One of my best memories at school was back in primary school, year four. The drains in the main school playground had clogged up in the night and poured down with rain, the lake-like basin slope to the ground filled with water and drowned the grass, reaching up to the top of the little tree we'd planted and affectionately named Gerbil.
The school hadn't apparently thought of this as warranting a day off, and we were all forced to trudge in with our boots and raincoats, trailing carefully around the newly crafted lake in the centre of the school grounds. But of course they'd had a little too much faith in our dedication to that path and we'd naturally ended up jumping into the water, filling our boots and chucking the water at each other.
The mud lifted up around our legs, soaked from head to toe, if you put your head in the water you wouldn't be able to see a thing.
The first time I put my head down under the brown blanket that reflected the heavy clouds in the sky, their movement disguised by the rippling in the water, as I headed toward the deeper centre of the ground, I saw a the shadow of figure suddenly drift into my murky view and in my shock I nearly inhaled and came up gasping, rubbing my eyes and nose, coughing.
The second time I dove under I opened my eyes just in time for some of the mud to clear, lowering back down to where I had disturbed it, and I saw the figure of another boy moving into a crouch, down in the very centre, the deepest point where there was no drain. Clouds of earth twisted up from the ground like upheavals of dust, and through the stinging of my eyes I floated and stared, seeing him sinking down toward the bottom, a scene that happened so quickly I witnessed in slow motion, how he was drowned out by the dark sediments rising over his head.
We'd played for only about twenty minutes before the teachers came out with the bell, red-faced and yelling. We'd been told off loudly while we were made to strip and towel down with the kitchen towels, and put on spare uniforms while ours were put into plastic bags to take home.
Unable or unwilling to teach us while they waited for our parents to get out of work to pick us up they pulled out the TV on a trolley and put on a movie, switched off the lights and closed the blinds.
The room was cold and we weren't really dry but no one complained so neither did I, just sat there shivering as I watched a video that compared the size of the earth to other planets, and then stars, and in my head, for whatever reason, I kept repeating the memory of the boy that was swallowed by that black shroud.
I'd been worried waiting for my mother to arrive, watching the other kids get picked up one by one, their parents upset with them, telling them off as they pulled them back to their cars, going through the back of the school where the car park was. I didn't want to see my mom look that way.
But she hadn't, she'd breezed on through without a care in the world, laughed at the way I looked and waited for me to accept her hand.
We left my clothes by accident but she didn't bother to turn back as we walked home, and when we got home she made chicken nuggets and gravy, the at the time, favourite meal of mine.
I hadn't thought about it much at the time, that it was a kind of day I would never get to experience again.
Because only two months after that, my mother would pass away, I would eventually move on into year five of Rosewood Primary school, the dynamic between myself and everyone else I knew would change. Before I knew it, dark clouds were rising up around me.
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It was ten minutes past eight by the time I made it downstairs, showered and dressed, and in the Brushwood household you had to be down by eight if you wanted to get any breakfast, because at ten past eight there were five minutes left at the table while they slowly cleared the empty dishes away, and then it was shoes on, and out the house by eight fifteen, to arrive at school by eight thirty, just fifteen minutes away by car, or thirty by bike, or more than an hour by foot.
I watched them through the opening from the living room you had to walk to, to get to the dining room, an open space connected to the kitchen. They sat at a traditional four seat wooden table sitting in the centre of the room, with a professional photo of all three of us, plus my dog Milk positioned next to Colby at the feet of the photographers light blue couch, printed on a large canvas next to the table on the wall opposing the door to the spandrel.
They made for a picturesque family, and anyone who saw them would have been impressed. Irene was fairly young, stress wrinkles peaking out around her eyes and mouth but otherwise aging gracefully, light hazel eyes, hair regularly dyed black about down just down past her shoulders, my father looking like any typical middle aged man, the stress of his job in charge of a team vetting large lump sum payments at Barkley & Colt Bank had wiped out most of the middle of his blond hair and he wore rimless glasses for his dark blue eyes, a large nose and thin lips, normal figure and his bespoke gold watch and silver cufflinks.
Lastly there was Colt, a mixture of the two, he lucked out on a large nose that somehow didn't obstruct his relatively good looks, blond hair and light blue eyes. That sounded like he only looked like our father, but really everything else reminded me of his mother. That said, while Colby was told he looked like my father by strangers, I, with my black hair and dark blue eyes, was so often told, as both a kid and a teen, that I looked just like Irene, that those aspects of my appearance began to irritate me.
I'd have died my hair a long time ago if I could have.
My school, though half run by lunatics flashing knives and rich bratty children whose nanny's ran after them with their completed school work, was strict on that sort of thing, our uniform extended past the stuffy ties and jackets we wore, but continued on to our shoes, our hair, and as said by our ever-miserable Headmaster Beckett, our decorum.
I approached the table, looking over the empty plates and back up to the canvas photo of us all, Milk looking fluffy and soft, trying to look past Colby at me. That was why he was my dog, out of all of us, he liked me most.
They noticed me when I reached in and grabbed my phone from the box. Taken and locked away every day at dinner, we were only allowed them back at breakfast.
"Hey." Colby greeted me.
I nodded and edged around the table, looking for something to eat, almost everything was gone.
"Come on Elliot," Irene looked at me, putting wiping her knife off onto the edge of her plate. "Breakfast is at seven forty, it's not that early, you should be able to manage that."
My father, a man called Ronald Brushwood, finished the last of his coffee. "At this point we know when we're supposed to leave by when you arrive."
Irene laughed and gestured for Colby to give her his plate. "Go on Colby, shoes on!"
I tried to reach for the last waffle left on the plate.
She noticed and took the bowl away. "No, no breakfast. You know there's no eating food in the car."
"But I'm hungry." I complained quietly, shoving my hands in my pockets. "I'll eat it before we get in."
"You have to get your coat and shoes on, you don't have time. Think of your brother, don't make Colby late!"
"I'll put it in my bag, eat it at school!" I told her as she was walking me to the door. Milk came running up and barked loudly just as I finished speaking and I immediately crouched down to greet and say goodbye to her large innocent eyes by petting her belly as she made a happy yipping noise.
"Either get in the car or you can eat your breakfast now and walk to school." She told me as she moved past me, grabbing her keys from the bowl above the shoe rack.
"I'll be late if I do that..." I mumbled, putting on my shoes and coat in the crowded entryway where the coat hooks and shoe rack were.
"Then maybe the teachers can persuade you to get up in time to eat."
I rolled my eyes as I trudged past her with Colby while she got her coat on, waiting for the sound of the car being unlocked before sitting inside.
Colby rubbed his eyes. "I'm so tired, I had to finish that essay for Turney and I worked super hard, like until two in the morning." He stretched and yawned.
"Poor boy..." Irene frowned, a little pride helpfully brightening up her eyes as she looked at him.
I was tired too, but I wasn't good at school and couldn't stand looking at my homework while I was at home. I'd just been unable to sleep, the moon shining through my curtainless bedroom, bright as any lamplight.
The car started.
"I'm dropping off Colby at the gate." She told me, looking at me through the rearview mirror, cold faded light hazel eyes making eye contact with mine.
I stared, then looked away for a moment. "Okay, letterbox?"
She nodded and began to reverse into the road.
I leaned my head against the window, watching the same houses, same trees and same park, pass us by as we drove.
And while nothing around me seemed out of place I still felt the weight of the backpack on my lap slowly become heavier the further we drove.
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The car pulled to a sharp halt outside the newsagents, a red circular post box directly outside it, a few paces away from a bus stop that serviced one bus that seemingly went in the wrong direction of everywhere.
I got out without a word, didn't loo back or say goodbye, stepped out onto the road and walked over to the pavement and she was already gone.
The school, Ulysses Secondary School, was round the corner and up the street from where I stepped out, and from there I began my slow trudge toward the modern concrete building that looked like one large grey brick had fallen on another.
Full of large modern windows, a staff elevator, a large lunch hall with admittedly pretty good lunches, and colourful corridors. It was just the kind of place to impress any new parents... but spend a day at the place and no amount of new computers or projectors could distract from how dull the place was.
I didn't bother walking quicker, it was okay if I was late. The point of dropping me off at the post box was to make sure my problems at school didn't end up affecting Colby by association, it would defeat the purpose to walk in at around the same time as him.
My stomach rumbled, I was really hungry, part of me considered turning back to spend the last of my pocket money on something from the convenience store, but the teachers already didn't like me and I didn't want to get yelled at so early in the morning, so instead I rubbed my eyes and sighed and continued walking.
Despite walking slowly I still saw Colby's back as he was heading through the main entrance to the school, a good way away from the actual school gate I was entering through.
He greeted a friend on his way inside, looked happy and worry-free.
I wished I was Colby, and I didn't, you know? In the same way you might want to be a hedgehog but you can't really imagine it well enough to make any deals with the devil for it.
He wasn't a bad kid, necessarily, but he was a bit thick in a confusing way, he got good grades but he was dense and didn't really consider other people, but he didn't mean anything bad by it. Other people just didn't exist as much for him. If someone was complimenting him while stabbing someone else he'd thank them with a smile. Just dense.
I really doubted he saw how much privilege he had over me in the house, even if he did he wouldn't care because that wasn't the way his brain worked.
When Irene came into his bedroom at seven to wake him up and they went down to have breakfast together, comfortable with my absence, without inviting me down, Colby didn't have the capacity to consider that there was something odd about that.
But I couldn't fully blame her for it, it was my fault really. When she'd first begun living with us, when I was eight or nine, and every morning, for a week, she'd gone up to wake me up in the morning, in sheer protest to her existence I'd pretended to sleep and continue sleeping, no matter what she did, if the cover was pulled off me, the pillows out from under me, if I was pulled off the bed, still I shut my eyes fast closed until she was well and truly gone.
She wasn't my mother, that's what I'd told myself, and I wouldn't let her pretend to be.
Nine years later she might have forgotten the week of rebellion against her but apparently the habit had stuck.
I reached the school entrance and headed inside. Peach walls were paired with a turquoise linoleum flooring, and the corridors were full of colourful posters, artwork and poems, but none of them belonged to me.
One of the poems, accompanied by a happy picture, was sat posted outside my form room.
I am a happy bee,
I buzz around the trees,
I never leave a trace,
I fill the empty space,
I am evidence of air,
When the breeze is not there,
During Spring hours,
Soon I pollinate the flowers,
My stinger like a splinter,
I'll pass before the winter.
I entered the classroom and speed walked to the furthest end of the room and sat down.
The desks and chairs were both plastic, with a matching light green table top and black legs. My desk was special, because every day I came in it had something new on it, this time it was a badly drawn image of people having sex on it in pencil.
I around the room against my better judgement.
Pierson's face easily caught my eye, the spiked brown hair and yellow puffer jacket still on, legs on the table in front of him, I saw him start laughing at me from the other end of the room the moment our eyes met, a couple of the girls around him giggling between each other, glancing at me, covering their mouths as they spoke between each other while still looking at me.
Either they'd done it together or he'd bragged, it wouldn't make a difference either way because the entire class was at some point involved in it. Two or three times a week I had something to look at on my table in the morning. Sometimes repetitive the table might have something like people fucking on it or a litany of insults carefully curated for myself, sometimes it was just used as a doodle sheet for various games, sometimes where they played hangman, and usually, in that case, the word to guess was 'E l l i o t' and a nice little arrow would then point from the name to the hung man.
I didn't get mad at this stuff anymore, but the low hum of humiliation trickled through instead as I hurried to try to clear it before the teacher arrived.
A little water from my bottle and and my jacket sleeve would have to do, or the sleeve of my backpack. It wiped away no problem, but sometimes I still saw the scratches on the table even after it was gone.
In the upper hand corner I could spot what no one else could, the small words written so roughly they'd just about been engraved. 'Elliot shits himself.'
Every day I rubbed at the words a bit, trying to get them to disappear, frustration biting at my ankles, no one else could probably see it without knowing exactly where to look. It was one of the reasons I didn't want to switch out my desk though, not that it would have helped me much, because they'd see, eventually, and I didn't want to see them laugh at it.
Apathy, it was what cut me down the most, not the kids that got a thrill from pushing me around, the ones that watched, the ones that sat around and casually continued talking.
Sometimes it felt like the only time I was there, really there, was when someone was making me into a joke in some kind of way. The rest of the time I was a ghost to these people.
I only felt a little better when I saw Victor enter the room, a slight smile on his lips directed toward me, and an attractive glint in his eyes, as he entered.
If he was in today maybe the day wouldn't be so bad after all...