Page 23 of A Flash of Neon
Neon swings an arm round me and pulls me into a hug. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s just go home.”
We hurry away from school before Caitlin and the others can catch up with us. My phone begins to buzz in my pocket, probably with messages from her and Hannah. I don’t read them right away. They might be genuinely nice but they might not be, and that would make me feel even worse.
“So what happened?” Neon asks once we’re nearly at my house. “Stage fright?”
I explain as best as I can. Now that the showcase is over and we’re away from school, my reaction seems quite silly. Even if I’d been really, really bad, it’s not like people were going to shout and throw tomatoes at us. Caitlin might have made a few mean comments, but she and everyone else would have forgotten about it eventually. But it was like my body went into flight mode: all I wanted to do was get out of there.
“Sorry,” I say again. “It would have been awesome to do something like that together. That was our only chance to sing together before you leave, and I ruined it.”
“Well, actually…” Neon pauses on the corner to the next street. “You don’t need to worry about that because I’ve made a decision.”
“Yeah?” I look at him. “What decision?”
Neon takes a long look around, surveying the rows of houses, the gardens with washing hanging up to dry or bikes lying on the grass – this quiet, uneventful slice of reality. Then he leans in and whispers something to me with a wide grin on his face.
“I’m not going back.”
“What do you mean, you’re not going back?”
We’re in the kitchen at my house. Joel is out, probably doing his shift at the bookshop, but I keep my voice low – I wouldn’t put it past Carrie to be listening in with a glass pressed against the wall. She was washing her bright yellow Beetle in her driveway when we got back, so Neon had to climb over the garden wall and sneak in through the back door while I distracted her by asking about a reality show that she’s obsessed with.
“I don’t want to,” Neon says now. “I’m going to stay here. In the real world. With you.”
He drops a piece of bread into the toaster as casually as if this was his home. For a moment, I imagine a reality where it actually is his home: where he keeps sleeping on our sofa bed and coming to school with me, and somehow my parents are fine with it. That’s beyond evenmyimagination.
“But you said you’d get in trouble for leaving – won’t people there notice you’re gone?” I ask. “Besides, the Realm sounds amazing! There are so many mythical or imaginary creatures that we don’t have here, and you get to meet famous characters, and…”
“Yeah, but it turns out I like being real. I like eating real food. I like breathing real air. I feel more solid here. More like myself and not … whatever I was before. A figment of your imagination, I guess.” Neon reaches into the cupboard for the peanut butter. “They’ll be mad, sure, but I think they’ll let it go eventually. I’m just one character, and I look human – it’s not like they’ve got King Kong on the loose.”
“But what about your mum?” I ask. “And Cauliflower and the band and everyone?”
A flash of sadness crosses Neon’s face. “I’ll miss them. Of course I will. But remember what I told you, about how characters in the Realm fade away when people forget about them? That’ll happen to them eventually.” He’s quiet for a moment, his fingers tapping against the worktop as he waits for the toaster to ping. “It’ll happen to me too.”
“Neon, I could never forget you.” I give a shaky laugh. “Are you joking? Do you really think I could forget about the time my imaginary best friend actually came to visit?”
“OK, maybe not me,” he says, “but youwillforget about the others. In a few years, you’ll move away and meet new people and have a new life, and all of this will be a memory – a story you told yourself long ago. You’ll think about me from time to time, but you won’t be able to tell anyone else in your life what happened because they won’t believe you. Everyone I love will disappear, and I’ll become more and more faded until eventually I’m almost nothing.”
A heavy silence stretches between us. Outside a robin sings a wistful tune.
“I don’t want that. I don’t want you to disappear,” I say quietly. “But it’s more complicated than what we want, Neon. Where are you going to live, for one thing? You can’t sleep on our sofa bed forever.”
“We’ll figure something out.” He catches his toast as it pops up. “Maybe your parents will have some ideas.”
The thought of telling Mutti and Mum is a definite nope for me. There is absolutely no chance they would believe Neon’s story about coming from a realm of fictional creations – and, to be fair, 99.9 per cent of people on Earth wouldn’t, either. My parents’ first step would be to get in touch with Neon’s mum, and when they realised she didn’t seem to exist they’d have a million more questions about who this boy was and how he got here. Social services would have to get involved, maybe even the police. They’d eventually realise that there was no record of Neon existing anywhere, and the whole thing would be a total mess, and I’d be in a ton of trouble.
“No,” I say. “Sorry. There’s no way we can tell them.”
“Well, we’ll have to find another place, then. The world is huge! There must be somewhere I can stay.”
He says this quite cheerfully as he spreads peanut butter on his toast. I don’t think he realises how complicated all this is. He might be fourteen in the Realm, but he’s brand new to reality.
There’s about a hundred and thirty pounds in my savings account. I’m not sure how much the B&Bs around here cost, but that wouldn’t get us more than a few nights. A hostel would be cheaper, but the nearest one is in Inverness, and I wouldn’t want to send him all the way there by himself.
There are so many thoughts whirling round my head that I don’t realise I’ve been silent for almost a minute.
Neon’s smile is starting to fade. “Don’t you want me to stay, Laurie?”
“Of course I do,” I say quickly, and I really mean it. “But it’s complicated.”
