Another one-worded and open-ended prompt: Gateway. What comes to your mind when you think of the word "gateway?" Happy writing?

The gate at the back of the rec had been padlocked since before I was born, so nobody ever used it as a gate. It was a seat. Jen sat on top with her trainers hooked through the bars, and Luke leaned against the post like a bouncer at a club that didn’t exist. I was fifteen and had been invited by accident. Jen needed someone to hold the carrier bag with the cider in it, and I happened to be standing nearby.

“You’re not going to be weird about it, are you?” Luke said. He wasn’t asking.

“I’m not weird about anything.” This was the most untrue thing I had ever said, and all three of us knew it.

Jen licked the paper with the concentration of someone doing surgery. She had a rule about not letting anyone else roll, and her lighter caught on the third try.

“Little ones,” Jen said, passing it to me. “Don’t cough, you’ll waste it.”

I coughed. Luke laughed, but gently, like I’d done him a favour. Jen took it back, showed me again, and made me hold the smoke the way you’d hold your breath before going under at the swimming baths. The second time I got it down. It scratched and sat in my chest like a swallowed coin. Nothing happened for a long time. I remember being almost offended. Fifteen years of being told this was the thing that ruined lives, and it was just three people on a gate, a car alarm going off somewhere on Binley Road, and cider that tasted of piss.

Then the car alarm stopped, and I noticed I’d stopped hearing it before it stopped. That was the first thing. I’d spent every day of my life with a radio on in my head, tuned to a station that only played what I’d said wrong that day, what Mum’s face did when I came through the door, whether the girl in Year Eleven had been laughing at me. I hadn’t known it was a radio. I thought it was just what thinking sounded like.

And now someone had turned it down.

“Oh,” I said.

Jen grinned at Luke. “She’s got the look.”

I laughed so hard I had to hold the bars. I couldn’t tell you what was funny. Luke was laughing too, with his head back and his Adam’s apple jumping, and in the orange light from the lamp across the field he looked about twelve. I thought: he’s happy. I remember thinking it so clearly, as if it were a fact about him I’d been given. We stayed until the grass went dark and wet. Jen walked me to the corner where the road splits, and before I went she pressed a Polo mint into my hand and said, “Chew it. Your mum’ll smell it.”

It felt like being handed a key.

I let myself in. Mum was asleep on the sofa with the telly on. I stood in the doorway and watched her for a while, and for once the radio didn’t say anything about her face. I put the blanket over her. I went upstairs and lay in bed with the ceiling with music on low, and Mum downstairs, not thinking about me, and I wasn't thinking about her, and for the first time n my life, everything was quiet. My fingers still held the smell, fingers that had drawn their lazy trails down the slope that everyone had so warned me about, the stepping stones downwards to the heavy stuff, except, it wasn't a slope at all. It was a door, and and on the other side was a room where I was finally quiet.

I’d have walked through anything.