Free Skin Deep by Laura Jarratt

pardon?’
    He sighed. ‘The runes. They’re an ancient Viking alphabet. She does stuff with them, throws them around. She says they tell her things.’
    I grabbed a fresh piece of gauze and moved to the next patch of scraped skin. ‘Do they?’
    ‘No, it’s a load of hippy crap.’ He paused and I wondered if I’d hurt him again. ‘But then they did tell her not to call me Anarchy so they can’t be totally useless.’ He tilted his head back and looked up at me, faking relief, and I saw his eyes were a warm hazel. ‘Don’t you like ice skating? You said the others had gone skating.’
    ‘Oh, er, it’s OK, but . . . I had homework.’
    ‘So you’d have gone with them if you hadn’t?’ He hissed a breath in as I cleaned over the bruised shoulder blade.
    I had the oddest feeling he knew I wouldn’t so I didn’t answer and concentrated on getting some stubborn grit out of the wound.
    ‘Don’t you go to college or school?’ I asked after a while.
    ‘Never did.’
    ‘What, never?’
    ‘No. Mum did home tuition with me. She thinks schools brainwash you.’
    I changed the water in the bowl at the sink. ‘That’s weird. Oh, not your mum! But never having gone to school. I can’t imagine it. How do you make friends?’
    He shrugged, forgetting his cuts, and then looked as if he wished he hadn’t. ‘You make friends with other traveller kids when you stop up for a while. Like when we had to put the boat in dry dock for repairs and we’d go and stay with friends of Mum’s for a bit.’
    ‘Why only traveller kids? Here, put your elbow in the bowl and let it soak.’
    ‘Because other kids don’t want to know you.’ His forehead creased into a frown and his voice took on a trace of hostility. Bitter, even. He cocked his head on one side and looked at me. ‘You know when I saw you down by the canal, I thought you were being snotty with me because of that. At first.’
    I shook my head vehemently. ‘I didn’t realise you lived on the boat. I thought you were on holiday.’ I knew what he meant. I’d heard people talk about travellers: thieves, live like pigs, violent, not to be trusted. But I couldn’t match any of that up with the boy in front of me. ‘No, it wasn’t that.’
    ‘Yeah, I know.’ He smiled and I dug my nails into my palms because I knew he knew the real reason I’d snapped at him that day.
    ‘Have your family always been travellers?’ I asked, to take the attention away from me.
    He shook his head. ‘We’re not Gypsies or traditional travellers. Mum got into it after uni. She went on the road at first, then she lived in a teepee for a bit, then she got the narrowboat. She’s into New Age stuff. There were a lot of them travelling back then, and they all hung out together. But most have packed it in now. There’s less of us every year.’
    I vaguely knew what New Age travellers were, but not much more. ‘So don’t you mix with the other kinds . . . um, Gypsies and . . . ?’
    ‘Nah, different culture. They stick with their own and we stick with ours, what’s left of us.’ He didn’t seem to like talking about this much and I got a feeling, when he started looking round the kitchen, that he was trying to find a way to change the subject. ‘This is big. You must get lost in here. Ours is tiny.’
    He smiled at me again. Lindz would have said he looked hotter with the brooding face he had a minute ago, but I liked the smile better. He sat placidly as I dabbed cream on his cuts and stole sneaky looks at his profile. He didn’t have a model face like Steven Carlisle. His jaw was too narrow for that and his nose tilted up too much – not a ski jump, but a definite lift. He wasn’t as bulky as Steven either, but whatever – he was gorgeous.
    ‘You’re really good at this,’ he said.
    I wished he’d stop smiling at me because every time he did I felt like a wobbly jelly being smacked with a spoon. It was infectious – made me want to smile back at him, but I was too shy