The School Swap Day

Chapter 1: Swap Day Announced

The notice went up on the form room board on a wet Tuesday in October, sandwiched between a poster for the Christmas food bank collection and a faded flyer for last year’s talent show that nobody had bothered to take down.

ST AIDAN’S CHARITY SWAP DAY – FRIDAY 23RD

Dress as ‘the opposite’ for the day! Non-uniform, £1 donation to the Whitmore Bay Lifeboat Appeal. Best form group effort wins a pizza lunch. Get involved!

“Oh, we are doing this,” said Alison, before Sam had even finished reading it properly.

He’d known her long enough – since a joint project on the Great Fire of London in Year 4 that had ended with both of them being sent to Mrs Pryce’s office for arguing about whether Pudding Lane was a real place – to recognise the tone. It was the tone she used right before he agreed to something he hadn’t quite decided on yet.

“Doing what, exactly,” he said, though he already suspected.

“Swap Day. Look at it.” She jabbed a finger at the poster like it had personally wronged her by not doing so already. “Jodie’s lot from 9G did it last year and raised about four hundred quid. Mr Douglas wore a skirt over his trousers and did the whole assembly like that. It was legendary.”

“I remember. I was there.”

“So you’re in.”

“I didn’t say that.”

The form room emptied out around them in the scrum before first period – bags scraping chair legs, someone’s phone going off with a ringtone that got it instantly confiscated, the low roar of thirty-odd fourteen-year-olds who had all had roughly the same amount of sleep. Alison didn’t move, which meant Sam didn’t either. She had a way of holding a conversation hostage until it went the way she wanted, not through any particular force, just a sort of patient, immovable cheerfulness that had steered the course of their friendship since primary school.

“It’s for charity,” she said. “The lifeboat people. You like boats.”

“I don’t ‘like boats’, I said the lifeboat station was interesting when we went on that trip in Year 7.”

“Same thing.” She was already walking, which meant he was already following, which was also how most of their conversations went. “Our form’s doing a whole thing. Keira’s organising the girls, someone’s borrowing their older brother’s blazers, it’s going to be brilliant. You have to be part of it.”

“Why do I have to be part of it?”

“Because you’re my best mate and I’m not doing it on my own, and also because Josh Bellamy said he thought it was ‘a bit weird’ and I want the numbers to make him look stupid.”

This, Sam knew, was the actual reason, or near enough – Alison had a long memory for being told things were weird, ever since Josh had said the exact same thing about her running the length of the football pitch to prove she could beat Kyle Redditch, which she had then done, decisively, in front of half of Year 8.

“I’m not being someone’s photo op for Josh Bellamy,” Sam said, mostly to have something to say, because he could already feel the shape of the conversation ending somewhere he hadn’t quite located yet.

“You’re not being anyone’s photo op. You’re being my mate on a Friday, same as any other day, except in different clothes.” She said it lightly, the way she said most things, like it cost her nothing to offer. “I’ll sort it, if that’s what you’re worried about. My sister’s got loads of stuff she doesn’t wear any more. You won’t have to think about it at all.”

It was such a small thing to say – I’ll sort it, you won’t have to think about it – that Sam almost missed the flicker of something underneath his own reply. Not dread, exactly. He’d have said dread if anyone had asked him, because dread was a familiar shape, the kind you got before a maths test or a dentist appointment, something you could point to and say that, that’s what it is. This wasn’t quite that. It sat somewhere closer to the nervous, unsteady feeling of being asked to volunteer an answer in class when he wasn’t sure it was right, except he couldn’t work out yet what the question even was.

“Fine,” he said. “But if I look stupid, that’s on you.”

“You won’t look stupid.” Alison grinned, already pulling her bag higher onto her shoulder as they reached the science corridor, already moving on to the next thing, the bell, double Chemistry, whatever came after that. “You’ll look brilliant. Trust me.”

He did trust her – that was the easy part, the part that had never once needed deciding. It was the rest of it, the part with no name yet, that followed him into Chemistry and sat somewhere at the back of his mind for the remainder of the day, quiet and unexplained, waiting.