Ah, there it is: think. What if I change my mind? I mean, two years ago I was in love with Harry Styles. But as soon as I say it out loud, that’s it, I’m gay. I can’t go back if another Harry Styles comes along, can I? God, life would be a hell of a lot easier if everyone didn’t assume you were straight.

*

The next time I get on the 27 I run up the stairs, but the drawing isn’t there. It becomes a thing after that; every time I ask myself, Is this the bus? But it never is. I’m beginning to wonder if I imagined it when, one drizzly Saturday afternoon, I’m at Trafalgar Records with Mal, the guy who owns it. Everyone in Brighton knows Mal. Well, everyone with taste in music knows Mal. He used to be in a ska band in the early eighties that didn’t do particularly well but did well enough for him to buy Trafalgar. My mother laughed when I told her that was my dream, to drink tea and listen to records all day. “All right for some,” she’d said as she shoved a load of towels into the washing machine. I know my parents want me to go to uni, like Meredith, and get a ‘proper job’, whatever that is, but if I had a record shop like Trafalgar, I wouldn’t need a nice car or a house with a driveway. I’d have everything I needed.

Trafalgar is the only place I take off my headphones. It took a while, but after a month of going in there, I realized that I’m a screaming extrovert compared to the regulars. By that point, I must have earned Mal’s trust because he finally said something other than, “I’m gonna have to order that one in,” to me. Not that he said much. I asked after a Florence and the Machine album and he walked over to the corner of the shop, pulled a Fleetwood Mac album out of the stack and handed it to me. “Here.” That’s all he said – “Here” – he didn’t even tell me why he was recommending it, but I bought it and stayed up until 2 a.m. listening to it.

He must have known, because when I went in the next day to tell him how much I loved it, he had a stack of records on the counter. It’s our thing now. I go in there every Wednesday afternoon after school and he plays me music. He says that he’s teaching me stuff I can’t learn in school and takes it very seriously. We started with the classics – Chuck Berry, Zeppelin, Jimmy Cliff, Sam Cooke, Patti Smith, The Stooges – and now we’re on to the more obscure stuff.

So that drizzly Saturday afternoon, he’s playing me a Kamasi Washington album when I see it, the Sharpie drawing of the moon and stars, among the gig posters stuck to the wall behind him. I must be staring because Mal turns and nods at the poster.