GLAZE
Also by Kim Curran
Shift
Control
First published 2014 by Kim Curran, TW12 2DL, Great Britain
www.kimcurran.co.uk
Copyright © Kim Curran 2014
Cover and Design by Regan Warner
Kim Curran has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
1
ISBN 978-0-9929297-0-1
To Lisa, who believes anything is possible.
And makes me believe it, too.
CONTENTS
K
IM
C
URRAN
1
‘WHAT DO WE WANT?’
‘A future!’
‘When do we want it?’
‘Now!’
A hundred voices ring out in angry unison, fists pumping, placards waving in the air.
I’d given up trying to explain the issues with the chant on the way here. How can you have a future
now
? In fact, how can you have a future
ever
? The future, by definition, is always tomorrow. Always unattainable. I’d tried to tell them that. I’d gone as far as using words like oxymoron. But then Dave Carlton called me a moron and everyone on the underground carriage had laughed. So I’d laughed along with them, as if the embarrassment wasn’t eating away at my stomach like acid, as if I wasn’t acutely aware of the void between me and them, and stared out into the flickering blackness of the tunnels.
Fifteen minutes later, here I am, standing in front of the gates of a school under threat, shouting along with the rest of them. Adding a hurried and mumbled ‘Ten years from...’ before the final and heartfelt ‘now!’ as some form of petty victory that even I knew was pathetic.
But I wasn’t about to leave the protest, even if they did have a stupid and logically impossible mission statement. Even if it was cold and I needed a wee and I didn’t know why we were protesting outside a school that was closing down when we were less than half a mile away from parliament, which, I was pretty sure, has more influence on our future than this school could ever have. Especially with the election only a matter of months away.
Forget all that. I was sticking this one out. Because getting buffeted about between twenty of my classmates and hundreds of strangers, having my feet trodden on and not being able to see anything other than the back of the kid in front of me, was the first time in months that I felt like I belonged.
Today, I was one of them again. United by the belief that ‘You’re better together’. Which is what Glaze is all about after all.
‘Are you filming this?’
At the sound of that all too familiar voice, I look up. Ryan McManus shoulders his way through the crowd to stand next to me. Well, next to the boy next to me. But in this tight vicinity I find my heart beating a little too fast. Stupid heart.
‘Live flow, bro,’ Karl, the kid next to me, answers. He’s the tallest in our class so Ryan tasked him with filming the protest and streaming it to Glaze. ‘Fifty K hits already.’ Karl’s eyes defocus—the sign of someone accessing Glaze. The sign I’ve come to loathe.
I’m the last in my year to get hooked up. You have to be sixteen to join. So while the rest of the boys and girls in Year eleven have been exploring all the delights Glaze has to offer for months, I’m still waiting. That will teach me for going up a grade when I was ten. I never quite fitted in to start with. But now their lives all revolve around who’s following who, and what’s trending today, they’re even further away. But not for long. In a matter of weeks, days and hours, I’ll turn sixteen and be able to reach them.
‘They can’t ignore us now, hey, Ryan?’ I say, weakly.
Ryan looks down at me, his dark eyebrows drawn together in mild confusion. I’ve got used to that just-waking-up look you get when you pull someone out of Glaze. Ryan must be struggling to focus on the two realities: the stream of data flowing before his eyes and an image of the shabby, ginger-haired, pale-faced girl looking up at him.
‘Yeah, sure,’ he says, blinking like he’s bothered by something. I’m worried it’s me who’s annoyed him, but then he smiles—that unbelievably cute smile—and I feel my knees go weak. Stupid knees.
‘This,’ Dave Carlton says, indicating pretty much the whole world with a lazy wave of his hand, ‘is lame. When is it going to get fun?’ His eyes fog over as he looks into his feed. ‘Dudes, check out the chick with the tits. She’s here somewhere.’ He snaps out and looks around, trying to match up the geography of the feed he was seeing with our current location.
‘As opposed to the chicks without tits?’ I ask. But I’m glad that no one hears.
‘Seriously, Ryan. You have to help me find her,’ Dave says. He grabs Ryan’s arm trying to see over the heads of our classmates to find his mystery woman. ‘Username “LuckyLucy”. Oh, LuckyLucy, this could be your lucky night. Am I right?’ He raises his hand, waiting for a high-five. Ryan leaves him hanging. It makes me like him even more.
‘Um, yeah, look I’m staying IRL today, Dave,’ Ryan says.
‘What? With these hotties around? Are you mental?’
‘I want to experience it first hand.’ He pats Dave on the shoulder, in the way that only Ryan McManus can get away with.
Dave shrugs. ‘Whatever. More for me.’
Dave goes back to looking around for his mystery lucky girl, flicking in and out of the feed to track her down. Ryan and I exchange a glance that I take to mean, ‘sorry about Dave, he’s a prat,’ but which I really wish meant ‘how about you and me leave this crazy place and talk about the real mechanisms of social change somewhere?’.
It was Ryan who organised this protest. He’d read a stream about it and decided that we should do something.
‘If we stand by and let them take this school, they’ll be coming for ours next,’ he’d said.
Most of the kids hadn’t been bothered by the idea of our school being shut down. But Ryan has this way of persuading people. Of leading them. If I’m honest, he’s the real reason I’m here. Not that I’d do anything just for a cute boy. I’m not that kind of girl. But Ryan, well, he is that kind of guy. The kind I would do anything for. I hate myself for it.
I turn away from him, embarrassed I’m staring too much, to see a wide-eyed, blonde girl moving through the crowd. She leaps into Ryan’s arms and the two of them start linking up like they’re not surrounded on all sides. I turn away so fast I hit my head against a protest sign. It hurts.
‘Oh, Ryan,’ Amy says, when they’ve finally disentangled. ‘Have you seen Nathaniel Buckleberry’s feed?’
‘Who?’
‘What about Nathaniel?’ Pippa pushes forward to join Ryan and Amy, or ‘Ramy’ as they’ve become known. I wave as she passes but she doesn’t acknowledge me.
Pippa, or at least the Pippa I knew, the one I was friends with a few months ago, was never into any of this ‘Che Guevara crap’ as she called it. She was happy flicking through women’s magazines and picking out her next outfit. But now, she actually seems to care about this stuff.
‘Nathaniel’s here!’ Amy says, grabbing Pippa by the arm.
‘He’s here? Where?’ She squeals. ‘How did I not know that?’ Pippa hops around, trying to see over the heads of our group.
‘Nathaniel’s a fake, Pippa. Like you.’
Either Pippa doesn’t hear Kiara’s snide comment, or she chooses not to. Either way, she’s now jumping up and down with Amy, begging Ryan to move so that we can find Nathaniel in the crowd.
‘She still not speaking to you?’ I ask Kiara, who is picking at the edge of her Take Back The Future sign as if it was responsible for our generation’s lack of prospects.
‘I think you’ll find it is I who am not speaking to her, Petri,’ Kiara says, her chin held high, trying to look like she’s not bothered. Stubborn as ever.
I sigh. I’ve been caught between their bickering too much recently to really bother any more.
I look from the giggling Pippa to the stern Kiara and try to remember how the two of them could have ever been friends. But they were.
Bona fide
BFFs. I know for a fact that Pippa punched the letter ‘K’ into her arm with a maths compass and covered it with ink she’d stolen from the art supply cupboard. And Kiara did the same with the letter ‘P’. You could see the stippling blood through their shirts for weeks after. I wonder if the scars still show?
I guess people grow apart. And teenagers are supposed to have the attention span of brain-damaged gold fish, after all. What we love today we’re bored of tomorrow. The Tumblr generation who can’t concentrate on anything longer than 30 seconds without hitting ‘next’. That’s us, right?
But it seems weird that in a matter of months you can go from carving someone’s initial into your flesh to not even acknowledging them in the hallway.
I’m seeing it all around me. Old friendships, old passions, set aside and forgotten about. Personalities tried on then discarded like yesterday’s fashion. There’s wreckage, for sure. Girls sobbing in corners. Boys punching lockers then sobbing in corners. And this, we’re told, is what growing up is all about.
Puberty, people, is a bitch.
It’s not like I’m immune to it. I’m only lagging behind a little. I assume that’s why it takes me longer to get over things. My favourite song of last year is still my favourite song today. I can play it on repeat for hours and hours and not get tired of it. I still love
Alice in Wonderland
as much as when I first read it. And I miss my friends.