“No fucking way.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him he was a dick.” Caleb rips a piece of grass out of the ground and shreds it into pieces.
“So are you, like, really rich?” Seren says after a bit.
“I wish.”
“You must be, to be at The Shore. And you lived in London. That’s, like, the most expensive city in the world or something.”
“We used to live on the seventh floor of a tower block in Dagenham. The lift was always broken, and the cops might as well have moved in, they were cruising around so often.”
“So…” Seren nods toward The Shore.
“Mum wanted to get me away from London.”
“What’s so bad about London?”
“If you listen to Mum, it’s full of crack dens and gangs who go around knifing people and mugging old ladies.”
“Yeah, but what about the bad stuff?”
Caleb laughs, and Seren feels all warm inside. He’s staring at her, as if he’s trying to decide something, and then he reaches down and pulls up the leg of his track pants. Around his ankle is a piece of gray plastic on a black band.
“You’re tagged.”
He nods. He’s nervous, Seren realizes.
“What for?”
“Stuff.”
Stuffcould be anything. It could be stealing or drug running or beating people up. Seren’s pulse races. It could be taking girls into the middle of nowhere and—
“Mum hates my mates. She reckons they’re a bad influence on me. It’s just me and her at home, so it’s a bit fucking intense, you know?”
“What happened to your dad?”
“He became a woman.”
“I did not expect that.”
Caleb gives a wry laugh. “Neither did we.”
“Do you still see him?”
“Yeah, of course. I mean, it’s a bit weird, but…he’s still my dad, you know?”
“Mine died.” It comes out a bit fast, and Seren realizes she’s never needed to tell anyone before. Not in sixteen years. Everyone knows everything in Cwm Coed.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah. I never met him. He had cancer, and then my mam got pregnant. He died two weeks before I was born.” Seren doesn’t look at Caleb while she’s talking, in case it makes her cry. Seren doesn’t miss her dad—how can you miss someone you’ve never met?—but she misses theideaof him so much it hurts.
“My sister’s loads older than me, so I think I was, like, Dad’s final present to Mam.” Seren pretends to stick her fingers down her throat, and Caleb laughs.
“How old’s your sister?”