High Heels & Pink Glitter (the heavily edited version)

Expert sniffers

Nate stopped outside the Gorbals Leisure Centre where the Southside Parkour Club met, on route home from Avril's.

The giant white building with its rounded roof had been built in the nineties, and he regarded it fondly. Nate used to work there as a group fitness trainer before he branched out into personal training. His legs, bums and tums classes were always booked up well in advance. The site of the blue and orange logo made him nostalgic for simpler times.

Erin sat on the wall outside, dressed in the ubiquitous teenager streetwise uniform of leggings, hoodie top and white trainers, talking to a guy who appeared to be the same age. Ross hung back from them, glowering.

To Nate's astonishment, his daughter had expressed an interest in starting Parkour again two weeks ago. He'd suggested it to her last year. Vaulting over obstacles, wall running and precision jumping in an urban environment seemed like a way of maintaining physical fitness that might appeal to a teenage girl, who otherwise spent unhealthy amounts of time online.

She tried it for three weeks before declaring it wasn't for her. Ross, on the other hand, had kept it up. The smouldering resentment currently coming off him in waves may be due to his twin invading his space again, or because he resented the guy she was chatting to.

Erin and Ross might be Nate's kids, but figuring out his twins' weird dynamic was way beyond Nate's skills. He couldn't claim expertise in teenage romance either—or any romance, for that matter, as his mate Adam pointed out far too often—but he recognised what was in front of him now.

The dark-haired, smiley-faced boy, really liked Erin. His attraction glowed, beacon-like, around him. Judging by their body language, close, but not yet intimate enough to touch, he hadn't done anything about it.

And Erin, beaming at him—the polar opposite of the knowing pout she'd worn in that half-naked picture she'd shared on Instagram—very much wanted him to do something, anything, but had no idea how to signal that intent loud and clear.

He wound down the car window. "Erin, Ross!"

They both started, Ross shooting his sister a malicious smirk, knowing the flirtatious game she and the unknown boy was about to end, and Erin gazing at him in dismay.

"Does your friend want to join us?" he asked. "Pal, I could drop you back wherever you live afterwards?"

The boy flushed scarlet. "Eh, no, ta. I'm meeting my uncle. Thanks fae asking."

A broad North Lanarkshire accent. Not the kind of speech you heard from Erin and Ross's fellow pupils. It cheered Nate up immensely. He had never wanted to send his children to a private school, but Jenny's parents insisted. They swept in, more than happy to pay the thousands of pounds it would cost for Erin and Ross to attend a fee-paying school from the age of seven onwards.

At the time, he gave in. Perhaps it would be advantageous. You shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, etcetera. But over time, doubts crept in. An insidious form of bullying went on in private schools. The other pupils were experts in sniffing out those who didn't belong in society's upper echelons.

Those like Erin and Ross, for example. Their grandparents might be massively wealthy. Their parents were not. While his children attended the fancy school, extras like skiing holidays, the foreign language trips, the Proms where parents hired stretch limos and paid for Filipino women to come to the house to mani-pedi their precious prince and princesses before they left the house, were a no-no, marking them out as different from their peers.

Even the fucking school uniform. Only one shop in Glasgow sold the precise blazer/kilt/trousers/shirt/tie/socks the blasted school demanded its pupils wear, no exceptions allowed. The shop owners never contemplated anything as vulgar as a sale.

Jenny and Nate skimped, buying it second-hand on eBay. Somehow, no matter how immaculate the used shirts, blazers, skirts and trousers were, those expert sniffers could detect the twins wore a cut-price uniform.

Nate had yet to meet a single one of his kids' classmates who wasn't a complete and utter over-entitled cunt.

Ross got in the car, slamming the door behind him. Erin, desperately trying to disguise bitter disappointment, slipped off the wall. She and the boy hovered awkwardly, unsure of what to do next. Nate, his teenage fumbling years not that long ago he couldn't recall his own awkwardness, wished he could disappear. That could make things that little bit easier.

In the end, the boy settled for a hesitant pat of Erin's shoulder, and a "See you next week, aye?"

She nodded back, watching him all the while as she walked towards Nate's car. The boy headed off, a despondent set to his shoulders. Nate longed to shake them both. You like each other, okay? DO something about it!

Probably not a message Erin would appreciate from her dad. She got into the passenger seat without bothering to greet Nate and sulkily slammed the seat belt into its catch.

The boy, still dejected, wasn't looking where he was going, and collided with a woman heading for the gym's entrance, dropping his phone in the process.

"God, sorry!" the woman exclaimed. She looked vaguely familiar—a curvy body encased in a velour tracksuit, her dark hair pulled back in a high ponytail and a rucksack slung over one shoulder.

The boy bent to the ground. His phone had fallen face down, and he turned it over, the dismay apparent as he studied the shattered screen. Erin muttered a 'shit', and unfastened her seatbelt, resting her hand on the door handle.

Ross, in the back of the car, made an indiscriminate noise Nate recognised as the international teenage warning signal for, If you don't move soon, I'm going to die of total and utter boredom and it will be all your fault. Too bad, there was something about the woman he recognised and...

She turned in profile, allowing him to connect enough dots to join the voice to the body.

Oh. It was her. Kelly.

She scuttled towards the boy. "Look, I know this wee screen repair shop on Victoria Road. Cheap as chips, though it'll take a day or two. Ask for Adnan. Tell him Kelly sent you."

She dug into her bag and withdrew a twenty pound note. "That'll cover it."

Ryan had been doing that typical teenage head-down paying no attention to his surroundings thing, so the accident hadn't been her fault. Erin's hand stayed where it was. Kelly and the youngster didn't appear to be aware of their audience, which was probably for the best. The accident had made the boy look gormless, and Nate guessed that if he knew Erin had witnessed it, his insides would curdle in embarrassment. Erin appeared to sense it too, re-fastening her seatbelt and sinking down in the car seat.

"Let's leave, Nate," she said, her tone returning to the bored insouciance she favoured when talking to him. Her calling him Nate was a recent affectation that he couldn't be bothered correcting. Kelly glanced up, meeting his eye as he shifted into first gear and drove off. For a second, she looked perplexed, obviously wondering who he was and why she recognised him, before smiling.

The smile barely lasted a second—a reflective thing before she realised who he was—but the warmth of it sent a glow through him. He drove away, smiling to himself.