thewhitelily

Got the wings of heaven on my shoes
I'm a dancin' man and I just can't lose
You know it's all right, it's okay
I'll live to see another day
Stayin’ Alive - The BeeGees

Carl Powers was wonderful.

The bus left the stop with a whoosh, and as it cleared the corner Jimmy did a little dance on the pavement, his feet moving to an imaginary beat as he spun in place and walked away, shuffling a quick ball change after every third step. He’d been holding it in all afternoon, on show among the other boring teenagers who put soooo much stock in appearances, as though Jimmy would have let them see anything he didn’t want them to. Every one of them was boring, so boringly invested in their boring friends, their boring boyfriends, boring girlfriends, boring families, and their boring plans for their boring lives, except…

Except Carl.

Because Carl Powers was more than that. Carl was interesting.

Jimmy danced his way up onto a stack of planks and bricks piled on the footpath and then down the other side again, ignoring the angry shouts from the building site. Idiots. What did they think he thought they’d do if he didn’t listen?

Carl Powers was smart, utterly wasted at the sports and trade-focussed Patcham Fawcett High. He had confidence, despite the way hitting his growth spurt early had sent him wading through the boys his age like a dark-haired giraffe through the savannah. And Carl Powers was talented, in his own limited way. He competed in the pool not only with his age mates, but with the under fourteens—and he left them all dead in the water.

Jimmy liked talent. He could respect talent, even useless talent. And he could respect the way Carl didn’t pander to the crowd of sycophants surrounding Britain’s rising star of the pool at every meet he’d seen him—the cunning with which he hid the secret that would have made them all turn on him—not well enough that Jimmy couldn’t see it, but certainly well enough for his barely pubescent age-mates.

And then…

Jimmy stopped, revelling momentarily in the feeling of the emotion that had welled up inside once more, the emotion that Carl had brought to the surface. Warm. No, not warm. The cat had made him feel warm. Warm was something different. This was hot.

Definitely not bored.

Jimmy had swum slowly at the Sussex regionals; he hadn’t wanted to risk making the cut for the national championship. London was nothing all that interesting. He’d hitched up there before—it wasn’t like Da was going to stop him, or even notice he was missing—and it was certainly nothing interesting while under the care of a school chaperon obsessed with winning sporting glory for the school. Swimming up and down the same pool over and over was boring enough without extra practice.

Usually Jimmy swam as fast as he could just to get his compulsory co-curricular over with and climbed out of the pool feeling blank and even more bored and wondering why he was still bothering to blend in or breathe the same air as people who thought any of this mattered.

In the water at the end of the race, Carl had been incandescent with his win against the older boys, glowing as he watched the adjudicators write his time up first on the blackboard—while beside him Jimmy coasted in to touch solidly in third-last place.

“Faggot had a bad day,” laughed the boy in the lane on Carl’s other side as Jimmy surfaced, gesturing to the board where Jimmy’s time was being written up. He was boasting a little too loud for having beaten Jimmy to qualifying by only four tenths of a second.

Idiot.

More than usually an idiot.

As though ‘faggot’ even came close to describing what Jimmy was. Another sports-obsessed moron from Patcham Fawcett. He’d know soon enough who’d passed on that particular piece of gossip and remind them of the value of keeping their opinions to themselves. It wouldn’t take much; everyone at Felpham Comprehensive—students and teachers alike—knew better than to try anything direct with Jimmy at this point.

Oh, whenever things had got physical Jimmy had always gone down nicely. He rarely fought back, unless the aggressor required encouragement to dig their own grave, and Jimmy bled prettily enough. Bruised beautifully, and never said a word to the teachers. Well. Almost never. But no matter how hard they tried, no-one had ever managed to knock the smile off his face, or the fear into his eyes, whether with words or fists or studied indifference. And then would come the run of impossibly bad luck that followed a run in with Jimmy….

Carl paused in shaking the water out of his hair at his teammate’s comment, glanced at Jimmy out of the side of his eye—and he’d laughed.

Oh.

Oh!

How unexpectedly marvellous.

Carl could see him.

Carl wasn't like the rest of the second-rate cronies who wouldn't have recognised he’d been holding back if Jimmy had swum backwards. Carl was the best swimmer in south England, not some low-rent PE teacher exhorting everyone to do their best with equal disinterest. Of course he could see what they couldn’t—and he hadn't said anything. He’d met Jimmy’s eye and he’d laughed. And Jimmy had felt….

Something hot.

Not the low-grade irritation of dealing with idiots day in, day out; not the superior resignation seeing them flapping about failing to see the simplest solutions to their problems; not the full-on fury at at being disappointed by someone he’d imagined to be more than they turned out to be, but….

Hot.

Even Da’s fits of temper didn’t make him feel like that anymore. They didn’t make him feel anything anymore, pathetic cringing drunkard that Da was at this point. As though there was an insult he hadn’t yet thrown, a cuff across the head heavy enough to make Jimmy go all limp and helplessly alive. As though Jimmy couldn’t mouth along with him every passive aggressive remark about the bitch who’d whelped him—as though it was Jimmy’s fault that dying was something people did.

As though Jimmy could be anything other than exactly where he’d chosen to be given an unfortunate clumsy step could have taken Da any night of the week. He could have aspirated on his own vomit, fallen asleep and slipped under the water in the bath, succumbed to blood alcohol toxicity, crashed his car on the way to pick up another carton, inhaled too much smoke while he was passed out and the house burned down around him….

Da was a dead man drinking, and it was all too easy to be bothered with until Jimmy was old enough to skip over foster care. There was no need to make things more difficult than he had to, and he did have some self control, after all. He hadn’t even done anything to Carl, while he'd been in the pool swimming his second race, this time against his age-mates. Well, nothing more than pick the combination for the younger boy’s locker so he could steal his shoelaces. But he’d done that at the last three meets, too, just on principle.  No one should love a pair of shoes that much.

Carl was different.

Jimmy took a quick step around to the side of the footpath to avoid the detritus of a clogged-up drain and spun back to pick up the rhythm again.

Carl had tried to apologise, later, for letting his classmate’s slur pass unquestioned. Gorgeous boy. Out of the water he looked less confident: less of a sleek part-fish, more a gawky and awkward adolescent. His narrow, quickly-growing bones seemed stretched out too thin between bulky joints and the nervous, oversized hands he used like paddles in the water. Embarrassment made him duck his head, staring down past the whipcord muscles of his legs at the big feet his height was finally catching up to. He was going to grow at least another two inches before the end of the swimming season, judging by those revolting shoes.

Jim had shrugged, lowering his eyelashes as he accepted the apology, the heat in his chest curling his mouth into a knowing smile. Carl had realised he’d crossed a line in that moment. He just hadn’t understood which one.

Clever Carl. Clever, clever, oh so stupid Carl. He was wonderful, he really was.

The cat had been wonderful too; a stray ginger that had wandered into Jimmy’s backyard a month or two back. He’d spent weeks coaxing it close with indirect eye-contact and indifferent body language, an abandoned saucer of milk and a casually twitching bit of string, until it had come close enough for him to gently stroke its fur and feel the quivering heartbeat hammering beneath prominent ribs, until it had nuzzled into his hands greedy for more more more, until the dumb thing had put its head right through the loop in the string he’d been playing with and practically begged him to draw the noose tight around its throat.

It had felt so warm in his hands, and it had made Jimmy feel warm too.

He’d never liked cats.

Carl Powers could be like that, too: warm and alive and then—later, so many interesting hours later—not.

The cat had gone out in the week before last’s rubbish, nestled under a layer of Da’s empty bottles after Jimmy had got bored. The bloody scratches on his wrists had nearly healed, too. But Carl… Carl….

Jimmy could still feel the heat of Carl Powers laughing—laughing!—at him. Looking at him like he could see him. Making Jimmy feel…

No one ever got to Jimmy, and that meant one thing for Carl. He couldn’t be allowed to continue.

How wonderful.

Jimmy walked on, the bounce in his stride diminished, his gait turned slow and economical as he let the options play out in his head.

He’d need to be careful as he coaxed Carl in; he was cleverer than a cat, cleverer than Da, cleverer than a teacher. Maybe, in a couple of years he could even have been clever enough to provide a genuine challenge.

Perhaps it would be more fun to wait, but Jimmy had never been that patient. He’d only get bored if he tried to make it last.

Oh well!

Carl was clever enough to be fun, while there was a game to play, he was special enough to be interesting—but Jimmy tried not to fool himself that he wasn’t still ordinary. Carl would always still be ordinary, because Jimmy was going to have to cast a wider net if he was ever going to find someone who wasn’t quite so ordinary to play with.

The plan was already unfolding in his head. It wouldn't be hard to nip up to London during the nationals. Carl wouldn’t question that Jimmy was there as a spectator, wouldn’t imagine that anyone’s life didn’t revolve around the swimming pool, even after he’d seen Jimmy deliberately miss qualifying. He could get close, get Carl alone so he could feel the thump-thump of his frightened heart, the stickiness of his blood…

No, that part had just been tedious. Meat, blood, organs, nerve responses, nothing more than basic biology. He could have got that much out of Da with a kitchen knife anytime he felt like becoming an orphan.

There was no need to get his hands dirty, not when it would be so much more satisfying to arrange for Carl kill himself—and so very easy to contaminate the cream Carl used obsessively before and after every swim to protect that gorgeous skin from the chlorine. Brighton General dumped its medical waste rather sloppily at the back—there’d be something he could use if he looked. He could make the switch while Carl was in the pool, or… no. Even better. Before. Timing was everything.

He would switch it back again while Carl was in the pool. This way, he wouldn’t even need to find a lethal poison—and even if anyone suspected, the pool would have wash away all the evidence.

All the evidence.  Of anything. Which meant…

The delicate web of the plan sparkled in Jimmy’s mind, hoarfrost scattered along each invisible string.

Oh, he could do that too!

Because Jimmy knew Carl’s secret. The athletic prodigy, rocketed into puberty ahead of his classmates, stripping off four times a day in a busy locker room among a crush of paranoid adolescent boys in lycra, obviously he couldn’t be gay. Even if he was. Even if his eyes were already lingering in all the right places. Even if Jimmy had seen them lingering on him.

Jimmy shivered with delight.

If he played it right, it’d be easy enough to get close. Easy enough to make Carl think it was his own idea to get closer still. Close enough to feel Carl’s big body against him, warm and alive, maybe even inside Jimmy, stretching him, hurting him, leaving desperate scratches on his skin without knowing that the poison was ready and waiting for him, without knowing that soon, after Carl had kissed him for luck and put on his skin cream and lined up at the blocks, without knowing that soon, soon… he would be the one struggling and dying, drowning in his own element.

Oh, that would be just perfect.

It must happen, it simply must.

Jimmy twirled and let the inaudible music take his feet again.

It would be a month before he could see Carl again at the nationals. A month to prepare to hitch his way to London and become to everyone but him just another anonymous boy in the change rooms, clustering around gorgeous, wonderful, special, soon-to-be-late Carl.

And who knew? If it worked out, Jimmy might even decide he liked swimming after all.