All Our Hidden Gifts by Caroline O’donoghue (ink ebook reader txt) 📕

Please don’t let me be sick. Please don’t let me be sick.

“Oh, shit, Maeve. Don’t pass out. C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

He wraps an arm around my shoulder. “C’mon, Maeve. Get up. You can get up.”

“Mmmmno,” I mumble.

“OK, well, grand, I’ll just sit here with you until you can.”

He props himself against the wall, his arm still around me. I fall against him, snuggling into the crook of his neck. Through the sickening nausea, I can still pick up his smell. Smoky and sweet, clean clothes and faded deodorant. The faint hint of the O’Callaghans’ house underscoring everything. The ripeness of fresh sweat.

His hand starts stroking my hair, twisting a long brown length between his fingers.

I make a mental note to treasure this moment for when I don’t feel so dreadful.

After a few minutes, the nausea starts to lift. I still feel heavy and disorientated, but not quite as much like I’m about to vomit.

“You smell nice,” I say.

“Thanks.”

“I like that you don’t reek of boy.”

He laughs. “And what does that smell like?”

“Like Lynx Africa and Hugo Boss.”

“Ah,” he chuckles again. “No, this is a concoction of my own making.”

“Really?”

“Yep.” I can feel his face stretching into a grin. “Sure for Men and Chanel No. 5.”

We laugh together, the low chuckle of a secret reverberating through both our bodies.

I press my face deeper into his neck. “I just think you’re so cool.”

I can’t believe I’ve said it. Just like that. The word “cool” so ridiculous in my mouth, like an eighties throwback.

His chest expands and he lets out a long, low sigh.

“No one’s ever said that to me before,” he says. “I think you’re cool, too, Maeve. But you knew that already, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“Oh, come on. You’ve been cooler than me since you were eight.”

“Well, that is true.”

“C’mon,” he says. “Let’s go home. Your parents will be freaking out.”

I feel the warm, firm pressure of his hand in mine.

“Oh, hey,” he says. “We forgot the last card.”

He turns over the final card in the Lily spread and a tremor I mistake for passing traffic rushes through my head. A flash of light fills the tunnel, and I hear a scream that could be my own, or Roe’s, or that of a million people all screaming at once.

Spots form at the front of my eyes. Purple, blue, gold splotches that circle my vision. Within seconds, I feel the cold gravel embedding on my forehead. And I’m gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY

MY FINGERS WORK UP AND DOWN THE GUITAR FRETBOARD. As I press each string, I keep waiting for the sting of steel to prick at my flesh, but it never comes. The guitar feels natural. The strings an extension of my hand.

But I don’t play the guitar.

Examining my hands as they pluck out a jaunty, repetitive tune, I see that my hands are not my hands. For one thing, my fingernails are painted azure blue. For another, they’re about twice their normal size.

Holy crap, I’m in Roe’s bedroom.

Holy crap, I’m in Roe’s head!

I am sitting inside of his body like a spectator. His eyes are my cinema screen, his brain my armchair. The window is open and the vague flapping of laundry drying is just barely audible from the garden outside. It is summer. Last summer. It is nine months ago.

There’s a knock at the door. “Yeah,” I call, as way of welcome, and Lily comes ambling in. We might share the same gene pool, but she looks nothing like me. Never has. She’s all long and loping and fair. Skittish and strange like a springbok. I’m stocky and dark, a limping badger that fantasizes about life as a giraffe.

At that moment, I feel my Maeve voice crowding in, trying to break into Roe’s flow. How could he say that, it interrupts. How could he not know he’s as gorgeous as he is?

Lily sits cross-legged on the floor in front of my bed. I’m adjusting the truss rod on the guitar, determinedly not making eye contact with her.

“Mum is freaking out,” she says amusedly.

My Maeve voice says, About what? but my Roe voice just laughs bitterly.

“Do you want me to say anything to them?” Lily asks, peeking through her long fringe. “Tell them that it’s not a big deal, or whatever?”

“Nah, it’s fine. You don’t have to do anything.”

“OK,” she says.

We sit in silence. I start fiddling with the guitar. Just as Lily is about to excuse herself, my mouth – or, Roe’s mouth – starts moving.

“Do you think I should have denied it? Said it was … a computer virus, or spam, or whatever?”

Lily shakes her head. “No. They would have believed it, but no.”

“It would make for an easier life, though.”

“Easier for who?” Lily asks. “For them? So they can pretend they have a straight son?”

Oh, comes the Maeve voice.

“I guess.”

“Look,” she says, with a half-shrug. “Lots of people are bi.”

“Not everyone. Not O’Callaghans.”

We laugh, exhausted. We know we have good parents. But we also know that our mother and father look at their two weird children with a sense of growing unease. As if the sea monkeys they had acquired have evolved, too quickly, into parasites.

Parasites, giraffes, badgers. I never knew your head was so full of animal metaphors.

Get out of my head, comes the response.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE SNOW HAS GROWN HEAVIER NOW AND IS FALLING sideways into the underpass when I wake up.

Roe runs his hands through his curls in an attempt to get the mud out. We sit and gape at one another, unable to think of anything to say. Or at least, anything appropriate.

We look at each other, confused, and even though I’m no longer in Roe’s head, I know we’re both thinking the same thing: Did that really happen?

We have both, in a sense, been outed. I know that he’s bisexual. And he knows what I think of him. He could feel the long ribbons of adoration swirling around him as I lived in his head.

His face is