The Tower

There's a tall, wobbly tower at the far end of the main football field. You can see it from any of the classrooms on this side of the building.

From here, my tutor room, it looks neat and white. The ivy climbing up and around it like a dragon looks pretty. Like a decoration on a cake. When you actually walk up to it, you see how crumbly the stonework is, and how, in a lot of places it's grubby enough to be more of a pale grey. Up close, you can see how tough the ivy is. The little clinging worms that dig into the bricks are more like teeth.

Sometimes, when I'm in B3 getting tortured with quadratic equations, or triangles... I can see a shape in the window. It must be her.

On Thursday afternoons, I'm in the next corridor along, ignoring Mr Thompson. He's usually going on about, oh, I don't know, Shakespeare, or Edgar Allen Poe, or someone like that. Some other stuffy dead person who uses really long sentences instead of having a personality. I can get a really good view of the window from where I sit.

You can't look too long, or Mr Thompson will pick on you to answer a question.

We know she's in there. When we are doing PE, all the boys try to get closer to it, until the teacher bawls and makes everyone change direction.

When he's got the year eleven boys out there, he takes up his part near it's base, as if he can physically stop them getting closer to her.

Everyone says it's his daughter up there. They say he locked her away because she is just too beautiful to be allowed. They say she might be cursed. Some of them, the ones who think they are very clever, say that the beauty is the curse. It got her locked away in the tower, didn't it? It must be a bad thing.

There are three brothers at school who everyone thinks will get to her first.

The oldest one, Callum, tried to climb it last year. He got halfway up before he lost his footing and fell. They screened off the area and he was bustled away in the back of an ambulance.

Earlier this year, his younger brother tried it. Jamie is clever. He tried to send a drone up there with a note clipped to it. It got tangled in the ivy and dropped like a stone. The PE teacher found Jamie hiding in the nearby bushes, hauled him out by the collar, and gave him a week of after school detentions. He said he saw her hand on the glass. No one believed him. He hasn't tried again.

The youngest brother is Leo. He’s quiet, and he’s got that look about him. Small and lean, with straight hair and the sort of face that would write poems if he didn't get beaten up for it. I saw him looking at it a lot, all thoughtful, like, you know. Walking past it, and again, a little closer, real casual, like it's a nervous animal and he doesn't want to to run away.

I started following Leo. I'm not a stalker or anything, I just... watch. I thought maybe maybe this is it! That's how it goes in stories, isn't it? The youngest of the three brothers succeeds where his older brothers fail. I could be near him when it happened, when he got inside, and then maybe... Maybe I'd be in the story as well. Maybe I could influence the story from the inside. Maybe she might notice me instead. It could happen, couldn't it?

One Thursday, when Mr Thompson was going on about ravens or coffins or whatever, I saw Leo standing right under the tower. I asked to be excused to go to the toilet. Mr Thompson said no.

"Please, Sir, I'm desperate."

Mr Thompson scowled, but he nodded as well. I went as fast as I could out of the classroom without actually sprinting, as if I really did have a bladder emergency. Or worse.

I had a horrible feeling that I'd get down there, and Leo would be gone. Already inside, maybe. Or given up, and gone back to Music class.

I felt horribly exposed, hurrying across that wide open field. I had no business being there. There were no classrooms in this direction, only the football field, and I didn't have PE until Tuesday.

I couldn't see him anywhere, and my heart sank. I walked faster, expecting any moment to hear Mr Stimpson bellowing out of the third floor window for me to stop running, and get my sorry hide back to class.

I'd come this far, hadn't I? I couldn't just give up now. Besides, the tower was closer than the school building, now. If I didn't want to get caught, keeping on made sense. I could go around the tower, and I'd be out of sight if any teacher happened to look out of the window, and glance down the football field.

Leo didn't hear me approach, he was intent on pulling at the ivy low down on the tower wall. It grew very thickly just there, and he was flushed and sweating with it. Should I offer to help? Is that my way in?

Still dithering, I was hanging back, just out of his sight, when he finally cleared enough of the ivy and exposed a narrow gap. Just big enough to crawl through. Leo squeezed inside, and I waited a heartbeat and went after him.

Inside, it was colder than it should be. The walls were damp and the stairs were narrow. It smelled like old paper and dust. The higher we climbed, the more I could smell something sweet, like flowers. Is that her perfume? It was a heavy, choking smell, and when I switched to breathing through my mouth, I could taste it.

Leo’s footsteps ahead of me were soft, like he was sneaking. Like a thief.

At the top, there’s a room. The door wasn't even locked. The window is smaller than it looks from the field, the same way the moon is always smaller in your photograph. The girl was sitting in a chair by the radiator, wearing a hoodie and socks. Her hair is quite long, and she'd done it in a plait that looked wonky, and there were lots of wispy bits excaping. It looked ordinary.

She looked tired.

She looked at Leo, and he looked at her. It was a bit awkward, really.

No one said anything.

I wish I hadn’t come. I liked her better when she was just a shape in the window. I backed away.

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