Page 40 of Men in Shorts

“Don’t get on that bus,” Duncan pleaded in a whisper. “Come with me. We’ll work this out.”

Brodie’s mouth trembled into a fleeting frown. “Geoffrey was right. He always said, ‘If I defend you, they’ll do much worse. That’s how bullies are.’ So I guess I can’t win.”

“What do you mean?”

“The crowd attacked meafterthe brawl. Because you stood up for me.Youset them off.”

“That’s different. They were angry with me and took it out on you. It wasn’t personal.”

“Not personal?” Brodie snarled. “It felt pretty fucking personal to me. Maybe I’m too sensitive, or maybe I just don’t suffer dickheads.” When his eyes met Duncan’s, they were as full of resolve as they were of tears. “Either way, I refuse to be part of this life. I can’t be with a footballer.”

Duncan felt the world shift beneath him. “Then I’ll quit the game.”

Brodie gave a bitter laugh. “No, you won’t, and you shouldn’t. It means a lot to you.”

The bus door opened with a hydraulic hiss. Lorna and Paul stood near it, waiting to see if Brodie was coming.

Duncan reached for him. “You mean a lot to me too.”

“Rubbish!” He lurched away, backing up toward the bus. “I’ve been part of your life for less than a week.”

“What are you talking about?” Duncan followed him. “We’ve been friends for months!”

Brodie stopped. “We were never friends,” he said in a low, dead voice. “All we’ve shared was a flat, and a course of study, and a-a meaningless hormonal caper.”

A hot shiver of humiliation seized Duncan. Was that how Brodie saw their gut-wrenching need to hold and touch and kiss and…everything? What about the laughs they’d shared, or the secrets? What about the moments they’d looked into each other’s eyes and felt the world shrink to the size of a bed?

Maybe it had all been in Duncan’s mind. Maybe he’d been too swept away by this roller coaster of a week to notice Brodie was never along for the ride. Maybe Duncan had felt enough for both of them.

He watched Brodie board the bus ahead of Lorna and Paul, who looked back, their eyes questioning. Then Duncan turned away, struggling to breathe. It felt like the rain had become an ocean, salt water scorching his eyes and clogging his lungs.

He’d lost Brodie. Or worse, he’d never had him to begin with.

Chapter12

Brodie had never been soill in his life.

His head felt full of cotton again, but now, that cotton was soaked in a vile, viscous substance that seemed to ooze around his skull as he tossed and turned in a futile search for comfort.

At least he wasn’t completely on his own. Lorna had stayed here in his room for hours after yesterday’s football match. Then last night Shu-Fen had deployed herself and the other four residents at their end of the hall to care for Brodie in shifts, bringing him tea, soup, and Lucozade. She’d even phoned her grandmother in Taiwan for an herbal-tea remedy that tasted of bitter cinnamon and let him sleep through the night for the first time in a week.

Sunday evening, as the sky darkened outside, Brodie’s mind began to clear, just enough to process yesterday’s events. It still stung to remember the crowd’s malice, the footballers’ brutality, and Duncan’s utter callousness about it all. But what hurt most was the memory of Duncan’s face, lashed by Brodie’s bitter words.

Had he really said they’d shared nothing but a “meaningless hormonal caper”? What a joke, what a supremely, catastrophically unfunny joke. He’d been trying to convince himself more than Duncan.

Brodie rolled over in bed, resting a bleary gaze upon his desk. The room’s silence was suffocating. He missed the chair creaking with the shift of Duncan’s weight, and the floor thumping with the tap of Duncan’s feet.

They were sure to see each other at Wednesday’s psych exam, if not sooner here at the flat. Would he find the courage to apologize, he wondered, or would he still be reigned by the fear that had made him turn his back on Duncan? How could he even trust his emotions, when this illness swung them about so wildly?

His attention shifted to the constant, cosmic-background-radiation anxiety of exams. Tomorrow was his first, and he hadn’t even opened his statistics notes since Friday. His plan had been to tackle the hardest chapters once he felt better. Hah.

But he refused to admit defeat. He would drag himself to that exam tomorrow morning if it killed him. At least then he’d have death as an excuse for missing his remaining exams.

Brodie retrieved his statistics textbook and notes from his desk, then slumped back onto the bed. Opening to the next chapter, he found a small piece of notepaper tucked within. At the top was the Sunderland football club logo, a red-and-white-striped crest flanked by a pair of black lions, all beneath a banner that readConsectatio Excellentiae.

On one side of the sheet, dated the previous Friday, Duncan had scrawled the basic probability function and a few terms:

P(E) = m/N

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