By Design

The Tragedy of Teresa Willow's Bicycle

'Do you have any more?'

'No.'

'What about at home?'

'No.'

'Can you get them anywhere in this town?'

'No.' I watched as no-longer-a-mystery Man aka the deep voice, groan as he licked his fingers to savour the last few crumbs of my last blueberry and chocolate chip cookie.

'It was good while it lasted,' he said wistfully, the satisfaction evident in his crooked grin and slouching posture. Good food made me feel like that too. Lazy.

'Aren't you going to introduce yourself?' I asked him.

After he took the cookie in the library, he'd brought me around the school for his own version of a tour (which filled the humour gap that Henry had missed when he showed me around) and right now we were pleasantly situated on a bench right in front of a giant fish tank in the school's underground aquarium. Prior to that, we'd gone to the indoor tropical gardens, the Japanese water gardens, the art gallery, the Great Hall and peeked into the cafeteria while he treated me to a chocolate mint milkshake.

The scale of the school exceeded our time limit of an hour for lunch, thus leaving him to promise to finish the tour the next day and propose that we spend the remaining time lounging about in the underground aquarium.

Despite our ongoing Q and A about the school, the one thing that we both forgot to do was introduce ourselves.

He laughed and rubbed his head sheepishly.

'We forgot the initial formalities of acquaintanceship,' he said cheerfully, tilting his head to look at me. 'I'm Elliot. Elliot Hadley.'

'Teresa Willows.' I held my hand out and he shook it obligingly, but not without sparing me an amused glance.

Elliot was a very handsome specimen, in a different sense to all the other students here. Whilst the others had very striking features, his golden-brown hair wasn't unnaturally glossy and his well-defined face didn't seem to stand out amongst some of the other popular people, but he was still extremely good-looking. You just had to look at him properly but by the way in which he slipped through the population unnoticed, people didn't throw him a second glance.

The only obvious similarity he seemed to share with the others was his glassy green eyes, which had the same flickering gold dust in them like other people who were born as designer babies, the Naturals. Pretty fascinating.

'Shall we start making our way back?' Elliot stretched his legs out and I crinkled my nose at their long length enviously.

'We still have fifteen minutes,' I said, sipping my milkshake and spreading my legs forward to compare them to Elliot's.

Rubber of bands. They were much shorter.

'Yeah but I was thinking that we can maybe fit in one more place,' Elliot said, a mischievous tone infusing his voice subtly. He sat up straight, still with his legs extended. Even then, they were much longer than mine and he chuckled, enjoying the superiority of height.

'What place is it?' I asked, swinging my legs back and forth instead. He may have won the battle of the leg lengths but I was going to outswing him.

'Actually, I'll show it to you tomorrow,' he said. He began swaying his legs too and I gritted my teeth when it turned out that he was a better leg-swinger than I was.

'Why the sudden change of mind?' I asked, draining the last few drops of my milkshake. Swing, swing, swing.

'It's my favourite place here so I want to show it to you without time pressing on to us,' Elliot said, lifting himself up from the bench. He brushed the crumbs from his shirt and swung his bag around his shoulder effortlessly.