Fifteen friend requests.
Seventy-five notifications.
Twenty-five messages.
I ignore them all, and type Al’s name in the search bar. His face comes up straight away. His huge Afro takes up most of the picture and he looks nuff awkward, like he doesn’t know how to smile properly. My chest goes all tight, knowing that I’ll never see him for real again, that he’ll only ever be this person in a photo.
Al’s been tagged in all these status updates – loads of people saying how sorry they are, or writing other stuff on his wall. I recognize some of the names and faces from school, but I don’t look at them. I know it will only make me sad or proper angry. Angry that people he didn’t even know are posting about him. Pissed that people who weren’t even friends with Al are going on about how upset they are, or how they wish he was still alive.
I click on through to his check-ins and, when it loads up, a map appears. It makes me think of the one in Al’s room of where he wanted to go, but the red marks on this one are places he actually visited – McDonald’s, the art gallery, the Portico Library, the Whitworth, Wythenshawe Park, the University of Manchester. Three things come up when I click on Recent Places: the Whitworth, Manchester Art Gallery and the museum. I stare at the list. Al had been at the museum on September 12th. Two days before he died.
My phone makes a popping noise and a message comes up, some girl in my year tryna talk to me.
Hope ur ok?
The grey bubble goes up and down with the dots where she’s writing something else, but I close Facebook before she’s finished.
I click on Insta instead and, ignoring even more notifications, I go to Al’s page. The last picture he posted is of all these paper cranes in a glass cabinet. There’s loads of them, on bits of string, hanging down inside the cabinet. It was posted on September 12th, so I guess it’s from the museum. But it’s the caption I can’t stop staring at. Al had written:
Some birds are not meant to be free.
I don’t even know wot he means. Was he talking about himself? Was it Al’s way of saying there was no other way out for him? Did summat happen at the museum? Did he know then wot he was gonna do?
I’m probably reading too much into it, but I wanna try to understand. Not just why Al did it, but everything about him. Why he liked that stupid museum so much. Or why he couldn’t stop going on about paintings. I just wanna feel closer to him again.
I pull out a hoodie from my wardrobe, tugging it on over my T-shirt. I pick my school bag up off the floor and stuff some money inside, along with my phone. I grab Al’s drawing from my bedside-table drawer and put that on top of everything. It’s not folded properly, so the edges of the paper gape open and the tip of Al’s shoe on the picture peeks out. I pull at the zips on either side of my rucksack, watching as the material closes and Al’s picture disappears inside the bag.
*
As I walk to the bus stop, I notice that our estate’s pretty quiet for once. Everyone’s either at work or school. I get my phone out to check the time – 15:10. I need to hurry, otherwise the bus will be full of people from school. It’s proper cold out, so I pull my hood up to cover my neck and some of my face and walk past the rows of houses. The houses are so close together that you can hear people arguing or playing music. Most of them look the same, all red brick with white window frames and rusty metal gates. The gardens are proper massive, tho. I pass this house on the corner with a manky old settee outside and another one with a broken bike leaning against the wall. I kick a half-finished can of Coke on the pavement towards one of the drains, watching as the contents spill out on to the road. In the distance, I hear someone’s dog barking and the couple from around the back of the estate who are always fighting.
The wind gets harsher as I turn on to the main road, so I shove my hands into the pockets of my hoodie and put my head down. I imagine Al walking beside me, in that weird way he had, his arms hanging down by his sides, like they were too long for his body.
When I reach the bus stop, there’s a group of people huddled underneath the shelter. I stand away from them, leaning against the railing. I search through the pockets of my hoodie, trying to find my headphones, but they’re not there. I must’ve left them at home and I can’t be bothered to go back for them. A 43 bus turns the corner and this old woman with one of them old people trolleys sticks her hand out to make it stop.
She gets on in front of me, pushing her trolley towards the front of the bus and sitting down next to a woman with a screaming baby on her lap. I throw some money down for a day saver, and then make my way to the back. The bus is pretty full, but I don’t wanna go upstairs in case I bump into someone from school, so I slump into one of the empty seats just as the bus lurches forward. More people get on, someone rings the bell, someone gets off, another kid starts crying. But it all fades into the background as I stare out the window, thinking about Al.
The bus pulls into another stop, just before the petrol station, and a group of girls get on. They’re all laughing and joking, talking dead loudly. A few of them make their way up to the top deck, scrolling through their phones, without looking up. One of them is taking a picture or filming or something. The last one stops when she sees me. I recognize her from school. She’s in Al’s year and I think I remember seeing him talking to her. I can’t remember her name, but I’m sure he’d mentioned her. I think they had art together or summat.
I suppose she’s fit. I mean, I obviously ain’t blind. But, if she was mates with Al, there’s no way she’d ever bother with me. Not when I’m in the year below. Not when I’m Al’s stupid kid brother. So I’m surprised when she walks towards me.
One of her mates leans down over this plastic bit of the stairs. ‘Eh, Megs!’ she shouts. ‘You comin’ up or what?’
‘Be there in a minute,’ she says. Her friend pulls a face and stomps up the stairs, and I wish I’d remembered my headphones so I could put them in and ignore her. She sits down next to me, moving her hair over her shoulder. It’s this dark blonde colour and there’s a bit of it clipped away from her face. I try not to look too hard, but up close I can see all these freckles across her nose. She licks her lip and I feel myself staring at her mouth. But I don’t want her to think I’m a perv or nothin, so I look away, and shove my hands into my pockets.
‘Hi. You’re Nathan, right?’
I nod. ‘Yeah.’
‘I’m Megan,’ she says. ‘I’m in . . . I was in Al’s year. We were in the same art class and that. We used to sit next to each other.’ She takes a deep breath, and pulls on the sleeve of her jacket. ‘I’m really sorry. I mean, I proper couldn’t believe it when I heard.’
My throat tightens. I can see some people moving in their seats. An old man on the opposite side of the bus turns round and I’m worried that they’re all listening, that maybe somehow they know as well. That they’ve all heard about Al and know wot she’s talking about.
‘It’s all right,’ I say, even tho we both know it ain’t.
She pauses, and starts to pick some of the varnish off her nails. ‘He was so clever,’ she says. ‘He always knew the answers to, like, everything. Every question anyone would ask, or anything the teachers would say, Al would know.’ She pauses. ‘He was going to do so much . . . I mean, he’d gone a bit quiet and stuff these past few weeks, but I didn’t think anything was wrong, y’know? I just didn’t see it.’