Page 108 of Begin Again Again

Byron looked up at the tiny spray of stars he could see. He wanted the weed and booze to unstick him as it had before, but the words wouldn’t come. There was a long silence and he wondered if Sal had nodded off. Then they shifted in their chair. “Byron?”

He unstuck his mouth with some difficulty. “Yeah?”

“Why are you always making excuses for shit cunts?”

“What?”

“Audrey. Our parents. That knob.” Sal jerked their head at the house. “Why do you feel like you owe them and you’re, like, willing to fuck over people who give a shit to keep them happy?”

Byron’s lungs felt dirty, his mouth thick.

“I’m waiting?”

He pulled out his phone and, squinting, opened the photo app. He found what he wanted in a second. He’d have made it his wallpaper if it wasn’t too embarrassing. “You wanna know what I want?”

“Yeah, I do,” Sal said stubbornly.

He passed the phone over.

Sal stared at the photo for a long time. “That’s what you want?”

“Yup.”

Their face sagged. “But that’s just… impossible.”

He shrugged.

“It’s impossible,” Sal repeated. “This is real life.”

“I don’t want real life.”

Sal pointed at his phone. “But Beth didn’t exist back then.”

“No,” he agreed.

“That’s… Byron, you can’t think like this.”

“Probably not.”

“But you do?”

“Yeah.”

A bat flew overhead, its wings arching in semi-circles. “You have to move on,” Sal was saying. “You have to get over that shit.”

Byron nodded, barely listening.

He waited until he was in bed to look at the photo again. He had a rule—no more than once a day, but tonight he needed to. He knew the image so well he could have drawn it from memory, but at the same time it was always new. It always hit him in the gut with how fucking good it felt to be there, in that moment.

He stood tall in Hammerheads’ colours, Audrey on one side, his mum and dad on the other. Sal crouched in front of them, knees wide, hands pushed together as though praying. He’d just kicked the winning goal in the semi-final and journalists were queuing to interview him. Coach told him to get on the field and take a picture with his family.

“You’ll want to remember this,” he’d said, and he’d no idea how right he’d been. Byron wanted to walk through the memory like a museum. To set up camp right in the middle of it and stay forever.

But Beth wasn’t there.

And that was the only thing he couldn’t make sense of.

Chapter 16

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