Free Louder Than Words by Laura Jarratt Page A

grip. ‘Silas.’
    She raised a perfectly arched eyebrow. ‘Unusual.’
    ‘Yes.’
    At any other time, or with any other girl, it would be funny to see him so at sea, but I had a strong feeling he was swimming way too far out from shore. I called him back in my head, for all the good that would do.
    She straightened up. ‘I should go. I have stuff to do.’
    Silas’s face fell. Yup, he’d blown it. And then inspiration struck him. ‘Can I buy you a coffee? There’s a café opposite here.’
    She regarded him with an impenetrable expression. ‘No, I don’t think so, thank you. Goodbye.’ And with that she walked off and didn’t look back.
    Silas stared after her like a dog whose bone has been taken away.
    Josie reappeared by my shoulder. ‘Hmmm . . .’ she said, ‘who on earth was she?’
    I shrugged, perplexed.
    ‘Loves herself for sure,’ Josie said with a sniff.
    But you would, wouldn’t you, if you looked like her? To have that much power, to stop a boy in his tracks that way, so that even now he was staring after the place where you’d been, it was inconceivable to me. My head could not imagine inhabiting a world where that was my reality. And of course it never would be.
    I wondered how it made Lara feel. Did she even notice how far removed she was from girls like me, the ones who slip through life without ever turning a head in the street? Or were we not worthy of her attention?
    When my brother finally turned away from the spot where she’d last been, his eyes held a misty look, as if he was still not back with us, still somewhere trailing in her wake.

CHAPTER 12
    I couldn’t sleep so I pulled a hoody over my pyjamas and padded across the landing in bare feet to Silas’s room. I didn’t knock in case it woke my mother, but scratched quietly on his door instead.
    ‘Come in,’ was the whispered response.
    I closed the door softly behind me and tapped a question on his shoulder.
    He grinned briefly as he typed some mumbo-jumbo. ‘Fixing the stuff I did to get Josie’s loser to leave her alone.’ He gestured to his bed and I curled up on there, pulling a corner of the duvet over my legs. ‘But the crap I took down on that website stays taken down. Some of those comments! They were so far beyond out of order, they were in the stratosphere. I don’t get guys like that – they say they like girls, but they don’t or they wouldn’t talk about them that way. Don’t you ever go out with a boy who objectifies women that way!’
    It was touching that he thought a boy would ever ask me to go out with him but there, that was classic Silas, forgetting how few people had the confidence not to follow and go with popular opinion.
    ‘You’re wrong – someone will,’ he said. ‘And it’ll be someone special. You’re lucky – the losers will leave you alone. You won’t have to waste time with them, or with people who don’t want you for who you really are.’ He crossed over and stroked my hair. ‘Don’t regret the lack of quantity, Rafi. Don’t ever do that because quantity means nothing. Quality is everything.’
    Unaccountably I wanted to cry, in case he was right and there was hope. But no, Silas was a glass-half-full person and I just wasn’t.
    He went back to his computer, opened another screen and typed more nonsense.
    Were all boys like him really? In the darkness after midnight, would they spill the secrets of their soul into the right ear? And would those secrets be beautiful?
    I thought of Toby and snorted. No, it couldn’t be that way with all boys. Not the ones who’d rather burp in your ear and fart on you than reveal a gossamer-thin thread of sensitivity, even if they actually possessed one. I was having a very hard time believing Toby and Lloyd had those threads at all.
    I wanted to ask Silas because he might know. Maybe it was a boy secret after all and not to be revealed to girls. But even if I could have spoken, I didn’t think I could have articulated the question –