Chapter TWENTY-TWO
SPRING CAME GENTLY, A GRADUAL OPENING OF EVERYTHING THAT started with the brave white blooms of snowdrops on the verges along the roads and rose in a slow crescendo of new leaves and flowers that transformed the landscape from dismal shades of brown and gray and black to a sea of shimmering green dotted with bright flags of color. I celebrated my fourteenth birthday in the middle of a mild but rainy March, and by the time April arrived the fields were green with newly planted potatoes or emerging stalks of wheat. It seemed that the world outside our house was a place of hope, a place where, every year, the barrenness of winter was replaced by the thrill of life and emerging abundance. In the mornings, as we traveled to school, I leaned against the window and watched it flash by, wishing I could reach out and grasp all that optimism, pull it to me, and press it into my chest. But while the world around was glimmering with renewal, winter had settled inside me, a frozen fallow field.
On the seat next to me, Tracey chatted away, chirpy like the birds in the newly lush trees. And though she made me laugh sometimes, with her mocking of the teachers and her jokes about the other kids at school, much of the time I found myself tuning her out the same way I’d learned to tune out Uncle Ted’s snoring, my father’s rants about royalty, and my mother’s monologues about bridal wear or the pros and cons of disposable tablecloths. And, like my family members, I discovered that Tracey didn’t seem to mind that I wasn’t really paying attention, that my absent grunts meant that I had drifted far away.
If I did pay attention to anything on those bus rides, it was to the sounds from the back, where Amanda sat, talking and laughing with her friends. I still longed to be there next to her, wanted it more than anything, but ever since that morning at the bus stop when I’d tried to kiss her I’d felt so embarrassed that I could barely even speak to her.
“You all right, Jesse?” she asked at the bus stop one April morning shortly after the Easter holidays. I’d arrived just as the bus was pulling up, and I had to run all the way along the high street to catch it. “You look worn out,” she said as she waited for the boys to clamber onto the bus in front of her, bashing one another with their satchels as they fought to get on first.
I was tired. My mother, increasingly immersed in her wedding preparations, was keeping very irregular hours. Despite my best efforts, it was hard to sleep when she was thundering up and down the stairs all night. When I looked at Amanda, though, I realized that she seemed tired herself, her hair greasy and a little bedraggled; there were dark circles under her eyes.
“Jesse’s fine,” Tracey said, launching herself between me and Amanda. “Just sick of having to get up at the crack of dawn for school. I know I am.”
In a way, I was glad of Tracey’s interruption. Although Amanda had continued to be friendly enough toward me, I’d felt a new distance in her—or at least I thought I did. It was hard for me to know for certain, however, since I now found it almost impossible to talk to her. I’d felt self-conscious enough in her presence before revealing my terrible feelings for her. Now I was tongue-tied with my shame.
“I wasn’t asking you, Tracey,” Amanda said. “I was asking Jesse.” She peered around Tracey. “You all right?” she asked again, looking into my face.
For a moment, I felt a thrill at her concern for me and wanted to shove Tracey out of the way. But then the memory of what happened when I actually tried to hold her came back to me.
“I’m fine,” I said. Then, limp and unprotesting, I let Tracey take my arm and pull her with me onto the bus.
We had a grim day ahead of us—religious education and physics in the morning, an afternoon of maths followed by PE, which I found particularly excruciating these days, since our teacher had recently acquired an enthusiasm for country dancing. That afternoon, after trying to execute a swivel in the Gay Gordons and getting caught up in my partner’s legs and falling flat on my face only to lift myself up to see my fellow dancers doubled up in laughter, I was relieved to make my way to our final lesson of the day.
Chemistry was taught by Mr. Matthews, who was probably the least-liked teacher at Liston Comprehensive. He had been nicknamed Adolf because he bore an unfortunate resemblance to Adolf Hitler, a resemblance that might have been significantly mitigated had he not insisted on retaining a toothbrush mustache and strutting around the chemistry lab delivering his lessons in a shrill, military bark. It was not unusual for the boys to goosestep through the door of the lab and, while his back was turned, perform Sieg heil salutes. But no one ever challenged him directly. Mr. Matthews kept a cane on his desk, and it took only the slightest movement of his hand toward it to command complete silence from his pupils.
That afternoon, Mr. Matthews had assigned us an experiment through which we were supposed to extract chlorophyll from a plant. We were to work in groups, and while I arranged the test tubes, Bunsen burner, and beakers, the Debbies were huddled around an article about the Bay City Rollers in the latest issue of Jackie and Tracey was busily decorating the cover of her chemistry exercise book with love hearts and “TG luvs GEL” (Edward, Tracey had recently discovered, was Greg’s middle name) in big block letters. Mr. Matthews had disappeared into his office, which looked out on the chemistry lab.
“God, I hate chemistry,” Tracey said, pushing her book away and watching me light the Bunsen burner. A fierce blue flame burst from its end. “What do we have to do this for, anyway? I mean, Adolf already told us what’s supposed to happen. What’s the point of us having to mess around with all this stuff?” Her eyes alighted on the small stack of filter papers I’d placed at the edge of the bench. Her face brightened. “You know, you can smoke those things.”
“What?” I asked vaguely.
“The filter papers, you can smoke them.”
“That’s daft,” I said as she picked up one of the filter papers, rolled it into a cylinder, and popped it between her lips, like a fat, empty cigarette.
“It’ll be a lark.” She pretended to take a drag from the empty filter paper, threw her head back, and exhaled loudly. “And, look, Adolf is tucked away in his office. He won’t see a thing.”
Through the open door, we could see Mr. Matthews thoughtfully leafing through a book. He seemed completely absorbed.
“Tracey,” I said urgently, “if he catches you, he’ll—”
It was too late. Tracey had already placed the end of the rolled-up filter paper over the Bunsen burner. At first the flame merely singed the paper’s edges, but then it caught alight. Tracey pulled it away, blew out the flame, then promptly stuck it into her mouth and began puffing away.
“You’ll choke yourself,” I said as Tracey burst into a sputtering cough. The Debbies giggled.
“No, no, it’s just like a ciggy,” she said, her eyes red and watery as she waved the smoke in my direction. “You should try it.” She took another puff and coughed again.
I looked at her skeptically. She didn’t look as if she was having fun.
It was foolish to think that any kind of misbehavior might escape Mr. Matthews’s attention, especially anything so brazen as smoking (even if it was only a filter paper) in his class. It took less than a minute for him to look up from his book, furrow his brow, and march out of his office.
“Oh, bloody hell,” muttered Tracey. “I’ve gone and done it now.” She looked around in alarm. The Debbies dived into their exercise books and feigned avid concentration. Tracey turned to me. “Here, Jesse, get rid of it, can you?”
On another day I probably would not have taken it from her, but in the wake of my humiliation in PE and my exhaustion, my reflexes weren’t as sharp as they should have been. When Tracey handed the paper to me, instead of knocking it away I took it, so that, as Mr. Matthews approached, there I was in a cloud of smoke. I looked about, desperate to find somewhere that I might dispose of the burning filter paper.
“Jesse Bennett!” he barked. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?” His face was a startling shade of red. Two ropy blue veins pulsed visibly in his neck on either side of his bobbing Adam’s apple.
“Nothing, sir.”
“Really?” He snatched the filter paper from my hand and dunked it in a beaker of water that stood on the bench. It was extinguished with a loud hiss and a thick ribbon of dark gray smoke. “And since when, I ask, did the process of extracting chlorophyll demand that you set light to a filter paper? I’m surprised at you, Miss Bennett. I wouldn’t put this kind of behavior past your friends here.” Tracey was making a concentrated study of the formulas chalked on the blackboard. Everyone else in the classroom was staring at me. “Perhaps they’ve infected you with their idiocy? Or perhaps you think chemistry is just one big joke, Miss Bennett?”
“No, sir.” My face was burning. Surely Tracey wasn’t going to let me take the blame for her stupid prank.
“I’m surrounded by morons. Everywhere.” Mr. Matthews swung around to indicate the group of boys sitting in the very rear of the classroom. While he was yelling at me, they had been making Sieg heil gestures in the air. As he turned, they dropped their arms stiffly to their sides. “Morons,” Mr. Matthews repeated, eyeing them fiercely. “Any more from you lot and you can join Miss Bennett for detention tomorrow evening.”
“Detention? But, sir …” I looked at Tracey again, but she was still frowning at the blackboard.
“Would you like to make that a week of detention, Miss Bennett?”
“No, sir.”
“Good,” he concluded. “So we’ll see each other here tomorrow at four o’clock sharp.”
“Yes, sir,” I said quietly, letting my eyes drop to the bench.
“GOD, JESSE, I CAN’T believe Adolf gave you detention for that,” Tracey said as we exited the chemistry lab after the lesson. “I mean, it’s not like it was anything serious….”
I spun around to look at her. “I told you not to do it. I told you not to light that bloody filter paper.” I could feel tears, hot and stinging, behind my eyes. “And you didn’t need to get me into trouble, you could have—”
Tracey gave an amiable slap to my arm. “Oh, come on, Jesse, don’t go getting your knickers in a twist over nothing. It’s just detention, for God’s sake. It’s not like he’s going to chop your head off.”
“But now I’ll miss the school bus. I don’t know how I’m going to get home.”
“Oh, you can get a bus from Liston that goes to Midham. It comes by the school at half past five. Of course, it goes all over the villages round here, so you won’t get home till half past six. But it’s only one night.”
“That’s all right for you to say. But you should be the one that’s in detention, not me. You got me into trouble. You deliberately—”
She sidled up to me. “Oh, come on, Jesse,” she said, threading her arm through mine. “That was great what you did, taking the blame for me. I only gave you the filter paper because Adolf would kill me if he’d caught me with it. I had detention with him five times last term. I wouldn’t put it past him to send a note home to my mam and dad. And then my life wouldn’t be worth living. You really kept me out of the shit there, Jesse.” She leaned into me and smiled.
I blinked back my tears. “You think so?” I asked, looking into her beaming face.
“Yeah,” she said, giving a decisive nod. “And you know I appreciate it, Jesse, I really do.” Then she tugged me forward, into the stream of students moving toward the school’s main doors. “Come on, I’m supposed to meet Greg by the school gates and I don’t want to be late.”
BY THE TIME I arrived at detention the next day, there was already a short queue outside the door, most of them boys who were always getting into trouble, and a smattering of girls who made a habit of wearing clothes that weren’t part of the regulation uniform or smoked in the bike sheds. While I wasn’t shocked to see any of these usual suspects, I was a little taken aback to see Malcolm Clements standing at the very end of the line. He looked me up and down as I took my place next to him and then looked away. I was surprised at how much his contempt stung me.
“All right, you horrible little wretches,” Mr. Matthews boomed, making me jump as he burst out of the chemistry lab. “Get inside. And anybody that breathes one single word without my permission during the next hour will find themselves in detention again tomorrow night. Am I making myself clear?”
A couple of minutes later we were sitting, heads bent over our exercise books, copying down the long series of indecipherable chemical formulas from the textbooks Mr. Matthews had handed out.
Time passed with excruciating slowness, expanded, it seemed, by a silence punctuated only by the scratch of pencils over paper, the turning of pages, and the hollow staccato of coughs. Eventually, five o’clock came around and we were released. Since I had half an hour before the bus arrived to take me home, I didn’t gallop away like almost all my fellow students. Instead, I ambled slowly along the corridor, breathing in the pungent smells of floor polish and disinfectant as I passed mop-wielding cleaning ladies.
As I made my way to the exit, I saw Malcolm walking in front of me. His satchel was unbuckled and bounced against his hips, and as he turned the corner of the corridor its flap flew wide and something fell from it and fluttered to the floor. When I reached the corner, I bent down to pick it up. It was several pieces of paper folded together, covered in tight paragraphs of tiny, scrawled writing. Without thinking, I picked up my pace.
“Malcolm,” I called.
He spun around. “What do you want?”
I waved the papers at him. “You dropped this.”
“Oh.” He took it from me. “Thanks.”
Without knowing why, I realized that I wanted to keep him there. “It’s probably not important,” I said, “but I thought … I thought … Well, you never know what someone has written on those little bits of paper. I write things all the time and I, well … I just thought you might need it, that’s all.”
Malcolm looked at me steadily, as if he were trying to solve a puzzle in my face. Then he let his lips ease into a slight smile. “Actually, those are my notes for the history essay I have to write tonight. I spent ages writing these. I’d be sort of lost without them. So, really, thanks a lot.” He put them back into his satchel.
“I’m glad you didn’t lose them,” I said as he buckled up the flap. Then, not knowing what else to say, I turned to make my way to the school’s main doors. I was surprised, though, when Malcolm matched my pace to walk beside me. I was also surprised and rather pleased when he seemed to want to make conversation.
“So why did you get put into detention?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Yeah, that’s what they all say.”
“No, really, I didn’t do anything,” I said with conviction. Then, more softly, I asked, “What did you do?”
“I got caught running in the corridor, but it wasn’t really my fault. I know better than to run in the corridors when Adolf is on patrol.” He looked at me and grinned. “See, I had to stay behind after registration, and when I got out I ran because I didn’t want to be late for French. Miss Greenly hates it when you’re late. Of course, there was no point trying to explain that to Adolf. You know, I actually think he’d make a good dictator, that man.”
“He is a bit of a wanker,” I ventured.
“You can say that again.” Malcolm laughed. “So, anyway, why did you end up in detention?”
I hesitated.
“Come on,” he said, nudging me gently with a skinny elbow. “You can tell me.”
For a moment, I wondered if I should just tell Malcolm that I’d set fire to the filter paper and tried to smoke it, if it would be disloyal to Tracey if I told him the truth. But while I’d taken the blame with Mr. Matthews, I wasn’t prepared to let Malcolm think I’d done such a stupid thing. So I told him what happened. Malcolm said nothing as I spoke.
“Do you want a lift home?” he said as we pushed out into the chill and he pointed to a car standing by the entrance, the headlights on and the engine running. “That’s my dad. He can drop you off in Midham if you want. It’s on our way.”
I looked around the school grounds. There were still a few kids from detention crossing the car park. And by the gates I could see a little crowd. I wondered if Tracey was among them, still chatting with Greg, waiting for him to give her a lift home on his motorbike. I wondered, too, what she would think if she saw me pass the school gates with Malcolm in his father’s car.
“No, no, it’s all right,” I said. “Really, I don’t mind getting the bus.”
“But that’s daft. It’d be much quicker for you if—” Malcolm paused, following my gaze.
“Thanks for the offer, but I don’t want to be any trouble.” I smiled at him. He didn’t smile back. For a moment, he looked hurt. Then his expression shifted to that same look of disdain I’d seen when I joined him earlier outside the lab.
“I get it,” he said. “You don’t want your precious friends to see you with me. Is that it?”
I said nothing.
“Your lovely best friend, the one who deliberately dropped you in it with Adolf—you don’t want her to see you with Malcolm Poofter Clements?” He imitated Tracey’s sour and mocking tone. “What would she say if she saw you with a pathetic little nancy boy like me?” He tossed his head and waved his hand loosely through the air, the way Tracey did when she made fun of him.
“No, it’s just that …” I wanted to explain to him. It wasn’t really like that. It was just that I couldn’t bear to go back to what had gone before. I couldn’t be like him, teased and ridiculed, and withstand it.
“You know something? You’re the one that’s pathetic. Look at you.” He jabbed a finger in my direction. “So busy worrying about what other people think. Did it ever occur to you to start thinking for yourself?” For a second, his expression was a burning accusation, and then he turned and stalked toward his father’s car.