“SARAH LENIHAN, I CHALLENGE YOU TO A SWING-OFF!”

The voice belongs to Radha McGinty: best friend, voice of reason, chairperson of the school LGBT committee Students For Equal Marriage Society, and the only person in school who knows I’m sleeping with Angel O’Rourke.

She does not approve.

Radha wears her love, her friendship and her identity for the whole world to see. She doesn’t approve of Angel’s standoffishness. She doesn’t approve of how Angel refuses to acknowledge that there is anything going on between us. She doesn’t approve of me getting hurt, even if I keep insisting I amn’t.

“Go swing with your friends,” says Angel, and she moves so that the bright block capitals on the wall urging me to kiss her are hidden by her body, and I can see the words she’s added there herself. Swirling and swooping, the perfect loops spell out, Did I vote on YOUR marriage?

“Saaaarah!” Melody’s voice sings as Radha slings her arms round my waist and pulls me away from Angel and the words on the playground wall. I let my best friend lead me back to the swing set by the climbing frame from which Shane and Matthew are slowly emerging, pink-lipped and tousled.

“Whatever you were about to do,” Radha says in an undertone when we’re out of Angel’s earshot. “It’s not worth it.”

I allow myself a last glance back. One of the stoner sixth-years is offering Angel a joint and the words on the wall are fading fast. I stick my rose back into my belt buckle and sigh.

“I know,” I say softly, but in my head I’m writing a love poem to the lingering smoke of a clove cigarette, how it wafts across the moonlit playground, how the ghost of the smell is like a kiss, long-distance.

3.

I write too many love poems. That’s what Radha says. Too many words taken up on stars and wet earth, the line in the crease of a girl’s palm, the 130 bus stop, on pastel skinny jeans and bloody underwear.

Not everything’s a love poem. That’s what Radha says. You don’t need to write a love poem to your favourite clothes, to periods, to muddy days, to the bus that takes the coast road into town, to the hands of a girl who’d never love you back, even if you thought for a second you loved her.

Not everything has to be about love. That’s what Radha says. But I have to believe that a different kind of love is possible. Outside of romance. Outside of passion. Outside of letting yourself fall flat on your face for another person who’d never even trip up for you.

So I write love poems to black milky tea at the perfect temperature and the satisfaction of finishing a two-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. To solving a quadratic equation on a test that’ll give you full marks and to taking a bite out of a crisp, sharp apple. To the quays of the city on a sunny Sunday, all seagull-strewn and smelling of car exhaust and half-melted 99s, the sounds of the stallholders on Henry Street and Moore Street still singing in on the breeze, “Bananas! Five forra you-ro!” “Getcha cigarettes hee-ur!”