Page 87 of The Good Boy

“And part drama-club improv exercise,” I add.

“Well, sounds made-up,” Nanna Maria says, crossing her arms. My grandmother is amazingly skeptical of other people’s strange belief systems.

“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,’” I tell her.

“What’s Horatio the bloodhound got to do with it?” Rory asks.

“So,” Miles goes on with extreme good humor and patience, which makes me fall for him a little more, “I told him about a dog I know that had recently been turned into a man, and would one of those rituals help him get back to being a dog?”

“Shouldn’t think so,” Nanna says, as if she is the authority on druid stuff.

“And he said, yes, he thinks it could,” Miles says. “Not a bit fazed by the whole situation, which I thought was a good sign.”

“Or a bad one,” I suggest, chewing my lip.

“And he offered to perform the ritual with us tonight!” Miles breaks into a smile, and I want to kiss him. Instead, I hop. Don’t ask me why, it’s something to do other than attempting to kiss a man, okay?

“Tonight!” I exclaim, looking at Rory. “We are performing a ritual tonight?”

“Yes,” Miles says, his eyes shining. “At the standing stones in Falsgrave Park. Steve says they will be a great substitute for an actual ancient ritual site. I know they have only been in situ since 2003, but he reckons they will do.”

“Well, if they’re good enough for drunk teenagers to make out on,” I say.

“I don’t trust druids,” Nanna says, gesturing at her chin. “It’s the beards.”

“Steve didn’t have a beard,” Miles said.

“Then is he even a druid?” Nanna asks. Nanna really has a thing about this, but now is not a time for woo industries’ professional rivalry.

“Well, it’s got to be worth a shot,” I tell her. “Right, Rory?”

“Right,” Rory says. “Please let us, Nanna. What if I wake up tomorrow and I want to try real ale and collect vinyl? I don’t even know what vinyl is.”

“Fine, but I’m coming too,” Nanna says, relenting a little. “To keep an eye on this hairless druid. Make sure he doesn’t try and sacrifice Rory as a blood offering. In the meantime, Miles, Genie has something she’d like to talk to you about.”

“Do you?” Miles looks at me, repressing a smile. “What’s that, then?”

“Oh well,” I bluster, waving my hand as if I can shoo away the very thought of telling Miles how I really feel. “It’ll wait until after we’ve performed the pagan transformation ceremony at midnight in a replica standing-stone circle in the park.”

Standard Saturday.

Chapter Thirty-Three

We have to wait for the moon to fully rise, so it’s gone ten by the time we get to the park. The night is bright and clear; the air is still warm with the last lingering heat of the day. It’s nice up here, at the top of Falsgrave Park—you really feel like you are in the middle of the countryside, with the tall trees gently waving their long graceful green branches in the breeze, giving us glimpses of the starlit town twinkling below, its own brightly lit firmament. Yeah, it’s pretty nice up here, and maybe the whole being-in-unrequited-love thing has made me a bit poetic.

Fortunately, there is the obligatory selection of drunk and horny teenagers already occupying the stone circle, and Steve the druid carrying two bulging bin bags to take the edge off my romantic tendencies. Add Nanna Maria and a very excited Rory to the mix, and all desire I might have to throw myself in Miles’s arms and beg him to run away with me is tempered to becoming a mere edge of hysteria. Awks.

“Oi, you lot, scarper,” Steve the druid tells the kids, waving his bin bags at them. They respond to his order, his cloak, and his bin bags with the natural skepticism and contempt you’d expect from any healthy young person—with howls of derision.

“Sod off, Gandalf!” one lad shouts.

“Yeah, we’re not moving for you, you weirdo,” a girl clutching a bottle of cherry-flavored cider and sporting some ripped striped tights tells him. “We were here first. Go and have your old person’s sex party somewhere else.”

“Very far away,” another kid says. “Where we can’t see you.”

“How dare you! We are not here to have a sex party,” Steve says, and privately I think that druids are much less chill than I imagined. However, I’ve thought about it and I don’t want to try talking to the teenagers myself, as they are terrifying as heck. Luckily Rory doesn’t have the same misgivings.

“Hi, guys,” he says, ambling into the middle of the circle, waving at them with both hands like a children’s TV presenter from the seventies, only not evil. “The thing is, we need to use these stones to do an ancient ceremony which will hopefully turn me back into a dog—”

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