Page 8 of Oleander

The way he walked was strange. He didn’t walk the way boys usually walk. The way other boys ambled, dragged their feet, and scuffed their shoes, this boy walked as though each step was a considered movement. A careful motion of his limbs and body forward toward a very precise destination. He carried something under his arm that I couldn’t see. He was almost upon me when he finally sensed my presence, his eye catching me in its periphery.

He didn’t startle, not a single gesture that would indicate shock to find a boy curled up in a dark corner of his courtyard reading.

He stopped moving and turned to face me fully.

The shock that should have been his was mine.

A jolt hammered my chest as his eyes locked with my own. I couldn’t make out their colour from where I sat, the sunlight pouring over his shoulder, blinding me. All at once, it was the most important thing in the world. The colour of his eyes.

I rose to my feet quickly to face him, a rush of pleasure moving through me at the fact that I was taller. By quite a bit. Half a head, at least.

His eyes were a pale, ice blue.

“Who are you?” he asked in a sharper tone than he’d used with Luke. It somehow had the ability to sound both soft and hard as stone at the same time. “If you’re one of those gypsies here to beg again, we don’t have any work for you.” He drew his gaze down my body and back up, distaste evident.

My ears burned with embarrassment.

“I’m Jude.” I got out.

“I don’t care. Now leave. There’s no work for you here.”

My eyes nearly bugged out of my head. I wanted to hit him. Burst his stupid, weird nose. My cheeks felt hot, and my breath quickened from anger.

“Luke’s my uncle,” I said, breathless with anger. “I’m waiting for him.”

His pale eyes narrowed. “Who’s Luke?”

I frowned at him. Was he slow? He’d literally just met Luke. I glanced at the house.

“Oh,” he said. “The gardener.”

I nodded dumbly.

“Right. Well, fine.” He looked me up and down again. “You look like one of those begging gypsies.”

He turned away and walked to what I soon understood was a stable. A few minutes later, he emerged, leading a huge caramel-coloured horse by a strap across its mouth out into the bright August sunshine.

It was the first time I met Caspien Deveraux, and I loathed him with a passion I didn’t know I was capable of.

And though I didn’t know it then, I’d soon come to love him with the very same ferocity.

Two

Ihadn’t been aware I’d been waiting to see him again until I watched him return his horse to the stable.

The second day, he came out to tell us that his uncle had said we could sit in the kitchen to eat our lunches if we wanted.

On the third day, he sat under a tree on the far side of the garden and read a book. I wanted to know the book title so badly that it was ridiculous. Why did I care what he was reading? He was a stuck-up prick who said I looked like a gypsy.

Since I was only working three days with Luke, I stayed home the next two, reading Pratchett and trying not to think about the weird-nosed boy – Caspien – at Deveraux House.

The following Tuesday, he rode the horse again, past where Luke, Harry, Ged and I hacked and cut at what felt like a hundred years’ worth of weeds. I hated gardening. I hated it more in the painfully hot sunshine. I tried to think of my laptop, the reason I was doing all of this. But that, for some reason, made me wonder what kind of laptophehad. A MacBook Pro, probably. I hated him.

I watched him from the corner of my eye as he trotted past us and down the incline, head held up and a snooty expression on his face – as though everything were beneath him, including me. When he reached the flat, he kicked his heel into the horse’sside and lowered his body just as the horse took off at a sprint. I watched them until they became a small blob in the distance.

“He’s training for the Olympics, apparently,” Luke said, huffing from exertion.

“Who?” I said, whacking a particularly stubborn bracket of weeds.