because Hugo was looking a bit iffy, but Dominic was a genuine mega-prick to Leon. It got bad, like. He used to tell people Leon had AIDS, so no one would go near him. And one time, yeah? Dom and a couple of others got Leon in the showers, they stuffed his jocks in his mouth to keep him quiet and tried to shove something up his arse—I heard it was a Coke bottle, and then they were going to make him drink it. I don’t know how far they actually got, but . . .” And at the look on my face: “Do you not remember any of that, no?”
“No,” I said, which was true. This had nothing in common, not only with the Dominic I remembered but with the entire world I remembered; it sounded like something out of a totally different school from mine, or maybe out of some horror-tinged English boarding-school movie with a hard-hitting message about the dark heart of humanity. “Are you positive you got the real story? I mean, dude, that’s some seriously crazy shit. I never saw anything like that in school. Like, nothing within a million miles of that. And I love Leon, but he exaggerates like hell.”
Dec was looking at me with a new expression on his face, or more like a lack of expression, so complete it was like a flat rejection. “School wasn’t paradise, man. It wasn’t just jolly japes and then everyone has a good laugh together. Sometimes it got hardcore.”
“Come on. Not like that. I was there. My memory might be fucked, but it’s not that fucked.” I glanced involuntarily at Melissa—I didn’t usually swear around her—but she was pinching a piece of candle wax into shapes, eyes down, and didn’t look up.
“I’m not saying it’s your memory. I’m not even saying you’re wrong. School was genuinely never like that, for you. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t like that for anyone else.”
“I’m not totally oblivious. I’m not thick. If this shit had been going on all around me—”
“Around you, not in your face. You’re not a shithead, you’re a good guy, so no one would’ve tried to get you in on it. And they wouldn’t’ve tried it on you, either; you’re not the type that gets picked on. But someone like Leon—”
“Leon is a fucking drama queen. He’ll take some tiny little nothing and blow it up into the apocalypse. I’ve seen him do it my whole life. I’ve been grounded because he—”
“I didn’t hear the Coke bottle thing from Leon,” Dec said. “I heard it from Eoghan McArdle. He was there, but he was scared to do anything in case they went after him as well, so he legged it. He said he went and got a teacher—maybe he did, I don’t know. Eoghan wasn’t a drama queen. At all. And he was really shaken up. That’s why he said it to me: he knew I was mates with you, so he thought I might’ve heard what had happened in the end.”
I couldn’t say a word. Partly it was outrage, at Dominic and, ludicrously, at Dec—I had liked school a lot, had remembered it with real fondness and an inner grin at all the stuff we had got away with, and now apparently the school I had liked so much had never existed. But overriding that was a much sharper sizzle of excitement, because it was all starting, just barely, to make sense.
“I did try feeling you out about it,” Dec said. “Delicately, you know what I mean? I thought Leon might’ve told you. But you didn’t seem like you had a clue. So I figured maybe Leon felt the same as me, didn’t want anyone knowing—let’s be honest, it’s not the kind of story you want to share, yeah? So I kept my mouth shut. I figured it should be Leon’s call.”
“He should have told me,” I said. My heart was going high and fast in my throat. “I would’ve done something.”
“Listen,” Dec said—leaning across the table to catch my eye, pointing his glass at me for emphasis. “I’m not accusing Leon of anything. OK? We all know he did nothing to Dominic. He’s a good guy, Leon. And let’s face it, even if he wanted to, it would’ve been like a Chihuahua trying to take out King Kong.”
“I know.”
“I’m just telling you because it’s probably a good idea for you to be aware of all that stuff. Yeah? If the detectives come back