Head Over Heels ✓

6 / happy new year

december, age 10

Asher's house was the ideal location for a New Year's Eve party with huge rooms in a huge house that sat on a sprawling estate. In the summer, guests spilled out onto the lawns and floated in and out of marquees while at the end of December, they filled various reception rooms as Ishaana brewed mulled wine, popped champagne corks, and cooked up hors d'oeuvres.

The house was busy, her friends and family drifting between the maze of connected rooms on the ground floor. The grand piano at one end of the house seemed to act as a point of congregation, where people gathered as the occasional guest decided to try their hand at tinkling the ivories. Audrie had spent a good twenty minutes impressing everyone with her grade six pieces, just a couple of years away from earning her elusive grade eight certificate, though Dylan had stolen her attention away before long.

Lucas didn't like the crowd too much. There were too many people he didn't quite know, the adults laughing and drinking as they summed up the year and made promises they wouldn't stick to once the clock hit midnight and ticked over into the first minute of the following year. Within an hour of arriving, he and Asher had headed up to the turret though now that the party was in full swing, they weren't alone.

Tom was curled up in the corner of the room with his nose buried in a book. Isabella, Matilda and Liliana had been with them at one point though the three girls were social butterflies who seemed to survive off attention, throwing on impromptu performances for their parents. Lucas loved his sisters, but he was nothing like them. Both of his parents seemed perfectly capable of producing utterly normal children, just not together, and he had found himself wondering in the past what was wrong: if he'd ever had a sibling, one to whom he was one hundred percent related, would they be like him? But he knew better than to let his mother know that the thought had ever crossed his mind.

An hour ago, Mika had arrived with her sister and her parents. Lucas hadn't known she was coming but he hadn't been too put off by her arrival when he had grown quite used to her. She was a gentle, smiling girl who had never questioned him or his quirks. If anything, she had taken them on board: ever since she had joined the school a couple of years ago, she had treated Lucas like everybody else while managed to respect his boundaries and his habits. Perhaps more impressively, she had taken Tom under her wing despite being both younger than him and in the year above.

She sat on a beanbag with a Sudoku book in one hand and a pen in the other, scribbling in numbers with ease. Although being put in the year above her own had been a mistake, she had more than earnt her place in the same class as Lucas and Asher. She was sharp as a whip with a brain for numbers and puzzles. Strategy was her forte: she devoured riddles, whizzing her way through the puzzle page in the newspaper with her father each night, yet her logician's brain didn't affect her sympathy. An empathetic girl with possibly the most self-aware mind Maddie had ever seen in a Year Six student, it seemed like she could accomplish anything she put her mind to.

"Can you get any of these?" she asked Tom, looking over at him with no expectation of a verbal answer. She passed him the page she was on, putting the pen down on the floor between them. They both knew that he could do the puzzles too. Lucas knew that Mika didn't really need his help, but he kept his mouth shut as he sat the table and selected another pencil crayon.

For his tenth birthday, four months ago, Truman had bought him an adult colouring book. The patterns were intricate - he had also bought him a better sharpener for the finest tip - and each page took a little longer, but he loved it. He no longer felt like a child for enjoying the calming sensation of a pencil in his hand, watching the colours appear on the page in a million shades that told a story. When he put down the brightest red, he lifted his eyes from the page to see Tom holding the Sudoku book with the pen clutched in his other hand, filling in one number Mika had missed before another, then another, until the box was full and he handed it back.