I Hear You Calling In the Dead of Night

Chapter 1: Dusty Road

~Oh, I feel overjoyed when you listen to my words.I see them sinking in. Oh, I see them crawling underneath your skin...~

I hear you calling in the dead of night

No one really notices Marcel. And why should they? He's taken every opportunity to make himself as small as possible (which is harder than you'd think with giant, unwieldy limbs that aren't entirely under his command yet and glasses with lenses as thick as the Hubble telescope). Seriously - if Marcel stares at the ground long enough on a sunny day, he's sure to ignite an unsuspecting family of ants. Luckily, for the local bug population, there's very few sunny days in England.

If Marcel's learned anything in sixteen short years, it's that the only thing worse than being invisible is being noticed for the wrong reason. He's been stuffed in enough lockers and endured enough atomic wedgies to sort out that much. Marcel's mum is convinced that once he's in uni, things will be different. That no one will care that his glasses could double as coke bottles or that he wears his trousers a smidge too high on his waist or that he looks like he dresses primarily from Mark and Spencer's 1974 Autumn line (brown tweed was a staple of British fashion as far as Marcel was concerned). But uni's still a long way off and in the meantime, Marcel has to cope somehow.

So, he treats school like a job - just a mandatory obligation - so he can move on to the next phase of his life. He goes to his lessons, sits somewhere in the middle rows (so he can't be lumped with the nerds and brown-nosers up front or the bad boys blowing spit-wads at the ceiling in the back). He never goes to the common room if he can help it and certainly not the canteen. Marcel's asthma is bad enough that he has a doctor's note excusing him from PE, so he spends his free period in the library, chatting with the middle-aged librarian, Alma, who recommends books for him to read and is pretty much his only friend.

Marcel eats lunch in the disabled toilet every day, cheese and Branston pickle on white-bread in one hand and an open book in the other (occasionally the food actually makes its way into his mouth and doesn't just slop down the front of his sweater vest as he hangs on the author's every word.) No one seems to notice his absence and he gets average enough grades – not high enough to merit academic accolades and not low enough to get him in trouble – so he doesn't draw attention to himself that way either.

In fact, Marcel's so invisible that if his teachers don't call on him in lessons - and they rarely do - Marcel can go whole days without speaking to anyone other than his mum, his sister, Gemma, and his cat, Dusty.

But it's fine. Marcel likes his routines. He likes eating the same thing for lunch every day and walking the same way home from school. He likes kissing his mum on the cheek when he comes or goes. He likes going up to his room after college to read in the picture window, tucked with a cuppa under a rug, the reassuring warmth of Dusty curled against the back of his knees. His life is predictable, but it's safe and it's the best he can hope for.

And if he just so happens to have a tiny, miniscule crush on the footie captain, Louis Tomlinson, well, that's no one's business but his own.

***

Except, one day everything goes horribly wrong. It's raining - the fast, sudden sort of rain - that makes the roads unnaturally slick and treacherous. Which means that the hatchback barreling down Marcel's lane can't break in time to avoid hitting Dusty, who's trying to dart under a parked car to escape the downpour.

Marcel's walking home from school, the same route he always takes - rain or shine - his suffocating tweed pants tucked into hunter green Wellies, the hood of his rain slicker drawn up against the torrent of water now pelting down on him from the sky, when it happens. It's all so quick, he has no time to react, much less try to stop it.