PART FOUR

Chester

We came up to the school gates, me and Kate had talked the whole way here, I'd learnt a lot about her. She hadn't decided what she wanted to be yet. She played guitar. She was an artist; she drew endless pictures and painted canvases. She loved to go out and sketch things. Her favourite fruit were apples. She talked a lot, but in patches, it tumbled out of her mouth, but then she could be quiet as well, like she spent a lot of the time thinking. She did lots afternoon classes, drawing, painting, but also learning languages. Don't ask me why. I don't even think she knew why she did it. The whole time she spoke her face lit up and was animated. Every thought she had, every feeling she felt. It showed on her face. I realised that she was completely free. She didn't care what anyone thought of her. She was innocent, pure, and very funny. Randomly while in the middle of conversation, she would remember a good joke, and tell me. No matter how lame they were, they always made me laugh. Also she would be in the middle of saying something, and then suddenly before I knew it we were talking about something else entirely. She sidetracked herself a lot. We were definitely going to be friends, as long as she was safe anyway.
"So tell me something about you." She looked at me with wide eyes, interested, then suddenly her expression changed and she said quickly, "I mean, only if you want to, you don't have to, I'm just curious, like where did you come from? What about your family?" It wasn't like she was even asking me; it was more like she was wondering out loud. I suppose I could tell her bits and pieces of my life, that couldn't hurt.
"I have three brothers, an older one, Jack, he's 22 and engaged. He lives with her, her names Jo, Josephine. She's lovely, we all like her. Then there's me, I'm 17. Then Sam, he's 16. Then Osk, Oskar, He's 14. My Mum and Dad are in their late 40's; they got married in their 20's and then had us. My mum is a scientist. And my Dad used to be in the army, but as a psychologist. He also helped out our soldiers as a translator for the civilians and stuff like that." She actually stopped talking and listened patiently. She still looked interested. Then the questions started
"Wow, that's cool, what does your dad speak? How long since Jack left? Why did you move? What are your Parents names? Where did you used to live? When's your birthday? What's your favourite ice-cream flavour?" I couldn't help myself,
"What?" I asked, she shrugged, and then continued.
"What do you do? What do you want to do? What do you like to do? What are you good at doing?" She took a deep breath, was about to continue on, but then suddenly looked embarrassed, shook her head, as if to clear it and then peeked up and me and waited for answers. I laughed out loud.
"Oh so your done then? No more questions?" I teased. She glared at me then replied,
"For now," I could tell that she probably wanted to poke her tongue out at me again, but she was holding back. This made the corners of my mouth turn up and I nearly laughed out loud.
"So?" She questioned me and looked up locking on to my eyes, and once again I got a shock, they were so beautiful, trusting, and innocent. And even though I was going to change the subject, and get Kate talking again, which trust me, wouldn't be hard, I found myself trusting her, and telling her more.
"My Dad speaks everything; I don't know any language he doesn't know." Shit, I wasn't supposed to tell her that, usually French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Portuguese is enough to gobsmack people. They don't need to know that he doesn't only speak those but also Arabic, Croatian, Filipino, Hebrew, Hindi, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Afrikaans, Wu, Lao, Malay, Zulu, Swahili, Setswana, Tonga, Russian and Italian. To distract her I quickly went on to answer the next question.
"Jack left last year." Now the next question needed to be answered with care. "We moved 'cos my mum got a job here, at the research centre across the city." Yes that should do. "My mum's name is Lynette. My Dad's name is Peter. We moved from a city in Spain." I watched her questioning expression change to a dumbfounded one.
"Wow, Chester that's awesome, why in earth would your mum choose to work here, in England? Were so boring compared to Spain... can you speak Spanish?"
"Well, yea, a bit, but me and my brothers went to a special school with English speakers, with a couple Americans, and an Australian boy, you know, kids from around the place, who's parents liked to travel, or had jobs that carried them to other countries. But yea, I picked up Spanish, and dad did give us lessons," That was until he gave up because we couldn't go 15 minutes without fighting with each other. "That was while we were in the city though, for a couple months at a time we would stay in a small village called Santillana del ma, it was beautiful. So yea, we picked up the language." She was staring at me breathless. I felt a bit self conscious, "what?"She snapped out of it and shook her head.