Chapter Text
Vince Noir was feeling nervous. His hair was upsettingly limp from the rain, his toes squelched uncomfortably in his non-waterproof suede boots, and his hands were sweating. He was standing on the doorstep of an old house, crumbly bits of brick getting all over his shoes, overhanging wreaths of ivy falling in creepy tendrils of tangled green, coming towards him like curious fingers. The house looked a bit like the sort of place in fairytales where either really good things or really bad things happened. Like it might’ve been a place full of friendly, mining dwarves, but it might also have been the home of a crotchety old witch who ate children for tea.
He had a suitcase in his hand, and he rested it against the crooked stone steps, trying to work up the nerve to knock on the door. The suitcase had been one of those ugly, grey canvas things to begin with, but Vince had gone at it with glitter-glue and ribbons and pins until he was properly satisfied it was garish enough. His last foster mum – the one he’d been staying with just before everything changed – had told him that decorating the suitcase was a stupid thing to do, because luggage handlers were lazy and careless and his bag would be ruined before he even boarded a plane. But Vince Noir never listened to anyone’s advice but his own when it came to accessorising, and the last family he'd lived with were so tight they'd never taken him on holiday further than Cornwall anyway, so it wasn’t like airports and luggage handlers were even an issue.
The point, though, was that Vince Noir was not on holiday. This creaky, crumbling house with the disintegrating brickwork and weedy overgrown garden – this was his new home.
Giving himself a determined shake, Vince took a deep breath and swung the heavy, ornate knocker that hung off the front door. The fact that it was shaped like a cackling demon with beady eyes staring right at him was kind of cool, but didn’t do much to alleviate his nerves. It seemed like an age before he heard the shuffle of footsteps and saw a shape approaching the frosted glass in a blur of powdery white and deep maroon. The door cracked open.
“Yes, dear?”
Vince picked up his bag and braced himself. “Hi Nan. It’s me.”
*
On the one hand, Vince thought, it was probably a good thing that his Nan had recently come back from her extended sojourn in Mexico – what had started out as an impromptu flight abroad to escape being tracked by the Russian government’s secret service for the work she did as a double agent during the war had turned into a ten-year stay in the country because she “liked the weather.” At least now, Vince got to stay with actual family instead of being carted around from home to home, from foster family to foster family.
On the other hand, Vince’s Nan was absolutely fucking bonkers. She’d showed him, an hour after he’d arrived, the knitting needles she kept camouflaged in her plant pots, which could be whipped out at a moment’s notice to double up as deadly weapons in case any unsavoury characters showed up uninvited on the doorstep.
“Always go for the eyes, dear,” she’d said, pouring Vince a cup of tea. “It’s the weakest spot. A direct conduit to the brain. Sugar?”
Vince, who usually drank more sugar than actual tea in his tea just gulped and shook his head.
Still, after staying a week without sustaining any serious knitting needle-related injuries, and making friends with his Nan’s grumpy black cat, Ralph, Vince thought that, overall, staying at his Nan’s was turning out to be a lot better than most of the other places he’d lived in.
His Nan, for one thing, didn’t scold him for eating sugary crap for breakfast. He’d been worried at first that, being an elderly woman, she’d try to feed him old-people food that came from a tin and looked like something a dog would eat. If his Nan had really spent half her life bringing down enemy tanks on undercover reconnaissance missions as she insisted so fervently that she had, Vince didn’t imagine that it had left her a lot of time to learn how to make the perfect Sunday roast, like the kindly old grannies everyone else at school seemed to have.
Sure enough, Vince’s Nan couldn’t cook roast, but she was happy to let him eat whatever he wanted, so long as he went down to the Tesco’s up the road to buy it himself with the allowance she gave him every week. The old woman was absolutely loaded – top-secret spywork was apparently very fiscally fruitful – which was why Vince was happy to come home with pockets stuffed full of Cola Bottles and Jelly Babies to supplement his diet without feeling guilty.
All the sweets and chocolates Vince was eating were probably going to give him a heart attack or diabetes, or at the very least make him break out in really bad acne, but he managed to retain his good health and a fantastic complexion, somehow, so Vince didn’t really give a shit. Besides, Vince figured that being an orphan pretty much meant he was allowed to eat as much junk food as he wanted without suffering the usual repercussions; it was a kind of karmic payback from the universe for taking his parents away from him.
The only thing that was making Vince’s stomach churn uncomfortably (although it might also have been the three bags of Sour Skittles he’d eaten in a row) was the prospect of starting at the local school the following week. He’d already moved school three times before. It didn’t really make the idea of doing it all again a fourth any easier.
*
“Nan?”
“Yes, dear?”
Vince edged into the living room where his Nan – Doris, she’d said he could call her, but after a lifetime of calling the people he lived with by their first names, Vince really thought he was owed the right to call the only relative he knew he had by the name every other kid had grown up using – was sitting in a big, sunken armchair. It was a hideous, sun-bleached mauve colour, covered in an ugly orange throw. Vince had liked it right away. “Um. Do I have to go to school tomorrow?”
“What, dear?”
“Do I have to go to school?” Vince repeated. “I’m sixteen. Can’t I just get a job or something?”
Doris put down the eyeglass she was using to examine a twisted, rusty piece of metal that resembled absolutely nothing at all and said, in a tremulous voice, “Vince, dear, school is a very important part of life. You may hate it now, but if you want to do clandestine espionage work for the military, you’ll have to get your A-Levels.”
Vince blinked. “Yeah,” he said, cautiously, “but I don’t think I wanna be a spy.”
“Why not?”
“I dunno.” Vince sat down on the sofa, and an audible poof of dust wheezed from the vomit-green cushions. “Don’t think I’d be any good at it. I’m shit at running. I always come last in the races at school. Plus I ain’t really any good at sneaking around.”
“What are you good at?” Doris asked, putting her fingers together under her chin. Above her head, mounted on the shelf in a perspex case, a stuffed badger was looking glassily in Vince’s direction, its lip curled back in a frozen snarl.
“Uh, well.” Vince looked away from the stuffed creature and said, brightening up with sudden inspiration, “I’m well into animals. The last place I stayed at, they had rabbits and two cockatiels and a chinchilla, and this massive Dalmatian, too. I got on great with them. The animals, I mean, not the family. So I thought I might work in a zoo?” Vince had always found that animals, unlike people, never seemed to get angry with you for going out shopping or clubbing instead of doing your homework or going to church. “Or maybe a pet store. You don’t need A-Levels to work in a pet store, right?” He glanced at his Nan.
“You never know,” Doris said, darkly. “There may come a time when you’ll have to deal with a renegade amphibian hell-bent on sabotaging the plans you’ve spent months meticulously setting into motion, and if the situation turns really nasty, you’ll wish you had paid more attention to your Biology teacher’s lessons on pond life. Ginger snap?”
Vince figured that either he'd misheard what his Nan had said, or the old woman was actually just plain barking mad. Thinking it best to remain silent, Vince took a biscuit obediently off the plate she was holding out to him – one of those weirdly elaborate porcelain ones with a frilled, gold edge and twirly, pink flowers painted in the middle. The kind of plate that was pointlessly decorative, since it would either be stacked out of sight in a cupboard or covered in the sloppy remains of someone’s dinner.
The biscuit was horrible and dry and made Vince’s eyes water with the effort not to cough violently and spray crumbs all over the dingy yellow carpet, but he ate it diligently and resigned himself to the fact that he would without a doubt have to go to school the next day. And if he tried to bunk, Vince thought, his Nan would probably track him down and crash kamikaze-style through the windows to drag him bodily back into the classroom. Doris might have looked like a frail old lady, but Vince had seen the wrestling trophies on the living room shelf, and he didn’t fancy his chances. He was only a thin waif of a boy, although Vince liked to think that his skinny arms, knobbly knees and jutting bone structure helped him rock a kind of new-age Oliver Twist orphan-chic look, which was all the rage in that week’s issue of Cheekbone.
“You’ll be fine tomorrow, dear,” Doris said, smiling warmly, waving the plate under his nose.
Vince wasn’t so sure, but he took another biscuit.
*
Vince’s first day at school began thusly: he slipped into his boring, navy-coloured uniform, proceeded to ruin the uniform aspect entirely by pinning badges all up his lapels and sticking gold stars down his tie. He followed that up with a hasty breakfast of milk, M&Ms and a ginger biscuit dunked in Nutella, then sauntered down the street to meet his doom.
Vince didn't actually meet his doom, but he did meet a boy called Leroy.
Leroy was tall and good-looking with a big smile on his face and bright red beads on the ends of his braided hair. He also had an Aladdin Sane badge on his bag, which Vince took to be a universal sign of instant and fated friendship. After brief introductions, it turned out that the boy called Leroy was in the same year as Vince, so they walked and talked together on the way to school.
“So where you from?” Leroy asked, curiously.
“Bit of everywhere, really,” Vince said, shrugging. “Grew up in Croydon 'til I was six but now I move around a lot.” Leroy looked at him expectantly so Vince continued, “Foster homes, you know. Only I get to stay with my Nan now that she’s stopped running from the Russian Government. This is like, the fourth school I’ve been to.”
Seemingly nonplussed by his curious story of origin, Leroy gave Vince a wry grin. “Bet you won’t have been to a school like Old Gregg’s before, though.”
“Old Gregg’s?” Vince puffed out, struggling to match Leroy’s sweeping strides, because Leroy was tall with powerful legs and Vince was maybe a little weighed down with the amount of junk food in his pockets and belly. “Greggory’s Academy?”
“Yeah. We nicknamed it Old Gregg’s, open brackets, Academy of Funk, close brackets.”
“Why?”
“It’s after the guy who founded the school, like, only seven or eight years ago. He had a thing for funk music. I’m not even sure this school’s legit as an institution or anything, but the last school in the neighbourhood burnt down, so we all had to relocate to Old Gregg’s.” Leroy shook his head. “He was mental, Old Gregg. He was the headmaster when the school opened, but then one day he was just gone, and no one knew what happened to him. There was this sixth former who swears she saw him trashing the art department’s supply of watercolours, wearing a wedding dress and howling something about a man called Jefferson. That was right before he disappeared, but no one really knows. Proper crazy, he was. He used to fill his office with empty bottles of Baileys and he was drunk as a bitch during assemblies. And he used to wear seaweed in his hair, too.”
Vince briefly considered the merits of a plant-based hairdo, then remembered that sea salt made him itchy. “I don’t think that would be practical.”
Leroy shrugged. “I don’t think it was a look. I think he had emotional problems.”
“So what’s Old Gregg’s like? The school, I mean.” They were approaching the gates now, ornate silver lettering proclaiming the school’s name funkily in the sun.
Leroy gestured for Vince to go in. “You’ll see,” he said, as Vince sidled through the gates, instantly swallowed up by the swarm of children and teenagers loitering about the grounds. “A word of advice, though – it’s not really a big deal if you get sent to the headmaster here, because pretty much no one ever gets into serious trouble, but if he asks you to explain yourself to Bollo, just go along with it, okay? Everyone in this place is fucking mental. You just get used to it.”
“Got it.” Vince decided the best thing to do when presented with this strange information was just to take it all in his stride.
A loud, obnoxious bell trilled overhead. Leroy made a face. “Fuck, we missed registration.” He patted Vince on the shoulder. “Never mind. You’re new. If anyone asks, I was showing you around.”
“So what am I meant to do?” Vince asked, looking around, despairingly. “I ain’t got a timetable or nothing.”
“Come on,” Leroy said, encouragingly. “You’ll probably have music first, like me. It’s always a laugh. You can go to reception after lunch and get a proper timetable.” And with that, Leroy dragged Vince sideways into a classroom and towards a set of desks at the back from which a hum of chatter emanated. There was a clatter of chairs as Leroy shoved one of the desks back, and an enthusiastic call of, “Leroy, mate, how’s it going?” from a boy with a pink-tinged face and a properly atrocious bleached-blonde mullet.
“Joey, my man, I’m good.” Leroy went up to the boy and gave him a complicated-looking hi-five-fistbump-handshake, then he turned to Vince. “Vince, this is my mate, Joey Moose. Joey, this is Vince. He’s new. Over there…” Leroy pointed to two guys one row along who seemed to be involved in a deeply riveting conversation. “That’s Montgomery Flange – just call him Monty, his name’s fucking ridiculous – and Howard Moon.” Leroy lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Moon’s a complete loser, okay, but he’s alright, mostly. Just don’t talk to him about jazz. Trust me,” he added, when Vince looked confused. “And over there,” Leroy continued, a little louder, gesturing to another desk, “those are my girls, Neon and Ultra.”
The two girls looked up and gave Vince a lazy salute. The dark-haired one – Neon – who was wearing a pair of glitterball earrings asked, “So who are you, then?”
“He’s new,” Leroy explained. “First day.”
“He got a name?” Neon looked at Vince through the thick purple mascara on her eyelashes. She had a scarf tied around her neck, bright blue covered in little silver skulls. Vince was entranced. He felt it warranted his special attention that the girl had glitterball earrings. He gave her his most winning grin.
“Vince Noir,” he said, with what he hoped was cool nonchalance. “Rock ‘n’ roll star.”
There was a pause, followed by a burst of derisive laughter. The two girls giggled into their hands, covering their mouths with fluorescent green and pink-tipped fingers.
“What?” Vince asked, stung, as they continued to coo amusedly.
“Are you actually a rock star?” Neon asked.
“Because we are,” the second girl offered. “Rock stars, that is. At least, we will be.”
“We’re in a band.”
“Kraftwork Orange,” Ultra said, offhand, like being in a real band wasn’t actually the most amazing thing in the world. Vince could feel little hearts popping up in his eyes.
“Ultra’s on drums and bass,” Neon said, pointing to the blonde girl next to her with a flourishing gesture.
“And Neon,” said Ultra, brushing aside her dramatically asymmetrical fringe, “is on guitar and keyboard.” She smiled, lipstick an eye-watering shade of pink.
“What about vocalist?” Vince asked excitedly, feeling dazzled by their bright colours like a magpie in a jewellery shop. “I could be in your band, I’m well good at singing.”
Neon raised a heavily-lined sceptical eyebrow. “We play instruments and sing. We don’t need you for our act.”
“Sorry,” Ultra added, picking at the green varnish on her nails, “but we’re all set.”
Vince visibly deflated. Leroy gave him a sympathetic look.
“But,” Neon continued, “you could maybe do some back-up vocals sometime. If we ever needed someone.”
“Because we like your hair,” Ultra specified. “It’s the right kind of look for the band.”
Vince, glowing with pride, gave his hair a bit of a pat, careful not to destroy the immaculate back-combed structure.
Someone behind Vince snorted derisively. “Your hair’s ridiculous.”
Vince blinked and turned, bewildered, to one of the boys Leroy had pointed to earlier. Howard Moon. “’Scuse me?” Vince asked pointedly.
Moon looked a little abashed as all nearby gazes turned to him, but he nevertheless repeated, “Your hair’s ridiculous,” then added, “Why is your hair that big? No one needs hair that big. It’s too much. It’s ridiculous. It’s a mess of – superfluity.”
Vince whipped out a mirror from his bag to check his own reflection, confirm that his hair wasn't, in fact, a mess, then glared at Moon. “Listen,” he said, “my hair makes grown men weep. It has character. Panache.”
“Panache?” Moon echoed, like he was surprised Vince even knew the word.
“Yeah, panache, so fuck you, Mr. ‘superfluity’. And my hair’s not messy, it’s back-combed. Have you ever read an issue of Cheekbone?”
“You’re like a budgie in a wig,” Moon said, ignoring the question with an air of haughtiness and condescension that Vince thought he didn’t really deserve from a stranger.
“Whatever,” Vince said, unruffled by the insults. He was so convinced of the fabulousness of his own hair that for him it acted like a powerful shield, deflecting all criticism and negativity with its boosted roots and mirror-like shine. “Like I care what you’ve got to say about hair. Do you even know what a comb is?”
“Yeah, I do,” Howard retorted. He paused, then seemed to realise his comeback was less than witty or cutting, so with a disdainful look, he turned away.
“Just ignore him,” Leroy advised, quietly. “We only keep him around because he’s good for copying notes off of in Geography.”
Vince was about to ask Leroy why Moon was so unnecessarily rude to new acquaintances, but there was a sudden hush in the classroom as someone Vince assumed was the music teacher swept into the room.
He was unlike any teacher Vince had ever seen. He seemed to be wearing a swishy purple dress that cascaded down to his feet, with spangles and shiny embroidery all around the edges of the sleeves that hung heavy and overlarge on his arms, and there was a huge afro on his head.
“Welcome, class,” he said, his voice sounding thick, like his mouth was too full of teeth. “Today, we will be trying something new. Not all of you are talented or wise enough to achieve that which we will set out to do, but it is the journey, not the destination, that shapes the character.” He paused, his eyes sweeping the class. They stopped and narrowed on Vince. “What is this?”
“Oh.” Vince stood up. “I’m Vince Noir. Um, I’m new. I’m not sure I’m in the right class?” Vince could feel the class looking at him. He just hoped that the angle was displaying his hair to its full advantage. He looked sideways and caught Moon’s glance. Moon looked away.
“A new student,” the teacher said, knowingly. “Wild, and untrained in the teachings as laid out by the order of psychedelic monks that we use, here, in this classroom. Do not fear.” He raised his chin. “You will soon understand. I, Rudi van DiSarzio, will teach you.”
“O-kay,” Vince said, uncertainly. He knew he was a bit of a troublemaker sometimes, but he wasn’t sure that wild and untrained was an entirely fair assessment of his character. “Can I ask, though?” Vince continued, as the teacher swished towards the blackboard. “Why’d you wear that dress thing?”
A ripple of laughter crossed the classroom. Mr. DiSarzio puffed up his chest. “It is not a dress,” he stressed, caressing the purple fabric with his large, brown hand. “It is a robe. Now sit down.”
Vince sat down. He wasn’t going to get kicked out of class on his first day, no matter how much he wanted to comment on the teacher’s hideous wardrobe. It wasn’t that Vince had a problem with his teacher wearing a dress, in theory. Vince liked dresses a lot. Dresses were fine. But violently purple, spangled priests’ robes were not.
“Now.” Rudi took a deep breath. “We are about to embark upon a musical journey, but we cannot hope to succeed if you do not all open your minds.” He closed his eyes, and with a gesture, encouraged everyone to do the same. “Let us begin our quest.”
With a last glance at Leroy, who just grinned at Vince and shut his eyes happily like this sort of lesson was perfectly normal, Vince leaned back in his chair, closed his own eyes, and let Rudi’s not-quite-Mexican accent lull him. Forgetting to actually do any work, Vince ended up drifting into a nice daydream where he was onstage, singing to a crowd of hundreds of super-cool and incredibly attractive fans, which was music-related, if not exactly what Mr. DiSarzio probably had in mind.
*
After music, there was an hour of maths with an excitable teacher called Mr. Susan, who was large and lumbering and enveloped in way too many cardigans, and explained everything to them in a sing-song voice. Vince found him irritating after about two minutes, and quickly took to putting his head down on the desk and muttering the names of as many Rolling Stones songs as he could remember to distract himself from wanting to throw biros at the back of Mr. Susan’s head. Following maths was art, taught by a large, lipsticked lady who insisted, with a purr, on being called Miss Eleanor, and was, Vince decided, altogether too familiar with the students.
“Does she have to look at me like that?” Vince asked out of the side of his mouth to Leroy, slightly panicked, as Miss Eleanor curled a bit of hair around her finger and licked her lips as she moulded a lump of clay suggestively with her other hand.
“I told you, you get used to it,” Leroy said with a grin. “No one’s been arrested yet, so…”
“That’s reassuring.”
The bell soon rang for lunch, and Vince escaped gratefully to the cafeteria. Vince’s Nan had given him a couple of quid for lunch, and even though every canteen at every school he’d ever been to had been fucking awful, most schools did a good plate of chips at the very least, and Vince was starving.
“Oi, Vince,” Leroy called out, who was clutching sandwiches to his chest. “I’ll save you a seat, yeah? We’ll be at the back.”
Vince nodded and got into the lunch queue with a tray. He got to the food counter expecting one of those nice old dinner ladies you got in most schools, but was instead confronted by a gnarled, grimacing old man with stringy, grey hair, a large, hooked nose, and a pointed chin covered in warts. He appeared to be wearing an old, dusty top hat and tails. Vince paused, wondering how much horror was evident on his face in that moment.
The man behind the counter grunted, one of his eyes ringed in an inexplicable chalky circle, like the ghost of a monocle, which served to make him look even more unhinged and repulsive. “Whaddaya want?”
“Uh.” Vince tried not to recoil. “Chips?”
“Chips!” the old man spat. “What d’ya mean, chips?” He shook the ladle in his hand at Vince. “It’s not even on the menu, boy. And you’ve got the gall to come in ‘ere askin’ for chips. You’ll ‘ave what everyone else ‘ere is ‘aving – pie and mash. Nothin’ wrong with the classic combo of pie with mash. That’s good food, boy. Good, cockney food, son. Oh, I remember the days when pie and mash was the staple diet of any respectable institution – none of this chips business, no macaroni cheese, we didn’t even have spaghetti in my day, boy.” The old man whirled the ladle around his head. Vince stepped back. “Spaghetti! Me old cockney ears couldn’t believe it; some lad comes up to me and asks for spaghetti. What’s that? I asked ‘im. Spaghetti? Who d’ya fink I am, boy? Do I look like someone who serves spaghetti? This ain’t Italy, you ponce, you’ll have pie and mash, like the others! He didn’t like that, so I just hit him over the head with his tray.” The man fell silent.
“Uh.” Vince blinked. He held his plate out at arm’s length. “I’ll have the mash, then.”
“’Course you will,” the man grunted, seemingly done with his rant, and ladled a sloppy mulsh onto Vince’s plate. Vince made a face and moved away as quickly as possible, hurrying to the back of the dining hall where Leroy was sat with Joey, Neon, Ultra, and Moon. Moon didn’t seem to be joining in with the conversation, though, and while the girls beside him were digging into tasty-looking baguettes, Moon was picking carefully at a thin sandwich of sliced brown bread cut into precise triangles that he’d taken from a square, plastic lunchbox that had a picture of a grinning man in a grey suit holding a trumpet stuck to the front. Freak, Vince thought.
“Your dinner lady’s a bit weird, ain’t she?” Vince said, sitting down opposite Leroy, next to Joey, whose face was covered in crisp crumbs.
“Not a dinner lady,” Joey interjected in a thick Australian accent. “Just a grumpy old man.”
“Yeah, I noticed.” Vince poked at his pie and mash dubiously. “He rambled for ages about spaghetti. What’s his problem?”
“No-one knows,” Leroy shrugged. “We just call him the Cockney Nutjob. He serves pie and mash every single fucking day. Friday, though,” Leroy waggled a finger, “that’s special.”
Vince took a bite of his food. It tasted okay, for a school dinner. “How come?”
“It’s eels on Fridays.”
Vince choked on his mouthful. The mash suddenly felt unpleasantly slimy on his tongue. “Eels?” he asked, disbelieving. “I didn’t even know you could eat eels.”
“Oh, you can eat eels, alright,” Neon said with a shudder that jangled her mirrorball earrings.
“Just not when they’re still alive,” Ultra specified, patting Neon on the shoulder.
Further down the table, Moon was staring blankly ahead, a far-off look in his eyes. “Eels,” he said, monotonous. “Eels.”
“There was a bad time,” Leroy started.
Vince looked worriedly at Moon, who was starting to twitch. “Do I even want to know…?”
“Probably not,” Joey said, shaking his head. He reached over and smacked Moon on the back. “Come on, Moon-O, snap out of it.”
Moon looked at Vince, his eyes wide. “Eels?”
“The point is,” Leroy said, looking at Vince sympathetically, “you might wanna start bringing packed lunches from now on. I’m not sure the guy’s even a real cook or anything. Rumour has it he slashed up all the old dinner ladies with a knife, got rid of the competition and took their jobs.”
Vince stared at Leroy.
“Hey,” Leroy said, holding his hands up. “It’s just a rumour, mate, it’s probably not true. But I told you, didn’t I? You ain’t never seen a school like Old Gregg’s before.”
Vince pushed his plate away.
“Aren’tcha gonna eat anything?” Neon asked, mouth full.
“Not this. I’ve got back-up.” Vince pulled a packet of Starmix from his pocket with a grin. “Real food.”
Moon, who seemed to have shaken his eels-induced trance, snorted. “That isn’t real food. That’s highly concentrated doses of sugar set into funny shapes to entertain simple children and promote tooth decay.”
Vince stuffed a couple of jelly rings into his mouth and widened his grin. Moon made a disgusted face. Vince chewed obnoxiously, then swallowed. “This is real food. You’re just boring.” Vince gestured towards Howard’s limp, brown-bread-based luncheon. “And you’re jealous ‘cos my food’s more fun than yours.”
“I’m not,” Moon said petulantly, and he took a defensive bite of his sandwich, but Vince saw his eyes straying to the sherbert-sprinkled packet of Starmix on the table with a guarded, but distinct look of jealousy.
“Come on, slags,” Leroy said after a moment, scrunching tin-foil up in his fist. “We’d better get to Chem.”
Everyone groaned, but stood up, brushing crumbs off their blazers and lobbing bundled-up rubbish into the bins before making their way out of the dining room, chatting happily. Moon, Vince noticed, lagged a little behind.
“Oi, Moon,” he said, falling into step with him.
“My name’s Howard, you know,” Moon said moodily, hunching his shoulders. “You call everyone else by their first names.”
“Alright, Howard,” Vince said. He pulled out the packet of Starmix from his pocket. “You want it? I’m full.”
Howard eyed the packet warily as if it contained something strange and evil. “Why?”
Vince rolled his eyes. “I dunno, ‘cos I ate too much? I don’t want it, seriously, you can finish it.”
Gingerly, Howard reached out and took the proffered packet. “Well. I might save it for later.” He tucked it into his blazer pocket.
“Whatever,” Vince said, with a laugh. “Do what you want with it.” He winked at Howard. “Catch you later, freak.” And with that, he scampered off to catch up with Leroy, leaving Howard looking a little perplexed behind him.