Page 7

Alice banged on his door at six-thirty. Zeph pushed to his feet and went to unlock it.

She was wearing a really short skirt and a tight pink top.

Her hair had been pulled back from her face into a bun and it didn’t suit her.

Nor did her makeup. Too much blusher and blue eye shadow. Not that he’d be telling her.

“Zeph! You have to come to your own party.”

“Do I?”

Alice let out a half-laugh, half-groan. “Yes! It’ll be fun. Get changed and come down.”

Get changed into what? Zeph closed and locked the door and went back to rereading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.

The music was on downstairs, too loud, but they didn’t have neighbours so it probably wouldn’t matter.

He heard people arriving from around seven, but was left in peace until just after eight when his phone rang. This time it was his dad.

“Hi,” Zeph said warily.

“Get downstairs now. I want to see a picture of you enjoying yourself.”

“I don’t—”

“No excuses. If an image doesn’t arrive in the next ten minutes, you’ll be going to football on Saturdays and rugby on Sundays. And I want to see a picture of you and the cake.”

“Okay, okay.”

“And smile!”

Zeph slipped on his shoes. He locked his door behind him.

Do Not Enter tape criss-crossed the bottom of the stairs and he climbed through it.

He gulped when he saw how many people were in the house.

Everyone seemed to be from school, which was reassuring.

They were all drinking alcohol, which was not.

At the bottom of the stairs, Zeph posed for a selfie with Alice and Georgia, sent the image to his dad, and decided he might as well get a drink before he returned to his room.

There were snacks all over the kitchen worktop, and bottles and cans on the island unit.

Crisps littered the sticky floor. Zeph looked through the bottles.

“There’s a lemonade over there for you, princess,” Scott said in his ear.

What the hell? Zeph’s spine turned to ice. It took him a moment to register that sensation came through fear and not because Scott had poured something down his back. “What are you doing here?”

“Alice invited us.”

Oh God, Alice! Why? She knew he liked neither of them. “Well, you’re uninvited. It’s my party. Fuck off.”

Wow. That was brave and unexpected. The pair took no notice.

What could he do? Nothing. He grabbed a bottle at random, levered off the cap and went to find Alice to have a word about inviting mortal enemies.

When he found her, he wished he hadn’t. She was plastered against Jack who was drinking Corona, his head back, his neck stretched, and he looked…

Zeph dragged his gaze to a safer place. Except Alice’s cheeks were flushed and she was laughing.

His heart cracked. Zeph hadn’t thought Jack was gay but he’d hoped.

Oh well. It was only when Jack caught his eye that Zeph managed to pull himself together.

Don’t run. You can’t let anyone see you’re upset.

He tipped the bottle to his lips and sipped the minty liquid.

Oh, nice. He drank all of it as he walked to the kitchen looking for more. Maybe getting drunk was a good move.

Except there was no more mojito. Now he was in the kitchen, it was a few steps to the stairs and the safety of his room. Before he could move, Georgia caught his elbow.

“Cake. Come on. You have to blow out the candles.”

He let her tug him outside because he thought there was a better chance of slipping away afterwards if he did this now. Plus, his father was expecting a picture.

The cake was… It was supposed to be a rocket blasting off, but there was a slightly obscene look about it.

Georgia was sniggering. The boosters looked like balls and all the candles were grouped around the rocket’s head.

Alice lit sixteen candles and Zeph sent a picture to his dad.

He stood awkwardly through the half-hearted rendition of Happy Birthday to you , took three attempts to extinguish the flames while someone jeered about his blowing skills, then slid away around the side of the house because Rufus and Scott were blocking the way back into the kitchen.

Zeph didn’t take another breath until he was at the front of the house.

He had his keys in his pocket so he could have let himself in the front door, but instead he headed down the drive and across into the field where a harvester had regurgitated rectangular hay bales.

Zeph lay on top of the closest one and looked up.

Middleton was to the west so the ambient light from the town didn’t have too much of an impact on the sky.

It was a clear night and chilly. He didn’t have to wait for the stars to reveal themselves, they were already bright.

It was easy to pick out familiar constellations.

He had an app on his phone to help identify what he didn’t recognise.

Once upon a time, when he was a small boy, and life was so much simpler, he’d counted stars.

He’d wanted to be an astronaut and thought he could fly to them.

When he was older, he’d realised there was no way of travelling to a star and surviving.

They were just huge balls of gas that shone and radiated heat because of nuclear reactions in their core.

So not an astronaut but an astronomer. With a good telescope, he’d really be able to count stars, pick out the redder ones that were cooler than the sun while the hottest would shine white or blue.

He’d been fascinated by the thought of some stars not even being there anymore, the light from them still travelling to Earth long after they’d turned supernovae.

Counting stars that actually existed was impossible.

As he grew up, Zeph concluded too much was unknown about space.

He wasn’t someone who liked uncertainty.

His illness being a case in point. Will I get better?

They couldn’t be sure. Will the cancer come back?

They didn’t know. Then his mum’s illness…

Same questions, until the one no one wanted answered happened when they were not with her.

Maths was his happy place. Solutions to find. And though there weren’t currently answers to every mathematical problem, things like the Riemann hypothesis or the P versus NP issue, maybe one day there would be.

Zeph clung to things he was certain about. That in two years, he’d leave home and if he didn’t get into Cambridge because that wasn’t certain, then he’d go somewhere else, and he’d never have to come back to Middleton.

Everything would have been different if his mum was alive. Maybe his mum would have been able to talk his dad round about Martin, then Zeph being gay wouldn’t hit like a nuclear explosion. And in that imaginary world, Jack would be gay too and he’d like Zeph.

I can dream. And I still count stars.