On a Scale of One to Ten by Ceylan Scott

Author:Ceylan Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicken House

A new year. Toby stubbed out his half-finished cigarette and squashed it into the pavement as he leant forwards to hug me. He was wearing his school uniform.

‘You all right?’ he asked, slipping a Polo into his mouth, because if anything could hide the stench of stale smoke, it was mints. ‘I saw you in the corridor at school today, but I didn’t have time to come over and see you, my Business coursework was due in.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t stay long, anyway.’

‘I know you didn’t, you never stay long!’

‘I’d rather sleep.’ It wasn’t a lie. If I could spend every second of my life asleep until the day I died, wouldn’t everything be infinitely easier?

Toby took another Polo from the packet. ‘Chips and vinegar?’

‘Chips and no vinegar,’ I said.

‘Half and half?’

‘Fine, then, but you’re paying.’

It was one pound per paper bag of chips, seeping with grease, and we ate them on the pavement outside the takeaway, the smell diffusing into my hair so that it became the scent of Herbal Essences deep-fried and battered. Two homeless men with a scraggly-looking lurcher asked for four pounds for a pack of chips each. Toby told them they were a pound a bag, and gave them two pounds. They fist-pumped him and walked straight past the takeaway and into the supermarket at the end of the road.

‘Chips,’ he snorted. ‘As if. More like a can of White Lightning and a packet of Royals.’

‘How’s Mia?’ I asked. I asked this every time we saw each other, and his answers were always vague and uncomfortable. I was waiting for the day that he’d say: ‘Oh, Mia? She’s great, she wants to be friends again. She’s really sorry.’ It was never going to happen, I knew that. ‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘Yeah, she’s good.’ He awkwardly pulled out his packet of cigarettes and was suddenly engrossed in lighting one.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’m glad.’

‘Got any New Year’s resolutions, then?’ said Toby, making no secret of the fact he was trying to change the subject. ‘Going to give up smoking?’

I laughed. ‘Not this year; I’ve done that one enough.’ I’d given up smoking ‘for real this time’ at the dawn of each New Year for three years now.

I did have a New Year’s resolution. It just wasn’t the sort you brought up in polite conversation. Or impolite conversation, for that matter.

‘How about you?’

‘No, I’ve got nothing either. I thought about the whole giving up chocolate thing, but, really, what is the point? I like it, so I’ll eat it. I’m not denying myself a bar of Cadbury’s just because. There needs to be actual meaning behind it.’

There was meaning behind mine. Check.

‘Yeah, I think the whole thing’s a bit stupid, to be honest. It’s just another day,’ I said. He dived his hand into the crumpled bag and finished the last chip.

‘You’re such a cynic,’ he said, between mouthfuls of starch. ‘I think this year’s going to be amazing.’

Amazing? I thought back to my New Year’s resolution, scrawled in black ink on the pages of my diary.

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