Free Follow Me Down by Tanya Byrne

worse, there was no sign of Dominic, so when Crofton scored early, I was livid and took some photos on my phone so I had something to include with my story.
    Luckily, the shower was fierce but quick and after about fifteen minutes, it stopped. People began to close their umbrellas and that’s when I saw Dominic, the hood of his Crofton sweatshirt up as he weaved through the crowd, taking photos of the game and the mothers pacing the sidelines in their Hunter wellies, their hands balled into fists.
    When he worked his way around to me, he grinned and said, ‘Let’s go.’
    ‘Dominic!’ I stopped to grab his coat as he turned to walk away. My fingers were so cold I thought they were going to snap. ‘The match has just started.’
    ‘Don’t worry.’ He held up his camera. ‘I have everything and you know what you’re going to write, right? Chloe Poole, scholarship girl done good. What more do you need?’
    ‘The score might be useful.’
    ‘Someone will tell you that!’ he shouted as the crowd cheered.
    I looked at the pitch to see who’d scored and when I turned back to him, he was walking away. I went after him and snatched the camera out of his hands.
    ‘You’ve been taking photos for all of fifteen minutes, Dominic,’ I hissed, wiping the raindrops from the screen with the pad of my thumb. ‘You can’t have enough.’
    As I scrolled through them, I was surprised to find that he did. There were dozens of the players, some great ones of Chloe and one of a little girl in a Cheltenham sweatshirt looking forlorn as the girl in the Crofton scarf next to her cheered. I probably should have stopped there, but when I saw the other ones he’d taken, I kept going. I expected to find a series of pictures of him and Sam with a parade of pink-lipped girls holding champagne glasses, but there was one of a farmer stopping outside a newsagent to frown at a poster in the window advertising pints of milk for 40p and another of a Google logo stuck to the door of a boarded-up library, and I was impressed. Then I got to one of Scarlett and stopped. She had her eyes closed and one hand covering her face as she laughed, but I knew it was her. When I realised that her shoulders were bare and saw her dark hair spilling across the pillow under her head, I almost dropped the camera.
    The photograph was taken in the last week because Scarlett had bangs in it, but I had no idea when. She hadn’t mentioned it, yet there she was, in bed, laughing, and I felt like an idiot, not just because I didn’t know, but because she didn’t tell me. Did she think that I was going to judge her?
    Would I judge her?
    ‘OK. You have enough.’ I handed him back the camera.
    ‘This way,’ he called out to me when I started to head towards Burnham.
    ‘What way?’
    ‘I have to show you something.’ He nodded towards the car park.
    ‘I can’t just leave, Dominic. I need to go back to Burnham and get a pass—’
    ‘We’ll go through the car park,’ he interrupted. ‘No one will see.’
    ‘Forget it, Dominic. I’m cold and wet and I just want to go back to my room,’ I muttered. The rain may have stopped, but I was still shaking, my breath puffing out in front of me as I crossed my arms and told him that I’d see him on Monday.
    But before I turned away again he said, ‘Fine. But you were at that dinner last week, Adamma. Do you think this –’ he nodded at the hockey players charging across the pitch – ‘is going to be enough to get Hannah and Mr Lucas’s attention?’
    ‘What can we do, Dominic? This is what we were assigned,’ I told him with a defeated shrug. But I can’t lie, I’d wondered the same thing.
    ‘Did you know that there are only two spots on the Disraeli for sixth formers?’ I didn’t. ‘One Senior Features Writer and one Senior Photographer. I’m up against someone who won Young Photographer of the Year. This face can get me pretty much anything I want –’ he sighed theatrically – ‘but I don’t