1 Chapter 1

1

The blast of the siren tore through conversations, momentarily drowned out the shouts and laughter of the school yard and sent students, moving at a reluctant pace, to their lockers. A small group of half a dozen final year boys continued playing ‘brandy,’ a game whereby a tennis ball is thrown as hard as possible at someone and if it hits them, they’re “branded”. In his haste to escape the path of the tennis ball, Darren, one of the more athletic boys, crashed into Bryan, a skinny, pimple-faced student, who was never included in their games. The impact sent Bryan crashing to the ground. Had it not been for the fact he shot his hand out to break the fall, the damage could have been much worse. As it was, the only injuries sustained were a bitten tongue, a throbbing knee, and a great deal of embarrassment.

Bryan picked himself up from the concrete walkway and gave his knee a quick rub.

“Gee, are you okay?” asked Sharon, who was not only one of the kindest girls he’d ever known, but who was also one of two school prefects. She was a little overweight and had wavy hair that seemed to Bryan to be untameable the way it curled this way and that, even within the confines of a ponytail, but she had a kind face. It was a face—porcelain white, blemish-free and perfectly proportioned—that he imagined an angel to have.

Bryan ran his tongue over his teeth, checking, and detecting nothing more than the metallic taste of blood, he nodded.

“Are you sure?” she asked, resting a hand on his back.

Bryan nodded again, keeping his eyes averted so he didn’t have to see the pity in her eyes. He could hear the boys laughing behind him and heard one of them say “Well done,” followed by what sounded like a high-five. He felt like sobbing. Not because of the sharp sting from the bite mark on his tongue and not because of the embarrassment of being knocked down in front of his peers, but because the boys enjoyed making his life hell and there was not a damned thing he could do about it.

He took a deep breath and felt Sharon remove her hand.

“We’d better get to class, hey?” she said.

He glanced up at her after she had left his side. Watching her arrive at her locker, smiling as she took out the books she would need for her afternoon classes, made him feel a little better. He couldn’t say why. It just did, though the feeling was only a fleeting one. He opened his locker and saw that during the lunch break someone had drawn a caricature of him, his face almost obliterated by spots, with a crudely drawn penis in his mouth. He reached out to rub it off with his fingers, but it was in permanent marker so he could forget about erasing it. He stared at it, feeling numb. His mind was empty of thought; the hurt and humiliation evaporated. He was the eye of a hurricane that boiled and spun around him.

The sting of a tennis ball being thrown at full force at his left buttock wrenched him back to the real world.

“Idiot!” snapped Kylie, one of the girls in his English class as she glared at the culprit.

When Bryan looked over his shoulder he saw Daniel, the best looking guy in the final year class, laughing riotously as Kylie showered his arms and back with slaps. He averted his eyes lest he draw any more attention from the boys. Strange, he thought, as he often had, how the girls scold the boys for bullying me and yet none of them actually do anything to help meIt was true. None of them, apart from Sharon, ever talked to him or interacted with him unless instructed to do so by a teacher, so it was perplexing why they should bother telling the boys off for torturing him.

Doing his best to ignore the various aches and pains acquired during the forty-five minute lunch break, Bryan sat down near the front of the class. The popular boys sat in the back row, directly behind the popular girls, and there were a few vacant seats in the middle rows, where Bryan sat. Only the ‘nerds’ sat at the front—the studious types who didn’t care about the high school hierarchy of popularity. Bryan sat where he felt the most comfortable, with two rows separating him from the popular students and one row separating him from the nerds. He was not at all sporty and his pimples obscured whatever looks he might have. Test scores showed he was only of average intelligence and he only put in an average amount of effort. He could hardly be considered bookish. Third row from the front was the perfect position for him.