Free Crossing the Line by Gillian Philip

spine and the nape of my neck. Swallowing, I took a step towards her. With a dismissive toss of her head she walked away, and I watched her go as I listened to my sister shriek with laughter at a dead boy who wasn’t there to laugh back.
    Aidan was dead and gone, but Allie would never let him go and there was nothing I could do to make her. I felt sick with guilt and uselessness and insomnia, because I hardly slept for two nights after the family outing. On the Monday I went hunting for Orla to apologise for my sister’s behaviour at the beach. At least, that’s the reason I gave myself. That was my excuse.
    Poor Aidan. We’re all using him still.
    Orla wasn’t hanging around the corridors with her posse; she wasn’t outside in the school grounds; eventually I found her just the other side of the wire fence, where we weren’t supposed to go (Health and Safety). Shewas sitting against a half-dead tree on the sloping bank of the burn (which was indeed unhealthy and not very safe). The same burn trickled soddenly through Allie’s fields, and it didn’t get any more appealing by the time it passed the school. Twenty metres on it was swallowed in a concrete tunnel that was like a whalemouth, jammed with a grille of rusty iron baleen. Plastic bags and fast-food boxes had caught in the hatch, tattered by the sluggish current, laced with dirty foam.
    Orla knew I was coming but she didn’t look up. Without the posse she didn’t seem quite so intimidating, so I clambered down the bank, close enough to read the book’s cover. Something by Albert Camus.
    â€˜Has that got pictures?’ I said.
    Lame, and she ignored me as I deserved.
    â€˜I saw your mum last week. She came round to ours.’
    Orla licked a black-polished fingertip and delicately turned a page.
    â€˜I’ve tried to talk to Allie,’ I said.
    Orla snapped her book shut, keeping her place with a finger. ‘What d’you want, Mister Ambassador? A box of Ferrero Rocher?’
    I looked at the book with her finger inside it. I could hardly say,
Well, no, but I was hoping for some sex.
    â€˜Eff off, Nick,’ she said, as if reading my mind. Except she didn’t say ‘Eff’ either.
    I effed off, because I couldn’t think what else to do. I hadn’t even turned away before she’d opened her bookagain and fixed her attention somewhere in the middle of the pages, where the spine was. I was watching her that closely and I knew fine she wasn’t reading. There was nothing for me to do, though. I climbed back up the bank and it felt like the final ascent of K2.
    At the summit waited a smug-looking sherpa.
    â€˜You’re going about this all wrong,’ said Shuggie, falling into step beside me.
    I took a breath to tell him to do what Orla told me, but instead I managed to splutter, ‘What?’
    â€˜I said you’re …’
    â€˜Yeah, shut up. I mean, what would you know about it?’
    â€˜Well,’ said Shuggie, ‘she’s not stupid, that Orla.’
    I wondered how hard I could hit him without actually hurting him too much. I wondered if I could get him to take his glasses off first. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
    Shuggie sighed as though he was at the limit of his tolerance. ‘Women want you to be honest, don’t they? Orla thinks you’re taking the mickey.’
    Orla having bagged the only decent quiet and private spot within a mile of the school, I was forced to sit down on the broken tarmac against the wire fence. I was also forced to endure Shuggie, because he sat right down beside me.
    â€˜Honesty,’ he said. ‘That’s what women like. Honesty.’
    â€˜And you’re the expert.’
    â€˜More than you, obviously.’ He took off his glasses and began to polish them on the hem of his shirt. That was atemptation. I could swing my arm back now and catch him in his bare face, but I knew I never