by Chloe Walsh
Binding 13
Boys of Tommen Book one
Chloe Walsh
Contents
Disclaimer
Author's Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Thank you
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Song Moments
Playlist for Shannon
Playlist for Johnny
About the Author
Also by Chloe Walsh
Disclaimer
This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
The author acknowledges all songs titles, song lyrics, film titles, film characters, trademarked statuses, brands, mentioned in this book are the property of, and belong to, their respective owners. The publication/ use of these trademarks is not authorized/ associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Chloe Walsh is in no way affiliated with any of the brands, songs, musicians or artists mentioned in this book.
All rights reserved ©
Author's Note
Binding 13 is the first installment of a brand-new series, following the lives of a group of fresh-faced characters straight out of the south of Ireland. I hope you enjoy reading about these characters as much as I enjoyed writing them.
This is the beginning.
Thank you for reading.
Chloe. xox
The right of Chloe Walsh to be identified as the Author of the work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system – without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form or binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Published by Chloe Walsh
Copyright 2014 by Chloe Walsh
All Rights Reserved. ©
Binding 13,
Boys of Tommen #1,
First published, July 2018
All rights reserved. ©
Cover designed by Jay Aheer.
Edited by Aleesha Davis.
Proofread by Brooke Bowen Hebert.
Formatted by JC Clarke.
I would like to dedicate Binding 13 to anyone who's ever had a dream they dared to chase with insatiable hunger and drive.
This story is for you.
1
High Hopes
Shannon
It was January 10th 2005.
A whole new year, and the first day back to school after Christmas break.
And I was nervous – so nervous, in fact, that I had thrown up no less than three times this morning.
My pulse was beating at a concerning rate; my anxiety the culprit for my erratic heartbeat, not to mention the cause of my upchuck reflex abandoning me.
Smoothing down my new school uniform, I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and hardly recognized myself.
Navy jumper with the Tommen College crest on the breast with a white shirt and red tie. Grey skirt that stopped at the knee, revealing two scrawny, underdeveloped legs, and finishing with tan tights, navy socks, and two-inch, black court shoes.
I looked like an implant.
I felt like one, too.
My only consolation was the shoes that Mam bought me brought me up to the five feet two mark. I was ridiculously small for my age in every way.
I was thin on the extreme, under developed with fried eggs for breasts, clearly untouched by the puberty boom that had hit every other girl my age.
My long, brown hair was loose and flowing down the middle of my back, pushed back from my face with a plain red hairband. My face was free of makeup, making me look every bit as young and small as I felt. My eyes were too big for my face and a shocking shade of blue to boot.
I tried squinting, seeing if that made my eyes look any more human, and made a conscious effort to thin my swollen lips by pulling them into my mouth.
Nope.
The squinting only made me look disabled – and a little constipated.
Exhaling a frustrated sigh, I touched my cheeks with my fingertips and exhaled a ragged breath.
What I lacked in the height and breast departments, I liked to think I made up for in maturity. I was level-headed and an old soul.
Nanny Murphy always said that I was born with an old head on my shoulders.
It was true to an extent.
I had never been one to be fazed by boys or fads.
It just wasn’t in me.
I once read somewhere that we mature with damage, not with age.
If that's the case, I was an old age pensioner in the emotional stakes.
A lot of the time I worried that I didn’t work like other girls. I didn’t have the same urges or interest in the opposite sex. I didn’t have an interest in anyone; boys, girls, famous actors, hot models, clowns, puppies… Well, okay so I had an interest in cute puppies and big, fluffy dogs, but the rest of it, I could give or take.
I had no interest in kissing, touching, or fondling of any sort. I couldn’t bear the thought of it. I suppose watching the shitstorm that was my parents' relationship unravel had put me off the prospect of teami
ng up with another human for life. If my parents’ relationship was a representation of love, then I wanted no part of it.
I would rather be alone.
Shaking my head to clear my thunderous thoughts before they darkened to the point of no return, I stared at my reflection in the mirror and forced myself to practice something I rarely did these days: smile.
Deep breaths, I told myself. This is your fresh start.
Turning on the tap, I washed my hands and splashed some water on my face, desperate to cool the heated anxiety burning inside of my body, the prospect of my first day at a new school a daunting notion.
Any school had to be better than the one I was leaving behind. The thought entered my mind and I flinched in shame. Schools, I thought dejectedly, plural.
I'd suffered relentless bullying in both primary and secondary school.
For some unknown, cruel reason, I had been the target of every child's frustrations from the tender age of four.
Most of the girls in my class decided on day one in junior infants that they didn’t like me and I wasn’t to be associated with. And the boys, while not as sadistic in their attacks, weren't much better.
It didn’t make sense because I got along just fine with the other children on our street and never had any altercations with anyone on the estate we lived in.
But School?
School was like the seventh circle of hell for me, all nine – instead of the regular eight –years of primary had been torture.
Junior Infants was so distressing for me that both my mother and teacher decided it would be best to hold me back so I could repeat Juniors with a new class. Even though I was just as miserable in my new class, I made a couple of close friends, Claire and Lizzie, whose friendship had made school bearable for me.
When it came time to choose a secondary school in our final year of primary, I had realized I was very different from my friends.
Claire and Lizzie were to attend Tommen College the following September; a lavish, elite private school, with massive funding and top of the range facilities – coming from the brown envelopes of wealthy parents who were hellbent on making sure their children received the best education money could buy.
Meanwhile, I had been enrolled at the local, overcrowded, public school in the center of town.
I still remembered the horrifying feeling of being separated from my friends.
I'd been so desperate to get away from the bullies that I'd even begged Mam to send me to Beara to live with her sister, Aunty Alice, and her family so I could finish my studies.
There were no words to describe the devastated feeling that had overtaken me when my father put his foot down on moving in with Aunty Alice.
Mam loved me, but she was weak and weary and didn't put up a fight when Dad insisted I attend Ballylaggin Community School.
After that, it got worse.
More vicious.
More violent.
More physical.
For the first month of first year, I was hounded by several groups of boys all demanding things from me that I was unwilling to give them.
After that, I was labelled a frigit because I wouldn’t get off with the very boys that had made my life a living hell for years.
The meaner ones labelled me a tranny, suggesting that the reason I was such a frigit was because I had boy parts under my skirt.
No matter how cruel the boys were, the girls were far more inventive.
And so much worse.
They spread vicious rumors about me, suggesting that I was anorexic and threw my lunch up in the toilets after lunch every day.
I wasn’t anorexic – or bulimic, for that matter.
I was petrified when I was at school and couldn’t bear to eat a thing because when I did vomit, and it was a frequent event, it was a direct response to the unbearable weight of the stress I was under. I was also small for my age; short, undeveloped, and skinny, which didn’t help my cause to ward off the rumors.
When I turned fifteen and still hadn't gotten my first period, my mother made an appointment with our local GP. Several blood tests and exams later, and our family doctor had assured both my mother and me that I was healthy, and that it was common for some girls to develop later than others.
Almost a year had passed since then and, aside from one irregular cycle in the summer that had lasted less than half a day, I was yet to have a proper period.
To be honest, I had given up on my body working like a normal girl when I clearly wasn’t.
My doctor had also encouraged my mother to assess my schooling arrangement, suggesting that the stress I was under at school could be a contributing factor to my obvious physical stunt in development.
After a heated discussion between my parents where Mam had pled my case, I was sent back to school, where I was subjected to unrelenting torment.
Their cruelty varied from name-calling and rumor spreading, to sticking sanitary pads on my back, then to full on physically assaulting me.
Once, in Home Economics class, a few of the girls in the seat behind me had hacked off a chunk of my ponytail with kitchen scissors and then waved it around like a trophy.
Everyone had laughed and I think in that moment, I had hated the ones laughing at my pain more than the ones causing it.
Another time, during P.E, the same girls had taken a picture of me in my underwear with one of their camera phones and forwarded it on to everyone in our year. The principal had cracked down on it quickly, and suspended who owned the phone, but not before half the school had a good laugh at my expense.
I remembered crying so hard that day, not in front of them of course, but in the toilets. I had bolted myself into a cubicle and contemplated on ending it all. On just taking a bunch of tablets and being done with the whole damn thing.
Life, for me, was a bitter disappointment, and at the time, I had wanted no further part in it.
I didn't do it because I was too much of a coward.
I was too afraid of it not working and waking up and having to face the consequences.
I was a fucking mess.
My brother, Joey, said they targeted me because I was good-looking and called my tormenters jealous bitches. He told me that I was gorgeous and instructed me to rise above it.
It was easier said than done – and I wasn’t so confident about that gorgeous statement, either.
Many of the girls targeting me were the same ones that had been bullying me since preschool.
I doubted looks had anything to do with it back then.
I was just unlikable.
Besides, as much as he tried to be there for me and defend my honor, Joey didn’t understand how school life was for me.
My older brother was the polar opposite of me in every shape of the word.
Where I was short, he was tall. I had blue eyes, he had green ones. I was dark haired, he was fair. His skin was sun-kissed golden. I was pale. He was outspoken and loud, whereas I was quiet and kept to myself.
The biggest contrast between us was that my brother was adored by everyone at Ballylaggin Community School, aka BCS, the local, public secondary school we both attended.
Of course, landing a spot on the Cork minor hurling team helped Joey's popularity status along the way, but even without sports, he was a great guy.
And being the great guy that he was, Joey tried to protect me from it all, but it was an impossible task for one guy.
Joey and I had an older brother, Darren, and three younger brothers: Tadhg, Ollie, and Sean, but neither of us had spoken to Darren since he walked out of the house five years previous, following yet another infamous blow out with our father. Tadhg and Ollie, who were eleven and nine, were only in primary school, and Sean, who was three, was barely out of nappies so I wasn’t exactly flush with protectors to call on.
It was days like this that I missed my eldest brother.
At twenty-three, Darren was seven years older than me. Big and fearless, he was the ultimate big brother fo
r every little girl growing up.
From a small child, I had adored the ground he walked on; trailing after him and his friends, tagging along with him wherever he went. He always protected me, taking the blame at home when I did something wrong.
It wasn’t easy for him, and being so much younger than him, I hadn't understood the full extent of his struggle. Mam and Dad had only been seeing each other a couple of months when she fell pregnant with Darren at fifteen.
Labeled a bastard baby because he was born out of wedlock in 1980's catholic Ireland, life had always been a challenge for my brother. After he turned eleven, everything got so much worse for him.
Like Joey, Darren was a phenomenal hurler, and like me, our father despised him. He was always finding something wrong with Darren, be it his hair or his handwriting, his performance on the field or his choice of partner.