Chapter Text
It’s always been horses for Marcus.
He remembers the first time he ever rode one. It was at the annual Bright Fields Pony Camp because his parents insisted on supporting Sam or whatever. He fell right off. The horse- Betsy, a sweet little pony- looked at him with something akin to concern in her eyes and gently nipped at his jacket when he stood up, as though asking if he were okay. So horses it was.
He falls in love with the thrill of the jumps, the unpredictability of such beautiful creatures. He falls in love with the stables, the hand-painted daisies on the sheds, and, most of all, the people. Sam’s hug and Mia’s wicked grin and Susie’s eyes and Becky’s braids and Jade’s laugh make him want to never leave. Ever.
-
He first meets Ted when he’s eleven and first starting lessons on a cold March afternoon. He knows it’s Ted because he has a name tag on. Everybody has a name tag on. He supposes that they do that every time somebody new comes along.
“You’re Marcus, aren’t you?” Ted asks. His voice is gravelly and he’s tall, much taller than Marcus. He has the scratchy beginnings of a beard and he looks vaguely familiar.
“Yeah!” Marcus says, looking up at him from beneath his helmet. He’s bouncing from foot to foot, half-eager to mount a horse, half trying to keep the cold at bay. “I’m starting lessons today.”
He semi-recognizes Ted as the guy who lives with his son out by the moorlands, the guy who is consistently the subject of his parent's gossips. But he can't be sure, so he just goes with the assumption he's not the island weird guy. Besides, he can't be the weird guy if he's this nice.
“Well, be careful out there,” Ted says and shoos him along. Marcus doesn’t give it a second thought because he’s been trying to convince Sam to get him lessons for months now and he really doesn’t want to be late and make her change her mind.
-
Sam only got the stables recently after Uncle Carl passed away and, from what Marcus can overhear in conversations, she's having trouble keeping it afloat.
That and the hope that he'll be able to be like the Kentucky Derby people are the only things that actually have him going along with his parent's wishes at the start.
-
There’s this girl his age at Bright Fields, Mia. Her hair is serious and her clothes are fussy. Marcus thinks she’s fantastic, and she thinks she’s above everyone else.
He first meets her in the stables when he’s supposed to be finding a helmet that fits him and is sufficiently manly.
“Who are you?” She asks, tossing her long, straight hair over her shoulder in a gesture Marcus assumes is supposed to be intimidating. And it is because he immediately and involuntarily straightens up as though coming to attention.
“Marcus. Sam’s cousin,” Marcus says.
“Of course. Well, clean up when you’re done. We don’t need any more mess around here,” she says with maddening superiority even though he’s pretty sure he’s older than her. “And that’s way too small for you. Learn how to tell sizes.” And then she turns on her heel and marches out of stables, leaving Marcus holding a too-small helmet and a dumbstruck expression.
Sam comes in soon after, and he's never been more thankful to see his cousin.
“You ready?”
“Yeah— yeah, definitely,” Marcus says hastily.
-
Marcus eventually figures out why he’s never seen Mia around at the public school. It’s because she goes to some fancy private school on the mainland. And he figures it out during a particularly embarrassing conversation where he says at least three unintentionally offensive things.
One person he can’t seem to place is Ted’s son, who Ted brings around every Friday. The other days of the week are anyone’s guess because they definitely aren’t spent at the public school. Marcus knows because there are twelve people in the grade and somebody like Pin would be impossible to miss.
Ted’s son looks more like a twig than a kid Marcus’ age. His hair is permanently messy and he lives in flannel shirts. His grin is wicked and his stare is unnerving, eyes the color of drizzly days at the beach, and his existence confirms Ted to be the island weird guy, but Marcus works up the courage to go up to him anyways.
“I’m Marcus,” Marcus says, offering his hand the way his father taught him to. Ted’s son takes it hesitantly after a nudge from his father.
“Hello,” Ted’s son says. His fingers are slender and calloused. “I’m Pin.”
The voice inside of Marcus’ head asks what kind of name that is but the other one says that it’s really none of his business.
He doesn’t see Pin around very much, mainly because the younger boy is focused on his lessons and other people are happier to hang around him. Other than Mia, because of the aforementioned unintentional offenses.
But he likes Becky and Jade, though they don’t seem to know where to look when they’re around him. They’re in the grade below him, so he’s seen them around the school building, doing whatever girls do during recess.
-
He sometimes sees Pin sneaking around the stables. Well, it’s not sneaking if it’s in broad daylight and if he walks around not caring if people see him. But he seems to have a thing with that one particularly beautiful horse (he can tell beautiful horses from ugly ones now, which is cool), Firefly, in particular.
“What’re you doing?” Marcus asks, leaning against the door of Firefly’s stable when his curiosity gets the better of him. Pin jumps back from Firefly, who he was gently stroking.
“Nothing,” Pin mutters.
-
Pin doesn’t show up the next Friday, and apparently, he came down with some sort of really bad stomach flu because Ted stays home as well. Mia rolls her eyes.
“He’s faking it,” Mia says conspiratorially while they lean against the fence and watch Becky lead Bob the pony through the course delicately under Sam's direction.
“How do you know?” Marcus asks, and his foot is starting to do that nervous thing again.
“Because I know Pin. He never gets sick, he was probably just nervous about coming in or something.”
Marcus doesn’t reply and Mia turns to glare at him.
“Should I just go screw myself, or are you going to stop treading on eggshells around me?”
“What? I’m not!” Marcus says defensively, and Mia rolls her eyes again.
“I’m a girl, Marcus. A delicate, needy female. The sooner you recognize that, the sooner you’ll get over yourself,” Mia snaps, stalking off and leaving Marcus vaguely wondering what he’s doing wrong.
-
When Pin shows up the following Friday, they end up doing their homework together. It’s part Sam and Ted trying to force them to be friends, part avoiding hanging out with the girls at the stables because all Becky and Jade do is giggle over inside jokes and Mia is… well, she’s Mia. Letters and numbers mix together in a jumbled disaster, but Pin navigates it effortlessly.
“I’m, um, starting at the public school next fall,” Pin says, twirling his pencil between his fingers. He was good at it too. But Marcus clearly has an odd look on his face, because Pin specifies, “Homeschooled. All my life. It’s why I’m around here so- um, a lot.” He speaks in fractured sentences, as though his stammers were desperately trying to keep up with his brain and failing miserably.
There’s a lot Marcus notices about Pin and he has to wonder what it all means. But he just nods and goes back to his math homework.
-
“What’s Mia’s deal?” Marcus asks towards the end of their study session, breaking a silence that seems to have been going on for half an hour as both of them had been absorbed in their work.
“There’s many deals with Mia, you’ll need to—” Pin cuts himself off and sighs, looking up. “You’ll need to be more specific.”
“She went on a rant about how she’s a girl,” Marcus says, though it’s more of a question. Pin puts his pencil down and stares at him for a few seconds with his chin in his palm, as though trying to comprehend how he could be such an idiot.
“So she’s a girl,” Pin says, giving Marcus a look that he can’t figure out how to extract meaning from.
“Yeah, I got that,” Marcus says dryly.
“She’s a girl, so she’s different than you,” Pin says slowly as though he’s concerned that Marcus won’t understand otherwise. “But not different enough to warrant you treating her any differently than anyone else. Or, like, being awkward around her.”
“What?”
“She doesn’t want you to ignore that she’s a girl. She wants you to acknowledge it and just be her friend.”
“So I tell her that she’s a girl?” Marcus asks, head tilted to the side in contemplation because he thinks that he might just understand that.
That is until Pin responds by sighing heavily and going back to his work until Ted finally signals from across the yard that it’s time for them to go.
-
He figures out what Pin means a few days later and he goes up to Mia, who’s sitting on the hay bales and reading a guide to dressing up for riding competitions. He stands there for a minute while she continues reading stoically before realizing that she’s waiting for him to make the first move.
“I’m sorry for being weird around you,” Marcus says at last. Mia snaps her book shut and leans forwards to glare at him.
“You should be,” Mia says.
“Do you want to paint the fences with me?” Marcus tries, and Mia huffs out a sigh, the kind that Sam does when she’s being purposefully difficult.
“I was going to paint them anyways. But I suppose you could join,” Mia says all regally.
“Cool,” Marcus says with an exaggerated thumbs-up that makes Mia roll her eyes and actually laugh. And yeah, he thinks that he’s starting to get her.
-
And so Marcus enters May with a basic understanding of trotting, a definite (sort-of, maybe, hot-and-cold) friend in Mia and a tentative friend in Pin, who has accidentally turned their study sessions into tutor sessions where he helps Marcus understand the importance of the Greco-Italian wars.
“Do you like spending time with Pin?” Sam asks as they bake cookies. Sam’s always been really into baking and they always do something along those lines when Marcus’s parents dump him at her house for the weekend.
“He’s sort of weird,” Marcus says and, yeah, that sums up Pin pretty well. Sam doesn’t seem to think so, though, because she gives him a scandalized look.
“Marcus!”
“It’s true! Him and Mr. Ted, they don’t act like anybody else I know,” Marcus says as he sprinkles more chocolate chips into the batter. Sam takes the bag away after she deems he’s gone overboard. “It’s like, they get people but they don’t. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“It’s very complicated, Marcus. You shouldn’t judge them,” Sam says, enacting her high and mighty older-cousin voice that she brings out whenever she wants to be righteous.
“I’m not saying it’s a bad thing or whatever, they’re just different,” Marcus says.
“Well, if they are different, it’s a good thing. They’re both very smart. You could learn a thing or two,” Sam says, poking his arm with a grin.
“Sam!”
-
Summer arrives in all its glory. It’s days spent practicing his rising trot on Jeremy, his horse, tediously, sweat dripping down his forehead. Days on the beach and sand everywhere at once and crashing waves under the drizzly sky. Days on the pier, ice cream melting before he can eat it.
It’s different from his past summers, spent with Harry and Charles and Oliver from school down on the soccer pitch. But it’s not a bad difference.
There’s one day that sticks in Marcus’ memory. All of the kids from Bright Fields, even Mia, bike down to the beach and spend the day there without adult supervision, getting sunburned and swept under waves, everything caught in a sense of breathless, never-ending June.
He only remembers only a bit of it years later. Pin’s hair is stuck to his forehead in a combination of sweat and saltwater. He’s not wearing a shirt, all sharp angles and gangly limbs racing over the shoreline. There’s a disruption in the air wherever he goes, a shimmering that an older person would attribute to a mirage. But Marcus decides it suits him, right before Mia dunks him under.
Pin isn’t out in the deep with them. He jumps over the short waves with Susie, another girl who just recently started lessons at Bright Fields and who Marcus recognizes from school. Her fear of the ocean overpowers her inclination to Mia’s peer pressure and she’s content to stay where she is. Marcus knows full well that Pin isn’t afraid of the deep, but he pretends to be for Susie’s benefit.
He catches Marcus’ eye and waves hello. A wave crashes over Marcus’ head before he can respond. When he resurfaces, everybody is laughing at him.
He doesn’t really mind.
-
July marks Pin’s birthday, which Marcus finds out two weeks after it actually happens. There isn’t much to say on the matter, and Marcus suspects that there never will be. Pin and Ted don’t really seem like big birthday people. Or celebration people in general. They just sort of stick in their own, monotonous lane.
But the month isn’t really noteworthy past that. It’s hot, so the horses are miserable, the adults are miserable, and the kids are a mix between delirious and miserable.
Becky and Jade monopolize the time spent in front of the industrial fan in Sam’s office, so Susie and Mia, who have become really fast friends (sort-of), dig up their battery-powered fans that some girl gave as party favor a few years back. Marcus just goes swimming in Oliver’s pool with Charles and Harry a lot. And Pin is around the stables a lot more because apparently, his house in the moorlands has even less air conditioning than Bright Fields, which is saying something.
-
“We haven’t seen you lately,” Harry says as they help each other out with sunscreen before they dive into the pool. Harry already has beads of sweat dripping down the sides of his face and looks uncomfortable in general. But he always looks uncomfortable, so it’s not out of character.
“It’s all that horse business, didn’t you know?” Oliver interjects before Marcus can respond, and he can’t help but laugh.
“It’s a lot cooler than it looks,” Marcus assures them.
“I feel like everybody’s getting in on it these days. Doesn’t Susie take lessons now?” Harry asks, taking off his glasses and blinking as he adjusts to the blurriness.
“Yeah. She’s really good, too,” Marcus says.
“Oh, we all know she joined because she saw Hawthorne around there,” Charles snarks before slipping into the pool with a sigh of relief.
Marcus laughs along, even though he doesn’t really know who they’re talking about.
-
Pin studies all through August. Marcus can tell that he’s getting more and more stressed as the days tick by to his first day of school. And even though he would rather not think of school during the holiday, he sits at the rickety barn table alongside Pin and answers all of his questions.
“How do you even study Language Arts?” Pin asks, nose all scrunched up as he looks at the schedule he received a few days prior in the mail.
“Grammar and sentence structure, I suppose,” Marcus says.
“How much grammar is there if they stretch it out over twelve years?”
“You’d be surprised at the stretching ability this school has,” Marcus jokes and Pin rolls his eyes. Marcus can tell that he’s not really annoyed because the corners of his eyes crinkle up in the way they do.
But his stress is nothing compared to Ted’s, who seems to be slowly coming to terms with the fact that this could be really good for Pin or really, horribly bad.
-
The last hurrah of the summer of 2012 is sort of depressing, so they’re sort of foreshadowing. There’s a fair in town that Ben, Becky’s little brother who sometimes toddles around the stables, wins a goldfish at. It dies within three days.
“It probably wasn’t happy,” Pin comments during the makeshift funeral that Sam holds in the barn. Ted shoots him a look, but Pin shrugs as though to say 'It’s true.'
“Show some tact, Pin,” Mia chastises, and Pin gives her an unimpressed look. Mia’s self-righteous tone gets under everyone’s skin, but it seems to bother him in particular.
“I’m just saying, it’s kind of sad to live in a bubble where all you can do is swim around until your death. He probably died of boredom,” Pin says. Ben looks up at him with wide eyes, and he hastily adds, “Now he’s probably in fish heaven. With, like, other fish. Which is better than being in a bowl.”
“Pin!” Becky says, looking positively scandalized.
“I was being nice!” Pin protests. He drops his voice to an undertone and adds, “Besides, he can’t understand what half of I’m saying.”
“I thought goldfish lost their memories every three seconds,” Marcus ponders out loud before Becky’s glare could manifest into a screaming match.
“No, it lasts for, like, five months,” Pin says.
“Really?” Marcus asks because now he feels sort of bad about the time he won a fish from the fair and managed to keep it alive for three weeks.
“Weren’t you paying attention during the sea life presentations during class?” Jade asks with raised eyebrows.
“I’m not in your grade.”
“Didn’t you do sea life presentations?” Jade asks, her voice growing more sarcastic.
“Can we go inside yet?” Susie asks before Marcus can respond, shuffling from foot to foot and occasionally wiping sweat off her brow. Sam sighs and nods.
“Come on, I have popsicles in the fridge,” Sam says, wrapping an arm around Ben’s shoulders. If he’s honest, Marcus doesn’t think the little boy is upset about the fish.
But it’s hot, school starts in two days, and things are always blown out of proportion when it’s hot and school starts in two days.
-
The two days slip by and September arrives at last.
School ends up being disastrous for Pin. There are twelve people in Year 6 and everybody already has friends and nobody really wants to go up to the new boy even though the island was small enough that everybody had seen him around town before.
It occurs to Marcus much later that he probably should have offered to be Pin’s friend. But it makes the guilt rise in his throat and he turns a blind eye to Pin sitting alone in the recess yard.
It doesn’t really matter. There’s a difference between family friends and friend friends. Everyone knows that.
-
Sometimes, Marcus thinks that Pin likes being alone. He figures out from half-overheard conversations at the stables as the air grows colder that Ted was the one who wanted Pin to start school, that Pin would have been homeschooled for the rest of eternity if Ted had let him.
But there were also the months of October and November, which were before he figured out how to mask his mournful look on the playground and before he figured out how to seem completely uncaring about everybody around him. Those were the months where he would look hopefully out across the soccer pitch, seeming to weigh whether or not he should ask to join in.
He never asks, and so the mask, therefore, goes up.
Within months, Pin is unrecognizable. He’s been sarcastic for as long as Marcus has known him, but it’s been dialed up. His face is colder, tenser. He has fewer moments of unadulterated laughter at the stables, fewer moments of pure joy. He just seems tired.
But nobody else seems very concerned, so Marcus lets it go.
-
Mia also isn’t around as much. During the spring and summer, she was a constant presence at the stables. But she joins more clubs at her fancy school and schoolwork steps up, so the time she spends there is halved. And, if he’s honest, he really misses her and her kickass attitude.
“You know, you could study with Pin and I,” Marcus offers over the phone. He can hear the rushing of water in the background of the call, so it’s pretty safe to assume that Mia’s on the ferry home.
And Mia sighs like he’s being an idiot.
“That’s your guys’ thing, Marcus. How do you think he would feel if you invited somebody else in on your thing?”
“Inclusive?” Marcus suggests.
Mia hangs up and Marcus has no idea what he did wrong.
-
“Mia’s mad at me again,” Marcus mentions during the weekly study session that they’ve somehow managed to keep up through the school year, albeit with more awkward silences.
“What did you do?” Pin asks without looking up, and Marcus suddenly feels sort of bad because he’s aware of how much of their relationship is conversation upon conversation regarding asking for advice about Mia.
“I invited her to our study session,” Marcus says, and Pin freezes for a moment before going back to writing. “And she acted like you would be offended. Like, I was just trying to include her.”
“She probably just thinks you’re inviting her out of obligation,” Pin says with a sigh.
“Why?”
“I don’t know, you just asked me what I thought. And I think she just wants you to think of her as somebody worth her own original traditions, not just as somebody extra to tack on when you feel bad,” Pin says. When Marcus still stares at him blankly, he adds, “Ask her if she’ll help you with French. She’s fluent.”
-
And so November bleeds into December bleeds into the end of 2012
Marcus spends New Year’s Eve at the stables. His parents’ party is for big fancy people but Sam is putting on a party for Bright Fields and kids are invited.
Susie doesn’t make it to midnight, which Mia will definitely tease her for later. Becky seems more hyper than ever and she and Jade keep all of the even littler kids entertained with puppet shows and magic tricks. Pin is nowhere for a long time, and Marcus suspects that he snuck out early.
But then he catches Pin’s eye when everybody starts counting down. They haven’t talked in a while.
Pin gives him a wry smile and holds up his hot chocolate in Marcus’ general direction, as though giving a toast. Marcus raises his in return and they both drink as the clock strikes twelve.
He forgets about it in the morning.