"Adam! Catch!" I followed him into the garden-we would be in trouble if Audrey's mam came out-and managed to catch the hat without falling off my bike; I stuck it on my head and cycled no-hands around the dolly classroom. Audrey tried to knock me over, but I dodged. She was sort of pretty and she didn't look really mad, so I tried not to run over her dolls. Tara stuck her hands on her hips and started yelling at Peter. "Jamie!" I shouted. "Come on!"
Jamie had stayed in the road, bumping her front tire rhythmically off the edge of the ramp. She dropped her bike, took a running jump at the estate wall and swung herself over.
Peter and I forgot about Tara ("You haven't a titter of sense, so you haven't, Peter Savage, just you wait till Mammy hears about your carry-on…"), braked and looked at each other. Audrey grabbed the hat off my head and ran, checking to see if I was chasing her. We left our bikes in the road and climbed the wall after Jamie.
She was in the tire swing, kicking herself off the wall every few swings. Her head was down and all I could see was the sheet of straight pale hair and the end of her nose. We sat on the wall and waited.
"My mam measured me this morning," Jamie said in the end. She was picking at a scab on her knuckle.
I thought, puzzled, of the door-frame in our kitchen: glossy white wood, with pencil-marks and dates to show me growing. "So?" Peter said. "Big swinging mickeys."
"For uniforms!" Jamie yelled at him. "Duh!" She slid out of the tire, landed hard and ran, into the wood.
"Sheesh," Peter said. "What's her problem?"
"Boarding school," I said. The words made my legs feel watery.
Peter gave me a disgusted, incredulous grimace. "She's not going. Her mam said."
"No she didn't. She said, 'We'll see.'"
"Yeah, and then she didn't say anything else about it ever since."
"Yeah, well, now she has, hasn't she?"
Peter squinted into the sun. "Come on," he said, and jumped back down off the wall.
"Where are we going?"
He didn't answer. He picked up his bike and Jamie's and managed to wobble them both into his garden. I got mine and went after him.
Peter's mam was hanging out the washing, with a line of clothes-pegs clipped to the side of her apron. "Don't be annoying Tara," she said.
"We won't," Peter said, dumping the bikes on the grass. "Mam, we're going in the wood, OK?" The baby, Sean Paul, was lying on a blanket, wearing nothing but a nappy and trying to crawl. I poked him tentatively in the side with my toe; he rolled over, grabbed my runner and grinned up at me. "Good baby," I told him. I didn't want to go find Jamie. I wondered if maybe I could stay there, mind Sean Paul for Mrs. Savage and wait until Peter came back to tell me Jamie was going away.
"Tea at half past six," Mrs. Savage said, reaching out absently to smooth down Peter's hair as he passed. "Have you your watch?"
"Yeah." Peter waved his wrist at her. "Come on, Adam, let's go."
When something was wrong we mostly went to the same place: the top room of the castle. The staircase leading up to it had long since crumbled away, and from the ground you couldn't even really tell it was there; you had to climb the outer wall, all the way over the top, and then jump down onto the stone floor. Ivy trailing down the walls, branches tumbling overhead: it was like a bird's nest, swinging high up in the air.
Jamie was there, huddled up in a corner with one elbow crooked across her mouth. She was crying, hard and clumsily. Once, ages before, she had caught her foot in a rabbit hole when she was running, and broken her ankle; we had given her a fireman's lift all the way back home and she had never cried, not even when I tripped and jolted her leg, just yelled, "Ow, Adam, you thick!" and pinched my arm.
I climbed down into the room. "Go away!" Jamie shouted at me, muffled by her arm and tears. Her face was red and her hair was tangled, clips hanging off sideways. "Leave me alone."
Peter was still on top of the wall. "Are you going to boarding school?" he demanded.
Jamie squeezed her eyes and mouth tight, but choked-up sobs broke through all the same. I could barely hear what she was saying. "She never said, she acted like it was all OK, and all the time…she was just lying!"
It was the unfairness of it that knocked the breath out of me. We'll see, Jamie's mother had said, don't worry about it; and we had believed her and stopped worrying. No grown-up had ever betrayed us before, not about something that mattered like this, and I couldn't take it in. We had lived that whole summer trusting that we had forever.
Peter balanced anxiously along the wall and back again, stood on one foot. "So we'll do the same thing again. We'll have a mutiny. We'll-"
"No!" Jamie cried. "She's paid the fees and everything, it's too late-I'm going in two weeks! Two weeks…" Her hands balled into fists and she slammed them against the wall.
I couldn't stand it. I knelt down beside Jamie and put my arm around her shoulders; she shook it off, but when I put it back she left it there. "Don't, Jamie," I begged. "Please don't cry." The green and gold whirl of branches all around, Peter baffled and Jamie crying, the silky skin of her arm making my hand tingle; the whole world seemed to be rocking, the stone of the castle rolling beneath me like the decks of ships in films-"You'll be back every weekend…"
"It won't be the same!" Jamie cried. Her head went back and she sobbed without even trying to hide it, frail brown throat turned up to the fragments of sky. The utter wretchedness in her voice cut straight through me and I knew she was right: it was never going to be the same, not ever again.
"No, Jamie, don't-Stop…" I couldn't stay still. I knew it was stupid but for a moment I wanted to tell her I would go instead; I would take her place, she could stay here forever… Before I knew I was going to do it, I ducked my head and kissed her on the cheek. Her tears were wet on my mouth. She smelled like grass in the sun, hot and green, intoxicating.
She was so startled that she stopped crying. Her head whipped round and she stared at me, wide red-rimmed blue eyes, very close. I knew she was going to do something, punch me, kiss me back-
Peter leaped off the wall and dropped to his knees in front of us. He grabbed my wrist in one hand, hard, and Jamie's in the other. "Listen," he said. "We'll run away."
We stared at him.
"That's stupid," I said at last. "They'll catch us."
"No, no they won't, not right away. We can hide here for a few weeks, no problem. It doesn't have to be forever or anything-just till it's safe. Once that school's started, we can go home; it'll be too late. And even if they send her anyway, so what? We'll run away again. We'll go up to Dublin and get Jamie out. Then they'll expel her and she'll have to come back home. See?"
His eyes were shining. The idea caught, flared, spun in the air between us.
"We could live here," Jamie said. She caught her breath in a long, hiccuppy shudder. "In the castle, I mean."
"We'll move every day. Here, the clearing, that big tree where the branches do that nest thing. We won't give them a chance to catch up with us. You really think anyone could find us in here? Come on!"
Nobody knew the wood like we did. Sliding through the undergrowth, light and silent as Indian braves; watching motionless from thickets and high branches as the searchers clumped past…
"We'll take turns sleeping." Jamie was sitting up straighter. "One of us can keep watch."