Man on the Inside

2

Brontë hasn't heard from Nimm yet, even though she's working today. He's only staring at his phone because he's waiting, but it's making him anxious to think about what she might text him. He forces himself to put it away. He's off the clock today. He's not supposed to be thinking about work.

He's standing outside the car, arms crossed. Most parents don't get out of their cars, and there's a good reason for that- the summer sun beating down on them is only mitigated by trees here and there, and it's something most of them do every day. Brontë only gets to do it once a week.

There's always a sea of teenagers escaping out the school gates the moment class is over, and it seems ever stronger now that the first week of classes is done. There's always a few, and then more, a burst where most students have just escaped and are packed too tightly to fit through the gate, before it eventually slows down again to just the slowpokes. Brontë's not just nervous because of what he's waiting on Nimm to send him.

But right at the start of that dam breaking, he hears a voice he recognises. "Dad!"

He has maybe half a second to turn and see Charlie running towards him, before she's buried herself in his chest. He naturally forms his arms around her in a hug, but she quickly backs out of it. "Hi," she says, and how she has so much energy at the end of a school day, he'll never know. Fourteen year olds can be like that sometimes.

"Hey, Charlie," he says, reaching out and tousling her hair a bit. She ducks down to avoid it, but can only get so far away. "How was your first week back?"

"Good." Charlie takes earphones out of her ears as she speaks, tucking them up into her pocket. She's still wearing the uniform pants- an interesting choice in this weather, but he can imagine her thought process- although he does notice she's wearing the girl's version of the uniform shirt. He knows better than to comment on it, though, even to compliment her- he doesn't want to make her any more self-conscious than she certainly already is. "I'm in most of my classes with my friends. And I'm making some new ones in the classes I'm not."

"Oh, that's wonderful," Brontë says, leaning against the car. "Everyone's been nice to you?"

Charlie has a four-colour pen in one hand that she's seemingly pulled from her pocket, and she's clicking all the colours down and back up rapidly as she talks. "Yeah. Of course. All my friends knew already, obviously. Some people got my name wrong, but Jenna was being really nice about correcting people for me. And Ricky said he'd hit anyone who bullied me with a textbook, but-" she points the pen at Brontë, like she can predict what he's about to say, and she's correct- "don't worry, I told him not to do it. Also because nobody would be afraid of a year seven anyway."

Brontë smiles sideways. "Where is he? You didn't leave him to find his way back here all alone, did you?"

"I helped him Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, so he knows. He found his way yesterday. This is the same place mum picks us up, except a bit down the road."

Brontë cranes his neck, searching the bobbing sea of schoolchildren for his son. When he went to school, it felt a lot less chaotic than the crowd looks. It probably wasn't. "Has he been doing okay, too?"

"Yeah, I think," Charlie says, fiddling with her pen again. "He doesn't really talk to me about it."

"That's understandable." It's easiest to spot Ricky when you're looking for him beside his best friend. Ricky's tiny, sandy-blonde, so white he burns after five minutes in the sun, and Jake is the visual opposite, tall and athletic with brown skin. That doesn't stop them from frequently getting mixed up, considering that they're essentially the same person.

Ricky says that Jake convinced his parents to change their choice of high school, just so that they went to school together. Brontë's met Jake's parents on a handful of occasions, and he can believe that- Jake's a good kid, but he's an only child, and his parents seem to have everything in their lives perfectly together, just for the purpose of making Jake happy. Brontë knows that's not the case, but it makes him look at his own life and wonder what exactly he did to get it not so perfect. It's still good. But things didn't turn out the way he was promised they would.