by Stuart Boyd
***
A couple of days later, she found both the orange and yellow jelly men under her bed, and the week after that a blue one had joined them. Helix kept insisting that he had nothing to do with them, and they got into another argument when Stella woke up one morning to find yet another one of them stuck to her head.
“It’s caught in my hair, Helix!” she wailed, trying to yank the green jelly man from her scalp, with the least possible hair loss.
“I don’t think this is very funny,” she told him, but Helix got offended and insisted that he had nothing to do with them.
“I don’t know why you’re denying it. It’s a pretty stupid thing to do, putting them in my bag and everything.”
This upset Helix even more, and even though he would still meet her after school every evening, they would walk back home in silence. He also began to sleep downstairs in the kitchen, but Stella still found herself fishing jelly men out of her bag, or under the duvet and untangling them from the clothes in her wardrobe. By the time it got to the last day of school before the Christmas holidays, there were a dozen little multi-coloured jelly men lined up on her desk.
