Getting ready Next year was The Year. He would no longer be stuck at home with his insufferable mother but would finally be taking his place at Sonora with his brother and cousins. It hadn't been so bad when only Simon had been away. Simon was a very decent chap and all that but he was obviously too busy with serious heir stuff to have ever played much with Jeremy. It was when Sylvia and Nathaniel had gone to school though that it had really started to feel like a club that everyone but him was part of, especially when they had all contrived to get stuck there over Christmas. Being the only child around for Christmas sounded good on paper, but it wasn’t like Jeremy had ever had to do much sharing anyway, even when his brother and cousins were around, and it had just made him feel left out. He had always resented how Sylvia and Nathaniel had been a pair, and how he was always being left out and told he was too small. He wasn’t too small, and he’d be getting the owl to prove it over the summer.
He was determined to start proving to Nathaniel how grown up and ready he was for Sonora, because he knew his brother didn’t think he was at all. Not only did Nathaniel always leave him out but he kept acting like Jeremy wasn’t being good enough, just because mother fussed and was weepy and headachey. Those things weren’t Jeremy’s fault. Nathaniel seemed to think they needed to pander to her because of that sort of thing but Jeremy didn’t see why. If mother would just pull herself together, everything would be fine. That’s what other people had said too. And maybe if she had been less miserable and fussy, Father would never have left. Jeremy remembered the emotional turbulence of that time as a blur. Mother being snappy and horrible, or frail and indisposed, and father being around less and less, until he wasn’t around at all any more… He had been young, and it had been an upheaval, a swirl of emotions. One in which he hadn’t kept track well of which element was cause and which effect.
As Nathaniel settled back into his room Jeremy made his way in.
“Welcome home,” he said, proferring his hand seriously. “How was school? Have you met anyone worthwhile who’ll be in my classes next year?” he added. It was a strange system, the way the students were grouped for lessons, but it did have its advantages in that Nathaniel could be scoping out Jeremy’s classmates for him, and perhaps making a favourable impression for him. Perhaps. So long as Nathaniel was actually putting in the effort, not just worrying and writing home all the time to check on mother.