8
Dex was lulled watching the stations pass him by. It was off-peak, a rainy Saturday morning slog of a train ride. The train was half full of poshos off to the Cotswolds for the weekend, or so Dex imagined. Ostensibly, he was slogging through piles of research on his laptop. In reality, however, he’d stopped paying attention once they’d passed Reading. He was thinking about the first time he had visited his parents at their new home, and he was thinking about Al.
He remembered how when he decided to pick Al up from school, everyone had begun to file out, and he had watched white face after white face, all uniformed and chatting and so very much belonging. Girls walking hand in hand, long, shiny hair playing in the breeze, boys climbing each other in games of macho one-upmanship. And the
