Head Over Heels ✓

3 / end of term

july, age 6

The summer term ended on a half day, a blisteringly hot Wednesday afternoon after a morning of the children clearing out their school trays and tidying up the classrooms. Lucas's bag was filled with little projects he had done throughout the year, mostly half-finished when he'd hardly ever had enough time to complete something to his standards. His obsessive neatness wasn't accounted for by the lesson timings and his teacher had never allowed him to stay in at break or the playtime after lunch to finish up. He had tried to throw them away, to abandon the pieces for which he had no pride, but the teacher had insisted his parents would probably want to see them.

He didn't want them to. He had no desire to show them something he didn't care about when he knew he could have done so much better. His mother would never say that: she hardly had a critical bone in her body, singing his praises for the smallest things, but he couldn't bear to let her see the half-hearted projects. As much as he hated to give up, he hated what he had done even more.

At twelve o'clock, he sat with the weight of his poor artwork in his bag as he and Asher waited for their parents to pick them up. The classroom wasn't nearly empty yet: there was a slow trickle of students leaving as various parents, friends and grandparents came to collect them, the children promising to keep in touch over the summer as their parents grumbled about having to entertain their kids for the next seven weeks. Lucas didn't see the point in all of the tears and the hype: he only cared about seeing Asher and he knew they would keep in touch over the summer.

Last year, hardly a week had ever gone by that they hadn't seen each other. He had spent more time with Asher than with his own father, who had been somewhat preoccupied with newborn Isabella. Now she was two weeks away from her first birthday and Cora's second child was due any day now. So was Sarah's.

Amidst the flurry of people coming and going, Lucas caught a glimpse of Audrie out of the corner of his eye. Her eyes were red, her cheeks streaked with tears, and he heard her sniffling when she tipped into the classroom, laden down with bags.

"What's wrong?" he asked. "Why're you crying?"

Audrie dropped down onto the seat next to him, a blubbering eleven-year-old amidst a sea of bemused seven-year-olds. "I don't want to leave," she said, dragging her sleeves across her cheeks. "I'm not ready to go."

"Go where?" he asked, frowning.

"High school!" she cried out, covering her hands with her face. "Today was my last ever day here and I don't want to leave. I don't want to leave all my friends and I don't want to go to a new school." Crossing her arms on the table, she buried her face in her bunched-up jumper. Lucas didn't know what to say. He had never really been faced with his weeping sister before, no idea what she wanted him to do.

"You'll be ok," he said, repeating what she told him every time he got worked up. He had never really had the unfiltered mind of most children his age, incapable of providing a stream of subconscious thought to amuse her, but neither was his empathy developed enough to know what to do. "You've got friends. And Dylan's there!"

She looked up and gave him a weak smile. "It's just hard," she said. "And it's so different."

Lucas looked at Asher, who was playing with a deck of cards he had found at the back of his tray. He turned back to Audrie. "Are you ok?"

She didn't respond but she pulled him into a hug and she held him tightly. He liked that: he wasn't the biggest hugger, something that only became more and more obvious as he aged, but there was something oddly comforting about being squeezed so tight. It was as though he knew he was safe when she held on so tightly that he couldn't get out.