TWELVE MONTHS AND TWO WEEKS PRIOR TO THE DEATH OF OLIVER SALLOW

The pink elephant paradox happened after they came back from their trip to London.

It was as if, as soon as they'd gotten off the bus, some kind of spell had broken. Suddenly, everything that had happened—watching Bake Off with Oliver, sneaking out to see the play with him, falling asleep on his shoulder—seemed impossible. There was no way that Finn had done any of those things.

It had to have been one of those things that Oliver had spoken about while he'd rambled about A Midsummer Night's Dream during one of their library afternoons. A changeling, wasn't it? Yeah. Fairies had swooped in, put another boy in Finn's place for a few days, and then swapped them back the moment he'd woken up in front of Blissby School with Oliver's shoulder imprinted in his cheek. It was the only explanation that made sense.

The problem was that the fae folk had apparently left Original Finn to deal with the emotional aftermath.

He was so goddamn confused.

It wasn't like him to go off on his own and ditch the entire football team to hang out with a boy he'd only known for a few weeks. Or to read annotated copies of Shakespearean tragedies. Nine times out of ten, he didn't even like the theatre, for fuck's sake.

And yet here he was, a small yellow flower pressed between the pages of one of his Geography books, a pair of ridiculous sunglasses that Oliver had gotten him to buy on his nightstand.

It didn't make sense.

He wanted nothing but to forget about it, but his brain, the bloody traitor, was once again not on his side. It was like the study his mum had read about in one of her magazines: if you try not to think about a pink elephant, you'll end up thinking about it even more. Ironic processes, or whatever it was called.

Oliver Sallow was the biggest, brightest pink elephant imaginable.

The advice that the magazine had given was to deliberately think about the pink elephant. Finn was more of a fan of violently repressing any and all unpleasant intrusions. He was pretty good at it, honestly. The deadline for uni applications. His mum's worsening mental health. His own beehive of a brain. All of it shoved into the bottom drawer and banished into the deepest recesses of his mind for his subconscious to deal with.

Even better that, unlike his panic attacks, he could actually avoid this particular problem. All he had to do was stop going to the library in the afternoons. Problem solved. Right?

Wrong.

Out of sight, out of mind didn't seem to apply here. The best way that Finn could explain it was that it felt as if there was a rubber band stretched between him and the library. The further he strayed from it, the tauter it pulled, a tension that just kept growing. At some point, something was going to snap.

An expert at using rubber bands to shoot missiles of paper and crumpled tissues across classrooms and cafeterias, Finn knew that it was going to hurt like a bitch when it did. He also knew that the thing most liable to snap was him, as two consecutive panic attacks within only the last two days had proven.

"Hey, Birdie." Aarun's voice made his head snap up. "You all right there?"

"Yeah," Finn immediately said. Glancing around the locker room, he realized that everyone else was already getting changed—meanwhile, he'd been sitting on one of the benches for the last five minutes, staring blankly at the mint-green tiles.

Without meeting his friends' eyes, he turned around and started rifling through his duffle bag for his cleats. Around him, the usual racket of almost twenty teenage boys getting ready for practice commenced. He could taste the deodorant in the air, it was that thick. He felt like he was going to choke on it, like it was covering the inside of his throat and he couldn't—

No. He gripped the door of his locker, forcing himself to drag in even breaths. This was nothing unusual. This was his team, his best friends. This was what he loved.

The pressure on his chest eased. He pulled his blazer off, then his button-up shirt, haphazardly dropping them onto the bench. From the corner of his eyes, he caught a glimpse of James, their goalie, doing the same thing. He quickly tore his gaze away.

Do not think about it. Do not think about it.

The image of Oliver's back, visible for only a few seconds before he pulled a black mesh shirt over his head, flashed in his mind.

Goddamn it. Finn wished he'd never learned about the bloody pink elephant.

"Come on, mate." Leaning against the doorframe, Kavi drummed his hands on his thighs to spur him on. "Coach's going to make us run extra laps again if you don't get a move on."

"I am moving," Finn huffed. "We're not even the last ones." He gestured at the other stragglers without raising his gaze from his own shoelaces.

It was ridiculous. This was a locker room. He'd changed with these boys hundreds of times; he knew what James Bailey's abs looked like without having to look at them. There wasn't—Wait, backtrack. Did the others know that as well? Was he the only one who had that image memorized? Had he been staring?

His ears were on fire. He suddenly felt the urge to go through the rest of his getting dressed with his eyes closed.

First the changeling incident, now the locker room felt like it had turned into a minefield. He was almost certain the two were correlated, but to find the predictor variable was to open the bottom drawer. He wouldn't. He... he couldn't.

Instead, he sped through his getting dressed, and when his coach made him run extra laps for dilly-dallying, he almost thanked him. For at least ninety minutes, he could outrun his thoughts and his anxiety and the memory of Oliver Sallow's voice whispering the meanings of Ophelia's flowers in a dimly lit bus. And if he walked away from practice with more bruises on his legs than usual and an ache in his lungs as if he'd just run a marathon, then that was for no one but him to know.

***

It was honestly a little eerie how easily his mum could tell that something was wrong. Maybe it was because she had so many pink elephants herself—some kind of overthinker-to-overthinker connection that others weren't privy to. Maybe it was because Finn wasn't as inconspicuous about it as he had hoped. Or maybe it was just because she was his mum and this was her job.

"Can I come in, love?" she asked in a stage-whisper.

Without looking up from his Maths homework, Finn hummed his assent. The wooden floorboards creaked as his mum crossed the room, one of her hands settling in his hair, carding her fingers through the messy strands like she always did. "Statistics, huh? Looks complicated."

Finn squinted at the numbers scrawled in his notebook. It didn't look very complicated to him at all. In fact, this might have been the first thing he'd looked at today that made sense. "It's just regression analysis," he murmured. Distantly, he noted how different his Rs sounded. Around his mum, he always soaked up some of her Irish accent. Since she was always home, this was often.

"Regression analysis at... 7:50 pm?" Her hand wandered lower, kneading at the tension in his shoulders. Finn hissed through his teeth, but didn't duck away. "Is this due tomorrow?"

"No," he reluctantly replied. "Friday."

He really wasn't very inconspicuous at all. This—distracting himself from everything else by throwing himself into his school work—had always been his most obvious tell.

His mum, apparently coming to the same conclusion, said, "You know you can always talk to me, right?"

"Yeah. I know."

She was silent for a moment. Then, she reached over his shoulder and resolutely shut his book. "Enough of this," she decidedly said. He finally tilted his head back to find her smiling at him, mischief flickering in her bright blue eyes. She was still wearing make-up—as if there was a chance she was going to spontaneously head out, as if the mailman wasn't the only person who saw her throughout the day. "Bake Off is on in less than ten minutes. You're not going to make me watch alone, are you?"

Sometimes, when Finn looked at his mum, there was a strange ache in his chest. They had so much in common: their red hair and their freckles, their soft-spoken way of talking, their love for comforting reality TV. Their overactive minds, the need for structure and predictability. Their panic attacks, and their inability to talk about them.

She was everything he liked about himself.

She was everything he was afraid of becoming.

"Okay," he whispered, leaning into her shoulder.

"Okay," she softly echoed, pressing a kiss into his hair.

Together, they left his room. While she went to the kitchen to get snacks, he turned on the TV. They squeezed themselves onto the worn couch like they always did: his mum with her fuzzy socks propped up on the coffee table, Finn curled on his side with his head pillowed on her lap and his hands tucked beneath his cheek. Even though his legs barely fit onto the couch, he always felt so small when he did this. Not in a bad way. Just in the way that children feel when they're being held by a parent. Warm. Safe. Almost instantly sleepy as the sounds of the TV mixed with the clinking of the spoon as his mum stirred her tea.

Like this, he didn't even startle when his phone buzzed against his thigh. He pulled it out, blinking when he saw that the text was from Oliver.

Oliver Library: can you believe he doesn't know that you have to fold in the powdered sugar? it's like he's never made macarons in his life

Finn glanced up at the screen, where a middle-aged man named Wolfgang was currently fussing over his clumpy egg-almond-sugar mixture.

Without his doing, a smile settled on his face.

F: Have *you* ever made macarons?

Oliver Library: no

Oliver Library: however

Oliver Library: i've also never had enough hubris to apply for a baking show with an embarrassing lack of understanding concerning french confection

F: Fair point

Oliver Library: do better, wolfgang.

F: Oh no, now Ally messed up her ganache

Oliver Library: the course of the technical challenge never did run smooth :/

Before he could swallow it down, a small chuckle tumbled from Finn's lips. Aware of his mum studying him, he lowered the brightness of his screen. Oliver's profile picture had changed since the last time they'd texted—instead of a library selfie of him looking bored, it was now a picture that Finn had taken. It showed Oliver in a thrift shop in Brick Lane, wearing a pair of pink heart-shaped sunglasses that clashed terribly with his funeral attire, his dark red lips just barely curled into a self-aware grin.

Looking at it, Finn's face felt warm.

More than that: as Oliver continued providing his snarky commentary—Finn could hear his voice in his head as he read the messages, down to the dramatic inflection whenever he bastardized a Shakespeare quote—the panicked thing that had been fluttering in his chest finally settled down.

This wasn't scary at all, he suddenly realized.

It was just Oliver.

***************************

happy friday!!

another semi-angsty chapter but at least we had a happy conclusion? :)

i honestly loved showing a bit more of finn's relationship with his mum. i hope you enjoyed this chapter as well!!

today's song is don't delete the kisses by wolf alice because of the first love feels :,)

see you on the next one!! <3