By any other name

First of all, it's the loan of a pen.

The kid is a transfer in, a scrawny bag of knees and elbows deposited into 10PT by the hands of fate. Jacob gave him a friendly smile on the first day, aware of how easy it is to get lost in the unforgiving sea of humanity that is East Rothman Comp, but all he got back was a thousand yard stare. Fear, perhaps, rather than unfriendliness, but he hasn't been motivated to try again. Not until now.

It's something about the kid's reaction that draws him in. It's not unknown to stick a hand in a rucksack and fail to withdraw a pencil case; Jacob's done it himself three times already this term. Every time, two hours too late, he's pictured with perfect clarity the little red box, still gracing the kitchen table. Oops. But hey, it's no big deal.

Sure, the teachers tend to go a bit apeshit about this kind of thing. Mr Mallory in particular is rather too fond of handing out detentions for missing equipment and improper uniform, muttering something about the want of a nail while filling in the little orange slip in his spider scrawl. But fifteen minutes at the end of the day is a slap on the wrist, not the end of the world.

The kid looks like it might be, though. His face drains of colour and then shades crimson and he blinks rapidly as if willing back tears. And, sure, that's well over the top as a reaction but Jacob's got pens to spare and no one needs a day as shitty as the kid seems to be having so he leans over and drops a biro on the desk while Mr Mallory's back is turned.

The kid looks at him like he's given him the moon. Weird.

The loan of a pen might be the start of it, but it's not the end. The kid tries to hand it back at the end of the lesson with muttered thanks, but Jacob waves him off. He gets the kid's name in response, with a blush and a shrug of thanks. He's Paul.

Paul borrows any number of pens from Jacob over the next year. Somehow Jacob manages to remember his every day from then on, to his mother's faint surprise. It's weird how often Paul forgets, because he's otherwise the most put-together teenager Jacob's ever met. They don't socialise outside of school but Jacob's quiet, inexplicable fascination with the new kid draws their orbits together and he finds Paul a study in contrasts.

He's impeccably turned out, despite his propensity to forget his pens, but he doesn't preen; after PE he's showered and dressed before Jacob's wrestled his way out of his sweaty shirt, like the ten minutes it takes the rest of them to change is an unspeakable indulgence. He's a wallflower, most of the time, but when Ms Laker faints on a suffocating summer's day he takes charge without hesitation until she's conscious and embarrassed and in the care of the school nurse, then disappears again like smoke. And while he's one of the brightest kids in the school, his homework is scrappy and barely passable and he's constantly teetering on the threshold of detention as a result. Teetering, but never quite falling.

Not until one Wednesday in May, when he stumbles in three seconds before the bell, dark shadows under his eyes and coffee on his breath. They've fifteen minutes here, ostensibly for pastoral support from Miss Drake but really to gossip and bitch and finish last minute homework. Paul drags crumpled papers from his bag and smooths them out on the desk, and Jacob's jaw drops when he sees the uncompleted maths homework. Never mind that Paul can probably whip through it in ten minutes, he's never one of the last minute scrabblers.

And then he realises that Paul's knuckles are white on his pen and his hand is shaking and nothing about this picture sits right with Jacob at all. It's maths, and Paul is good at maths, and even if he wasn't it's only one homework paper, but the guy looks like he's on the edge of a panic attack.

And Jacob's... not great at maths. He manages, sure, just enough to be in the top set alongside Paul, but it doesn't come easy. He's done his homework, though, and he doesn't even think before sliding it out of his bag and placing it casually beside Paul's. For a second Paul's face twists into something like hurt, like he thinks Jacob's taking the piss, rubbing in the fact that he's done his for once. Jacob rolls his eyes. "Copy it," he mutters, behind his hand, and Paul's eyes widen and he shoots a guilty look towards the oblivious form tutor before scribbling down the answers at light-speed.

"I owe you," he says, with more gravity than the situation demands.

Now it's the loan of a pen, and a set of maths problems.

They don't see each other over the summer holidays and Paul apparently spends his time with a late growth spurt. He comes back tall rather than gangly, broader in the shoulders and deeper-voiced, and puberty is clearly going to be kind to him, albeit rather belatedly. It's his eyes that give Jacob pause, though. They seem to have aged months and more in the space of six short weeks and that fact sits uncomfortably in his chest.

He starts sharing his food with Paul when he realises the contents of his lunch-box haven't changed in deference to his new physique. There was barely enough there last year to feed a twelve year old, and Paul is finally much bigger than one of those. Paul spends a few days demurring before Jacob breaches his defences with one of his mum's patented cookies, and it's all downhill from there.

It's the loan of a pen, and a set of maths problems, and a whole bunch of shared lunches. He never asks, and Paul never offers, but Jacob watches him a bit more closely after that.

Year 11 is GCSEs and the strain is getting to them all. There's more homework and less gossip in Miss Drake's tutor group, the odd breakdown and more than a few tears. Paul's not obviously stressed by the workload but he's growing paler and, Jacob thinks, thinner, despite the cookies. He's still forging through his schoolwork, got a decent set of grades on his mocks, but he's... dimmer somehow. Less vital.

Jacob breaks the habit of a lifetime and talks to Miss Drake. She agrees to look out for Paul, although Jacob has the sense there's something she's not telling him, but she gently suggests that what he might need most is a friend. They are friends, now, Jacob realises, for all that he knows basically nothing about Paul that he can't deduce from appearances. Paul's not rude, but he's evasive when questioned, and Jacob's not enough of a dick to force the issue.

He doubles the number of cookies in his lunch. His mum thinks he's trying to woo – her word – a girl, and he doesn't correct her because that seems like an invasion of Paul's privacy. He brings a flask of coffee from time to time and they share it surreptitiously and Paul grips his cup like it's life-saving. "You ever want to talk," Jacob offers awkwardly, over one such shared flask. "I'm here, you know? We're friends."

The expression on Paul's face suggests this revelation is as much a shock to him as it was to Jacob, despite the pens and the maths, the lunches and the cookies, the coffee and the refusal to pry. Something settles in Paul's posture, though; something that feels important. "Yeah," he says, his voice a little rough. "We are."

They're friends, but it's a circumscribed friendship. Jacob invites him to a party precisely once, out of a sense of obligation rather than any anticipated interest on Paul's part. The hunted look on Paul's face as he fumbles through a polite refusal is enough to persuade Jacob to never ask again. "Just didn't want you to feel left out," he says, gently as he can. Paul shakes his head fervently. "I don't."

It's still a shock, though, to hear Paul's not staying on for sixth form.

"Need to get a job," is his entire explanation, when Jacob asks what A-levels he's taking and gets that wholly unexpected answer. And then – when Jacob frowns and points out his age, and the law, and so forth – a shrug and, "Apprenticeship then. Whatever. I need to be earning."

"There's a whole lifetime for that," is Jacob's feeble response, and a shadow falls across Paul's face. "Mate," Jacob says, helplessly. This feels like the cusp of something much bigger, something Jacob isn't sure he has the capacity to handle, but if any of their year deserves A-levels and uni and the world of possibilities out there, it's Paul. "Whatever you're not telling me... You can, you know?" Paul just nods, and Jacob lets him go.

It's cookies, and coffee, and meeting Paul on his own terms. And it pays off, a week later, when he says, brusquely, "Do you mean it?" And then, at Jacob's obvious confusion, "That I can talk to you?"

The answer comes out of Jacob's mouth instinctive and certain. "Of course."

Paul nods, his jaw set. "Come to mine?"

They don't do this. They don't visit each other's houses, they don't meet outside of school, don't talk, barely text. It's like Paul only exists between the four walls of East Rothman and dematerialises when the bell rings. They're both painfully aware of that fact as they walk shoulder to shoulder back to Paul's house three days later, with Paul's demeanour reminiscent of that of a man approaching the gallows. Paul turns as if to say something, then lets his shoulders slump in something like defeat as he thinks better of it. "Come in," he says, instead.

"Well," Jacob says. "I see, now."

It's not the first thing he says, of course; his mum raised him better than that. First, he says, "Hello," and, "Pleased to meet you," but can't offer, "Paul's told me all about you," because that would be a lie. And where his own mum would be fussing around and offering juice and brownies like they're still seven, it's Paul who says, "I'll put the kettle on," and leaves Jacob sitting awkwardly opposite a pale, exhausted looking woman in an armchair that has more complex controls than his mum's car.

"You're Paul's friend," she says, and it's weighted more heavily than your average conversational opener and Jacob meets her eyes levelly when he replies, firmly, "Yes."

They're in Paul's room, later, nursing mugs of tea, when Jacob says, "Well. I see, now." And maybe it's clumsier than it could be but the silence that preceded it has to have been grating on Paul as much as on him. Paul, who went straight to his mother when they got in, who spoke quietly with a lady in dark blue scrubs who left a minute later, who came back from the kitchen with two mugs of tea and another, plastic cup with handles and a spout.

Jacob sees, now, why fifteen minutes at the end of the day might actually be the end of the world. He sees why Paul feels a need to be earning, and why his lunches don't grow with his body. He sees why pens might be the last thing on his mind as he leaves and homework a second thought at best but why the outward appearance of coping must be maintained at all costs. He sees more than he really wants to of his friend, and his heart creaks with it.

"It's just the two of you?" he asks, neutrally, and Paul nods.

"Dad walked out when I was five," he says, and Jacob's mind recoils from what Paul's once-scrawny shoulders have borne in the ten years since.

But he does his best, in what he suddenly feels is the stilted, insufficient language of adolescence, to convey his feelings. To let Paul know how little this changes, this new knowledge, while in the same moment changing everything. "I won't tell anyone at school," he settles on, eventually, and Paul's grip on his mug slackens just a little. "But I'm here, ok? We're friends."

All in all it couldn't really have gone much better, until Jacob's taking his leave of Paul's mum – "Call me Marian" – and he mentions in passing his plans to study Biology next year. "Oh," she says, "Same as Paul!" and Jacob would do anything, anything to be able to turn back time and stop the instinctive confusion that spills from his lips. That, and erase the hurt, betrayed expression from Paul's face.

Paul doesn't speak to him the next day, or for a week after that. There are no shared lunches or loaned pens, no illicit coffee or copied homework. Jacob wavers between his commitment not to force Paul into conversations he clearly doesn't want and his desperate need to fix this. He settles for slipping cookies into Paul's bag when he's not looking.

"She won't let me drop out," Paul says, tightly, when he finally deigns to speak to Jacob again. Jacob's huge huff of relief is only partly a reaction to that news, and much more about the fact he hasn't shattered this friendship forever.

"I'm sorry," Jacob says, but he's all too aware that, really, he isn't. And there's a tiny hint of something in Paul's eyes that might be relief, that might be a hint of his spark returning, and Jacob watches him almost breathlessly.

"No, you're not," says Paul, but he doesn't sound pissed, he sounds... kind of giddy, actually, and he's shaking, and Jacob slings an arm round his shoulder and guides him onto a stool.

"You're not either," Jacob says, and suddenly he's giggling, and it's inappropriate, it's so fucking inappropriate when Paul's not spoken to him for days and he's stuck his oar into something that is absolutely not his business, but now Paul is giggling, too.

It's not a sound that Jacob's ever heard from him before, and it does something peculiar and warm to his insides.

"She said... she said we can manage." Paul's still shaking, and Jacob wonders how long he's been bottling this up, and just what he's been going through these last days when they weren't talking, and decides that 'not forcing Paul into conversations' might not actually be a winning strategy all the time. "I've... She still does the accounts, the finances, I'm not old enough. But I see a lot and I thought... Hell, they don't tell you," he finishes, in a muddled, helpless rush. Jacob makes what he hopes is an understanding noise, even though he absolutely doesn't, and gets a withering look in return that's oddly fond. "She wants me to go to uni, even. And there's... there's loans, obviously, but there's grants, and all sorts, and if I lived at home..."

And there it is. There's that spark that has been missing, and it's blooming through him like wildfire and Jacob watches in something like wonder.

It's a loan of a pen and a hell of a lot of coffee, it's listening without judgment and meeting Paul where he's at, but maybe more than anything it's this; a door opened to a life that's so much bigger than it might have been.

It's not plain sailing, of course it's not. But the thing about opening doors is that people can come in through them, too. So Jacob is at Paul's every few days, and Marian watches them study together and gives Jacob grateful little looks when Paul can't see. Not that he's doing any of this for her, not really. Not even when he tells Paul to shut up and let him help when he loads the dishwasher or empties the drier; not when he drags his mum round to meet Marian and leaves them to scheme together with the result that Paul comes to prom while Jacob's mum 'sits with her'. (Neither of them expect to come back to find their respective mothers giggling over hands of poker, empty wine glasses on the table. Paul looks faintly scandalised.)

Marian in hospitalised, and Paul is distraught, and Jacob's mum moves him in with them wholesale for the fortnight before she comes home. And then Jacob packs up a holdall and won't take no for an answer and camps on Paul's floor while they take shifts with the carers through the sleepless nights and the long, terrifying days until Marian is stable again.

Paul squares his shoulders and ploughs through it all and gets the grades he needs in his AS levels by the skin of his teeth. And the mums conspire a little more, and Jacob starts to drag Paul to the odd party, and something loosens in him as his social circle widens. (Jacob's not jealous. He's not.)

Paul's eyes are still older than the rest of him, but they're ageing more slowly now and Jacob does his best not to fuss. And all too soon they're applying for uni, and Paul's choices are limited to the places in commuting distance from his house and... well. Jacob finds he doesn't want to go much further than that, either.

He expects some pushback from his mum, something about spreading his wings and not limiting his life to this place where he's grown up but instead he gets what seems like sincere support and a look that Jacob can't interpret, but which feels a little too knowing.

And then there's a late night, of flashcards and essays, and what started with the loan of a pen becomes a shy, stolen kiss in the dark, and a world peeling wide open like an orchid in flower.