and the girl next to him shrank back, but her friend only laughed and turned to Tyler.
‘Touchy isn’t he?’
‘Leave him alone, man.’ Tyler’s voice was a contented drawl. He pushed the girl none too gently in Ricky’s direction. ‘Go and give him some of what you just gave me, that’ll chill him out.’
The girl made as if to comply, moving towards Ricky with what seemed to be a sly and yet also somewhat vacant look, and Ricky felt a moment’s panic at the thought of her lunging at him, but her friend shoved her back.
‘He’s with me; you always do this. He’s not interested are you?’ She fixed Ricky with a challenging stare.
He had had enough. He got up, passed the spliff back to Tyler and shrugged his coat on.
‘You goin’?’
‘Yeah.’
Tyler shrugged. ‘More for me then,’ meaning, Ricky knew, the girls as much as the weed. He felt nauseous, looked around at the grimy room and suddenly wanted a shower. He walked off without saying goodbye to Mindy, making his way out onto the street and breathing in grateful gulps of cold air. As he started off towards home he heard heels clattering along behind him.
‘Wait!’
It was Mindy, hurrying up to him with a worried expression on her face.
‘I’m okay,’ he said, sharp enough that she stopped a few yards away looking deflated. ‘I just want to go home, all right? I'm not in the mood.’
‘Is it true, what Shauna said?’
Ricky sighed, shuffling his feet and looking down at them, then back up at her.
‘Yeah.’
Taking his confession as a positive sign she stepped towards him, close enough so they were almost touching, looking up at him with an expression of hope. She was pretty, he thought, and would be more so if she didn’t have that stupid stuff on her lips and fake eyelashes stuck awkwardly onto her eyes like deformed spiders with legs going every which way. She couldn’t be any older than him.
‘I’m not like her you know. I mean, I wouldn’t have done that.’ She waved a hand in the area of his groin.
‘I know.’ He thought about her moving his hand onto her tit, but decided not to mention it.
‘It must be hard.’ She changed the subject abruptly, leaving him wondering at first what she meant and glancing down towards the very area he thought for a second she was referring to. Then she went on, ‘Knowing the killer’s been let out. I saw your mum in the paper. Pretty, isn’t she?’
‘I suppose.’ He didn’t want to talk about his mum, not now, and when the girl moved in for another kiss it was the memory of Lucy’s face as she had berated him about the shoplifting incident yesterday that caused him to pull away.
‘It’s not you,’ he said quickly when the girl looked crushed, ‘it’s just, I don’t want to talk about that. I’m sick of hearing about it all, to be honest.’ As he said the words he understood they were true, that he would be happy to never have to think about the release of his brother’s killer and the implications of it ever again. ‘I’ll see you again, yeah? Give me your number.’
The girl looked happy again, whipping out a state of the art mobile that made Ricky embarrassed to have to pull out his mum’s old Nokia. She rattled her number off to him, frowning when Ricky paused as he went to enter her name into his contacts.
‘It’s Mitzi. Like the girl off the telly.’
‘I know that. My phone was just playing up.’
As Ricky walked away he wondered why he didn’t feel any more pleased with himself. His first kiss and a girl’s number and she was nice too, especially when she was away from that other one. But mention of his mother and Jack had annoyed him. It was everywhere he turned at the minute, he couldn’t get away from it. Stirring up old memories of playing with a smiling, red-cheeked toddler who held his arms out to Ricky with an expression of absolute adoration. He had never been jealous of Jack, not when he had been alive anyway.
He was worried too about his mum, who had been in a strange and restless mood ever since the news that Terry Prince had walked free. There was a determined light in her eyes, a tension in her body as if she were waiting for something that unnerved Ricky and made him wonder what his mother would do next. He had the feeling something was about to happen, something even bigger than him scoring with a girl, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to be around for the fall out.
When he reached his nan’s she pursed her lips at him and Ricky hoped she couldn’t smell either tobacco or weed on him, or see any difference in his eyes, but she only said, ‘You’re late. I hope you got your homework done? You know your mum said you weren’t to go out at all.’
‘Sorry, Nan.’ He hurried off up to the spare room he always slept in when he was here, sitting on the bed and taking the phone out of his pocket to have a look again at Mitzi’s number. Quickly, before he could change his mind, he texted her.
It’s Ricky, this is my number, he typed and then paused before he pressed send. He ought to put a kiss, but then kisses were for girls weren’t they? He half wished Tyler were here to ask his advice, but he wouldn’t want Tyler to know about his lack of experience with the opposite sex.
It was at least ten minutes before his phone buzzed in response and Ricky grabbed at it, eager to see if it was Mitzi. It was, but her response puzzled him.
Look on Facebook. I’ve just seen it she had typed and Ricky’s brow creased. He rarely even used Facebook, it was more for his mum’s generation, and most of his mates used Pheed or Instagram now or just messaged each other on their BlackBerrys, which unfortunately with his ancient phone wasn’t something he could join in with.
No internet here. What have you seen? he typed and this time her answer came swiftly, words that Ricky sat and stared at for a long time, a knot of dread unravelling in his gut.
There’s a page about your brother and the guy that killed him.
Ricky didn’t reply but lay back on his pillows staring at the ceiling. It was to be expected, it had already been all over the news, yet here was what he dreaded most, that it would encroach on his life, his world, even colouring his meeting Mitzi. He felt like he didn’t want to see her again at all now. Five minutes later his phone buzzed again.
Are you ok? I’m here if you want to talk.
Ricky turned his phone off.
While Ricky was navigating the uncharted waters of teenage dating, his mother had been preparing for her own date, the first in two years. Lucy was surprised at how her hand shook when she leaned over the mirror to apply her eyeliner, and at the way her stomach fizzed with excitement, making her hungry yet at the same time unable to eat. As much as she tried to tell herself that she was only doing this for the information she hoped to get out of Matt, part of her reacted to the prospect of seeing him again with an entirely different agenda.
She wondered if perhaps going to bed with him would help get rid of the jittery, on-edge feeling that had been with her constantly since the phone call. Four days. It
