Tribal sun motif across the upper back

Gary Tindall found her first. He had grown broad and kind in the way boys from the Lower Fields estate sometimes did, and he carried two cans of cider as if they were a peace offering. "You still doing the sun thing?" he asked. She laughed, because she had forgotten that she once filled every margin of her history book with spirals that curled out like wind, and a ringed disc in the middle she called the heart of the day.

They had bet a fiver in Year Ten that she could draw the same design twice without lifting the pen. She had won by a single stroke. Gary said he had kept the fiver in a frame, but now he pulled out his wallet and found a folded note, soft as cloth, with the old circle drawn in blue ink on the back of a bus ticket.

Priya unfolded it under the strip light. The lines had faded but the twelve sharp rays still held around the disc, and the spirals sat exactly where her nine-year-old hand had wanted them. "I never finished the bottom," she said. "I kept waiting to decide what the flames were for." Gary shrugged. "Mrs Ashdown said they were wings. Maybe you were drawing us all out of here." She folded the ticket back along its crease and slipped it into her cardigan pocket, and outside the car park lights came on one by one.