‘It’s like having a five-year-old kid sister or something,’ I grumbled to Zoe in between classrooms. ‘Except one that’s a good head taller than me.’
Zoe yawned. ‘Don’t expect any sympathy from me,’ she said. ‘This is what you get for going out with the prize jerk’s brother.’
Zoe’s disapproval took some of the shine off my romantic night out. The other issue was whether I should come clean to Mum and Dad about where I was going. The funny thing was, I realised, if it had just been Mum, I’d probably have told her the truth, but Dad being there complicated things just a bit. He’d ask more questions about it than Mum, I knew. And he’d insist on dropping me off and picking me up, and he’d arrive too early, and he’d probably be grumpy with Luke and treat him like he was some kind of crime suspect. It would all just be far too embarrassing.
So I said I was going out with some made-up friend for a birthday meal. I dug out the least gothy clothes I could find, which was a bit of a struggle these days and I ran for the bus with my stomach feeling like a pot of hot, bubbling liquid.
Luke met me in town and we went to a pizza place – a budget one that was part of a chain. He had a 2-for-1 voucher for it and asked if I minded if we used it.
‘Course not. Why would I?’ I smiled at him.
‘Some girls would be ashamed,’ he said. ‘But I spend most of my money on my travel to college and I give some to my step-mum. I’m not exactly a millionaire.’
I told him I didn’t mind a bit. After a little while, I almost forgot to be nervous. Luke was easy to chat to and he made me laugh. He was studying at the sixth form college in town and after his A-levels he was hoping to go to the local university.
‘Don’t you want to go away?’ I asked. It was Zoe’s main ambition, to get into a university as far away from home as possible. She hoped for London, but she’d also already checked out other arts courses, all at the other end of the country. We’d talked about going to the same university if we could.
Luke shook his head. ‘Not really. Anyway, Kerry needs me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know how to say it, really. She just needs taking care of, sometimes, that’s all.’
He’d been looking after his little sister ever since they were much younger, he explained. If anyone picked on her, he tried to sort them out. ‘I think maybe she has a – a – syndrome or something. I told my step-mum she should get tested, for maybe dyspraxia, or –’
‘What’s that?’
‘It kind of means you can be a bit clumsy, to put it in its simplest terms. But it’s not your fault. Or else, I said, maybe it’s Asperger’s Syndrome. That’s a kind of autism.’
‘Oh, yeah. I have heard of that one. I think a boy in my last school had it. Come to think of it, he was really smart at lessons too, but...’ I tried to find a tactful way of saying that he didn’t have too many friends.
‘Anyway, my stepmum wouldn’t have it. She went mad just at the suggestion. So, I read up about it when I can and I try to think of ways to make things easier for Kerry. I couldn’t just go off and leave her though. She’s too... she’s such an easy target.’It all made me sort of wish I had a big brother, even though I’d never wanted one before. It must be great to have someone looking out for you like that. But would a big brother be able to drive away the bad dreams I had almost every night? Maybe not.
It also made me a bit more shame-faced about the way we sometimes treated Kerry. Most of the time, she acted like she didn’t notice that she got on our nerves. If one of us – usually Zoe – had a go at her or laughed at her, she didn’t fight back. She hardly ever complained about the times we deliberately left her behind, or that we did as much as we could without her, especially out of school. But maybe she noticed more than we thought. Maybe she confided it to Luke. I felt like someone was wringing my insides, twisting my gut.
In the end, I said: ‘Look, Zoe is not mad on Kerry, you know. So sometimes we don’t ask her along to things. It’s just –’
‘I know,’ Luke said. ‘Kerry doesn’t always realise what’s going on, but I do. And yeah, she can be hard work. But she can’t help it, most of the time. And you know what? At least she’s got a friend in you. That makes me feel better.’
‘Right.’ I hoped in the low light of the restaurant he couldn’t see me blush. I cast around for a way of changing the subject and asked him what bands he liked.
After that, don’t ask me where the next couple of hours disappeared to. We talked about bands: he wasn’t keen on the goth scene, but I reckoned I could get into some of the music he liked. We talked about books and films and TV. I could’ve chatted to him all night and it wouldn’t have felt too long. I couldn’t believe it when it was time to get the last bus home.
Luke walked me to the end of my street. ‘It’s been really nice,’ I
