I don’t bother going home to change after my last exam, even though it’s only three o’clock and the pub will be empty. In Carty’s you’ll get served in school uniform, as long as you take off your tie and blazer before approaching the bar.A lonely pint will be the perfect first drink; just me, wondering if this was my last day at school. It’s chancy my grades will be good enough to get me back for sixth form. I hate school uniform, so that would be one plus to failing. There’s something about the material used to make shirts, trousers, and blazers, that rubs my skin in uncomfortable ways. Now I wish I’d gone home to change. If I’d done that though, I’d have had to kiss goodbye to my lonely first pint.Turns out the pub isn’t empty. I hear Harpo before I see him. He’s ganching away to Chloe at the corner table beside the never lit fireplace, his usual spot. Chloe is a year younger than me, and the barman, Richard, knows it too. If the peelers came in, he couldn’t deny it, not after her being splashed all over the newspapers last month.

This is the first I’ve seen Chloe since she came back to town. The sight of her turns my head into a bag of blood. She looks at me with a face like she’s been caught hoaking through her mum’s purse. Which is plausible, after her disappearing to Galway last year with her secret second boyfriend, a twenty-something-year-old hippie, in a battered VW camper van. Her parents thought she’d been kidnapped. Some nut-job even wrote to the newspaper saying he’d killed her and another girl who went missing up in Belfast the winter before. Creepy stuff. We all believed it because she really didn’t seem the type to run off. Then the boyfriend got done for something stupid, chucking stones at planes or slashing train tyres, and the Garda found he was living in a commune with an underage girl who everyone up north thought had been murdered by some psycho. He’s in jail now, the hippy, not the letter writer; they never caught him.

‘Someone needs a coffee, not a pint,’ Harpo says, snapping me out of my daydream. ‘What’s weighing you down?’

‘My tie and blazer,’ I say, taking them off and flinging them over the back of a chair. ‘Can I get either of yous a drink?’

‘We’re good,’ Harpo says.

Harpo’s almost a hippy, not a proper one, just a guy with longish hair. His half-dunked gingernut thatch ripples every time his head moves. Never has a man more desperately needed to turn grey. He’s a lot older than the guy Chloe ran off to Galway with. Easily thirties, probably forties. I’m not a hippie, in any sense of the word. School kept making me cut my hair, so the longest it could be was just below my ears. That looked dung, so I gave myself a number one all over. People keep saying I look like a convict.

‘Mind if I join yous?’ I say, arriving back at their table with my pint.

‘We do. Sit somewhere else,’ Harpo says, holding his deadpan expression that little bit too long, before breaking into a laugh. ‘Wise up,’ he says, pushing a chair towards me with his foot. Harpo is a stand-up who never got on stage. His regret won’t let potential audiences escape.

‘You seemed pretty preoccupied there,’ Harpo says. ‘What’s up?’

‘Last exam today.’

‘A-levels?’ he asks.

‘GCSEs.’

‘Really? That all the age of you? You look older.’

‘That’s what we’ll tell the peelers if they come in.’

‘You going back for A-levels?’ he says, ignoring my crack about the police.

‘Fifty-fifty. Or forty-nine for, fifty-one against.’

‘What about you? You doing A-levels?’ he asks Chloe.

‘Next year,’ she says, turning beetroot. Chloe barely passes for her actual age.

‘What subjects you studying?’ I say, half playing along, half just wanting her to speak to me. ‘Geography? Criminology?’

‘Haven’t picked them yet,’ she says. Her stare says we aren’t discussing the elephant in the room, currently sitting in her lap.

‘I did Geography today,’ I say. ‘Lot of questions about down south. Particularly Galway. You probably know it all, after studying Geography last year.’

‘I’m about to walk right out of here,’ Chloe says. The suggestion of a laugh in her voice tells me she won’t, but she’s surprised us before.

Harpo laughs. ‘That’s you told. Don’t worry. She told me off before you.’

‘How’s Ivan?’ she asks.

If I’d had any food in my stomach, I’d have tasted sick in my mouth. I try to freeze my expression, hoping to give nothing away, while sensing Chloe already knows anything I could give away. I take a drink, only to put some kind of barrier between my face and hers.

‘Don’t see much of each other,’ I say. ‘No classes together.’

‘Well, tell him I’m sorry. Wasn’t fair, him getting dragged into it like that.’

‘He dragged me into it.’ My tone says more than I meant to. I take another drink, because I feel I’m about to admit things I’ll want to take back later.

‘Wait, what’s this?’ says Harpo.

‘The Criminology teacher came after Ivan about Chloe, and he said to ask me.’

‘Drop the silly metaphors,’ Harpo says, sounding properly annoyed for a change.

‘Do you remember Ivan? Chloe’s boyfriend. Not the one she ran away with. The police thought he might have been involved in her disappearance. He said he wasn’t, but he suspected I’d been seeing her behind his back. The police came to my house and took me off for questioning. My dad had to go down the station with me.’

‘You kept that quiet.’

‘Would you want anyone knowing that about you?’

‘So what happened?’

‘Nothing. The night she went missing I’d been working at the petrol station. There was CCTV and everything, so they knew it was nothing to do with me.’

‘So that’s why he stopped coming here?’

‘Well sorry to you too,’ says Chloe.

Suddenly I didn’t want to be sitting with her, to be looked at by her after my backwards admission: everyone had known I liked her. I liked her even before Ivan got with her. He knew it too and didn’t care that I backed off the second they were a couple; that I passed myself and tried to welcome Chloe into the group. Then when she disappeared, I got him out at weekends, kept him busy. I never once said out loud how I felt about her. And no one asked. I couldn’t tell Mum and Dad. I was trying to revise for important exams, when all I could think about was that she was dead. Then, when she showed up alive, it was a new shock. A happy one, that pulled months of misery inside out, but a shock all the same. I could hardly stick my head in a book for thinking I’d see her again, and all the stupid conversations I imagined having with her. I felt embarrassed just thinking about them. Harpo would say, ‘Feel wick!’ if he knew about them, and he’d be right.

‘I’m off to the bar,’ I say, sinking the arse of my pint. ‘Anyone want anything?’

Both shake their heads. The elephant has disappeared from Chloe’s lap. As I stand up, I realise it’s climbed onto my back. I stretch to adjust my posture but don’t manage to shrug it off. I take my time away from the table, go to the toilet, mess around on my phone. I read over the messages from Ivan, which I haven’t deleted yet. The last one was friendly, despite Chloe being missing, the same tone we’d always used. He sent it the day before he told on me to the police. I’m not able to be poker faced like that. I think about messaging him, get him up here, so we can have it out. He wouldn’t respond though. Like he didn’t respond to my other messages, even after Chloe was found.

I kill time having an uneventful chat with Richard as he stocks the bar for the evening ahead. I hope Chloe leaves before I embarrass myself.

‘My dad’s picking me up soon,’ Chloe says as I return. ‘This is the first time I’ve been allowed out on my own since I came back.’

‘And you came here?’ I ask. Then turn to Harpo, who’s as permanent a fixture as the Tuppenny Nudger. ‘No offence like.’

‘It’s the one place my parents don’t know about,’ Chloe says.

‘How come?’

‘Dunno, but the police never went near here when they were looking for me.’

‘I watched them dig up Sentry Hill,’ I say, but neither responds. ‘When’s he picking you up?’

‘Twenty minutes.’

‘Want another for the road?’ Harpo asks her, finishing his Guinness.

‘Another drink or another drink for the road?’ I ask. It doesn’t get a laugh and made more sense in my head. Chloe shakes her head and puts her hand over the mouth of her highball.

‘You know,’ she says when Harpo is at the bar. ‘I didn’t know the police spoke to you too. I really am sorry.’

‘Don’t be. Nothing bad came of it.’

I remember my imaginary conversations with Chloe and recognise for the first time that the real her never contributed a single word to them. She was like a pop star singing words someone else wrote, words no one was interested in unless they were coming from her mouth. She would never say those words. Not even the unimportant ones.

‘Do you really not see Ivan anymore?’ she says.

In our imaginary conversations, Chloe never once mentioned Ivan, not even to make fun of him.

‘Just in school. We don’t speak much.’

‘You two were best friends.’

I want to pinch her, just to make sure it’s the real her beside me. Lower my expectations for this slim exchange we’re finally having.

‘He’s still friendly with those other lads. I’m the one who got ostracised.’

‘There’s a big word. Did you put that in your English exam?’

‘Sorry. I did Classics today. Had to write an essay about the ancient Greeks all ostracising each other.’

‘What’s it mean? Kicking someone out of a group?’

‘More or less.’

‘Sorry for that too.’

‘Wasn’t your fault. Suppose they got sick of my slabbering.’ I say, for the first time admitting, to myself as well, that my friendly banter had developed more of a barb to it after Chloe joined the group, especially with Ivan. I’d managed to strike deeper, deliver more of a sting, and twist it, all while maintaining that jokey air I’d carried back when my jokes really had been just jokes.

‘I’d like to apologise to him. Not just for the police. For not ending it with him properly.’

Harpo comes back and saves me some polite, excruciating words. I hurry my drink, readying myself to leave with Chloe. With the timing of a mind reader, she says she’s off. I down the finish of my pint in one go, with Harpo cheering, ‘down it! down it!’ and Chloe keeping time with head bobs.

I follow her, pulling on my blazer and unwinding the knot in my tie. Once through the door, we’re standing in the small hallway before the main exit onto the street.

‘You can’t go out with me,’ she says. Then reads my expression. ‘Not like that. My dad can’t see me with you. I’m supposed to have gone to the cinema. Told him I wasn’t meeting anyone.’

‘Fair enough,’ I say. ‘I’ll wait a few minutes.’

‘Thanks.’

‘How long will this last? You think you’ll be out at all this summer?’

‘I really don’t know.’

‘I can’t offer you a camper van in Galway. I’m not even able to drive.’

‘Don’t go there.’

‘Sorry. Just,’ I hesitate, then force it out, because I need to make this conversation real, and my words will come out now in front of Chloe, or later when I’m in the toilets vomiting. ‘Can we meet up this summer? I’d like to go out with you. Just me and you.’

‘You’re very sweet,’ she says, kissing a friendly refusal on my cheek.

Before I think of a suitable protest, Chloe is out the door, the elephant lumbering after her. I feel a lump in my throat, as if my vomit is about to make an early entrance. I put my tie on. Wonder if the wide end is long enough or the thin end too short. Pull the tie off. Retie it. Decide it’ll do. Pull it off. Pocket it. Take my blazer off. Fold it over my arm like a tipless waiter, and return to the bar.

‘Did she knock you back?’ Harpo asks.

I almost tell him where to go. I’m in no mood to listen to his slabbering, but I stopper whatever part of myself I opened to ask Chloe out, and drape my blazer over the chair, adjusting the shoulders so they sit square across the back of it. ‘Just decided to stay a bit longer.’

Gerard McKeown has been shortlisted for The Bridport Prize and longlisted for The Irish Book Awards’ Short Story of the Year. His work has been featured in a number of journals and anthologies, most recently Best Horror of the Year Volume 14 (edited by Ellen Datlow), and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.