I look down and see Adrian yelling at me from the terrace. I am sitting on top of the North Tower, Mr. Potter’s history class being too painfully boring for me to bear, despite my unending love for knowledge. I needed to feel the wind on my face, the mountain air filling my lungs. It feels like Wales. Like home.

I sigh dramatically, as is my extremely strange talent. “Can’t you bother someone else?” I shout back at him.

Adrian’s black, curly hair is being blown every direction, contrasting fantastically with his pale face. His eyes, bright green, stare up at me, and I see concern and, somehow, fear in their enchanting depths.

“No,” he yells. “I actually can’t, and I’ll be given detention if you don’t get down RIGHT NOW because I’ve been assigned to take care of you!”

“I don’t need taking care of!” I call indignantly, which is partially true. It’s not like I’ve had anyone these past eight years. I’ve adapted, yet still the orphanage felt it necessary to send me to this wretched boarding school.

Adrian has removed his gaze from me and is staring challengingly at the steep tower. He looks back up at me. “How’d you get up there?”

I scoff. “Like I’d tell you!”

Adrian rolls his eyes and begins—oh dear—climbing the grey bricks up to my spot. He slips down a few, and I have to resist the urge to tell him to be careful. Why should I care if he falls?

He finally reaches the cone-top of the tower. From there, it is remarkably easy for him to reach my own seat in this heavenly world of clouds and wilderness and (somewhat less heavenly) annoying boys.

“Christ, Blake,” he gasps, taking in the brilliant view. “How’d you know it’d be so beautiful up here?”

“I know where all the mirrors are,” I shoot back. Then, I pause. I probably shouldn’t have said that. I’ll sound like a little arrogant rebel that way. But alas, that is the disguise I must put on, for the Universe forbid I am ever caught being myself. “Sorry,” I say. “That sounded…”

“Confident.” Adrian punches my shoulder lightly as though we are friends. We are not. Well…maybe we could be. But that is not an idea I would bother to entertain.

I chuckle, humbled. “Actually, at the orphanage, there were towers like this, just not nearly as tall. I used them to escape classes.”

“Oh.” Adrian sounds disappointed. I can’t think why, until he says, “I thought it might be because of the view itself, not just to escape.”

“Well, I could have gone anywhere to escape. I could have hidden in the dormitories or the loo or the library. But I chose here because I can be in the air. I feel like a bird. Like a raindrop. Like I’m free, instead of trapped in an eternally rotating cast of hellish ghouls such as Mr. Potter.”

“Am I one of those ghouls?” Adrian asks flirtatiously, but I can hear the insecurity in his distinctly (and disgustingly at times) American accent.

I laugh. “No, I suppose not.”

He smiles. I smile. Rain clouds are on their way. And I think, briefly, that this boy and I, we could truly be friends.

But such impossibilities cannot be allowed to weasel their way into my mind, for they will interrupt my plan to leave.