'I wish I wasn't the weirdest sixteen-year-old guy in the universe.'

Felix would love to have been a number. Numbers have superpowers and they're safe - any problem they might throw up can be solved.

'If I were a five, I'd be shaped like a pentagon ... there'd be magic in my walls, safety in my angles.'

People are so much harder to cope with. At least that's how it seems until Bailey Hunter arrives at school. Bailey has a stutter, but he can make friends and he's good at judo. And Bailey seems to have noticed Felix-

'Felix keeps to himself mostly, but there's something about him that keeps drawing me in.'

Both boys find they're living in a world where they can't trust anyone, but might they be able to trust each other, with their secrets, their differences, themselves?

 

Eileen Merriman works full-time as a consultant haematologist at North Shore Hospital. Her writing has appeared in a number of national and international journals and anthologies, including Smokelong Quarterly, The Island Review, Literary Orphans, the Bath Short Story Award Anthology 2015, the Sunday Star-Times, F(r)iction, takahe, Headland and Flash Frontier. Her first novel was Pieces of You, with reviewers calling it 'compulsively readable' and 'compelling, challenging, and heartbreaking'. It was a 2018 Storylines Notable Book and, along with her second novel, it was shortlisted for the NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.

Her other awards include second in the 2015 Bath Flash Fiction Award, commended in the 2015 Bath Short Story Competition, third in the 2014 & 2015 Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards, and first place in the 2015 Graeme Lay Short Story Competition.