Free Renegade by Kerry Wilkinson

the grass. ‘Exactly.
You’re
the reason.’
    I feel embarrassed because it is something I would rather not think about and we break into an uncomfortable silence.
    ‘Will you tell me a story?’ Jela asks softly.
    ‘What about?’
    ‘Tell me about Martindale.’
    After Jela returned from the King’s company, she didn’t speak to anyone. I would sit with her, telling her stories about my home and have shared memories with her I’ve never
thought about telling anyone before.
    ‘Do you remember Opie?’ I ask.
    ‘The other Imrin?’
    It shouldn’t be funny but for some reason it is. As Jela giggles to herself, I find myself joining in until we end up shushing each other, which leads to another cacophony of stifled
laughs. It’s nice to feel young.
    ‘Yes, the other Imrin,’ I concede, still smiling. ‘My earliest memory of him is from when we were about five or six. There were a bunch of us all roughly the same age in a
field on the edge of the village playing this game where someone is “it” and the rest of you have to get away. You just run and shriek and then, eventually, it either gets dark or your
mum comes over telling you it’s time to go home. I was watching “it” chase Opie but then, as they were running, Opie’s shoe came flying off. He kept running for a bit as if
he hadn’t noticed but, because it was summer and the ground was hard, there were all these little stones and he ended up hobbling around. The grass wasn’t like this but it was still
long and as he stopped and got tagged, he turned around to look for his shoe. He was trying to retrace his steps but couldn’t see it.’
    Jela picks a small white and yellow flower from the ground and pushes it into her hair. ‘Do you have daisies in Martindale?’ she asks.
    ‘Fields of them.’
    She grins. ‘I’d love to see them one day. Anyway, what did you do to him?’
    I try not to grin but the smell of the grass has brought the memory to the front of my mind. ‘I saw exactly where it was and picked it up and lobbed it in a bush when he wasn’t
looking.’
    Jela splutters in outrage. ‘Why?’
    ‘I don’t know, I was just a girl and he was this big lad who lived down the road. Do you remember being young when you really liked someone?’
    Jela grins. ‘Maybe.’
    ‘I think I knew then that he was someone I liked. You don’t know what those feelings really mean, so you end up annoying the other person instead. Our families always knew each
other. We would hang around as really young children, being naughty and getting into trouble. Our house was bigger and we’d celebrate birthdays and things like that together. Then there was
this period where I must have annoyed him every day for about five years.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘I’d pinch him on the arm and call him “Dopey”. I would move all his things around at school, just to see if he noticed.’
    ‘What happened?’
    I feel a lump in my throat thinking about him and his younger brother Imp. ‘I think I grew up. One day he was someone I was bugging, the next we would be out in the woods together,
running, climbing, hunting and talking. It was as if there was no middle ground.’
    Jela sighs wistfully, as if I am telling her something she already knows. ‘Do you remember when I told you about my friend Lola when she ate some of the tan fruit and was
paralysed?’
    ‘Of course.’
    It was her story that gave me the idea of how to escape the King. While he was temporarily crippled from the fruit juice, we ran for it.
    ‘The lad who found her was called Ayowen. He’s my Opie. It was really small where we lived and he was this lad I’d seen around the village but I was too young to know who
anyone was. One day I asked my mum who the kid playing in the mud was and she said “Ayowen”. I don’t know if it was the way she said it, but I couldn’t get it out of my head
for the rest of the day. I lay in bed that night saying it over and over: “Ay-o-wen”. After