It would be love after a few sights. Last Tuesday, she caught my eye again, and I caught hers back. I’ll probably ask her to prom – betraying the pact made with my two closest friends, to go together rather than with dates – but I need the confirmatory third or fourth sight of her. Then I’ll tell her that I fancy her.

With the frenzy of two months before prom dominating classroom and corridor conversation, our minds are occupied. We’re unusually busy. Much to our teachers’ dismay, we’re organising the detail of prom night – the before, the during, and the after; the whos and the wheres – rather than revising for our GCSE exams.

Most of us will be fine. The majority will pass or excel, then join chosen sixth form colleges, well on the way to university then career then retirement. The ones who are left behind will spend their lives after sixteen treading water in separate oceans, identical in their inability to swim and lack of mentor teaching them the different strokes.

I take in almost every feature of Adam Grey’s appearance as he stands in front of me. I will later realise that I missed something. My life is a tangle of tenses.

Thanks to the interference of third parties – my friends, our teachers – I will realise that Adam stole my phone, that it was nestled in his left trouser pocket as he spoke to me that lunch break. He stole my Samsung SGH-E900 with the slide top, which when moved reveals a keypad beneath it. The technology was boundary-pushing when such models were first released.

After the full details of his past crimes emerge, it will seem that Adam is an anti-Robin Hood. He’s stealing from the better off and giving to himself. He needs to do this, but he should have sought help a different way, which is easy for someone like me to say, especially now, after the fact.

I’m better off than Adam, but not necessarily financially. It’s hard to tell. We’re taught not to judge books by their covers. It’s one of the few lessons I pay attention to here in school, despite its reappearances at various stages of my education – masquerading as other discussions, posing as different parables. I see through the well-meaning lies. I’m a sucker for the moralising tendency of being talked at rather than to. Because this lesson works.

I’m better off than Adam because I’m surviving more successfully. I’ve got the safety net of enough friends to silence the dread of high school loneliness, even if I wish I had more. I’ve got parents that care enough to make me a packed lunch and wash my uniform, so I’m not easy pickings for bullies who hunt with their noses. I’ve got enough academic potential to disappear into the crowd of schoolkids teachers neither favour nor target out of concern.

I’m in the middle ground, comfortable with my destiny of unremarkable, modest, mediocre. I just need to finalise my prom date and get my projected exam grades.

Adam must do a lot more. He’s set to be one of the left behind, which is unfairly conditioned by many external factors that others could – and should – be blamed for.

‘You okay, Adam?’ I ask, with the most sincere tone I can muster. My attempt isn’t helped by my friends, who snigger into their sleeves behind me, then perform the Adam Grey hand gesture the year group have been doing since he joined the school: wafting a non-existent smell away from them. My friends then rough up their uniform as a tribute to his, which is punctuated with stains and holes.

‘Mmmmyeah,’ Adam mumbles back, his face drenched scarlet, his eyes darting to the ground when he catches me catching him looking at me.

‘Such a weird kid,’ Mike contributes, conscious that Adam is still in earshot as we walk away.

‘Leave him alone. He’s never done any harm,’ I try, ever the anomalous peacemaker in the trenches of this small-town British state school.

‘Yeah – until he has,’ Pete adds.

*

ADAM GREY’S DAD IS A CLONE

Adam’s reputation here isn’t helped by the rumours that his Dad is a clone. Apparently, Adam’s real Dad left his Mum after she had an affair, and the version of Dad occasionally spotted picking Adam up from school on his motorbike is a clone. Like the wafting gesture, this rumour caught on like wildfire.
         
Shortly after the interaction with Adam, when I didn’t notice the missing phone, which is information I’ll receive soon, before today’s final bell, in time to distract my courage-plucking-up moment of asking Ellie to prom after second period of Design Technology (where we sit on the same row)… my friends and I are eating lunch.
         
‘He is weird though,’ Pete belatedly agrees, digging up the bones of our earlier half-conversation.
‘There’s probably a reason. There’s always a reason. You’re not just born weird,’ I try.
‘Probably doesn’t help having a clone for a Dad,’ adds Mike, somehow both softening the insult and sharpening it, as if the thing we’re all constantly stabbing Adam with is double-sided. Double-bladed. An instrument of misery that requires one assailant but inflicts the pain of two.
         
‘Yeah,’ Pete laughs. ‘Two Dads that don’t like you, at different times. Must be lonely. They could at least be in the same room and dislike him together.’

The day passes with the rest of lunch break, then Chemistry followed by double Design Tech. For Chemistry, I’m free of Mike, and Pete and I don’t resume the circular discussion of Adam’s weirdness. For DT, I’m at the opposite end of the classroom to my two friends. They exploited our amicable but timid but excellent DT teacher (a professional graphic designer on the side) early in the term and negotiated sitting together, disrupting the seating plan. I was very happy with the seating plan, which had me on a row with three of the most popular girls in the year group. I remain ecstatic with this good fortune.
         
On the way out after second period, as we gleefully bolt out the doors, desperate to return to our home lives, I gulp. Clear my throat. Do it.

‘Ellie, um, have you got a minute? No worries if you haven’t, if you’ve got somewhere to be.’

‘Nowhere to be. Got more than a minute,’ she smiles.
         
She says yes to going to prom together. I’ve successfully recalibrated after the 30-minute interrogation of Adam I was witness to during the first period of DT, where I found out the truth about the phone. I have the phone back now, so I save Ellie’s number in my contacts when she reads out the digits.
         
I’ve brushed that inconvenience under the carpet and helped leave Adam behind, where this cruel world at this consequential age will always position him.
         
I’ve marched on ahead – forwards, as most of us do. Under my arm is the confidence-booster of a popular girl as prom date, which might lift me out of the average crowd. I’ll only know in the coming days/weeks as the news spreads around the school.
         
Then, on prom night, I might become a God, or something, if that’s what happens in these situations. This is all new to me.

*

THE END

During the interrogation, Adam cried a lot, even though we’re at the age where boys are expected to abide by the social code and “man up” in public. He also wet himself, which just made me feel sad for him. He’s been raised in a way that has left him with a lot of problems, making him under-equipped for all of this.
         
Mrs. Price turned to me then, after Adam did that. After she placed a comforting hand on Adam’s shoulder, as she had been trained, while Mrs. Williams watched it all play out. After she told him not to worry about it, but that he “should go and get cleaned up.”
         
‘Adam does that sometimes, but I’d appreciate if you kept that between us. He doesn’t need another reason for people to pick on him.’

‘Of course. I wouldn’t. I don’t, by the way. I try not to.’

‘I know you don’t, Richard.’

‘The others do, but I’ll make sure they stop.’

‘Well I’d appreciate that, Richard. Adam would too. It was your Mike and Pete who told me about the phone, to be honest with you. They had a hunch. There’s no need for this phone thing to leave this room either. I’m sure you understand.’

‘I do.’

‘Adam’s got a lot going on, right now. Always has, actually. But that doesn’t give him the right to take other people’s things.’
         
I didn’t, but I wish I offered him the phone there and then, when Mrs. Price said that. Or when Adam re-entered the office, red in the face, eyes puffy and to the floor, a wad of toilet paper held over his trousers, another wad in his hands.
         
I wish I said that it’s his if he wants it. I wish I lied and said that I won’t need it anyway, that I’m getting another phone for Christmas, so this one is only temporary.
         
But I didn’t.

I walk over to my friends, who are waiting for me by the gate, as is our daily arrangement. Mike doesn’t hesitate. He cuts to the chase:

‘So what did she say?’

‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I lie (try).
         
A grin breaks out on Mike’s face. Decorates it. For a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, erases its creases and tensions. The grin warms his face up, sharing this heat with anyone lucky enough to be in the immediate vicinity.

‘Screw the pact. I’m happy for you. Not sure how the hell you pulled it off, though. Ellie’s way out your league.’

‘You’re punching above your weight,’ Pete agrees.
         
The conversation moves on as we start walking – moves on to the Champions League football matches being televised that evening, to our lessons tomorrow, to whatever scraps of homework or preparation required for them we can remember between us. Then the conversation shifts again, as our words so often do when we say them aloud to each other, freeing them from the confines of our heads.
         
‘Did you get the phone back in the end?’ Mike asks, knowing the outcome of this line of questioning, so not even waiting for me to reply, before adding: ‘You owe me one, mate.’ A different grin with a whole new mess of implications greets me. I nod.
         
We walk past about a dozen kids in the year below circling a boy as he’s getting back on his bike, picking up his bag and straightening his glasses as he does so. The circle fakes a drum roll by patting their knees in sync. My friends watch the performance, slowing their walk to maximise how much they see as we pass.
         
I’m looking somewhere else. Back the way we came, Adam sneaks out the school gates while there’s a lull between waves of schoolkids. He crosses the road, where his Dad’s clone, his Dad, and his Mum are waiting for him, perhaps. Instead of leaning against a parked motorbike as he usually would, his Dad’s clone is gripping a great big ladder thrown down from the spaceship’s boarding ramp. Adam reaches him, they hug, and his three parents usher him to clamber up first so they can all go home. From this distance, I can only imagine what they’re saying to each other. The options for dinner that evening, perhaps.  

– George Oliver

Note: This piece was previously published in 2025 by Twenty-two Twenty-eight.