Page 76 of Second Story

A few heads nod.

I nod back. “If you’ve ever felt cornered, I could talk you through some strategies another time if you wanted. Work with you to come up with some of your own so you get to moonwalk away from trouble without losing face or having issues escalate to this.”

I touch a scarred wrist, and Luke nods even harder, so I do more than roll up my sleeves. I stand to tug my shirt free and reveal enough of the shitshow splashing my torso and back to provoke indrawn breaths just as the school bell rings for break time, and I tuck my shirt back in so not to scare any younger students.

“I’ll wear my mistakes forever. Thought they meant I’d lost everything. My friends, who pretended they didn’t know me.My family, because they were ashamed.” It still hurts to admit this. “Of me.”

You’re gonna kill it as an uncle.

I have to sit again then—need a moment to replay what sounded far from the shame I’ve had running as my background program for so long.

Digging inside that borrowed toolbox buys me some time, but I’m suddenly clumsy and the stack of books beside me falls onto car park gravel.

Isaac must have finished his storytelling session.

He scoops up those missing-parent titles, and I just talked about men who don’t do emotion, but one glance from him shows me plenty. I hear it too in his murmur. “Ashamed? They can’t know you.”

I’d kiss him if knife-sharp eyes didn’t watch us.And I’d ask Isaac to come with me, as Josh suggested, which almost feels like a bridge between where we’ve been and where we are now. I would, if the headmaster of this school didn’t cross his arms like I still have work to do to secure a longer run of workshops.

That’s all I need to see to go all out, only not to impress Luke Lawson.

The way Isaac looks at me?

I can’t stop. Not until I’m sure I’ll get to keep him.

21

ISAAC

Joe asks, “Want to know what I did next?”

He speaks to the group of students, but it’s me he watches until I nod. Like them, I’m all ears while Joe digs in a tool kit.

Luke is too, and I wish Joe looked up in time to see my boss holding his breath as if he can’t wait to hear the rest of this story. The jury is still out with some of this audience at risk of following in Joe’s footsteps, but I’m pretty sure he’s hooked Noah, who edges closer.

“I stopped kidding myself.”

Noah fires a bullet-fast question. “About what?”

“About thinking I was on the way up.” He drops a spanner into the box at his feet, the clang hollow. “About actually hitting rock bottom.” He lets another spanner drop, a second clang echoing. Joe dropping a last tool into that box reminds me of Noah tossing part of his past into a time capsule. That’s who Joe makes eye contact with. “And I had to stop pretending that I didn’t need anyone in my corner.”

He was all alone.

Man, I’m angry enough then to run all the way to London and march his family here to see how he pulled his life back together, then went on to do the same for me.Andfor these students who listen to the strongest man in Glynn Harber describe when he was at his weakest.

Joe takes a deep breath. “I thought, and I thought hard. Lay in that hospital bed and tracked back to each fork in the road it took to end up with me crying like a baby through skin grafts that failed.” He raises his fists, biceps bulging like my heart does at this quiet confession. “And I cried again in physio sessions designed to help me retain this kind of movement. Physical pain, you know? The mental kind was worse. Made myself sick with how I’d chosen the wrong direction over and over, but this is what kept bobbing to the surface the longer I had to think—my mistakes were understandable.” This sounds hard for him to grit out. “And they were forgivable.”

“Yes.” Luke says with conviction. He says the same to Joe as he has to me during our walks. “Keep going.”

Joe does. “I started offending at fourteen. Got attacked at nineteen. Took years after that to believe that I’d served one detention order after another but what I should have been sentenced to was grief counselling with my fam. With my dad and my brother. We lost the person who held us all together but never spoke about it. And the longer I thought back, the clearer I saw this pattern—talking wouldn’t have worked because they didn’t speak the same language as me. We didn’t only lose Mum. We lost our translator. I missed her even more then. Still do.”

Joe’s shoulders bow, if only for a second, then he gets back to poking at old wounds in public.

“So, if I was a marked man instead of a future top boy on the rise in Wintergreen, and if I was a disappointment to my family, that left me with what?”

Noah speaks up.

“With nothing.”

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