Page 12 of The Last Casterglass
“Yep.” She shrugged, forgetting that she was holding her coffee, and nearly spilled it. Quickly she put it back down on the table. “I was a serious afterthought—my brother Sam is ten years older than me, and Althea is nine years older than him. And you’ve met my parents—you know how, well, batty they are?”
“Charmingly so, but yes, I suppose.” The smile Oliver gave her was tinged with compassion, and that made Seph look away quickly.
“Well, when I came along, they’d pretty much got out of the whole parenting groove, although to tell the truth I don’t know how much they were ever truly in it. Stuff like vaccinations and toddler groups went by the wayside.” She shrugged, this time thankfully without holding a scaldingly hot cup of coffee. “It was fine. I did my own thing. I liked it that way.”
“What, as a baby?” Oliver was clearly joking but he had no idea how close to the truth he really was.
“Well, no, obviously not when I was an actual infant, but I grew up mostly on my own. They sent me to school for year six, the way they did with the others—we were all homeschooled before then.” Although Seph had actually had precious little homeschooling; there had been occasional lessons when a particular interest had suddenly seized her mother, but beyond that she’d been left to her own devices.
“And year six was when you missed so much school because of the measles?”
He’d made that leap pretty quickly. The whole year had been a complete washout; she hadn’t made any friends, and she’d been way behind in her work. “Yes, it turned into pneumonia, unfortunately.” Oliver was frowning now, and it made Seph hasten to add, “It all turned out fine, honestly. I didn’t even like school, so I was glad not to go. Big relief, really.”
“Why didn’t you like school?”
“I suppose because I wasn’t used to it.” And she’d been the weird kid, too weird even to be bullied. She’d been ignored instead; she suspected the other children simply hadn’t known what to do with her. Which had been both a relief and a disappointment, really.
“So where did you go for secondary school?” Oliver asked, his forehead still furrowed.
“I stayed at home.” She was going to sound like such an oddball now, Seph thought despondently, although he was probably thinking,Ah, that makes sense. No wonder she’s so strange.That possibility made her feel even worse. “There wasn’t enough money for boarding school by then, and I wasn’t particularly keen on the local school, so I more or less homeschooled myself.” Which had beenfine. Kind of.
“Homeschooled yourself!” Oliver raised his eyebrows, his tone somewhere between impressed and scandalised. “How did you manage that?”
Seph hesitated, unsure whether to backpedal or brag. “I don’t know. I just did.”
“Oh, come on.” Oliver leaned forward, his face alight. “You can’t leave it at that. Did you take your GCSEs? Your A levels? I mean, what did youdo?”
Seph felt herself flushing. “I took my GCSEs,” she answered slowly. She’d registered for them online, ordered the books, taught herself. Occasionally her mother had fluttered by to see how she was doing, or her father would take a kindly interest and read one of her essays, but it had all felt very token; as if they’d completely forgotten about her and then suddenly remembered,Oh right, we have another daughter.Should make a bit of an effort, perhaps!
“And then I went to sixth form for my A levels,” she finished, “but I didn’t manage to actually get any.” She buried her nose in her coffee cup then, unwilling—or perhaps unable—to meet his gaze. Would he be horrified? Pitying? Which would be worse?
“Why not?” Oliver asked after a moment. His tone was quiet, but she couldn’t tell much from it.
She put her coffee cup down and broke off a bit of flapjack, crumbling it between her fingers. “I don’t know. It just wasn’t for me. I quit after year twelve.” She risked a look up; his expression was alert without being too pitying. She hoped. “I guess you can’t start school at sixth form without being seen as a little—weird.”
Unlike in primary, the kids in sixth form had bullied her, in a careless sort of way.Oh look, here comes that freak girl, they might say as she came down the corridor. Looking back, Seph wasn’t sure what had been so weird about her. All right, her social skills hadn’t been amazing, and she’d been pretty sullen and silent. She’d also gone through a defiant Goth phase because, like the pink dreadlocks, black hair and lots of liquid eyeliner had felt like armour. But it hadn’t felt like anythingtooout of the ordinary, except, for the back of beyond part of Cumbria, maybe it had been. Or maybe she really was weird, on some sort of fundamental level, because she found conversations like this one so difficult.
She tried to smile, but to her horror her lips were trembling.Oh, help.She hadn’t meant to admit that much, she realised.Revealit, because she felt so vulnerable and so, well,sad. She thought of her seventeen-year-old self, angry and defiant and so very afraid, and she ached for that girl. She wanted a do-over, but she also wanted to give herself a hug. Which was sort of ridiculous, because she didn’t think she’d actually progressed all that much. Except here she was, talking about it with a nice—and cute—guy, so maybe she had, after all. At least a little.
The thought gave her enough strength to smile, even if her lips still trembled. “I’m not saying it wasn’t hard, though,” she said, in a tone that was meant to be wry but shook a little.
“It must have been really hard. I can’t even imagine, and my own secondary school experience was somewhat unorthodox.”
“Was it?”
He shrugged, the movement dismissive. “Not like yours. Not even close.”
“Tell me.” She craved some kind of shared experience, she realised, because it was something she hardly ever had. She’d been a loner for so much of her life, she didn’t really know what it felt like, to say,Yes, me too!And yet she wanted to. Badly. She wanted that, she realised, with Oliver in particular.
He hesitated, his long, lean fingers toying with the handle of his coffee cup as his expression turned pensive. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said at last. “I just suppose I never really felt like I fit in, either. When my aunt and uncle took me in—well, they were really kind, but…I also felt…other. They sent their son Jack to this posh boarding school that my uncle had gone to, the kind of place where you wore a fancy uniform, complete with straw boater or what have you, and I went to the local comp. Not that I minded,” he added quickly, leaning forward as if he really wanted her to understand. To believe him. “I didn’t even want to go to that snooty school. But it just felt…” He shrugged, helplessly. “It felt like some sort of snub, even if it wasn’t. Like I didn’t matter quite as much, and why should I? I was the nephew, not the son. I suppose I was always aware of that, on some level. Sometimes more than at other times, but there was always something there.”
“Yes.” Seph felt a lump forming in her throat, because she understoodexactlywhat he meant, how he’d felt. Hadn’t she felt the same way? Like a forgotten addendum, the epilogue to their family that nobody had remembered to read. She’d never imagined that someone might feel similarly. Someone like Oliver, who seemed so posh and confident and relaxed.
She stared at him as if seeing him for the first time, not as someone she had to protect herself against, but someone who might actually understand her. Be her friend. Could it be possible?
Or was she just wishing it was? Heaven knew she had trouble trusting herself but as Oliver smiled at her and she smiled shyly back, she knew she wanted to. A lot.
Chapter Six