Page 2 of Only ever you-Ana & Byron
Byron jumped to his feet and squared his shoulders. He was still shorter, but not by much. "Deal!" he said solemnly, his accent thick and serious, “Lets pinkie promise on that.”
Ana rolled her eyes and walked off, but her cheeks were pink.
Gray leaned toward Cadi. "He's not gonna give up."
Cadi grinned. "It's not easy to keep up with Ana."
It was the first spark of something that would smoulder for years-under the skin, behind the jokes, never quite spoken aloud.
Chapter two
Chapter 2
Ana and Byron (age 12)
The pungent odour of formaldehyde made a strange mix with the fresh smell of crushed plants. Pencil shavings littered the tables of the Year Seven biology lab, mingling with the quiet hum of whispers and the occasional squeak of a stool leg on the linoleum floor. Most students were supposed to be drawing a diagram of the parts of a plant cell, but group work had dissolved, as usual, into distraction.
"Did you see Alfie got moved to half-fly?" muttered Brynn behind his hand.
"Yeah, because Rhys can't pass straight to save his life," snickered Toby, who had never played rugby in his life.
"I tell ya, Morgan said he likes Cadi. Like, likes likes," whispered Gracie "All that red hair, he said"
"Bet he doesn't know Gray's gonna murder him," returned Dora with a huff.
Ana sat straight-backed at her stool, lab coat buttoned, safety goggles pushed up onto her jet curls like a crown. She wore them on top of her glasses, just to be sure, though it did make it difficult to see things under the lens. The table was meant to be a 'team station' for identifying cell structures under the microscope, but she'd hijacked the task entirely. Her biro moved with fierce purpose as she labelled the chloroplast, vacuole, and nucleus with a neat, looping script, lips pursed in concentration.
Next to her, Byron leaned sideways just enough to peer at her worksheet without tipping far enough to get caught.
He was all limbs and freckles, with an unruly mop of wavy brown hair and a polo shirt that looked like it was staging a jailbreak from his pants. His collar was lopsided, and there was already a small hole in his sleeve that he was absentmindedly enlarging with a grubby index finger.
"I see you, Byron," Ana said flatly, eyes still on her work.
"Ain't doin' nowt," he whispered, edging back a centimetre, even as his eyes lingered on her diagram.
"You're replacing my air with your stinky breath. And staring at my vacuole."
"That sounds dead dodgy when you say it," Byron grinned.
Ana shot him a look, dead unimpressed.
"Get your mind out of the gutter, you slug. Do your own work and let me do mine. You didn't even turn your microscope on."
"It were too blurry," he muttered. "Microscopes hate me, I tell ya."
"It is too blurry, not were, you Duffus. And no, microscopes don’t have feelings. You just didn't focus the lens."
"Just show me again, will ya?"
Ana gave him a long-suffering sigh. "This is not hard. Read the sheet. It literally tells you what each part does."
"I did. Just want to confirm with an expert, don't I?"
"You want to cheat."
"Borrow. Borrow knowledge. It's a team task, innit?"
Ana rolled her eyes. "Teamwork doesn't mean copying my entire diagram and labelling mitochondria as 'green blobby thing that looks like a beetle with its feet in.' Mrs Greenwood is looking at us."
