Saffie stared at the photo in silence. After a few moments, she pressed her finger to the hashtag, and sure enough there were the rest of the photos she’d taken with her classmates, each modified with their own unique filter. One gave her a grisly food-filled beard, another enlarged and animated her tongue so it was dribbling and lolling around, and one depicted a bunch of squirmy maggots crawling all over her face. As one of the maggots bit into her eye and chewed it out, leaving a bloodied, hollow hole, a teardrop hit the screen, blurring the horrible image.

Saffie’s mum plonked down her drink, grabbed Saffie by the arms, and spun her so that they were facing each other, leaning in until she was uncomfortably close. The strength of the gin on her breath stung Saffie’s nostrils.

“Saffie, I’m going to be stern with you and you’re not going to like it, but you need to listen to me, okay? This is how school works. The reason everyone teases you is that you make NO EFFORT to fit in. While all the other kids meet up to socialise, what do you do? You stay in your dark bedroom wasting away playing bloody computer games with your uncle.”

Saffie couldn’t take it any more. All of the elation she had experienced earlier had turned into anguish, and she felt it bubble up inside of her until it came spilling out uncontrollably. With tears streaming down her face she pulled away from her mum’s grip and ran as fast as she could up the stairs, skidding into her bedroom where she collapsed onto her duvet and sobbed into it until it was soaking wet.

The bullying wasn’t over. Of course it wasn’t. It never would be.

After a while, Saffie pulled her legs towards her chest and pressed her face to her knees, hugging her shins while the last of her tears absorbed into her nylon school skirt. Her mum had to have opened her bedroom window earlier because a breeze knocked one of her many collectible figurines from her shelf, but Saffie didn’t care.

A moment later, there was a rap on the door and Saffie immediately said, “I don’t want to talk, mum.”

“It’s not your mum, Saff,” came a man’s voice. “It’s Dax.”

Saffie had been so busy crying, she hadn’t even heard him arrive. Her bedroom door opened tentatively and Dax entered, placing his large palm on her head. He propped his backpack up against the side of the bed and sat down next to Saffie with a sigh, making the mattress bounce a little.

Dax was a big guy with a round, friendly face and curly, unkempt brown hair. Holly often said he looked like a tramp, but Saffie thought he looked more like a medieval warlock.

“You okay, kiddo?” he said.

Saffie couldn’t lie. She didn’t want to lie.

“No,” she said quietly. “No, I’m not okay.”

“Your mum told me what happened. Bullies are the worst. The absolute worst. And you know what? Screw those guys! You’re the coolest girl in that school, they just can’t see it.”

“I’m not,” Saffie said. “I’m the least cool girl there’s ever been in any school ever. I’m Saffie The Strange.”

Dax took a deep breath.

“Tell me,” he said. “Who managed to collect all the skulls on the beach level of Pirate Quest?”

“Me,” Saffie said meekly, remembering the good times they had had playing that video game together.

“And who defeated the final boss on Dragon Chronicles with just a base level sword?”

“Me.”

“And who helped me program a game from scratch in which the player can turn enemies into toads?”

Saffie wiped her eyes in her skirt, keeping her head pressed against her knees.

“Me.”

“Exactly. That makes you Saffie the Legend. Saffie the frickin’ badass.”

Saffie wanted to believe him. She really did.

“You know what they used to call me in school?” Dax continued. “Earwax Dax. Because Anthony Ratner noticed I had a bit of earwax one day and decided to shout it from the rooftops. You know what Anthony Ratner is doing these days?”

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

Saffie looked up.

“Shovelling poo,” said Dax. “LITERALLY shovelling poo. He ended up doing a stint in prison, and when he got out the only people who’d give him a job were Thames Sewer Maintenance Solutions.”

“I can’t see Beatrix Hawthorne ever shovelling poo,” Saffie said.

“No,” Dax admitted, “but she may very well end up working at her parents’ insurance firm. That’s kind of like shovelling posh poo.”

Despite herself, Saffie giggled. Dax could always find a way to put a smile on her face.

“The moral of the story is - high school ended, and with it, so did the bullying. Nobody’s called me Earwax Dax for twenty six years. When you leave school, you’re gonna go on to become the most incredible, amazing woman, and those stupid names they called you will be gone forever.”

Saffie tried to imagine a world in which she wasn’t Saffie The Strange, Scruffy Saffie, Scud Face Saff, or any of the other things she’d been called over the years, but it was difficult.

The bedroom door opened once again, and Holly entered with her arms folded, her face red with rage. She eyed Dax’s backpack.

“I hope you didn’t bring her any junk food,” she said sternly. “Being overweight didn’t help you in school, and it certainly won’t help her.”

“Relax, sis,” Dax sighed. “I brought strawberries.”

“Good. And from now on, I’m limiting the time you spend with her. You’re turning her into you.” She paused as if she was about to say something but was hesitant to say it, then she just went ahead and said it anyway: “We’ve already got one Earwax Dax in this family, we don’t need another.”

Saffie couldn’t believe those words had come out of her mum’s mouth. She glanced at Dax, and for the first time in her life, she saw his thick skin disintegrate. For a brief moment, he was the bullied teenager he had been telling Saffie about just moments earlier.

Holly left the room and there was silence for a few minutes until Dax cleared his throat, got up, and started opening his backpack.

“I don’t really feel like strawberries right now,” said Saffie. “But… thanks.”

“Not even crushed strawberries?” said Dax with a glint in his eye, and pulled out two strawberry frappes topped with swirls of cream and chocolate sauce. “I didn’t specify how the strawberries had been prepared.”

“I could eat some crushed strawberries,” Saffie said with the hint of a smile. “You always get me the best birthday presents.”

“You think this is your birthday present? Saff, this is just something I grabbed on the way over here.” Dax handed Saffie her drink and placed his own on the windowsill while he rummaged deeper in his backpack. “You are not going to BELIEVE how good your real present is. You ready?”

Saffie nodded.

“This is the first of two gifts, okay?”

With deliberate theatrics, Dax pulled out what appeared to be a large, rusty old key and presented it to Saffie with an excited grin on his face. She took it hesitantly and flipped it over in her fingers a few times. The bow was a hollow circle with some kind of blue gemstone growing out of the stem. Actually, it was more of an oval with slightly thicker sides than its top and bottom - a letter ‘O’.

“Oh man, what am I doing?” Dax suddenly blurted out, thrusting his arm at her. “Give it back, Saff, it’s too dangerous.”

“Too dangerous?” Saffie said, keeping the key to herself. “What is this thing? I mean, I can see it’s a key, but… what does it open?”

“Oh man, oh man, oh man,” Dax said, pacing back and forth on her beige carpet. Saffie could see a bead of sweat forming on his forehead. “I’ve been in two minds about giving this to you for weeks, and I convinced myself it would be fine, but now I’ve handed it to you, I think I’ve made a big mistake. Saff, you have to give it back. I’ll get you something else, I promise. Something better. Oh, who am I kidding, what could be better than this?”

“Dax, you’re not making any sense,” said Saffie. It was only then that she remembered he’d been acting a little strange off and on for the last few months.

Dax looked at the door for a second, then back at Saffie.

“If your mum finds out what this key is, what it does, she’ll never forgive me.”

“She’s not exactly your biggest fan anyway,” said Saffie. She was way too intrigued by the gift to simply give it up.

“There are plenty of teens, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine,” Dax muttered to himself before grabbing his frappe and consuming half the contents in one long slurp through its thick straw. “It’s supposed to do that, by the way.”

Saffie looked at the key. The ‘O’ had begun to glow a faint blue. As Saffie brought it closer to her face, the glow seemed to get brighter and more vivid in colour. It was mesmerising, almost as if the key was luring her towards it. As she brought the key closer and closer, she was suddenly jolted out of her trance by a sharp sound from behind her.

A whisper.

“Ultra Sleep.”

Saffie instinctively spun around and saw a flutter of leaves. Someone had been perched on the branches of the tree outside her window, spying on them.

“Dax, did you hear that?” she said, sticking her head outside. She gave the tree and the garden below a good scan, but there was no trace of the intruder.

When Dax didn’t respond, she said, “Dax?”

Saffie spun back around to find her uncle clutching his head with his free hand and grimacing.

“Dax? What’s the matter?”

He had gone deathly pale.

“S-Sa…” he stuttered. “G-give the… Onyx t-to the… Oracle.”

“What?” Saffie said. “Dax, what’s happening?!”

“G-give the Onyx to the… Oracle,” he repeated, his eyes going bloodshot.

He dropped his frappe, the remainder of its contents exploding all over Saffie’s carpet.

“Oh my god, Dax! Oh my god, OH MY GOD!”

Dax’s arms suddenly dropped to his sides, and with a heavy thump, his whole body hit the bedroom floor. Saffie threw the key onto her bed and sank to her knees, clutching her uncle.

“DAX! TALK TO ME!”

But there was no response.

With a deep exhale, Dax’s eyes closed.