Candy by Kevin Brooks

night before.”
    I tried to look composed, as if I wasn’t shocked or embarrassed or anything, which I wasn’t really, but I somehow felt as if I ought to be, and I couldn’t keep the feeling from my face.
    “What?” she said, looking at me. “I was only saying—”
    “I know…it’s all right. It’s nothing.”
    I thought for a moment she was going to say something else about Dad or about gynecologists in general or about me getting embarrassed, but she didn’t. She just smiled for a second, then popped the eggy chips into her mouth and started talking again. “OK,” she said. “Facts number two and number three: You live in Heystone and you’re in Year Ten at Heystone High.”
    My mouth dropped open in dumb surprise.
    “Am I right?” She grinned.
    “How do you know that?” I said.
    She laughed, wiggling her fingers at her head. “I’m psychic…I can fe-e-el your thoughts…I know everything there is to know…”
    “Did you follow me?”
    Her face went still. “Of course I didn’t follow you. What do you think I am?”
    “So how do you know where I live?”
    “Because…” she said, starting to eat again, “…because…I used to see you at the skateboard park.”
    “What? When?”
    “Years ago, when it first opened. You used to hang around there after school, you and your skateboard friends, falling off your boards all the time.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I was there.”
    “Where?”
    “At the park.”
    “I don’t get it. What were you doing there?”
    “Sneaking around bumming cigarettes most of the time.” She laughed. “It’s no great mystery or anything—I used to live in Heystone, that’s all. I went to St. Mary’s—”
    “The convent school?”
    “Yeah. I wasn’t there for long, though…”
    I looked at her, trying to imagine how she’d look in a St. Mary’s School uniform—the long blue dress, the stupid little hat, the short white socks—but I couldn’t picture it.
    “Whereabouts in Heystone did you live?”
    “Otley,” she said.
    I nodded. Otley’s on the posh side of town—or the posh er side, to be more exact. Heystone doesn’t do poor, it only does varying degrees of rich, and Otley’s about as rich as it gets.
    “Surprised?” Candy said.
    “Well, yeah…I mean, not about Otley…just the whole thing. You know, the coincidence.”
    “What coincidence?”
    “Us…you and me…both of us coming from Heystone…”
    “You think that’s a coincidence?”
    “Well, yeah…”
    She shook her head. “Why do you think I called out to you at the station?”
    “Why?”
    “Yeah. D’you think I make a habit of calling out to any old strangers on the street?”
    “Well, no…I suppose not…”
    “I recognized you. I just told you that…I remembered you from the park.” She angled her head and looked at me. “You haven’t changed much, you know. Not that it was that long ago—only a couple of years.”
    “You recognized me?”
    “Yes.”
    I didn’t know how I felt about that. It was nice, in a way. Nice to be recognized. Nice to know she remembered me. Nice to think I must have had something worth remembering. But I wasn’t sure I wanted nice. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be recognized or remembered.
    I wasn’t sure what I wanted.
    “Are you going to eat that?” Candy said, nodding at my bread.
    “Help yourself,” I told her.
    As she folded the bread and mopped up the egg yolk from her plate, I gazed out through the café window. The patio outside was deserted. Across the zoo I could see the pathways winding up and down through a landscape of trees and rocks and make-believe animal worlds. Man-made mountains stood glowering in the distance, as pale and gray as poster-painted papier-mâché, and I wondered if the animals knew the mountains weren’t real and, if they did know, whether they cared.
    “Why do you have to think so much about everything?” Candy said through a mouthful of eggy bread.
    I shook my head. I didn’t mean to