Matriculation: (The Oxford Trilogy #1)

by Riley Meyer

  I smiled.

  “You are wise, you know that?”

  “I do know that, thank you my dear.”

  We were quiet for a moment.

  “Maybe you can find a way to give the same speech to Mark,” I suggested.

  “Rafe,” Maura said.

  “What?”

  “Yer need to drop it.”

  “What do you mean? Drop what?”

  “Drop Mark. Stop thinking about him. Or try to. Because if yer spend the rest of the year pining after him, hoping that he’ll have some revelation or some massive personal development, all that’s gonna do is waste your time. He has to learn his lessons in his own time and your sitting around hoping that’ll be today, or tomorrow, or next week isn’t going to help him at all, it’s just going to make you miserable.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I am right.”

  “It’s hard.”

  “I know, darling.”

  I tilted my head back to look at her.

  “I’m going to need a distraction.”

  “Well I’ll help. Yer've already been offered free access to my fanny. I’m a true friend.”

  I laughed.

  “You are. You really are.”

  “But you can’t redeem your voucher now,” she said, stretching her arms out in front of her and over my head, “because aunty Maura has a date.”

  “Which one is it?” I said, sitting up to let her out.

  “Which one, you ask, as though I’m some kind of loose woman.”

  “Which one is it?” I repeated.

  She stood up and turned back to me, flashing a cheeky smile.

  “Both of them.”

  “Ah,” I said, “my mistake.”

  “It’s less of a date, more of a—” she hesitated.

  “Rendezvous?”

  “Exactly. They’re not great conversationalists, to be fair.”

  “No kidding.”

  Maura looked at me.

  “Are you going to be OK?”

  I nodded and I realised that actually, I was. At least for now. She smiled and kissed me on the forehead.

  “Keep busy. Call your Ma’am or something.”

  “Good idea. She just sent me another inspirational meme.”

  “Let me guess: ‘Every day is a clean slate’.”

  “Actually this one was a picture of a hedgehog holding up its hands as if its praying with text saying ‘Send this photo to five people who you feel blessed to have in your life’.”

  “Is she even religious?” Maura asked.

  “No, but she likes hedgehogs.”

  “Of course. See you tomorrow?”

  I nodded.

  Maura smiled again and left.

  When she had gone I leant against the wall and looked out the window. It was almost nine o’clock at night but there was still light in the sky, just a little, ebbing at the corners. It could have been sunrise or sunset, both had the same feeling of transition, of a truce between opposites.

  I felt the same truce within me. On the one hand, the sadness about Mark, about what it could have been and would now not be, but on the other a kind of calm, the knowledge hard-earned from years of experience that those feelings, hard though they were, wouldn’t overwhelm me—that they too would pass.

  I picked up my phone. There were lots of red flags on the Grindr icon. I’d only downloaded it to try and stalk Mark, but unless his resolution had been extremely short-lived indeed, he wouldn’t be on there any time soon. I held my thumb over it until the option popped up to uninstall the app. I was about to press it but I hesitated.

  Then I flicked away the menu and opened the app instead. The familiar grid of photos, of bare chests and tanned faces, appeared on the screen. I opened my messages and scanned through them. They formed a kind of dystopian found poem: Hi? Got any more pics? Free now? Want to fuck? Dick pic? You’re hot. Free now? NSA?

  Then I saw it: a message that at first I hadn’t noticed because the profile had no photo attached. I pressed it so I could read the rest.

  My breath caught in my throat. The message said:

  I was wonder if I’d find you on this, Enigma.

  My mind raced. Surely it wasn’t... But who else would call me an enigma? Surely it couldn't be a coincidence.

  I stood up quickly and went to the window.

  If I put my head completely out of the window I could just make out, in the dying light of the evening, the cottages at the far end of the deer park, half obscured by trees.

  I counted them from the left. One, two, three.

  And there it was—James’s cottage—where we’d had our class the other day. Number three. It was the only one of the row of houses that had its lights on.

  I stared at those rectangles of yellow light as they became brighter and brighter against the gathering dusk, no longer a soft glow but sharp and blinding, shining out across the grounds like a lighthouse warning me away.

  Or like a beacon drawing me in.

  Rafe’s story continues in Examination, coming Summer 2020.