“For God’s sake, keep your eyes on the road.”

“But have you seen those spires. Look at the windows! Shit, Matthew, we’re going under an arch.”

“We go under an arch to get to the supermarket, Cory.”

“That’s a railway bridge, it doesn’t count.”

“It’s still an architectural masterpiece.”

“If you like that kind of thing. Oh my God look at that! It looks even more like Hogwarts than in the pictures.”

I had to groan at that. Cory’s been on about Hogwarts for weeks. If I’d known he would get so Harry Potter fangirl on me, I’d have chosen an ultra-modern university—all chrome and glass. I’d actually chosen one, despite having taken the Oxford/Cambridge entrance exam. Even though they’re the two best and most prestigious universities in the UK, I wasn’t keen on going. I’m a working-class boy through and through, and brushing shoulders with the upper echelons of society, with their cut-glass accents and inbred arrogance, didn’t appeal at all.

Cory told me over and over that it wasn’t like that anymore, and anyway my prejudices about the upper classes were irrational and foundless. Just because someone spoke with a posh accent and was heir to a fortune didn’t mean they were a bad person. I listened to what he had to say, shook my head, and went back to grumbling about being made to feel inferior. It didn’t help that Cory infuriatingly pointed out that any feelings of inadequacy and inferiority would be down to me, not them, and I should at least give it a chance.

Unfortunately we’d both passed the exam, and Cory was so crestfallen when I tried to talk him out of going, I’d finally given in. I always do.

Cory was my very best buddy. We’d been friends forever, although we were an unlikely couple, I have to say. Before anyone gets the wrong idea, couple means pair of friends. We were mistaken for boyfriends often enough, but although Cory’s gay—and I always said if I ever took a walk on the gay side it would be with him—I’m straight as they come.

I’d like to say I was a one-woman man and had a steady girlfriend since junior school. That’s definitely what I wanted—a steady relationship, leading to marriage, a nice house, a couple of children, and a dog. Unfortunately, it had never quite worked out that way, and the longest relationship I’d had that far was six months. I’d thought that one was going to last, until I got the long-distance relationships don’t work, and university changes people talk the week before. Ah well, there’s a lot to be said for starting over with a clean slate. So there I was, young free and single and about to launch on the greatest adventure of my life.

It didn’t really start right then, though, because we were only there to look around and make the final decision about whether we wanted to come there. If there had ever been a chance we wouldn’t, it evaporated the instant Cory caught sight of the elegant gothic buildings and had long gone by the time we passed under the arch and followed the signs for the visitors’ car park.

It was a mistake to let Cory drive. His focus was everywhere but on the road, and how we managed to get to the car park without swerving onto the immaculate lawns or hitting something, I’ll never know. Fortunately, the car park was almost empty. We were early, of course. Cory had wanted to leave at some ridiculous time, like five a.m., but I managed to contain him for a couple of hours.

The car rattled and hissed as we chugged to a highly relieving halt. I think it was the furthest my poor old banger had ever gone, and she was as glad to arrive as we were. Bless her, she was a bit of a wreck even then, but she was reliable, and even if she wasn’t pretty, she was all mine. Well, mine and Cory’s. We’d saved up together and paid half each. Not that it would have mattered. We were so close we tended to treat just about everything we owned as joint property. Except the computers.

Cory’s a computer genius. He’s seriously amazing with anything to do with computers, from building them to writing his own code and designing websites and games. Most of our friends, as well as pretty much everyone in both families, have a website or blog designed and set up by Cory. They’re not all well maintained or even used, but they’re there. It’s a testament to his persuasive techniques that even my great-grandmother has a blog, on which she posts recipes and embarrassing photographs of the family, present and past. She might be the only eighty-year-old in the country to know her way around the Internet so well. She’s researching our family tree and has more friends on Facebook than I do.

The crazy thing is that Cory’s genius doesn’t stop there. He’s also freakishly talented at science, especially biochemistry. He actually worked in a real lab in the last year of A levels and did some kind of advanced course instead of the bog standard syllabus. I’m totally convinced that one day he’s going to build a cyborg, and I’m not the only one. Characteristically, Cory’s coy about his talents and has no confidence in his ability to be the first person to crack the whole organic/mechanical fusion thing.

One of the reasons he was so keen to go to that particular university was because they’d created a personalized syllabus, so he could study both his passions together. I bet the professors were creaming their pants over him. Not literally, I hope. The last thing I needed was to get involved in a professor/student scandal, and Cory was more than capable of getting into trouble without ever seeing it coming. It’s not just his eyes that are short-sighted.