what?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll ask Mike,” Charley said, phone already in hand. “What?” she demanded. “It’s not exactly a big school, is it? Mike’ll know him.”

Mike, another friend from primary school that they didn’t see too much of these days, had gone on to St. John’s on his grandfather’s inheritance. But Darren didn’t seem the type to be into comics and Japanese art, so Jayden doubted they did know each other. “Fine,” he said. “Please yourself. But you’re getting stupid over nothing, because it’s nothing.”

“You’re a bad liar, honey,” Charley cooed and stole another cookie. “Is he cute?”

Jayden reddened. “He’s…all right-looking, I suppose.”

“Your face says he’s gorgeous,” Charley said and mock-swooned. “You’ve got a crush! You have! Oh my God, is he gay? Tell me he’s gay. This is perfect!”

“No, he’s not gay.”

Her face fell. “Did you ask?”

“Yes,” he lied, trying to adopt Darren’s short, perfunctory tone. If it would get Charley off his back, he’d tell her anything he had to. If it meant she wouldn’t go and hunt Darren out and tell him herself, then he’d lie, and he’d do it well, for once.

“Oh,” she said, and her face crumpled into an expression of gut-wrenching pity. “Oh, Jayden, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Jayden shrugged. “I don’t even know him. It’ll pass.” At least that was true. He didn’t know Darren, beyond the wild hair and the amazing musical talent and the low tolerance for taking other people’s crap that Jayden suspected was actually ‘zero’ rather than just ‘low.’ He didn’t know him.

But he’d like to.

* * * *