Crossing the Line by Gillian Philip Read Free Book Online Page B

they did.
    They were still kind of enjoying themselves, so they set to with a bit more kicking and punching – well, what passed for punching with a pack of rock apes – and I was roaring and whacking them back when one of them was yanked off me and thrown back.
    â€˜Oy,’ said Mickey Naughton. ‘Piss off out of here.’
    They were about to, and no hanging about, when he added: ‘And give us that.’
    Meekly one of them handed over the iPod, and they scarpered.
    Mickey didn’t hand over Calum’s property, but turned it in his fingers. I was still panting and snarling with rage. I looked at Calum, expecting some sort of reflection of myself. Instead, there was only familiar, tearful, impotent fury. My stomach went cold. If you stuck a ponytail on him, and twenty years, and a Jeff Buckley T-shirt…
    Smiling, Mickey dangled the iPod by its earphone cord. ‘Whose is it?’
    â€˜His,’ I said, jerking my head at Calum.
    â€˜Oh, aye?’ He looked from me to Calum and back again. ‘If it wis yours I’d give it back. You’re the one that wis fighting for it.’
    I was still enraged enough to say, ‘Give it to him.’
    Mickey tilted an eyebrow. ‘Seeing as
you’re
asking.’ He tossed it disdainfully to Calum, and winked at me. ‘You’re a good lad.’
    I was sweating and wiping blood off my nose and gasping for breath, but what I remember most clearly about that moment is my whole body puffing up with macho pride as Mickey walked away without a backward glance. I turned to Calum. Maybe I was expecting a little admiration. Maybe I was expecting a little gratitude.
    Oh, aye. I was forgetting he’d suddenly turned into a clone of my dad. The only expression on his bruised face was resentment.
    â€˜What did you do that for?’ he snapped.
    I was speechless.
    â€˜It’s only a frigging iPod,’ he yelled, though tears brimmed at the corner of his eyes. ‘You don’t fight back! Everybody says that. They might have had a knife or something!’
    I stared, fascinated, as he stormed off.
    My dad threw hissy fits
just
like that.
    You don’t fight back.
Right. I’d better remember that. I didn’t get these life lessons at home. Except, of course, by watching.
    I kept right on watching. I wasn’t committing myself,not in these early weeks, though Kevin Naughton was suddenly trying to be my best friend. He shouted out to me in the playground, asked me where I went to primary school, which teams and bands did I like, what did I think about
her
or
them
or
that
? He flattered me with questions I’m sure he knew the answers to already.
    â€˜My brother thinks you’re great,’ he’d say. And I’d think about Mickey, so cool and couldn’t-give-a-damn, so smart and professional, so brutal and frightening. I should have been wary. Instead I was chuffed out of my skull.
    Meanwhile, Calum was giving me the cold shoulder, and I realised I didn’t care, especially when it clicked that he was now a little scared of me. Truly, I did not go to school with the intention of getting into the wrong crowd. I did not pack my fall-from-grace into my backpack on day one. But I’d heard Craigmyle High chewed you up and spat you out, and many things determined what shape you were when you sat dazed in the pool of its spittle at the end of your school career. Teachers were the least of it.
    I intended to remain human; well, humanoid. Nick-shaped. I wasn’t going to be stamped into something unrecognisable or even, God forbid, something Dad-shaped. Like my ex-friend Calum …
    You don’t fight back
. Well, well. There was a lesson that worked two ways.
    I’d like to be one of life’s good guys, who wouldn’t? But I was not going to be one of its victims. I was not going tobe humiliated and bullied every day of my life, then go home with the shame simmering in my embittered