"Spend an hour coming up with a fact about your name – I thought we were at one of the best schools in the country," he muttered to Naomi, who smiled back at him.

"And yet you want to sleep through the rest of your education." She had a point. "Why are you so tired, busy summer?"

"Late night, I'm hungover. Badly."

"I didn't have you down for the type of guy who gets trashed on a school night."

"It's good to try new things." Arran wondered exactly what type of guy she thought he was. He tried to shift the topic on. "Good summer?"

"Alright, University open days, summer reading, visiting family. I've had better, I must have seen every decent University in the country by now."

"Are you going for English?"

"Yeah, you?"

"Not sure yet, maybe."

"Leaving it a bit late," she said offhandedly as she started working on her tablet.

She was right, if Arran wanted to go to one of the most prestigious Universities in the country he had under a month to pick one and write his applications. Even if he decided against Oxford or Cambridge, his school encouraged all students to meet the October deadline. Applying to one of those might convince his mother that he really did care about going to university.

"So what did you do this summer aside from avoid making University plans?" Naomi broke his sombre musings.

"Uh, literally nothing," he admitted. "I spent the last month drinking on the coast really."

"Impressive." Once more, she didn't sound impressed. "Celebrating?"

"Commiserating, bad break up." He hoped that would end the discussion.

"I'm sorry."

For a while silence fell, Arran wrote his name on a blank piece of paper and doodled in the corner.

For a while silence fell, Arran wrote his name on a blank piece of paper and doodled in the corner. He wanted to change the topic.

"So, what does your name mean?" he asked, needing something to write down for the meaningless assignment.

"Well," she began, looking through some search results on her tablet. "It says here that Fall could be a topographical surname from England. Which is obviously fascinating and very important. But given that my dad is from Nigeria it seems pretty unikely."

Arran laughed and made a lazy attempt to write that down, but Naomi seemed to lose sight of the humour.

"This sucks," she said. "Like this serves no real purpose at all. I could be studying. I could be at Cambridge right now learning something real or actually living my life."

She sounded genuinely frustrated, beyond the moaning that had come before. She sounded as desperate to start her life as Arran felt desperate to postpone his.

"Well, Redfern is nice and easy, if you want to write down a little and get on with some other work I don't mind pretending we're still doing this for the rest of the hour."

"Thanks," she said with a smile. "What's the deal with Redfern then?"

"You're joking? Are you not actually Lancastrian?" he asked. "The Pendle witch trials, it was the Device witches and the Redfern witches, they accused each other and then they all burned at the stake. It's local history!"

Even though Arran knew more truth behind it than most, he was shocked that she had no idea about the two famous witch families. His mother's father had been a Redfern witch, still on the run several centuries after the trials. It was one of the reasons that Celyn was treated with such fear; witches never became vampires. And vampires couldn't practise magic. She and all of her children occupied a very uncomfortable in-between space. 

"So what's the deal Redfern? Are you a witch?" Despite the fact that she had no idea of the real connotations behind her joke question, Arran couldn't help but feel a little insulted.

"Do I look like a witch?" Then again, he thought, do I look like a vampire?

"How would I tell?"

"You could try to throw me in a lake, see if I float. It wouldn't get you anywhere, but it'd be fun to see you try."

"Oh shut up." she rolled her eyes at him.

He did shut up, he knew that he shouldn't be annoyed by the insinuation that he was a witch but he couldn't help himself.

He resumed doodling on the page in front of him, happy to drop the subject of magic and let Naomi do some work. But she seemed distracted, scrolling through the chapter she had pulled up on her screen and then scrolling back to re-read the same passages again and again. Out of boredom more than anything, he cast out a little telepathic net, not expecting to be able to see any detail of what was going though her mind.

The sensation was striking. He could feel her unease intensely, as if he knew her mind inside-out already. She really was eager to get out of this school, but it felt far more urgent than she let on. There was a fear there, out of context for Arran but so vast that it drove her desire to get away.

Suddenly he felt ashamed at having invaded her privacy.

"Are you okay?" she asked, her voice sounded far away.

"Yeah, fine," he replied, gripping the edge of the desk and trying hard to focus only on the feeling of wood under his hands. "Just nauseous, it'll pass."

He took a few steadying breaths and pulled back his psychic focus with limited success, a touch of Naomi's subconscious panic lingering on the fringes of his psyche.

He didn't want her to feel like that, especially not when he had to feel it too.

He felt the same compulsion that had driven him over the summer to make people happy so that he could feel it through them. But this time it wasn't for his own ends. The fear that he could feel at the back of her mind reminded him of how he felt when he thought about living forever. He didn't want her to have to deal with whatever it was that made her feel so helpless.

"Your hair really suits you like that," he said in a bid to distract her.

It worked a little. He could tell by her internal reaction that she didn't spend much time with people her own age and flirting, no matter how little, was novel for her. He really wished that he hadn't delved into her head.

"Thanks," she replied, "I wanted to try something different this year."

"How come?"

She hesitated like she was going to say something, but then she just shrugged and said, "I don't like this school. It's full of entitled, rich-kids, no offence, so I've never really put the effort into making any friends. I thought I should probably do some of that finding yourself crap before university so I don't waste my first year trying to figure out my own personality."

"Expedient," he said. "Why would I be offended? How would you know if I'm rich?"

"Well, last year your mum dropped you off at the train station in BMW and what's that suit? Armani?"

"Yeah, but it's Emporio, not Georgio."

She leant forward and whispered to him falsely conspiratorially "I don't even know what that means."

It felt like she was teasing him but it ticked Arran off a bit. He understood far more about her now than he had any right to based on a five-minute conversation but there was no way to tell her that. How could he possibly explain it?

"Are you taking notes on this trial personality?" he asked. "Because you're kinda mean."

"I'll add that to my notes, thanks for your feedback," she replied with a low laugh.

"What does Naomi mean? You've got to find something."

She looked him in the eye and smiled widely. "It means pleasantness." She purred, her voice falsely sweet.

"Of course, it all makes sense now," He muttered. Before this morning he probably would have described her as pleasant, but there was clearly a very sharp side to her. He wondered why they'd never spoken properly before.

"What about Arran?"

"I don't know, actually." He had never put much thought into it. "It's my dad's surname."

"Really?"

"Yep, that's me, Surname Surname," he breathed.

"Doesn't that get confusing?"

"Not really, I don't see him much."

"Oh I'm really sorry-"

"It's fine," he interrupted her. "Like it's genuinely no big deal, I could see him tomorrow if I wanted to, I've just never really seen the point."

Naomi nodded and typed something into her tablet. "Well, apparently Arran means 'arched ridge' in Gaelic." She remarked after a while.

"Fantastic, just call me Arched-Ridge McNothernWitch." Joked Arran, not for the first time wondering how much hassle it would be to change his name.

"It could be worse."

"What's that, Pleasantness?"

She shot him a dirty look but continued anyway. "My mum wanted to name me after my great-grandmother so I was nearly named Ethyl."

Arran laughed, "Okay, that's definitely worse."

---

The rest of the day passed quickly enough, after the terrible name meanings presentations, Arkwright had a full day of pastoral activities planned. Arran spent most of the session about careers asking James and Naomi about their future plans so that he could stop thinking about his own lack of ideas. Overall though, he was pleasantly surprised with how well the day had gone, given his terrible morning. Even last period English went okay. Ms. Elder didn't give any leeway for the first day back but he sat a table with Naomi and she reluctantly helped him struggle through the first lesson's work despite having not done the summer reading, something she berated him for as they left the class at the end of the day.

"I told you, I spent the summer drowning my sorrows, I didn't even think about reading," he explained as they walked.

"Well, you're going to have to catch up fast. How fast a reader are you?"

"Pretty quick, why?"

She pulled out her copy of the classic play that they were studying Tis Pity She's a Whore, and offered it to him. "You can borrow mine for one night, I want it back tomorrow morning."

"Easy," Arran said.

"You get the train back to town, don't you?"

"Not today, but normally yeah."

"Well I'll see you on the train tomorrow, with my book."

"Sure."

"That you will have read," she added, sternly.

Arran smiled and waved her off. He walked over to the car park and found his mother's car, getting in book in hand. Celyn had her phone out, rapidly tapping out a message.

"Friend of yours, that girl?" she asked without looking up.

"Just some girl from my form," He replied, glancing out the window in the direction Naomi had left in.

"Aha," Celyn said, absently as she finished what she was doing. "Listen, I'm going to have to go away at the end of the month but then I really am going to be working from home for most oof the year."

"It's fine, seriously."

"I just want you to know that I'm here for you, even when I'm not actually here. You're my son, you're allowed to take up my time and energy, okay?" she said, putting her hand on his knee and squeezing. "That being said, it would be nice if you had some more local friends to talk to."

"By some more, do you mean any?"

"Yes, Arran, it would be nice if you had any friends."

He pulled a face at her and looked out of the window as they pulled away. He did have friends, but not many, and they were spread out all across Europe. There really weren't many vampires his own age and interspecies friendships weren't that common. Maybe it would be nice to make some proper school friends after all.