Page 87 of For Real

“Jesus.” Toby was staring again. The last sunlight of the day was spilling down the stonework and across the pristine lawn. “This is so beautiful it hurts. I’m never going to have any of this stuff, am I?”

“Oxford?”

“Everything you said.”

My heart squeezed painfully. The truth was, I didn’t know how to have a conversation like this with Toby. I’d been alive for longer—a lot longer—so I should have had some answers for him, but I didn’t. And regardless of what had been said in Radcliffe Square, trying to offer him…what? guidance?…felt perilously close to parental.

“Those things aren’t about where you are,” I said, as gently as I could. “They’ll happen naturally because you’re nineteen and your whole life is waiting for you.”

He ran his fingertips along the wall. “I don’t feel like it’s waiting. I feel like it’s fucked off.”

“Why? What happened?”

He just shrugged.

And I didn’t want to ruin our—Damn it, it was not a minibreak or a holiday of any kind. But I still didn’t want to ruin whatever-we-were-having by insisting on answers he didn’t want to give me. There was no rush, after all. I could try again some other time.

We emerged onto the New Building lawn, and Toby drew in a sharp breath. “That’s the ‘new’ building?”

We gazed across yet another gleaming grass-scape to the Georgian symmetry of the New Building, with its arches and its tall, leaded windows. “Well, compared to the fifteenth century, the eighteenth century is new.”

“This place.” Toby shook his head again. “Fucking nuts.”

“If it would help, I could show you Waynflete. It’s across the river, behind the Sainsbury’s, although in my day it was behind an off-licence.”

“Is that where you lived?”

“Yes, for my first year. It’s a concrete monstrosity from the sixties. All the colleges have them, but some hide them better than others.”

Toby smiled, and something that had knotted itself inside me unravelled again.

As we trooped along between the glass-smooth lawns, heading for the building, he muttered, “‘Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.’”

“Hmmm?”

“All this grass you’re not allowed to walk on. Doesn’t it just make you want to like…run all over it?”

“I’ve never thought about it.”

“What happens if you do?”

“Go on the grass? I don’t know. Bad things probably.”

He slipped away from me and ran towards the grass in exaggerated slow motion, humming “Chariots of Fire,” “La-la-la-la-laaaaah-la. La-la-la-laaah!”

“Toby, don’t.” It was hard to sound stern when I was laughing. “Behave yourself.”

Reaching out with straining fingertips, he very carefully brought his toes down on the edge of the lawn and froze, as if expecting the heavens to rain down thunder and retribution. Then he relaxed. “I seem to be okay.”

“Yes, well, it’s a slow-acting poison, you little git.”

Finally, we found the right staircase and located our room. This building was primarily reserved for fellows—and Jasper, who had God’s own luck in the room ballet—so it was quite luxurious compared to what I remembered of student life. It was, however, fairly basic in its facilities.

I put down my bags. “You know, I should have booked a hotel like a normal person. I just didn’t think.”

“No way. I love seeing a piece of your past. And the view…holy shit. Look at the sky. I’ve never seen anything like that. That’s crazy sky.”

There was a large desk in front of the window, and Toby was stretched almost all the way over it, streaked gold and orange and pink and purple in Oxford’s brightest, boldest light.

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