Frustration -SERIES- [Part 1] [boyxboy]

Chapter Fourteen

Later that night we were all sitting on the Name Withheld tour bus on the two and a half hour journey to Bristol so the bands could play there the following night. Conor was practically back to his old self, before all the stuff with KISS Magazine and Carrie Chilcott and the "Conthur" website; he was sitting in the midst of the group, once again effortlessly focusing all attention onto himself.

'Selfish,' Josh said to me in an aside as I sat a little out of the way, just watching and listening to what was going on.

'What?'

'You're being selfish,' he clarified, his voice light.

'I am not! How?'

'You're unreasonably pissed off because Conor's dad brought him out of his funk and you've been trying for weeks and haven't gotten anywhere.'

'That's not true,' I muttered, even though it was.

'Sure it is. And I mean I get it, from what Conor was saying last night it sounds like his dad has gone all aggressively hetero and wants them both to become upstanding members of some suburb somewhere together, so essentially your theoretical worst enemy has gotten through to your boyfriend where you failed. But the important thing here is that it worked, not how or why it did.'

'If you think any of what you're saying is news to me then you're wrong.'

Josh held up his hands in retreat. 'Okay. Just as long as you know it.' He paused. 'Remember when we were seven and Mrs Connolly divided the whole class into pairs for the nature walk?'

Slightly taken aback by the direct change in conversational topic, I nodded. 'Uh huh?'

'And she paired you with Marie Keegan and me with Gemma Mayberry even though you and I always went together on nature walks?'

'Yeah...'

'And we respectfully requested that she pair us together and them together instead?'

'Yeah...'

'And she wouldn't?'

'Where are you going with this?'

'Do you remember what we did?'

I shrugged. 'Put up and shut up?'

Josh shook his head. 'No. You came and stayed over at mine and we looked up black magic on the internet even though it was dial-up then and took us half the night, but we managed to find out how to make voodoo dolls.'

'Fuck. We were a bit morbid as kids weren't we?'

'You still are. Let's make voodoo dolls out of Mr Archibald and that Chilcott woman.'

Despite myself, I laughed. 'Are you insane? What would that possibly achieve?'

Josh shrugged. 'Nothing much. I mean, nothing happened to Mrs Connolly, but imagine how much better you'll feel after sticking pins into their little cloth bodies.'

'We did have a smug assurance that Mrs Connolly would get what was coming to her, didn't we?' I conceded.

'We did. And since we both spent the whole day watching her and waiting we didn't even notice how annoying Gemma and Marie were.'

'Marie did keep saying I was "yucky" and would never get a girlfriend.'

'Well I guess technically she was right.'

'The wisdom of youth. Okay. Voodoo dolls it is.'

'What about voodoo dolls?' a voice asked, and we both looked up guiltily to see Conor standing over us, looking amused.