Binding 13 Summary & ending explained

Shannon

On the tenth of January I caught the early bus to my new school with my brother's ten euro folded in my sock and one rule in my head: be nobody.

Joey had pressed the note into my hand at six. "For lunch. Don't argue."

I had been somebody's target for as long as I could remember. Names. Shoves. Girls who waited for me at the gates. Joey, my older brother and a star hurler, waded in on my side whenever he could, but he couldn't be everywhere. After one year too many, Mam went against my father and moved me to Tommen College, the expensive private school. My father said it was money down the drain. He said a lot of things.

Tommen didn't eat me alive. That was the first shock. Claire Biggs screamed my name across the hall and hugged the breath out of me, and Lizzie Young nodded like I'd never been gone. By lunchtime I was almost breathing.

Then I realised I'd left my phone behind.

"We'll come with you," Claire said.

"I'm fifteen, not five." I said it lightly, and I went alone, and to save time I cut across the training pitches.

Somewhere behind me a man and a boy were roaring at each other. I kept my head down. I always did.

The ball hit me in the back of the skull like a door slamming. The sky tipped. I rolled down a grassy bank and came to a stop on my back, my skirt torn, the world ringing.

A face filled the sky. A boy, big, sweaty, his eyes wide with horror. He was pulling his jersey over his head and then over mine, tugging it down over my legs while somebody up the bank whistled.

"Shut up," he snapped at them. "All of you, shut up." Then, softer, to me: "Don't move. Can you hear me? I'm so sorry."

He half carried me up the hill, my head lolling on his shoulder. I remember the smell of grass and sweat. I remember saying, very seriously, that he had a pretty face.

I didn't know yet who he was. Everybody else at Tommen did.