fic: One Of England's Finest (2/5)
Tuesday, 3 February 2009 23:10![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
extemporallypart i.
The next day, when Brendon woke up, he felt rather happy. Matron Greta came to give him his breakfast, and he smiled at her.
"Better now?" she asked kindly.
“Much, thank you,” Brendon said, through his spoonful of porridge, and tried to show how thankful he really was by the expression on his face.
She smiled at him but didn’t say any more, and soon went away. Brendon was grateful for that.
Even though he was just as bored as he had been the previous few days, he had a good time practicing on his flute, and Matron didn’t even try to stop him – well, she wouldn’t, he played well.
Mikey, the first-former two beds over from him, said, "Is that the Moonlight Serenade?"
Brendon brightened. He’d tried to make conversation before, but Mikey had always responded to him with grunts and an unimpressed, deadpan expression. Plus, he had been recovering from a severe attack of asthma, so that didn’t help either.
"Yes, it is!" Brendon may have bounced a little. “It’s not very good, because the piece really needs its cello, but it’s passable, and the range is all right if you overlook - " He had to force himself to stop, and asked, "Do you like Glenn Miller?"
Mikey’s eyes glowed a little as he leaned forward and expounded on the virtues of Glenn Miller, and their conversation stopped only after Matron Greta announced firmly that it was time for lunch. Brendon was convinced that deadpan expressions notwithstanding, Mikey was the best first-former ever.
After lunch, Miss Asher came dropped by unexpectedly. Brendon straightened up immediately – he may not have been such an absolute fool as the others were over her, but she was intimidating nonetheless. "Urie," she said in her low drawl, and Brendon couldn’t help but lean forward.
"Yes, Miss." Something about her inspired the most ramrod posture, and the most attentive listening ear, after Master Colligan, who tended to roar if he suspected that you weren't paying attention.
"I’ve come to give you a make-up lesson for French, since you’ve missed such a lot."
They spent two hours going over what Brendon had missed, and it sounded pathetic, but Brendon was happier for it. He had no friends, no social life to speak of – but he was at public school, a place he never thought he’d land up at – and he was more than relieved to learn that the work was one thing he could keep up at. He told himself he didn’t need to prove himself to anyone, but perhaps that wasn’t quite true. He wanted to prove himself to himself, and he wanted his parents to be glad for him too.
It was a pleasant afternoon, anyway. He seemed to understand what Miss Asher taught, mostly, and she didn’t say anything, merely raised an eyebrow, when he was fidgety at first and then later felt his cold medication kicking in and became drowsy. He felt less intimidated by Miss Asher, and even began to feel that this school wasn’t quite so bad any more. For the first time in a week – since he was out in the rain and began to feel ill – the sun shone in through the infirmary window, while Matron bustled around and found the time to bring both Miss Asher and Brendon cups of tea, then later stood by to the side, sipping from her own cup and looking at the both of them fondly.
After the lesson, Miss Asher picked her notes up and left, saying "Get well soon, Brendon" in a rather kind voice. Brendon said his "Thank you" and mustered up the courage to ask if she thought he would be very behind, when he got back to class?
"There shouldn’t be a problem at all," she assured him, shutting the snaps of her leather satchel. "You’re sharp, and a hard worker."
Brendon blinked – this was perhaps more praise than he was accustomed to – but before he thought of a reply, Miss Asher had crossed the word, whispered something into Matron’s ear, and was gone. Brendon waved weakly at her retreating back.
It wasn’t two minutes after that when Jon stopped by at the infirmary. Greta brought him in with a mildly disapproving look, and said: "It’s got to be a short visit now, Walker." Jon nodded at her easily and gave her his most charming smile, which may have caused Brendon to catch his breath a little. Even when it wasn’t directed at him, it was still stunning.
Jon stopped by Brendon’s bed as he struggled to arrange himself in a sitting position.
"I meant to come visit you," he said sheepishly, "Sorry it wasn’t earlier. I had work – sixth form and things, sorry."
Brendon nodded, trying not to appear too much like an overeager puppy. People had told him he tended to do that, sometimes. "So what’ve you been up to, Jon Walker? Walker. Jon Walker. JWalk." He hoped he wasn’t babbling too much.
Jon said, "I’ve been developing my photographs. That’s another reason why I didn’t come earlier – I wanted to show you them."
"You have a camera?"
Jon smiled, an utterly genuine smile.
"I got it two years ago – I did some saving up with my birthday money, but most of it was my parents really. They live in India, and I think they feel really guilty that they aren’t able to be around more."
Brendon said, "Your parents live in India?" Jon gave a shrug. "Mine are in China! That means they’re next to each other, practically." He frowned, trying to recall the world map. "Well, sort of."
"Is that why you came to Malory Towers?"
Brendon looked down at his coverlet. "Yes," he said. "I won’t see them for another three years, until they complete their mission trip. During the holidays I go to stay with an uncle, but it’s not really the same, you know?"
He looked up, to find Jon studying him again. "Don’t worry," he said gently. "It gets easier."
"Do you visit your parents in India during vacations?"
Jon laughed. "Sometimes, yes. I lived there, until I was seven really. But the visits happened more when I was a child? Nowadays I just stay with relatives mostly." He leaned forward, saying, "Actually, I used to boast about killing tigers during my holidays in India, but Tom soon caught me out."
Brendon frowned. "Tom Conrad? How? It was the lack of a tigerskin rug, wasn’t it."
"That and the fact that I refused to talk about how tiger meat tasted, of course."
"You should have just made something up," Brendon leaned forward, waggling his eyebrows. "Tasted like chicken – like you, Conrad!"
Jon laughed. "Do you want to see my photographs?"
Brendon nodded eagerly, and Jon passed a packet over, which Brendon opened and spilled over the bedside table, before picking through the photos with an eager hand.
He got to the third photo, a picture of the farmhouse on a grass slope, before pausing. Brendon said, "Oh," and fell silent, before looking at it again. The subject matter wasn’t very interesting, perhaps – but the angle was strange, as if Jon had taken it lying down at the bottom of the slope, so that the house loomed against the foreground. If Brendon squinted, he thought he could see the washing flapping at the side of the yard.
"Do you like it?" Jon said, sounding a little hesitant.
"Do I like it?" Brendon repeated, running his finger down the photograph, even though he knew you weren’t supposed to do that, "No, I love it."
"You can have it, then," Jon waved off Brendon’s half-hearted sounds of protest. "No, really – I can always develop another copy."
Brendon beamed at him, before setting the photograph aside carefully. "Thank you, Jon Walker!" He meant for it to sound a little teasing, perhaps – but it sounded a little breathy. Brendon put that down to his cold.
Jon studied him carefully, before saying, "You’re welcome." From the angle at which he was sitting, Brendon could almost imagine that he was leaning forward. From that angle, Brendon could see his collarbones, from where his shirt gaped open at the top, tie taken off. He couldn’t stop staring at Jon’s pink lower lip, especially when his tongue darted out, to lick at it somewhat nervously.
"I think it’s time for this visit to be over, now!"
Brendon and Jon darted apart, even though they were never really close in the first place. Brendon looked around, before realizing that Matron had called that from the infirmary storeroom, where she spent many an hour taking stock of medicine.
"Did you hear me, Walker? Brendon needs to rest, or he won’t get well!" Matron Greta appeared at the doorway of the storeroom and placed her hands on her hips.
"I was just going, Matron," Jon called across the ward, giving her his most innocent smile. Matron Greta snorted, a little. "You’d better not fall sick this term, mind. Now, say goodbye to Brendon."
Jon grabbed his blazer and winked at Brendon, before disappearing out the infirmary door. Matron came over and said firmly, "You have to rest now, you’ve had a most tiring afternoon," before drawing the curtains around Brendon’s bed, leaving him to his own very confusing thoughts.
--
Things only continued to get better after Brendon left the infirmary. For one thing, he wasn’t sick, and after a week of feeling draggy and under the weather Brendon was reveling more than ever in being fully healthy, and bounded with energy. He remembered Matron’s advice, and threw himself into his schoolwork and tried not to worry too much about not having friends.
Then, he met Ryan and Spencer.
Brendon wasn’t quite sure how he’d managed to convince Ryan and Spencer to be his friends – he was pretty sure that he’d just sat down at their table one day and been so enthralled by their snarky talk and in-jokes, of which he only got roughly one-tenth of, then he’d really never left. He didn’t even feel like he had to say much – other than “Hello, I’m Brendon” that first day, and the occasional “Jolly good!” he interjected when they outdid even themselves, he couldn’t recall saying much those first few weeks. Maybe he’d worn them down with the sheer eloquence of his practiced puppy-dog eyes – Brendon really didn’t know what’d done it.
Ryan and Spencer, it seemed, were day students who did everything together despite the fact that they were in different forms – Spencer in the upper fourth, and Ryan in fifth. From what Brendon could gather from listening in on their conversations at the table, they lived together at the Smiths’ house, while on the topic of Ryan’s parents they both remained conspicuously silent. Brendon didn’t bother to ask; he wasn’t quite sure he dared to. The only time Ryan’s father had been briefly alluded to, Brendon had happened to look up and saw Spencer staring down at him with an expression that had been both even and quietly threatening.
They continued to not-object to him sitting at their table, treating him with a strange mix of bemused tolerance and practiced lack of acknowledgment that Brendon figured was all he could really ask for, really, until one day when he’d stayed behind in Geography to help Master Colligan put the maps away. That errand had soon evolved into Brendon somehow being roped into helping him clean his study, pick a packet of papers up from the Headmaster and making a cup of tea for him. No wonder the boys were always so eager to run off after Geography, he thought.
All in all, Brendon was half an hour late when he finally sat down at the lunch table.
"So, where were you?" Spencer asked casually, as though he’d addressed more than five lines to Brendon in the history of their acquaintance.
Brendon jumped, and nearly spilt soup down himself, and winced. Gauche, gauche, gauche, he thought. (Gauche was a word Ryan liked to use a lot.) “I was helping Master Colligan,” he said thickly, before swallowing his mouthful of soup.
"Ah," Spencer said, as though that was all the explanation he needed. And it probably was.
Brendon couldn’t help it; he leaned forward and batted his eyelashes. "Why, did you miss me?"
Ryan and Spencer looked at each other before one of them barked out a sharp laugh, and Brendon let out the breath he hadn’t known he was holding. "Yes," Ryan said, in his nicest monotone (at least, Brendon was pretty sure it was a non-vicious one), "That’s it exactly."
Brendon beamed and said, "I’m pretty unmissable," before diving down into his soup again, reasonably certain that the tops of his cheeks were pink from relief.
--
The next day, Brendon was eating lunch when Jon Walker passed by with a few of his friends. Brendon brightened up and waved to him, while Jon waved back and smiled. When Brendon looked away, he saw Ryan and Spencer looking at him incredulously.
"What?" Brendon said self-consciously. He looked down at his shirt, and was reassured that there were no gravy stains. No noticeable ones, that was.
"Brendon," Spencer said, with the air of breaking unwanted news to one, "Do you know who that was?"
"Yeah, that’s Jon Walker. He’s a sixth-former? He’s the coolest person on earth!"
"No one is cooler than us," Ryan said flatly.
"We know who Jon Walker is, Brendon," Spencer added.
"That’s… good?" Brendon was confused; he really didn’t know what Spencer and Ryan were getting at. "Everyone should know who Jon Walker is."
Ryan and Spencer looked at each other despairingly. Then Ryan beckoned Brendon to lean in closer, and started educating him. Apparently, Jon Walker was dangerous! He ran with a group called the Starship, run by Gabe Saporta – Brendon thought he knew which one of the boys that was - who were suspected of not only bullying small boys and terrorizing the village shopkeepers (“the real kind of terrorizing,” Ryan said firmly, when Brendon ventured that that was what all the boys did anyway), and even possibly smuggling sandwiches into the local prison to a man called the Cobra. The Cobra was supposed to be the leader of the gang - which did all things illegal and dangerous, as far as Ryan and Spencer were concerned.
"Excuse me," Brendon said as politely as he could, while making it clear he thought he was speaking to a couple of lunatics, "How could this Cobra be their leader if he’s in prison?"
Ryan leaned forward even further. Brendon thought he resembled a mildly deranged raccoon, what with the eyeliner smudged around his eyes.
"That’s the point, Brendon! We don’t know anything. Apparently Saporta was his second-in-command before the Cobra got caught, and now he’s holding down the fort. We don’t know when the Cobra’s going to be released, but let me tell you, you probably don’t want to get caught in the middle of that turf war as a gang moll –"
Brendon decided it was possibly safer to just keep nodding, and avoid eye contact. Ryan had clearly been watching too many mafia-themed movies. Brendon’s maddening air of patience only served to enrage Ryan further.
"Don’t you get it, you stupid little boy, we’re trying to save your life!"
Spencer put a restraining arm around Ryan and leaned forward.
"Even if you don’t believe us, Brendon, you have to admit that Walker and his sort aren’t exactly… our sort." He said that with a certain distaste. "They drink and smoke, Brendon. We don’t want you falling in with that kind." Then, as a last Parthian shot before leaning back again, he said, "What would your mother say?"
True, Brendon thought. However, even if he hung out with a bunch of completely wild and immoral people, Jon himself was nice. This sort of thing happened sometimes, he knew. For all he knew, it was happening now. Perfectly sane Brendon sat down to lunch with Ryan and Spencer one crazy day, and before he knew it, it was all over! Entrapped, he thought wryly, into friendship.
Over the lunch room, Brendon saw Gabe make a strange, vaguely vulgar sign, and everyone else laughed and flipped the same sign. Jon, sitting next to Saporta, caught Brendon’s eye and winked at him. Brendon smiled back.
"… so yes, they’re dangerous and you musn’t go near them, not even Jon Walker, all right? You've got to listen to us, Brendon, if you want to make it through Malory Towers in one piece."
"All right," Brendon said, still staring over Ryan and Spencer’s shoulders, "I’m listening."
He wasn’t, not really.
--
The next day, Brendon was excited to receive a letter with a package from his Uncle Frank, who was technically his guardian when the Uries were away. Immediately, he ripped the package apart. Five pounds, and a chocolate cake! He was giddy with joy when an alarming thought occurred to him. Uncle Frank hadn’t made the cake himself, had he? Sometimes he got these alarming notions. Brendon sniffed the cake and decided it was fine. Carrying on, he then started to open the letter:
Dear Brendon,
I hope you are well and haven’t caught a cold yet, colds are especially annoying at this time of the year. Anyway I felt quite guilty because I haven’t done much as a guardian, and also because I am too young to provide much guidance anyway, I feel. So I decided to give you a treat, and feed you nonsense! Here, have some money and cake. Cake is always good, I feel. I hope you are having fun at boarding school. Please don’t study too hard, I would be ashamed to have a nephew like that.
Uncle Frank
P.S. You could have a midnight feast? I don’t know what boys at public school get up to, if you ask me it’s all overrated.
Brendon grinned, and grinned. A midnight feast was the best idea ever! Even though Ryan and Spencer couldn’t attend (the idea of being day students was just stupid), he could invite the rest of the form even though he didn’t know them very well. And perhaps, just perhaps, he would get to know the rest of them.
--
"I think it’s a stupid idea," Ryan said at lunch.
Spencer elbowed him. "Ryan," he hissed.
Ryan was unrepentant. "I still think it’s stupid."
Spencer ignored him and turned to Brendon. "A midnight feast sounds good, Brendon. I just – don’t overdo it, all right?" If Brendon hadn’t guessed, he’d have thought Spencer looked slightly worried.
"Ryan’s just jealous he won’t be able to attend," Brendon said gleefully, glad that Spencer at least approved of his plan, "Aren’t you, Ryan?"
Ryan just snorted. Brendon spent the rest of lunch telling them all about the food he’d bought from the village.
--
Brendon woke up feeling excited.
It was midnight when his alarm clock rang, and he opened his eyes. A small part of him sleepily thought that it must have been his first day at school – he remembered the same sensation of sheer excitement before he realized that it was his first midnight feast. It was dark – he hadn’t realized quite how dark midnight was supposed to be – and the long white curtains at the window were billowing restlessly. Brendon fancied that he could hear the sea lapping softly away at the North Tower.
"For God’s sake, Urie," one of the boys whined, "shut that thing up."
Brendon sat up, and dutifully stopped his alarm clock from ringing. No one around him seemed to be stirring. "Guys!" he said loudly. "It’s time for my midnight feast!"
Brendon thought he heard a faint moan from two beds across, then a slight huffing sound and the slight shuffle of a pillow being pulled over one’s head. All over the dorm, no one showed any signs of stirring.
Brendon’s smile soon slipped off his face. He knew he wasn’t very popular, but he thought everyone liked midnight feasts. He bit his lip, feeling very small in the regulation pyjamas that his mother had insisted on buying two sizes too large for him – “you’ll grow, Brendon” she’d said, although Brendon hadn’t been much convinced – and did nothing for a full half minute but swing his legs, perched on the end of the bed, feeling dejected.
He supposed no one had been particularly enthusiastic about the midnight feast, when he’d told them about it – they hadn’t agreed to go, but they hadn’t said no either, except for that one really mean fifth-former who looked angry all the time, and Brendon’d only asked him because he was together with his brother at the time, who was in Brendon’s dorm. He’d thought it was all right, because midnight feasts were supposed to be casual things – they’d probably turn up anyway, right? It wasn’t as if they had anything better to do.
Brendon’d really thought they’d want to come. He felt a little like crying, but didn’t. Instead he took a deep breath and stood up, thinking that he might as well keep the food he’d left in the common room in preparation for the midnight feast. The only thing worse than holding a midnight feast which no one seemed inclined to turn up to was the food for it being stolen the next day as well.
Brendon trudged down the stairs to the common room and switched on the light, rolling up his pyjama sleeves as he did so. He then began the arduous task of locating all the food he’d hidden – some quite too well, perhaps! – in the room. Eventually he found the chocolate cake in the food cupboard behind a quite unpalatable currant cake, from some unmarried aunt or other, and the fizzy orange down the huge sofa. It’d leaked only a little, which Brendon counted as a success.
As he was bending down – he was quite sure he’d stored something underneath the sofa – he heard someone come in. Brendon jumped and extracted his head from underneath the sofa, hoping it wouldn’t be a teacher or a prefect. Typical, he thought to himself fiercely, I get caught for holding a midnight feast no one turned up for.
He turned around. It was Jon Walker.
“Brendon?” Jon said, looking confused. Brendon couldn’t help noticing the way Jon’s pyjamas stretched across his chest, and became only more conscious of his own baggy pyjamas, and the way they’d managed to accrue the unlikeliest of stains despite being only a month old. "What are you doing here?"
Any relief Brendon might have felt dropped away. "I, uh," he said. "We, I mean, I’m having a midnight feast? Only no one wanted to come. I think everyone was just too tired after the lacrosse match today."
Brendon knew Jon knew it was a lie, and looked down. There was nothing everyone liked better than midnight feasts after victorious lacrosse matches. "So, I’m clearing up. Don’t want the food to be found tomorrow!" He laughed a little, but soon stopped when he noticed how it seemed to reverberate in the almost empty common room.
He looked up to see Jon studying him intently with his brown eyes. "Hey," Jon said, "if you’re still keen on having that midnight feast, I’ll bring my friends. If you don’t mind."
Brendon was startled. Jon’s friends were all older boys – Jon, of course, was a sixth former himself, but Brendon tended to forget that – and cooler than anyone Brendon ever hung out (or attempted to hang out with). They were the kind of people who tended to get themselves talked about, from the things they were reading or the music they were listening to to the escapades they got themselves into with Miss Archer’s Ladies’ Academy.
"Wow, sure!" Brendon said, and dropped his bottle of orange fizzy. "Um – oops –" he said, as he scrambled to rescue it. At least he hadn’t broken the bottle; it merely rolled away harmlessly on the carpeted floor. He dropped to his knees to get to it, nearly squashing the cake in the process. He felt himself blushing, then cursed himself for being such an accident-prone idiot in front of Jon Walker.
Jon laughed, but it didn’t seem to be a mean laugh. (Brendon had become an expert at identifying these things.) "Tell you what," he said, "you tell me where the rest of the foodstuff is, and I’ll go get it and we can head to the sixth-formers’ common room. Then we can party without waking up this lot."
"Thanks!" Brendon said gratefully, standing up. He piled the food onto the sofa and said, "The sausages are in under that table, I think, and the ginger beer should be down this sofa somewhere – and I think I’ve got the tinned pineapple, it’s just here –" he bent down and got them from his coat, hanging on the rack, suddenly feeling rather young and ridiculous.
Jon laughed. "Tell you what, Brendon," he said, "Next time just put it all in one place."
"I don’t have a hiding place big enough for all this stuff!" Brendon protested woefully. Jon smiled. "Well, point." They gathered as much of the food as they could manage in their arms, and set down to the sixth-formers’ common room.
Brendon had to hurry to keep along with Jon, even though Jon was carrying most of the food. "I even have bread-and-butter in my dressing-robe pocket!" he said proudly, hoping it hadn't become too squashed perhaps.
Jon looked bemused. "Whatever for?" he asked.
"I don’t know," Brendon confessed. "I just thought it was something you had to have at midnight feasts."
Jon considered it. "Well, I suppose it goes with the sardines. You don’t want sardines without bread and butter. Nasty," he said solemnly.
Brendon laughed and felt unexpectedly light and happy. He could have prolonged this moment forever.
part iii.
The next day, when Brendon woke up, he felt rather happy. Matron Greta came to give him his breakfast, and he smiled at her.
"Better now?" she asked kindly.
“Much, thank you,” Brendon said, through his spoonful of porridge, and tried to show how thankful he really was by the expression on his face.
She smiled at him but didn’t say any more, and soon went away. Brendon was grateful for that.
Even though he was just as bored as he had been the previous few days, he had a good time practicing on his flute, and Matron didn’t even try to stop him – well, she wouldn’t, he played well.
Mikey, the first-former two beds over from him, said, "Is that the Moonlight Serenade?"
Brendon brightened. He’d tried to make conversation before, but Mikey had always responded to him with grunts and an unimpressed, deadpan expression. Plus, he had been recovering from a severe attack of asthma, so that didn’t help either.
"Yes, it is!" Brendon may have bounced a little. “It’s not very good, because the piece really needs its cello, but it’s passable, and the range is all right if you overlook - " He had to force himself to stop, and asked, "Do you like Glenn Miller?"
Mikey’s eyes glowed a little as he leaned forward and expounded on the virtues of Glenn Miller, and their conversation stopped only after Matron Greta announced firmly that it was time for lunch. Brendon was convinced that deadpan expressions notwithstanding, Mikey was the best first-former ever.
After lunch, Miss Asher came dropped by unexpectedly. Brendon straightened up immediately – he may not have been such an absolute fool as the others were over her, but she was intimidating nonetheless. "Urie," she said in her low drawl, and Brendon couldn’t help but lean forward.
"Yes, Miss." Something about her inspired the most ramrod posture, and the most attentive listening ear, after Master Colligan, who tended to roar if he suspected that you weren't paying attention.
"I’ve come to give you a make-up lesson for French, since you’ve missed such a lot."
They spent two hours going over what Brendon had missed, and it sounded pathetic, but Brendon was happier for it. He had no friends, no social life to speak of – but he was at public school, a place he never thought he’d land up at – and he was more than relieved to learn that the work was one thing he could keep up at. He told himself he didn’t need to prove himself to anyone, but perhaps that wasn’t quite true. He wanted to prove himself to himself, and he wanted his parents to be glad for him too.
It was a pleasant afternoon, anyway. He seemed to understand what Miss Asher taught, mostly, and she didn’t say anything, merely raised an eyebrow, when he was fidgety at first and then later felt his cold medication kicking in and became drowsy. He felt less intimidated by Miss Asher, and even began to feel that this school wasn’t quite so bad any more. For the first time in a week – since he was out in the rain and began to feel ill – the sun shone in through the infirmary window, while Matron bustled around and found the time to bring both Miss Asher and Brendon cups of tea, then later stood by to the side, sipping from her own cup and looking at the both of them fondly.
After the lesson, Miss Asher picked her notes up and left, saying "Get well soon, Brendon" in a rather kind voice. Brendon said his "Thank you" and mustered up the courage to ask if she thought he would be very behind, when he got back to class?
"There shouldn’t be a problem at all," she assured him, shutting the snaps of her leather satchel. "You’re sharp, and a hard worker."
Brendon blinked – this was perhaps more praise than he was accustomed to – but before he thought of a reply, Miss Asher had crossed the word, whispered something into Matron’s ear, and was gone. Brendon waved weakly at her retreating back.
It wasn’t two minutes after that when Jon stopped by at the infirmary. Greta brought him in with a mildly disapproving look, and said: "It’s got to be a short visit now, Walker." Jon nodded at her easily and gave her his most charming smile, which may have caused Brendon to catch his breath a little. Even when it wasn’t directed at him, it was still stunning.
Jon stopped by Brendon’s bed as he struggled to arrange himself in a sitting position.
"I meant to come visit you," he said sheepishly, "Sorry it wasn’t earlier. I had work – sixth form and things, sorry."
Brendon nodded, trying not to appear too much like an overeager puppy. People had told him he tended to do that, sometimes. "So what’ve you been up to, Jon Walker? Walker. Jon Walker. JWalk." He hoped he wasn’t babbling too much.
Jon said, "I’ve been developing my photographs. That’s another reason why I didn’t come earlier – I wanted to show you them."
"You have a camera?"
Jon smiled, an utterly genuine smile.
"I got it two years ago – I did some saving up with my birthday money, but most of it was my parents really. They live in India, and I think they feel really guilty that they aren’t able to be around more."
Brendon said, "Your parents live in India?" Jon gave a shrug. "Mine are in China! That means they’re next to each other, practically." He frowned, trying to recall the world map. "Well, sort of."
"Is that why you came to Malory Towers?"
Brendon looked down at his coverlet. "Yes," he said. "I won’t see them for another three years, until they complete their mission trip. During the holidays I go to stay with an uncle, but it’s not really the same, you know?"
He looked up, to find Jon studying him again. "Don’t worry," he said gently. "It gets easier."
"Do you visit your parents in India during vacations?"
Jon laughed. "Sometimes, yes. I lived there, until I was seven really. But the visits happened more when I was a child? Nowadays I just stay with relatives mostly." He leaned forward, saying, "Actually, I used to boast about killing tigers during my holidays in India, but Tom soon caught me out."
Brendon frowned. "Tom Conrad? How? It was the lack of a tigerskin rug, wasn’t it."
"That and the fact that I refused to talk about how tiger meat tasted, of course."
"You should have just made something up," Brendon leaned forward, waggling his eyebrows. "Tasted like chicken – like you, Conrad!"
Jon laughed. "Do you want to see my photographs?"
Brendon nodded eagerly, and Jon passed a packet over, which Brendon opened and spilled over the bedside table, before picking through the photos with an eager hand.
He got to the third photo, a picture of the farmhouse on a grass slope, before pausing. Brendon said, "Oh," and fell silent, before looking at it again. The subject matter wasn’t very interesting, perhaps – but the angle was strange, as if Jon had taken it lying down at the bottom of the slope, so that the house loomed against the foreground. If Brendon squinted, he thought he could see the washing flapping at the side of the yard.
"Do you like it?" Jon said, sounding a little hesitant.
"Do I like it?" Brendon repeated, running his finger down the photograph, even though he knew you weren’t supposed to do that, "No, I love it."
"You can have it, then," Jon waved off Brendon’s half-hearted sounds of protest. "No, really – I can always develop another copy."
Brendon beamed at him, before setting the photograph aside carefully. "Thank you, Jon Walker!" He meant for it to sound a little teasing, perhaps – but it sounded a little breathy. Brendon put that down to his cold.
Jon studied him carefully, before saying, "You’re welcome." From the angle at which he was sitting, Brendon could almost imagine that he was leaning forward. From that angle, Brendon could see his collarbones, from where his shirt gaped open at the top, tie taken off. He couldn’t stop staring at Jon’s pink lower lip, especially when his tongue darted out, to lick at it somewhat nervously.
"I think it’s time for this visit to be over, now!"
Brendon and Jon darted apart, even though they were never really close in the first place. Brendon looked around, before realizing that Matron had called that from the infirmary storeroom, where she spent many an hour taking stock of medicine.
"Did you hear me, Walker? Brendon needs to rest, or he won’t get well!" Matron Greta appeared at the doorway of the storeroom and placed her hands on her hips.
"I was just going, Matron," Jon called across the ward, giving her his most innocent smile. Matron Greta snorted, a little. "You’d better not fall sick this term, mind. Now, say goodbye to Brendon."
Jon grabbed his blazer and winked at Brendon, before disappearing out the infirmary door. Matron came over and said firmly, "You have to rest now, you’ve had a most tiring afternoon," before drawing the curtains around Brendon’s bed, leaving him to his own very confusing thoughts.
--
Things only continued to get better after Brendon left the infirmary. For one thing, he wasn’t sick, and after a week of feeling draggy and under the weather Brendon was reveling more than ever in being fully healthy, and bounded with energy. He remembered Matron’s advice, and threw himself into his schoolwork and tried not to worry too much about not having friends.
Then, he met Ryan and Spencer.
Brendon wasn’t quite sure how he’d managed to convince Ryan and Spencer to be his friends – he was pretty sure that he’d just sat down at their table one day and been so enthralled by their snarky talk and in-jokes, of which he only got roughly one-tenth of, then he’d really never left. He didn’t even feel like he had to say much – other than “Hello, I’m Brendon” that first day, and the occasional “Jolly good!” he interjected when they outdid even themselves, he couldn’t recall saying much those first few weeks. Maybe he’d worn them down with the sheer eloquence of his practiced puppy-dog eyes – Brendon really didn’t know what’d done it.
Ryan and Spencer, it seemed, were day students who did everything together despite the fact that they were in different forms – Spencer in the upper fourth, and Ryan in fifth. From what Brendon could gather from listening in on their conversations at the table, they lived together at the Smiths’ house, while on the topic of Ryan’s parents they both remained conspicuously silent. Brendon didn’t bother to ask; he wasn’t quite sure he dared to. The only time Ryan’s father had been briefly alluded to, Brendon had happened to look up and saw Spencer staring down at him with an expression that had been both even and quietly threatening.
They continued to not-object to him sitting at their table, treating him with a strange mix of bemused tolerance and practiced lack of acknowledgment that Brendon figured was all he could really ask for, really, until one day when he’d stayed behind in Geography to help Master Colligan put the maps away. That errand had soon evolved into Brendon somehow being roped into helping him clean his study, pick a packet of papers up from the Headmaster and making a cup of tea for him. No wonder the boys were always so eager to run off after Geography, he thought.
All in all, Brendon was half an hour late when he finally sat down at the lunch table.
"So, where were you?" Spencer asked casually, as though he’d addressed more than five lines to Brendon in the history of their acquaintance.
Brendon jumped, and nearly spilt soup down himself, and winced. Gauche, gauche, gauche, he thought. (Gauche was a word Ryan liked to use a lot.) “I was helping Master Colligan,” he said thickly, before swallowing his mouthful of soup.
"Ah," Spencer said, as though that was all the explanation he needed. And it probably was.
Brendon couldn’t help it; he leaned forward and batted his eyelashes. "Why, did you miss me?"
Ryan and Spencer looked at each other before one of them barked out a sharp laugh, and Brendon let out the breath he hadn’t known he was holding. "Yes," Ryan said, in his nicest monotone (at least, Brendon was pretty sure it was a non-vicious one), "That’s it exactly."
Brendon beamed and said, "I’m pretty unmissable," before diving down into his soup again, reasonably certain that the tops of his cheeks were pink from relief.
--
The next day, Brendon was eating lunch when Jon Walker passed by with a few of his friends. Brendon brightened up and waved to him, while Jon waved back and smiled. When Brendon looked away, he saw Ryan and Spencer looking at him incredulously.
"What?" Brendon said self-consciously. He looked down at his shirt, and was reassured that there were no gravy stains. No noticeable ones, that was.
"Brendon," Spencer said, with the air of breaking unwanted news to one, "Do you know who that was?"
"Yeah, that’s Jon Walker. He’s a sixth-former? He’s the coolest person on earth!"
"No one is cooler than us," Ryan said flatly.
"We know who Jon Walker is, Brendon," Spencer added.
"That’s… good?" Brendon was confused; he really didn’t know what Spencer and Ryan were getting at. "Everyone should know who Jon Walker is."
Ryan and Spencer looked at each other despairingly. Then Ryan beckoned Brendon to lean in closer, and started educating him. Apparently, Jon Walker was dangerous! He ran with a group called the Starship, run by Gabe Saporta – Brendon thought he knew which one of the boys that was - who were suspected of not only bullying small boys and terrorizing the village shopkeepers (“the real kind of terrorizing,” Ryan said firmly, when Brendon ventured that that was what all the boys did anyway), and even possibly smuggling sandwiches into the local prison to a man called the Cobra. The Cobra was supposed to be the leader of the gang - which did all things illegal and dangerous, as far as Ryan and Spencer were concerned.
"Excuse me," Brendon said as politely as he could, while making it clear he thought he was speaking to a couple of lunatics, "How could this Cobra be their leader if he’s in prison?"
Ryan leaned forward even further. Brendon thought he resembled a mildly deranged raccoon, what with the eyeliner smudged around his eyes.
"That’s the point, Brendon! We don’t know anything. Apparently Saporta was his second-in-command before the Cobra got caught, and now he’s holding down the fort. We don’t know when the Cobra’s going to be released, but let me tell you, you probably don’t want to get caught in the middle of that turf war as a gang moll –"
Brendon decided it was possibly safer to just keep nodding, and avoid eye contact. Ryan had clearly been watching too many mafia-themed movies. Brendon’s maddening air of patience only served to enrage Ryan further.
"Don’t you get it, you stupid little boy, we’re trying to save your life!"
Spencer put a restraining arm around Ryan and leaned forward.
"Even if you don’t believe us, Brendon, you have to admit that Walker and his sort aren’t exactly… our sort." He said that with a certain distaste. "They drink and smoke, Brendon. We don’t want you falling in with that kind." Then, as a last Parthian shot before leaning back again, he said, "What would your mother say?"
True, Brendon thought. However, even if he hung out with a bunch of completely wild and immoral people, Jon himself was nice. This sort of thing happened sometimes, he knew. For all he knew, it was happening now. Perfectly sane Brendon sat down to lunch with Ryan and Spencer one crazy day, and before he knew it, it was all over! Entrapped, he thought wryly, into friendship.
Over the lunch room, Brendon saw Gabe make a strange, vaguely vulgar sign, and everyone else laughed and flipped the same sign. Jon, sitting next to Saporta, caught Brendon’s eye and winked at him. Brendon smiled back.
"… so yes, they’re dangerous and you musn’t go near them, not even Jon Walker, all right? You've got to listen to us, Brendon, if you want to make it through Malory Towers in one piece."
"All right," Brendon said, still staring over Ryan and Spencer’s shoulders, "I’m listening."
He wasn’t, not really.
--
The next day, Brendon was excited to receive a letter with a package from his Uncle Frank, who was technically his guardian when the Uries were away. Immediately, he ripped the package apart. Five pounds, and a chocolate cake! He was giddy with joy when an alarming thought occurred to him. Uncle Frank hadn’t made the cake himself, had he? Sometimes he got these alarming notions. Brendon sniffed the cake and decided it was fine. Carrying on, he then started to open the letter:
Dear Brendon,
I hope you are well and haven’t caught a cold yet, colds are especially annoying at this time of the year. Anyway I felt quite guilty because I haven’t done much as a guardian, and also because I am too young to provide much guidance anyway, I feel. So I decided to give you a treat, and feed you nonsense! Here, have some money and cake. Cake is always good, I feel. I hope you are having fun at boarding school. Please don’t study too hard, I would be ashamed to have a nephew like that.
Uncle Frank
P.S. You could have a midnight feast? I don’t know what boys at public school get up to, if you ask me it’s all overrated.
Brendon grinned, and grinned. A midnight feast was the best idea ever! Even though Ryan and Spencer couldn’t attend (the idea of being day students was just stupid), he could invite the rest of the form even though he didn’t know them very well. And perhaps, just perhaps, he would get to know the rest of them.
--
"I think it’s a stupid idea," Ryan said at lunch.
Spencer elbowed him. "Ryan," he hissed.
Ryan was unrepentant. "I still think it’s stupid."
Spencer ignored him and turned to Brendon. "A midnight feast sounds good, Brendon. I just – don’t overdo it, all right?" If Brendon hadn’t guessed, he’d have thought Spencer looked slightly worried.
"Ryan’s just jealous he won’t be able to attend," Brendon said gleefully, glad that Spencer at least approved of his plan, "Aren’t you, Ryan?"
Ryan just snorted. Brendon spent the rest of lunch telling them all about the food he’d bought from the village.
--
Brendon woke up feeling excited.
It was midnight when his alarm clock rang, and he opened his eyes. A small part of him sleepily thought that it must have been his first day at school – he remembered the same sensation of sheer excitement before he realized that it was his first midnight feast. It was dark – he hadn’t realized quite how dark midnight was supposed to be – and the long white curtains at the window were billowing restlessly. Brendon fancied that he could hear the sea lapping softly away at the North Tower.
"For God’s sake, Urie," one of the boys whined, "shut that thing up."
Brendon sat up, and dutifully stopped his alarm clock from ringing. No one around him seemed to be stirring. "Guys!" he said loudly. "It’s time for my midnight feast!"
Brendon thought he heard a faint moan from two beds across, then a slight huffing sound and the slight shuffle of a pillow being pulled over one’s head. All over the dorm, no one showed any signs of stirring.
Brendon’s smile soon slipped off his face. He knew he wasn’t very popular, but he thought everyone liked midnight feasts. He bit his lip, feeling very small in the regulation pyjamas that his mother had insisted on buying two sizes too large for him – “you’ll grow, Brendon” she’d said, although Brendon hadn’t been much convinced – and did nothing for a full half minute but swing his legs, perched on the end of the bed, feeling dejected.
He supposed no one had been particularly enthusiastic about the midnight feast, when he’d told them about it – they hadn’t agreed to go, but they hadn’t said no either, except for that one really mean fifth-former who looked angry all the time, and Brendon’d only asked him because he was together with his brother at the time, who was in Brendon’s dorm. He’d thought it was all right, because midnight feasts were supposed to be casual things – they’d probably turn up anyway, right? It wasn’t as if they had anything better to do.
Brendon’d really thought they’d want to come. He felt a little like crying, but didn’t. Instead he took a deep breath and stood up, thinking that he might as well keep the food he’d left in the common room in preparation for the midnight feast. The only thing worse than holding a midnight feast which no one seemed inclined to turn up to was the food for it being stolen the next day as well.
Brendon trudged down the stairs to the common room and switched on the light, rolling up his pyjama sleeves as he did so. He then began the arduous task of locating all the food he’d hidden – some quite too well, perhaps! – in the room. Eventually he found the chocolate cake in the food cupboard behind a quite unpalatable currant cake, from some unmarried aunt or other, and the fizzy orange down the huge sofa. It’d leaked only a little, which Brendon counted as a success.
As he was bending down – he was quite sure he’d stored something underneath the sofa – he heard someone come in. Brendon jumped and extracted his head from underneath the sofa, hoping it wouldn’t be a teacher or a prefect. Typical, he thought to himself fiercely, I get caught for holding a midnight feast no one turned up for.
He turned around. It was Jon Walker.
“Brendon?” Jon said, looking confused. Brendon couldn’t help noticing the way Jon’s pyjamas stretched across his chest, and became only more conscious of his own baggy pyjamas, and the way they’d managed to accrue the unlikeliest of stains despite being only a month old. "What are you doing here?"
Any relief Brendon might have felt dropped away. "I, uh," he said. "We, I mean, I’m having a midnight feast? Only no one wanted to come. I think everyone was just too tired after the lacrosse match today."
Brendon knew Jon knew it was a lie, and looked down. There was nothing everyone liked better than midnight feasts after victorious lacrosse matches. "So, I’m clearing up. Don’t want the food to be found tomorrow!" He laughed a little, but soon stopped when he noticed how it seemed to reverberate in the almost empty common room.
He looked up to see Jon studying him intently with his brown eyes. "Hey," Jon said, "if you’re still keen on having that midnight feast, I’ll bring my friends. If you don’t mind."
Brendon was startled. Jon’s friends were all older boys – Jon, of course, was a sixth former himself, but Brendon tended to forget that – and cooler than anyone Brendon ever hung out (or attempted to hang out with). They were the kind of people who tended to get themselves talked about, from the things they were reading or the music they were listening to to the escapades they got themselves into with Miss Archer’s Ladies’ Academy.
"Wow, sure!" Brendon said, and dropped his bottle of orange fizzy. "Um – oops –" he said, as he scrambled to rescue it. At least he hadn’t broken the bottle; it merely rolled away harmlessly on the carpeted floor. He dropped to his knees to get to it, nearly squashing the cake in the process. He felt himself blushing, then cursed himself for being such an accident-prone idiot in front of Jon Walker.
Jon laughed, but it didn’t seem to be a mean laugh. (Brendon had become an expert at identifying these things.) "Tell you what," he said, "you tell me where the rest of the foodstuff is, and I’ll go get it and we can head to the sixth-formers’ common room. Then we can party without waking up this lot."
"Thanks!" Brendon said gratefully, standing up. He piled the food onto the sofa and said, "The sausages are in under that table, I think, and the ginger beer should be down this sofa somewhere – and I think I’ve got the tinned pineapple, it’s just here –" he bent down and got them from his coat, hanging on the rack, suddenly feeling rather young and ridiculous.
Jon laughed. "Tell you what, Brendon," he said, "Next time just put it all in one place."
"I don’t have a hiding place big enough for all this stuff!" Brendon protested woefully. Jon smiled. "Well, point." They gathered as much of the food as they could manage in their arms, and set down to the sixth-formers’ common room.
Brendon had to hurry to keep along with Jon, even though Jon was carrying most of the food. "I even have bread-and-butter in my dressing-robe pocket!" he said proudly, hoping it hadn't become too squashed perhaps.
Jon looked bemused. "Whatever for?" he asked.
"I don’t know," Brendon confessed. "I just thought it was something you had to have at midnight feasts."
Jon considered it. "Well, I suppose it goes with the sardines. You don’t want sardines without bread and butter. Nasty," he said solemnly.
Brendon laughed and felt unexpectedly light and happy. He could have prolonged this moment forever.
part iii.