“No!” said Ameerah.

“I don’t mean on purpose. But would you say I ever bullied the younger kids?”

“No more than the rest of us, mate,” said Guy. “And we were only doing what was done to us before.”

“Doesn’t make it right, though, does it?” Charles replied.

“I don’t think you were ever cruel,” added Jeremy.

“This isn’t making me feel any better.”

“What’s on your mind, Charles?” Nory asked, giving his arm a friendly rub.

“I don’t know. It’s just being here. Remembering stuff. What if something I said to someone years ago, you know, like just a throwaway comment, I’m not even talking specifically. I can’t recall specifics, if I’m honest. But what if I said something to someone and years later . . . You know Tristan was bullied.”

“We were all bullied,” Guy snapped. “Toughens you up.”

“Bullshit!” said Ameerah. “Bullying doesn’t toughen anyone up. It makes them miserable. It leaves scars.”

“That’s my point,” said Charles. “I know we were all bullied to a certain extent, but what if the bullying that Tristan experienced stayed with him? And those kids who bullied him would have no idea that years later their words caused him to . . . well, you know.”

Jeremy put an arm around Charles’s shoulder. “Tristan had more issues than being bullied. I’m not dismissing it; I’m not saying that it didn’t have a lasting effect, but Tristan had a lot of problems and not enough solutions.”

“It eats me up.” Charles’s eyes were wet. “To think that someone somewhere, someone I don’t even remember, might be hurting because of something I did when I was at school.”

“We were all just trying to survive, mate,” said Guy.

“That’s no excuse!” Charles almost shouted at Guy.

“Charles,” Jeremy’s voice was soothing. “I was with you pretty much all the time at school. We got bullied together, remember? And I can promise you that I never saw you target any one kid or behave in any way like those kids who bullied us. I would have remembered. I would have flagged it with you if I had.”

“Thanks, Jez.”

“Jeremy’s right,” added Guy. “At worst, it was hijinks, nothing that would leave a mental mark. I always wondered why you didn’t give as good as you got. When I told my father I was being bullied, he told me it was a rite of passage; it would make a man of me. And I paid it forward, just like he’d have wanted me to. I’m not proud of it, but I can’t afford to analyze it. I’m hanging on by a thread as it is.” He tried to laugh, but it came out strangled and he coughed instead.