Fit by Sammy Wright

Author:Sammy Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary fiction;debut;Northern England;coming of age;foster care;young adult;Cinderella;modern fairy tale
Publisher: And Other Stories Publishing
Published: 2021-09-30T17:13:40+00:00

Aaron is there at the end of the day too. It’s summer, so he has nowhere to be, and no one to be with. Jack and him walk down to the river. They walk to the forest. They take an old coke bottle and smoke buckets in the river water. They lie back in the dank wood, hot with mud dust, throats dry and stung by burnt plastic.

Aaron’s eyes drift across the leaves above him. They flick from dark to light to dark. He is waiting. He has been waiting for some time. He waits on the moors, and in the forest, and on the bench outside Tesco. He waits in his lessons, staring at the desk, at the ceiling, at his bony hand. He is waiting for Rose, now, but he was waiting before that. His mind is an eye. His mind is all eye. Drifting attention, and no more. He wants nothing, because what is there to want?

Thirty metres away is the main path. They hear people sometimes, but never see them. A rustle of feet. Once, a dog, a fat-nosed black lab, rooting wetly over the ground, looping towards them, then away, grunting, though the bracken.

Jack feels the earth under his back. He feels his weight. He feels heavy beyond anything. Desire is a weight in his gut and his groin, pressing him down. He wants to drive the forklift.

Aaron rolls upright, hunches forward. His body is too thin. His clothes hang like sails. He packs the foil cup, places it over the bottle. He offers it to Jack. Jack sits up too.

They crouch, knees in the mud. Each in turn pulls the bottle, cut open at the bottom, up so the water draws two litres of dense, acrid smoke. Then they lift and inhale, sharply. Wisps linger. Aaron holds his face tight, screwed in on itself. Jack is impassive, until the smoke eases, dragon-like, out of his nostrils.

They lie back again. The smoke seems to make no difference. In the distance, someone laughs, someone shouts. The sounds deaden and lose themselves in the trees.

‘Is she back soon, then?’ asks Jack. His mind has been running on Rose. His eyes close sometimes, and she’s there, on the beach. In the caravan. Sitting beside him on the narrow fold-out bed.

In her pictures, on Instagram, she moves with confidence. She’s a different person. She’s not like him anymore. She is part of the world beyond. She looks back at him, over her shoulder. A stranger.

It makes him feel sick, and small. It makes it all real.

‘Is she rich, now?’

Aaron shrugs.

It always used to be that everything else was beyond them. The three of them. They were out, on their own, uniquely fucked. Jack is restless. An itch, deep in his bones.

‘I passed my GCSEs, you know,’ he says.

The sun dapples the ground with bright patches. It looks flat. Jack knows there’s more. He closes his eyes. He feels the needle in his arm, the dry calm of the clinic. His head is thick, half dead.

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