Page 166 of Good Losers (Lochkelvin Academy)

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“D’Artagnan!” Danny exclaims, snapping his fingers suddenly in the back seat of the car.

“Nope.”

“Oh, come on,” he whines with a glare at the back of Rory’s dark gleaming head. “Porthos, then.”

“I’ve already said him,” Finlay reminds Danny smugly, his hands nimble on the steering wheel above his tartan kilt. His cheap plastic aviators adorn the messy black crown of his head and he hasn’t stopped smiling all day.

The road to Lochkelvin shortens by the minute. I taste it in the air, the power and status held in this remote little pocket of Scotland. Something about the snaking loch, the sullen gray sky, crackles thickly with mystery and agelessness, as though the castle were somehow out of normal everyday time.

For the first time in the whole car journey, nerves tickle my belly like wings.

Luke stares out of the window, looking oddly at peace as great green glens whiz past. The others hadn’t exactly been thrilled about his secret abdication plot, but I guess bygones are bygones and what’s done is done, in much the same way as a secret file had reached the wrong hands at the very start of summer. With Luke’s abdication, there’s the promise that the UK will soon lurch on without its royal overseers: he’s forced his mother’s hand to call the whole sham off, knowing Becca has no desire to become the figurehead, legitimate or not, of an entire country.

My fingers are still threaded between Luke’s. I’ve barely left his side all weekend.

“Fact is,” Luke drawls, sounding bored of this conversation, “no one except Rory remembers how many bloody musketeers there are anyway, so we may as well be a gang of five.”

“But I want to be the main one,” Danny whines.

Rory’s eyes shine with amusement at me from the wing mirror. “Dream on. You’ll never be D’Artagnan.”

“So itwasD’Artagnan. I was right! You lied!”

I catch Rory’s gloating smirk, like Danny should have expected this in all the years he’s known him.

“There was also never a girl in the musketeers,” I point out, and Rory gives an elegant shrug.

“Does it matter?” he asks, his answer plain from his tone. And this seems like a huge leap from a boy who’d spent much of our early moments together muttering, embittered, about weak, snowflake bitches.

Now I’m being driven to his ancestor’s school, previously an all-boys school until last year, whose students had made their protests exceptionally clear to the girls. A lot has changed, I muse. As I glance around the car — at Danny surrounded by fledgling friendships; Finlay making the car engine purr, his shirtsleeves rolled up to show off his bright arc of rainbow ink; Rory’s handsome face now rarely twisted with cruelty and spite; Luke no longer weighed down by the threat of a crown — I think to myself that a lot has changed in some very unexpected ways.

And me? I don’t know if I’ve changed as much as the others, but my life in America is fast becoming a distant memory. It’s good, freeing. It forces me to become a better person, not one lumbered with a tragic past. Being away from the prison of home means I’m able to be myself and perhaps discover along the way who that person truly is.

I guess being in a relationship with four other guys is also a strange new thing.

Luke’s speech has already made headlines and broken the internet. When we went back to the square for the car, all that remained of the Antiro protesters had been an avalanche of plastic signs and litter – perhaps they’d been recalled on Benji’s orders, or perhaps they’re biding their time for further protests.

No one knows. Because another upside about Finlay being our driver is that he hasn’t been able to feast his face on the constant rolling updates, much to Luke’s relief.

The car crawls up the hill at a dangerous incline. At long last, the wrought-iron gates to Lochkelvin emerge at the peak of our ascent, and the happy, nonsensical chatter from the car quietens significantly.

We don’t know what lies through those big wooden doors. We don’t know what reception awaits us on the other side.

Finlay parks the car with ease beside the rounded stone wall of a castle turret, his kilt blowing to the side. The summer sun that had been so emblematic of Edinburgh has dipped, replaced by a constant dreary gray. We’re so high up that the wind pierces us, not so much a gentle summer breeze as an actual full-body blow. I remember arriving here via juddering taxi last summer, the rain splitting open the sky in thick clear pellets. I remember every struggled footstep to reach those blasted wooden doors, assuming that what lay beyond them would be sanctity, safety.

I’d been wrong.

Today there is no rain, though from the murky clouds gathering in the distance, I don’t bet on it lasting. Rory slams the car door shut and Finlay locks it with a beep that sounds remarkably out of place in no-tech Lochkelvin. Finlay glances grimly at the sky and throws on his battered jacket, and I remember how good he looks in his school outfit of leather jacket and traditional kilt. His car is the only one we’ve seen for miles, which means everyone must have already arrived from summer break.

“Ready?” Rory asks, with a meaningful look at me and Luke. Luke nods, making headway for the stone steps with Finlay, like he wants this over with as soon as possible, but I hang back.

“We do this together, right?” I ask Rory, hating the nerves fraying at my voice. “Even when you’re inside there, being head chief and all, we’re still together, yeah?”

He examines me with a slow tilt of his head, his caramel hair waving in the wind. “Luke,” he says. “Fin.” And then, with a strong air of exasperation, “Danny.”

They all approach their head chief, Danny looking particularly bewildered by the use of his first name.

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