Why didn’t I use ‘supposedly’?
This seems to make her even angrier. “I know what it means!” she shouts. “God, you really do think I’m thick, don’t you!”
“No,” I whisper.
“Yes, you do. You and your smart little comments and your crap little facts and your geeky little face.” She pulls that expression again: the one with the crossed eyes and protruding teeth. Which is really unfair: she knows I had my braces taken off years ago, and my left eye is only lazy when I’m tired. “You really think you’re better than everyone else, don’t you, Harriet Manners?”
“No,” I mumble again. The humiliated burn has spread to my neck and my ears and is creeping up my scalp. I can feel the entire class staring at me the way they stared at the monkey at the zoo with the red bottom. “I don’t.”
“I can’t hear you,” Alexa says more loudly. She walks closer – way past my personal space boundaries – and for a brief second I think she’s going to slap me. “I’ll rephrase. Do you think you’re better than everyone else, Harriet Manners?”
“No,” I say as loudly as I can.
“Yes, you do,” she hisses, getting even closer, and even in my shock I can’t believe the expression on her face: pure, almost shining, hatred. As if it’s burning on the inside of her and lighting her up like one of those little round candles with pictures of penguins on the outside. “You have no idea how much of a loser you really are.”
“That’s not true,” I whisper.
Because I totally do. I know exactly who I am. I’m Harriet Manners: A++ student, collector of semi-precious stones, builder of small and perfectly proportioned train sets, writer of lists, alphabetiser and genre-iser of books, user of made-up nouns, guardian of twenty-three woodlice under the rock at the bottom of her garden.
I’m Harriet Manners:
GEEK.
Alexa ignores me. “So I think it’s time we put it to the test,” she continues and then she looks around the room. I can feel my eyes filling up with water, but I’m totally frozen. Even my tongue feels numb. “Who in this room,” Alexa says slowly and loudly, “hates Harriet Manners? Put your hand up.”
I can’t really see anything because the whole room is wobbling.
“Toby,” Alexa adds. “Put your hand up or you’re going down the toilet every lunchtime for the next week.”
I close my eyes and two tears roll down my face. I think it’s really important that I don’t see this.
“Now open your eyes, geek,” Alexa says.
“No,” I say as firmly as I can.
“Open your eyes, geek.”
“No.”
“Open your eyes, geek. Or I will make this worse for you today, and tomorrow, and the day after that. And I will keep making it worse for you until you realise what you are and what you are not.”
So even though I know precisely what I am – and even though I’m not sure it’s even possible to make it worse – I open my eyes.
Every single hand in the classroom is up.
I wish she had just punched me.
And, with that final thought, I burst into tears, grab my satchel with GEEK written all over it and run out of the classroom.
y the time I get home, I’m crying so hard it sounds like somebody sawing wood.
I’m not really a crier, though, and there’s a good chance my parents won’t understand what I’m doing, so I scoot into the bush outside my house until I can be absolutely certain – without a shadow of a doubt – that I can breathe without either hiccuping or a bubble of snot coming out of my nose. Then I sit in the bush in the hole that Toby’s made for himself in four years of stalking and sob quietly into the sleeve of my school jumper.
I’m not sure how long I cry for: it’s like a never-ending circle of tears because every time I calm down and look up, I catch sight of the red letters on my satchel and it sets me off again. It even feels like they’re getting bigger and bigger, although rationally I know they must be staying the same size.
GEEK
GEEK
GEEK
GEEK
GEEK
And I can’t pretend it doesn’t matter any more because it does. Because they just won’t leave me alone.
I’m so tired of it all. I’m tired of not fitting in; of being left out; of being hated. I’m tired of having everything I am ripped up and strewn around the room the way a puppy wrecks an abandoned toilet roll. I’m tired of never doing anything right; of constantly being humiliated; of feeling like I’m just not good enough, no matter what I do.
I’m tired of feeling like this. And most of all, I’m tired of being a polar bear, wandering around the rainforest on my own.
When the letters are two metres high and flashing, I finally lose it completely. I give a little scream of frustration and attack the word with my belt buckle until the material’s so ripped you can’t read anything. And then – finally calmer – I curl out of a ball, climb out of the bush, wipe the mud off my uniform and try to pretend that I’m behaving in a totally rational way for 4pm on a Friday afternoon.