Chapitre 2: Chapter 2
But then, Nan lives in a village full of old people, so probably not.
He should look forward to visiting her. He should. He does love his Nan—he will even admit to it—and he only sees her twice a year as it is, but he can’t help but feel bored in the sweltering heat of the south, and the stillness and inactivity of village life for people whose existences revolve around their plants, their churches, and their perpetually absent grandchildren.
And then there is the vague resentment at having to go: he does not choose to visit every summer, but is handed a backpack and a suitcase by his mother and parked on the train every year, without fail, because, in essence, his parents do not trust him in the house alone for eight weeks.
In his more generous moments, Ryan can acknowledge the truth: they do not trust his friends for eight weeks. They do not trust Tom and Danny and Harry, and all the lads from school suddenly let out to the streets, not to lead Ryan astray.
He wishes he could disagree—wishes he could honestly claim to be stronger than that, but then, Tom (mostly Tom; after all, Danny and Harry have no such hold over, or interest in, Ryan’s daily life) has talked him into bunking off, into throwing stones at the McPherson house, into that official caution for shoplifting, and out of numerous opportunities that perhaps he should have taken.
Whether they trust Tom or Ryan, or not, the ultimatum is the same. He can go to Nan’s, or he can sit in his mother’s office every day and stare, paralysed with boredom, at legal documents that he won’t ever understand.
Ryan’s parents both work full-time: his mother is a lawyer, and his father trains weaker, slower, thicker people in the territorial army and the army cadets, and comes home with a voice hoarse from shouting. They are both professional, upright, strict people with a work ethic the size of Ryan himself, and a constant wariness of his slipping into the “deliquent, completely irresponsible!” ways of the true Mancunians that he associates with at school—people like Tom and Danny and Harry.
Sometimes he understands, but he doesn’t have to like it.
His parents, after all, don’t know Tom like he does. Tom is his best friend, to use a juvenile and girly term, and while he understands what his parents see, he also sees what they don’t—Tom’s ambition to be a police officer, his habit of getting into fights to protect his little sister, his loyalty to his friends even as he mercilessly teases them himself, and the sheer danger in insulting Tom’s mother.
Tom isn’t perfect, he knows, and sometimes his parents’ inability to see that grates
But then, today, in the wet cloth of summer heat and watching Tom and Danny exchange lustful comments on the perfect arse that graces the inside of the very short skirt of Maria Marquez, he can also see why they don’t
“You off south again?” Harry asks, already preening in the reflective face of his watch, and Tom snorts.
“If you got any gayer, you’d be shagging Andy Sutherland,” he mutters, and cocks his head at Ryan. “They’re not packing you off to London again?”
Ryan shrugs. “Yeah.”
“Fuck’s sake, I’d go fucking apeshit if my parents trolleyed me off again,” Harry drawls, ignoring Tom’s comment and fiddling with his hair—bleach-blond this week—again. “Dunno why you don’t, you know. You’re weird.”
“Come off it,” Tom scuffs him around the head, undoing his work. “His old man’s a soldier, in’t he? You wanna pick a fight with him?”
It’s a good point—and the one Ryan allows. It’s not the right one, but the right one would earn him a solid year of mockery, so he smirks when Harry huffs and drops down from the bike rack, and says nothing.
“Still,” Tom mutters, “fucking gay.”
“Protesting too much!” Harry mocks, unlocking his bike. “I gotta get back before the old man—cheers, losers.”
“Fuck off,” Tom calls after him, and then he’s gone. After a moment, Danny—because it is not done to intrude on Tom and Ryan—heaves himself off the red-hot bars and disappears to pester the girls again, ever hopeful, and Tom stubs out his cigarette on the nearest saddle. “You not back ‘til September, then?”
“Probably not.”
“Gay,” he repeats, jumps off the rack and pulls Ryan into an awkward hug. “Go on then—git. Your girlfriend’ll be waiting.”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Not until you man up,” Tom agrees, and waggles his eyebrows. “Gothic chick—she’ll be a hellraiser in bed.”
“Go screw yourself,” Ryan returns easily, and walks away. Somewhere over his shoulder, Tom laughs and his lighter snaps again, and then he is out of the school grounds and into the cool shade of the alley that runs along the back of the terraces towards his own estate.
Cadeaux
-- Cadeau
reçu État de l’alimentation hebdomadaire
-- Classement
Power Stone 
-- Power
stone