“That's – no, um – that's fine, love. You shouldn't worry,”

Nigel nodded, satisfied that his secrets were safe. For the moment, anyway. Secrets were never safe forever, but he’d take as long as he could get. “I’m not worried,” he said, pretending not to be worried. After all, he had more important things to be worried about than his name. It didn’t really matter if he became the laughingstock of the school if he was dead within the next few days. Then they might be sorry for laughing… Well, probably not. But at least he might be famous for about two hours. Until someone accidentally cast a permanent hair colour change spell on their friend, or started sprouting oozing purple lesions, or something…

“I only meant to cheer you up. I didn't want to bring up anything sad like that,”

“What?” He was somewhat taken aback. “Sad like what?” He wasn’t aware that he had mentioned anything sad. Well, he had told her that his father was dead… and that was sad. Then. Now he didn’t hardly think about it. It was a long time ago, and he was pretty much used to being fatherless by now. “Are you talking about my dad’s murder?” he clarified. “I was little when it happened, so it’s not like I’m all…” Nigel fluttered his hands in little circles, trying to locate the right word. “… emotional about it.” He shrugged. The rest of it didn’t seem sad to him. It was all he had ever known, so he was oblivious to her sympathy.

“We can work everything out tomorrow, if you still want to. There's no need to write anything down before then. We can sort it out when you get there… Only if you still want to.” 

“Did I say I didn’t?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. She was starting to confuse him. First she coerced him into doing this reading thing with his something numbers, and now she was trying to back out of it? Girls were so weird. He couldn’t understand them at all. “Do you not want to?” The gist of this conversation was beginning to derail, he thought. “I thought you wanted to do the thing. If you don’t want to, it’s fine with me.” He didn’t need her silly numbers, after all. His birthday was coming up, and he was going to die. What could her numbers possibly say?

He had just been trying to take a page from her book and play along because it seemed to make her happy to be doing this weird number thing from him. Well, see if he ever did that again… He tried to do the make other people happy thing, but it was clearly not worth his while because it seemed that people didn’t know what would make them happy and kept changing their minds. Yeah, he was going back to only making himself happy. Or… well… maybe not happy. Less miserable than he could be. And that was really all that he was after for his last few days.