LITMIR.BIZ

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not being there. The teacher sitting with us was making an empty-handed gesture, as if to say, what do you expect me to do, so the deputy grabbed a book off one of the shelves and gave it to the lad.

      I watched all of that. The two teachers arguing and stressing each other out, and the boy standing there, head down, shoulders hunched. He was tall and looked more than sixteen. His head was shaved, which surprised me because at our school (St Thomas’s – Roman Catholic – very hot on morality and standards and that) boys aren’t allowed to have their heads shaved. This boy wasn’t in proper uniform either. We wear this awful shade of maroon, but he had a plain black jacket on, over a white shirt. His black trousers were a shade too short for him. He was wearing trainers too, which were also forbidden. In our school they reckon wearing trainers prevents the flow of knowledge to your brain. Only joking. But we do have to wear plain black shoes.

      I liked this boy’s face. He didn’t have eye contact with anyone, but looked alternately at the floor (wooden, varnished over the scratches), the walls (laminated posters of key words – simile, metaphor, personification) and the ceiling (polystyrene tiles, a fluorescent light that went on and off intermittently). But his eyes weren’t vacant – it was like there was an untapped power behind them. He made me think of a caged lion, or a cornered animal that you had to be wary of, in case he turned on you. I saw him turn his gaze on the class for just a microsecond, and in that microsecond I looked away, scared he might have noticed I was staring at him.

      The teacher in charge pointed to the desk at the front by the door and the boy sat there, and then I could only see his back. I couldn’t tell, but I don’t think he was reading. I think he was just sitting there, turned in on himself, thinking about whatever people think about when they’re being private.

      It was a bit unusual, I thought, joining a Year Eleven class midyear, and I tried to work out where he could have come from. Had his family moved to Calder?

      His arrival had caused a bit of a stir and people had begun to chat. The teacher looked up from his marking and glared at everyone. I glared back at him and enjoyed the flash of uneasiness when he noticed. Immediately I lowered my gaze and made as if I was reading Macbeth.

      I reckon it’s tough being new to a school. School is bad enough anyway – you’ve got to navigate your way through all the different groups. Paula and Janette are the girls in our year who are in charge, socially, that is. Paula’s very streetwise and mouthy; Janette is just a boy magnet. The rest of the girls follow them. Rachel and Elizabeth and some others are swots. Then there’s Saira and the other Asians. As for the lads, there’s the geeks with computers and GameCubes; the soccer-crazy ones, the skaties and the ones that tough it out at the bottom of the heap, the ones the teachers have it in for.

      I was trying to work out where this new boy, Craig Ritchie, might fit in. I would have said in the last group, except most of the boys who just mess around in lessons are idiots, but this lad had a look on his face – he was no idiot. There was more to him. I wondered whether any of the other lads in the class would speak to him at the end of the lesson, but realised they wouldn’t. Not yet, anyway.

      So when the bell went for break – the teacher with us had been anticipating it and had had his books piled tidily on the desk for the last four minutes – I went over to the Craig Ritchie boy, and said, “Hi.”

      “Hi,” he mumbled.

      “You new here?”

      “Yeah.”

      Not the most scintillating conversation, but he was shy and I didn’t want to come over like the Spanish Inquisition.

      “Where are you from?” I ventured.

      “Fairfield.”

      I knew Fairfield. It was quite a few miles away, a scabby, run-down council estate. No one from our school lived there.

      “Why are you here?” I asked.

      “Reckon they were forced to have me.” There was a hint of a smile on his lips as his eyes met mine. I told him where the drinks machines were, and said I’d show him the way. We walked over to the dining hall, and I filled in the silence by telling him about St Tom’s. That, as a school, it was better than most, but it was still a school. And who to watch out for, and what you could get away with. I hoped he’d reciprocate by telling me stuff about him, but he didn’t for a while. We sat drinking cans of Coke in the dining hall while people gave us funny looks. They were thinking: Who’s he? Why is Anna Hanson making up to him? Is she that desperate? People are so nosy.

      But to be honest, I was nosy about this boy.

      “They call you Craig?” I asked.

      “No. Ritchie.”

      He looked awkward in his clothes. The sleeves of his jacket were too short and kept riding up over his threadbare cuffs.

      “Are you going to get a uniform?” I suggested.

      “No. I won’t be here that long.”

      “Because?”

      “School isn’t my thing.”

      “Me neither.”

      He shot me a quizzical look. I knew what he was thinking. I looked every bit the nice, typical, high-achieving schoolgirl. On the surface, you might even take me for a swot. My uniform is regulation. I don’t even hitch my skirt up because that is so sad – everybody does it. I don’t wear make-up and have my hair tied back. I do have my nose pierced but I can’t wear the stud in school.

      “So why are you here?” I asked him.

      Ritchie shrugged, then explained. “I stopped going to my old school last year – that was where I used to live. Then we moved. I was pissed off with school, I didn’t want to start all over again, but Wendy reckons education’s important. She got St Thomas’s to agree to have me if I turned up every day and did all the work. So I could take my GCSEs.”

      “Wendy?” I was puzzled.

      “Wendy. My mum.”

      “You call your mum by her first name?”

      Ritchie shrugged again.

      “But even then,” I said, babbling, “it’s really hard to get into St Tom’s. There’s a waiting list, cos this is a good school.”

      “Whatever,” Ritchie said. “But you haven’t met Wendy. She always gets her own way. When she has her mind set on something …”

      His voice trailed away. I sensed he didn’t want to talk about his mum and I wasn’t going to pry. I hated people who did that. So I changed the subject. “Do you know anyone here?”

      He shook his head. I reckoned he wouldn’t last long. I could see his eyes darting round the dining hall, casing the joint. Like a cat who’s out of his territory, trying to get his bearings as quickly as possible. When the bell went for the end of break he said he had to go to the library and do a maths test. I explained where the library was. He loped up the stairs, two at a time, and I watched him go.

      “Are you going out tonight?” my mum asked.

      “Yeah, later on,” I muttered, my eyes on the TV screen. Until I spoke those words, I hadn’t totally made up my mind to accept Karen’s invitation. Now I’d committed myself I felt mildly interested in my own decision. I wondered why I’d decided to go.

      I suppose one factor was that I just didn’t want to stay in on Saturday night. Even though Mum was a bit more cheerful today, the idea of just being glued to the sofa all night and staying up till two or three in the morning all by myself wasn’t the most appealing of prospects. Whatever happened in town would be better than that.

      But

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