The Dead Boy's Guide To Second Chances

11. the pink elephant paradox

TWELVE MONTHS AND TWO WEEKS PRIOR TO THE DEATH OF OLIVER SALLOW

The pink elephant paradox happened after they came back from their trip to London.

It was as if, as soon as they'd gotten off the bus, some kind of spell had broken. Suddenly, everything that had happened—watching Bake Off with Oliver, sneaking out to see the play with him, falling asleep on his shoulder—seemed impossible. There was no way that Finn had done any of those things.

It had to have been one of those things that Oliver had spoken about while he'd rambled about A Midsummer Night's Dream during one of their library afternoons. A changeling, wasn't it? Yeah. Fairies had swooped in, put another boy in Finn's place for a few days, and then swapped them back the moment he'd woken up in front of Blissby School with Oliver's shoulder imprinted in his cheek. It was the only explanation that made sense.

The problem was that the fae folk had apparently left Original Finn to deal with the emotional aftermath.

He was so goddamn confused.

It wasn't like him to go off on his own and ditch the entire football team to hang out with a boy he'd only known for a few weeks. Or to read annotated copies of Shakespearean tragedies. Nine times out of ten, he didn't even like the theatre, for fuck's sake.

And yet here he was, a small yellow flower pressed between the pages of one of his Geography books, a pair of ridiculous sunglasses that Oliver had gotten him to buy on his nightstand.

It didn't make sense.

He wanted nothing but to forget about it, but his brain, the bloody traitor, was once again not on his side. It was like the study his mum had read about in one of her magazines: if you try not to think about a pink elephant, you'll end up thinking about it even more. Ironic processes, or whatever it was called.

Oliver Sallow was the biggest, brightest pink elephant imaginable.

The advice that the magazine had given was to deliberately think about the pink elephant. Finn was more of a fan of violently repressing any and all unpleasant intrusions. He was pretty good at it, honestly. The deadline for uni applications. His mum's worsening mental health. His own beehive of a brain. All of it shoved into the bottom drawer and banished into the deepest recesses of his mind for his subconscious to deal with.

Even better that, unlike his panic attacks, he could actually avoid this particular problem. All he had to do was stop going to the library in the afternoons. Problem solved. Right?

Wrong.

Out of sight, out of mind didn't seem to apply here. The best way that Finn could explain it was that it felt as if there was a rubber band stretched between him and the library. The further he strayed from it, the tauter it pulled, a tension that just kept growing. At some point, something was going to snap.

An expert at using rubber bands to shoot missiles of paper and crumpled tissues across classrooms and cafeterias, Finn knew that it was going to hurt like a bitch when it did. He also knew that the thing most liable to snap was him, as two consecutive panic attacks within only the last two days had proven.

"Hey, Birdie." Aarun's voice made his head snap up. "You all right there?"

"Yeah," Finn immediately said. Glancing around the locker room, he realized that everyone else was already getting changed—meanwhile, he'd been sitting on one of the benches for the last five minutes, staring blankly at the mint-green tiles.

Without meeting his friends' eyes, he turned around and started rifling through his duffle bag for his cleats. Around him, the usual racket of almost twenty teenage boys getting ready for practice commenced. He could taste the deodorant in the air, it was that thick. He felt like he was going to choke on it, like it was covering the inside of his throat and he couldn't—