Never Let Me Go, Chapter 1

So I’m not trying to boast.

Their recovery times have been impressive, and hardly any of them have been classified as “agitated,” even before fourth donation.

Tommy took a few strides after them—it was hard to say whether his instinct was to give angry chase or if he was panicked at being left behind.

Kathy H., they say, she gets to pick and choose, and she always chooses her own kind: people from Hailsham, or one of the other privileged estates.

Then the next morning, when I was making conversation to keep his mind off it all, and I asked where he’d grown up, he mentioned some place in Dorset and his face beneath the blotches went into a completely new kind of grimace.

But there was no sign of a guardian, so we just kept swapping reasons why Tommy deserved everything he got.

The pavilion was big enough to take two separate groups without them bothering each other—in the summer, a third group could hang about out on the veranda.

The pavilion was big enough to take two separate groups without them bothering each other—in the summer, a third group could hang about out on the veranda.

There was a kind of conversation that could only happen when you were hidden away in the pavilion; we might discuss something that was worrying us, or we might end up screaming with laughter, or in a furious row.

The other boys were all moving around the field in that deliberately languorous way they have when they’re warming up, but Tommy, in his excitement, seemed already to be going full pelt.

This time Ruth heard me, but she must have thought I’d meant it as some kind of joke, because she laughed half-heartedly, then made some quip of her own.

Tommy burst into thunderous bellowing, and the boys, now laughing openly, started to run off towards the South Playing Field.

We’d all seen plenty of Tommy’s tantrums by then, so we came down off our stools and spread ourselves around the room.

He was just raving, flinging his limbs about, at the sky, at the wind, at the nearest fence post.

And although we hadn’t had any part in this latest plan to rile Tommy, we had taken out ringside seats, and we were starting to feel guilty.