DAYLIGHT FADING

eleven | but that's the least of all my fears

We pass the rest of the drive to Norwich is our comfortable relative silence and Jez’s eyebrows don’t even twitch when she sees the building the car park I’ve pulled into is attached to. If this had been my mother, her lip would have curled and she would have asked me what we were doing in such a vulgar area. She was a country-club woman through and through.

I quickly hop out of the car and race up the stairs, finding apartment no. 216. I ring the little doorbell and begin to bounce of the balls of my feet. I’m just about to being pacing when Matt opens the door, hair slightly rumpled from sleep.

He nods at me before walking back into the apartment. The glimpse you get of the inside is not the typical 20-year old living on their own mess, inside just military neatness. Many people underestimate Matt simply because he lives in a council flat and doesn’t dress in sharp suits.

He hands me a thin, laminated strip of one of those new ID cards for students that they’ve started making recently. It’s a great choice. Driver’s licences are exceptionally difficult to forge well on a short time scale and it’s exactly the kind of thing a teenager would take as a proof of age to a tattoo parlour. Most of all, I can’t see a single missing detail.

“This is great, Matt,” I give him a small smile, flipping it over to inspect the back.

“Well, I figure you need to get on the law’s bad side by taking a seventeen year old to a tattoo parlour after all of those years pretending butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth,” Matt grins at me and for a moment, I grin back.

“Wait, I didn’t tell you I was taking a seventeen year old to a tattoo parlour,” my alarms instantly turn on. Maybe he really does work for the Secret Service. Then again, why the hell would the Secret Service be interested in me?

“Calm the fuck down, D’Angelo, it’s a deduction from your personality,” Matt rolls his eyes at me, “she has to be seventeen because your morals won’t allow anything else. You wouldn’t take a seventeen year old to get drunk because they can buy their own alcohol and from the looks of the chick in the photo, she could pass for eighteen and sneak into an eighteen plus gig anyway. So, that leaves tattooing because it’s the only other thing you’d do.”

If I’d had Matt’s brain in school, I would have never had to spent so much time wheedling my way out of trouble in Selby’s office. They never tell you that if you’re smart, you get let off lighter.

Take Seb, for example. He was planning to set a sheep loose in school and attempted to light my cigarette for me whilst walking and dropped it. Somehow, it landed on the sheep and managed to set the wool on fire. The sheep then ran, flaming, through the school, setting all of the fire alarms off and causing absolute chaos. He only got one lunchtime detention.

I smoked on the furthest end of the sports field, which is about a mile away from every other student and was somehow found by Selby. I had to spend three weeks in after-school detentions.

I call that favouritism.

“D’Angelo!” my head snaps to Matt.

“Sorry, I spaced,” I have a habit of spacing on people when I reach the point of nostalgia. Probably because I have too much to be nostalgic about.

I dig into my pocket and pull out my purse. I count out Matt’s cash to him and he smiles, handing me the ID.

I quickly jog back down the stairs and jump back into the car, handing Jez the little laminated bit of card. “This is good,” she turns it this way and that, “very good.”

“Matt’s the best. That’s why we used him so that we could get into clubs,” I shrug at her, and her lips twitch.

“You snuck into nightclubs?” Jez sounds far too amused for her own good.