Non Pratt - Trouble

I was scared of going inside. No one in the school needed to see my name in print to know who Chris had been with. My hand looked strange on the door as I summoned up the courage to push it open. The world felt tilted, unreal, as I walked down the corridor. I could feel people looking at me, but I didn’t dare meet their gaze.

Penny was waiting by my locker, her friends clustered nearby, kept away by the forcefield of fury that surrounded her. As soon as I was within striking distance she lashed out, the slap stinging my skin. I saw her pull back for another, but she hesitated, fingers curling like a dying flower until her fist fell limply against my chest, fresh tears falling from closed eyes.

I tried to hold her, but she pushed me away.

It’s not like she’ll come running to you…

“Penny, I—”

“Don’t you dare say you’re sorry, Ty.”

I didn’t know what else to say.

“It says you were fighting. What were you fighting about? What could be so important that you’d push him in front of a moving car?”

“I didn’t” — I closed my eyes, saw my hand letting go of his jacket, his foot on the kerb — “push him.” It was barely a whisper.

“What were you fighting about?”

But I shook my head. I would have confessed to pushing him rather than tell Penny that the boy she loved, the one she mourned so keenly, had slept with someone else.

“Tell me!”

“It’s not important.”

“How can you say that?” Penny screamed in my face, battering my chest with her fists. I tried to put my arms around her, but she fought me away and ran off down the corridor. I made to go after her, but there was a hand on my arm, a warning, “Leave her, mate.”

I didn’t want to hear it and I spun round in anger, my fist bunched and flying, remembering how it felt to fight. Wanting something to take me away from what was happening…

I punched Rav so hard that I broke his jaw. And my hand.

“What happened after that?” I ask.

“I was suspended. My parents decided I needed a fresh start and whisked me away to Australia for the summer whilst they sorted out the house.” He’s staring across the room and his face is gentle, like he’s thinking about how grateful he is that they’d do that.

But that wasn’t what I’d meant. “I meant with Penny.”

Aaron shakes his head, once to each side and the look of loss on his face slays me. “That was it: friendship over. She never spoke to me again and I made it easy for her. I faded out of my own life and when we decided to move I shut down my Facebook account, changed my email address and got a new phone.”

I could never have done that, shut off my whole life in one go. “So you never told her why you and Chris were fighting?”

“I’ve only ever told one person the truth about that.” Aaron looks at me and takes a sip of Diet Coke.

“Not even…” I don’t say Neville’s name, but I see Aaron close his eyes, a gentle “No” formed on his lips.

I find myself staring at his mouth long after his lips have stopped moving.

Neville might have left, but Hannah’s still here, in spite of all I’ve done to push her away. Now, when I look at her, I finally see someone I trust. Someone I love.

Our faces are close enough that all I can see are his eyes and I see something there. Something promising.

Slowly, I tilt my mouth to his until our lips touch, until there’s only a kiss between us.

I lift my hand up to rest on her hair…

There’s a cough in the doorway and we pull apart, guilty.

“Aaron?” Hannah’s mum says. “It’s your parents on the phone.”

My parents are — understandably — pretty upset. Mum in particular. Yesterday she blamed herself for putting me in a vulnerable position. Of course I was going to get attached to Neville, she should have seen it coming, how could she have been so stupid? It took me a long time to explain to her that what she’d done had made all the difference. Without Cedarfields, without Neville, I’d never have made it this far. The reason I was so upset about losing him was because he’d been there when I needed him most. I’m not sure she understood, but it was late and we were all tired.

Tonight is a different matter. Tonight she’s mad with me.

“I don’t know what to do with you.” I stay quiet. “This time last year I didn’t have any grey hairs. That’s impressive for a woman my age, but now…” She leans forward and runs a finger along her scalp, joining up single grey hairs like an astronomer grouping constellations. “Look. I’m nearly as grey as your gran.”

Dad and I raise our eyebrows at each other.

“Don’t think I didn’t see that,” Mum says, sitting up again. “Aaron, you have got to stop doing this to us. I’m serious.”

“Doing what?” But I know.

“Scaring us.” Her eyes sparkle with unshed tears. “You don’t know what it’s like, being a parent…”

I think about that night in the car with Robert.

“…this time last year I honestly thought we were going to lose you the way that Chris’s parents lost their son.” It hurts to hear this, but I force myself to listen. “Such a waste.”

There’s a pause in which she glares her tears into submission and Dad rests a hand on my shoulder and waits for her to go on. But she’s still not speaking, holding her breath and trying not to cry.

“Aaron,” Dad says. “When are you going to start trusting us?”

How can I tell them that I have always trusted them when all I do is lie about the things that happen in my life? It’s time I told them everything.

Including Hannah’s secret — and how I feel about it.

I wave a goodbye to Dad as he heads into the staffroom after a traffic-besmirched journey arguing in German (mostly). He seems to be satisfied by my accent and has stopped griping about an aptitude for languages running in the family, which means all those language downloads on my iPod have paid off. Gott sei Dank.

I’m walking down the corridors during that pre-registration lull where everyone’s in the classrooms, sitting on desks and killing time until the teacher walks in. Up the stairs and round the corner; our class is the furthest away from the staffroom and I can hear the raised voices from this end of the corridor. The posters pinned on the walls waft as I walk past, but I ignore them. I stopped reading the noticeboards before the end of the first week — no one else does.

My left shoe squeaks annoyingly on the next couple of steps and I stop to wriggle my heel a bit until it stops.

When I reach the door, the noise on the other side is deafening, louder than I’ve ever heard before. I take my phone out of my pocket to check it’s on silent — it is. I’ve missed a couple of calls from Hannah, probably asking me to pick up an ice cream, and there’s a message from Gideon, but since I’m about to see him I don’t bother opening it.

I lean my shoulder on the door, lever the handle down and enter the classroom.

Beside me Gideon turns towards the door and pinches my arm.

I twist where I’m standing and see Aaron.

God, please… I don’t know what to do.

He smiles, but when he sees my expression he knows there’s something wrong — something very wrong — because the smile fades as he meets my desperate gaze. I flicker a glance to my right and watch him follow my lead.

A sudden hush has fallen over every one of us as we watch him read it. Beside me Gideon is shaking with rage and Anj grips my arm, holding me back as I strain over the desk towards the bitch who did this.

All this must have taken some persistence.

Across the top of the image on the whiteboard is the headline from the local paper — FOURTH YOUTH TO DIE ON OUR ROADS — and underneath there’s part of a Facebook Chat conversation. One is Mandy, a girl Chris and I sat with in Science. She constantly teased us on our bromance whilst trying to stop us from copying the results from her experiments — someone I’d call a mate. The other is someone called Katiecakes whose avatar is a picture of some boobs — no prizes for guessing the owner. I wonder how many of my past school friends she tried before someone responded. I wonder if she tried Penny.

The screengrab cuts into the middle of their conversation:

& Aaron woz there wen his mate got killed?

Yeah. It was pretty rough for him — he went off the rails a bit, drinking, starting fights. He even punched someone in the corridor. Broke his jaw.

R WE TALKING ABOUT THE SAME AARON TYLER?! ;) That Y he “left”?

He left after the news article came out.

?

Everyone thought it’d been an unlucky accident, but the article said that Ty and Chris had been having a fight — that’s how Chris fell into the road.

WHAT?????!!!!

Yeah. It came as a bit of a shock. Penny took it pretty badly.

Who she?

Chris’s girlfriend. Her and Ty had always been pretty tight, but after the accident she was the only person he hung out with. But they had a massive blow-out at school when she saw the paper and after that she stopped talking to him. She’d leave the room if he walked in, stuff like that.

So they were like an item? OMG thats AWFUL! He pushed his friend under a car & started shagging the girl he left behind!

And because Katie isn’t interested in the truth, because she wants to cast me in the worst possible light, that is where she has cut the screen. I’d like to think Mandy would have defended me, but who knows? Maybe that’s what everyone at Bart’s really thought. It’s then that I see the photocopy of the full article on our classroom pinboard. I think of the overstuffed noticeboard I passed on the way in. I’ll lay money Katie’s posted those around the whole school. In fact I’ll be disappointed if she hasn’t.

I walk over and sit at my desk and look at Hannah. She’s staring at me like a puppy on death row. Anj looks pretty tragic too and Gideon is practically steaming at the ears, but it’s Katie whose gaze I meet.

Her expression is totally impassive. She’s watching, waiting, seeing just how far she’s really pushed me.

The door opens and in walks Mrs English.

Mrs English doesn’t really know what she’s looking at. She asks Aaron to explain since his was the name she identified.

Thirty-five pairs of eyes turn to see how he’ll react. Thirty-five pairs of ears prick to hear what he’ll say. One heart (mine) threatening to break if this goes wrong.

“The class has just found out why I left my last school.”

She looks confused. Does she know? Aaron’s dad must have told the teachers something… You see her glance nervously at the board, her eyes widening as she takes in all the information for the first time.

“Can someone tell me who put that up there?”

Mrs English isn’t looking at anyone in particular — there’s more than one Katie in our class, and it’s not like our form teacher is able to identify the right one from an inch-square picture of cleavage.

Katie is looking at Hannah and at me as if daring us to say something, but even as Hannah opens her mouth someone else says, “Yes.”

For a moment no one knows where to look, but I recognized the voice right away and I’m looking at Rex as he stands up off the desk he was leaning on.

“Katie Coleman did it. I saw her fiddling with the projector when I came in.”