“I told him stuff I’ve never told anyone.” I dip the tip of my finger into the puddle of maple syrup on my plate then lick it off. “Stuff he probably didn’t even want to know.”

Reeba chuckles gently.

“When things are –” I pause, trying to find the right word but can’t – “swirly, I go in there and he makes me a mug of tea and we listen to records and then everything is less…”

I pause again and she adds, “Swirly.”

I chuckle this time, but it’s not funny.

It’s not funny at all.

I feel it again then – the loss – and the thought of it, of not having those Wednesday afternoons at Trafalgar with Mal, of going back to riding the 27 bus back and forth between home and school and lying on my bed, listening to some band singing about love and life and all those other things I know nothing about, makes my chest hurt in a way it never has before.

“Here.” She takes my phone off the table. When she hands it back to me, her number is in my contacts. “For when life gets swirly,” she says when I look up at her and I smile.

*

She texts me when I’m on the bus home.

Pancakes tomorrow? I’m subjugating my grief with breakfast food. Join me.

I realize that I’m grinning when I text back to say that sounds good, and bite down on my bottom lip as I look up at the celling. The Sharpie drawing isn’t there … but it doesn’t matter, because I know the sky is there, and it knows I’m here too.

“Anything from the trolley, henny?” Alistair lisps as he minces down the aisle of our beaten-up bus.

He’s wearing the same tracksuit as the rest of us, navy-blue joggies and a navy-blue jacket with the team’s logo on one side and the logo for the Cockpit, a local queer bar, on the other.

I designed our logo, a football with each pentagon panel made from a different queer flag: the rainbow flag, the trans flag, the bisexual flag. Purples and pinks and blues.

Our team’s called Mosaic, you see, so the logo’s made up of different patterns and pieces. Like a mosaic. Pretty clever.

Well, I thought so.

I like drawing and designing stuff. That’s what I want to do when I go to college next year.

My mum wants me to do something practical, like plumbing, or painting and decorating.

My dad’s not really speaking to me.

Alistair’s got his bright blue football shirt twisted up so it looks like a crop top.

He’s wearing a sequinned scarf around his head, which he’s been flicking off his shoulders like hair whenever someone says something he disagrees with, rolling his eyes and sucking his teeth.

He sticks his arse out and shakes it, the skinny white boy equivalent to twerking.