The Dead Boy's Guide To Second Chances

2. dead boy's parting gifts

TWO MONTHS AND TWO DAYS AFTER THE DEATH OF OLIVER SALLOW

Finn O'Connell is haunted.

Not in the traditional sense. He doesn't hear wailing at night. He doesn't have scratches on his arms that he can't explain. The things in his room don't move on their own.

His haunting is more insidious (insidious: item number sixty-four in Oliver Sallow's Encyclopaedia of Big Words). It follows him everywhere. Here, the scent of cigarette smoke drifting from an empty bathroom at school. There, a song on the radio that he knows belongs into one of his five-hundred playlists. Faint laughter that sounds a bit like his. The taste of Maltesers. The smell of nail polish. Rue and rosemary and lilac calla lilies.

And now this: a poster for a performance of As You Like It, taped to the wall next to his locker like it was meant just for him to see.

He forces himself to keep his eyes on the image. He's not supposed to avoid these things, Samira always tells him. She's usually right about this stuff.

Finn tries to be objective about it. The poster looks nice. Whoever made it really knows their way around Photoshop. Oliver would've—

He closes his eyes and rests his forehead against the cool metal of his locker. The quiet Fuck he murmurs echoes inside it. Why did Oliver have to be obsessed with bloody Shakespeare, out of all writers? Couldn't it have been some niche author no one else knows?

"Oi!" Finn startles when someone crashes into him from behind, pulling the hood of his windbreaker into his face. "Come on, mate, it's almost half past. We can't be late to practice the very first day of term!"

Blinded by 100% polyester, Finn flails wildly to shake off the attacker. It's either Kavi or Aarun—he can't tell because their voices and their level of general dickhead-ness are almost identical. "Let go of me then, you git!"

The arms finally release him from their headlock. Flipping his hood back, Finn turns around to face the twins. They're each standing with their arms crossed—no way to tell which of them it was.

Judging by his grin, Finn suspects Aarun. "Come on, then!" he says. "Wiley's gonna make us run extra rounds because of you again."

Finn bites down a remark about how he technically never asked them to walk him to practice almost every day. That would sound ungrateful when he's really, really not.

He didn't use to spend a lot of time with his football mates outside of practice before Oliver was g—before Oliver died. That's changed now. They see each other every break, and after practice, they usually head to one of their houses to revise. Not to the library. Never to the library.

Finn grabs his duffel bag from his locker and slams it shut.

They do come late to practice; by the time they're changed and out on the meadow behind the school building, Coach Wiley already has the other boys doing drills. "Seven laps around the field!" he shouts when he spots them.

While Aarun and Kavi stay back to try and bargain with him, Finn immediately falls into a jog. It's possible that he wanted to run laps. They always help him clear his head: the steady pumping of his legs, the focus on keeping his breathing even. One lap after another, easy, familiar. He would do this forever if he could.

By the time he reaches seven, his cheeks probably match the red of his hair. He goes to join his mates where they're dividing up teams for their scrimmage, but his coach intercepts him.

"Birdie. Can I talk to you for a second?"

Reluctantly, Finn comes to a halt. He got the nickname Birdie after his first game on the team. Just before halftime, a pigeon landed on the field, right in front of the other team's penalty box. He was so scared to hit it, he gave up the chance at a goal; instead of attempting a shot, he kicked the ball past the side line and carried the confused bird off the field.