Flight of a Starling. Lisa Heathfield

      Lo sweeps quickly between the seats, collecting piles of dropped popcorn and ripped tickets. I follow behind her, tipping it all into rubbish bags to tie and throw away. I wonder how many sticky fingers leave their prints on it all. How their skin dust leaves them and becomes a part of us.

      ‘Do you think he watched it?’ Lo asks quietly.

      ‘Dean?’ I shouldn’t even say his name with Ma so close by.

      ‘Who else?’ she smiles.

      ‘I’m sure he did.’

      ‘Maybe he didn’t like it’ Lo says. ‘He didn’t stick around.’ She stops and looks at me. ‘We could go and find him,’ she whispers. ‘It’s stopped raining. We can go after this clear-up.’

      ‘Just us?’

      ‘Yes,’ she says quietly. ‘We’re old enough. Just us.’

      I feel torn, because I know we shouldn’t, but part of me wants to see her heart shine bright. ‘OK,’ I say, before I think any more.

      ‘You will? Even after Newport?’ She smiles slightly.

      ‘You won’t do that again.’ In just one night Lo kissed two flattie boys whose names she barely knew. She was sick from the drink when she got home and woke up with her head filled with lightning and regret. Then one came knocking on Terini’s door and she hid in the bathroom while I said I didn’t know her.

      The fountain boy seems different, though. And something about Lo is different too. Something on the edge of her skin lights up when she talks about him.

      We’ve barely finished cleaning up when we walk off, the candy stripe of our big top growing smaller behind us. Lo’s bottle-white hair shines messy in the night’s darkness. She’ll be cold without a coat, but there’s no point me saying. I’ve told her that Lil knows more rain is coming, but she might as well not have heard.

      ‘Will Spides and Ash mind that they’re not with us?’ she asks, linking her arm through mine.

      ‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘But I think they’ll mind even more that we’re looking for a flattie, so I’m not going to tell them.’

      There are three figures ahead of us, on the edge of our site, lit by one of the street lights.

      ‘He’s there,’ Lo says, without looking at me.

      ‘Are you sure?’

      They’re standing, all with their hands in their pockets. Two have got their hoods up, almost covering their faces, but the other one turns to us, as though he senses that we’re near. It’s Lo’s boy from the fountain.

      ‘Do we just walk by them?’ I ask.

      ‘No. We stop and talk,’ Lo says.

      ‘What if they’re waiting for someone else?’

      She looks at me. ‘He’s waiting for me,’ she says. It’s there, in her eyes, and it makes me feel I’ve made a mistake. We shouldn’t have come.

      The fountain boy raises his hand and waves at us, at Lo.

      ‘I think maybe Ash and Spider should be here,’ I say, slowing down so much that I’m barely moving. Lo doesn’t stop; she unhooks her arm from mine and just looks back at me and smiles.

      ‘They’re fine, Rita,’ she says. ‘They’re good ones.’

      ‘How do you know?’ I’m walking to catch up with her, because she can’t go on her own.

      ‘I just do.’

      ‘Hey,’ Dean says as we get close.

      ‘Hey back,’ Lo smiles. A strange silence sits in the middle of us all. The boys in hoods look at us as though we’re from a different land. Maybe we are. Maybe they are.

      ‘We watched your show,’ Dean tells Lo.

      ‘What did you think?’ She’s all jutting elbows, hands resting on hips.

      ‘It was good.’

      ‘Just good?’ she smiles.

      ‘Better than good.’

      One of the boys pulls back his hood, even though Lil’s rain is starting to spit. He’s the one with his skin scalded from too many spots and he looks straight at me.

      ‘Don’t you get jealous that your sister is the star of the show?’

      ‘I’m not.’ Lo has anger in her voice. ‘We’re all equal.’

      The boy puts his palms up, as though stopping her.

      ‘No offence meant.’ And I think he means it. ‘Anyway, I thought the motorbike bit was the best,’ he says.

      ‘Typical flattie,’ Lo mumbles.

      ‘What’s a flattie?’ the boy asks.

      ‘One of you. Not one of us. Do you know that Rita nearly died when we practised that?’ Lo exaggerates.

      ‘I’m not surprised,’ he says casually, but he looks impressed. Strange that the closer we come to death, the more they like it.

      ‘What happened?’ Dean asks.

      ‘I misjudged my jump,’ Lo says.

      ‘It could easily have been my mistake,’ I say. I don’t like the guilt that still sits in her.

      ‘Does it really come down to that?’ Dean asks. ‘Just a split-second mistake between you and death?’

      ‘It’s the same for us all,’ Lo says. ‘Every day you walk the line between dying and surviving too. It’s not just us.’

      The boy with the hood still covering his face nods, his hands still in his pockets, staring hard at the ground.

      ‘You’re pretty bendy,’ the boy with the crumpled skin says.

      ‘Will.’ Dean sounds annoyed.

      ‘What? They are.’

      ‘Do you get scared?’ Dean looks at both of us, but I know he’s asking Lo. ‘When you’re up high? That you’re going to fall?’

      ‘No. Never,’ Lo says. And I know it’s the truth, because it’s the same as I feel. ‘But I have nerves. That’s different.’

      ‘How?’ Dean asks.

      ‘Being nervous keeps you aware,’ Lo says. ‘It brightens everything around you, so that you notice it all. Being scared just burns everything, so nothing is clear.’

      ‘Burns everything?’ Will asks.

      ‘Fries the edges of everything,’ Lo says. ‘So you can’t see clearly any more.’

      ‘Sounds a bit nuts to me,’ the boy in the hood says.

      ‘No,’ Dean interrupts him. ‘I get it.’

      ‘You would.’ The boy in the hood half laughs. I recognise him now – he was at the fountain too.

      The rain is getting heavier, enough to wet our faces and make our hair cold.

      ‘I like the sound of it,’ Will says. ‘Frying edges.’ And he walks to the middle of the road and sits down.

      ‘What are you doing?’ Dean asks, looking around.

      ‘Getting scared,’ Will shouts, lying his whole body flat on the ground.

      ‘You’re being an idiot,’ Dean says.

      ‘I want to see things burning.’ Will stares up at the black sky, blinking hard into the raindrops.

      ‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ Lo says. She’s confused and it makes her shoot anger at the boy.

      ‘He