Non Pratt - Trouble

“…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.”

Katie is horrified. The colour’s drained from her face.

“Is this true?” Mrs English is looking at Katie for an answer but it’s the person behind her who speaks up.

“It is. She asked to borrow my laptop — I didn’t realize she was going to use it for this.” Marcy doesn’t even deign to acknowledge Katie as she speaks.

I watch Marcy turn, the way I knew she would. Katie used to be her boyfriend’s best mate’s girlfriend. Now she’s worth no more to Marcy than I was — now she’s fair game for Marcy’s preferred brand of humiliation.

Katie gambled everything on this — and lost.

Serves her right.

I owe Anj and Gideon an explanation. It’s very hard, telling them, explaining what happened when Neville died — how Hannah saved me. I tell them what I told her, joining up the dots that Katie’s little PowerPoint presentation had set out. Anj is hurt, but she listens and, when I finish, she hugs me just as hard as Gideon. They tell me that they understand how hard it must be and that they’re here for me, that I’m their friend.

Neville, Hannah, Gideon, Anj… I can’t believe I deserve them, but I’m grateful nonetheless. So grateful it hurts.

My antenatal classes are crammed into a bank holiday weekend that should have been spent in the garden trying to force extra facts into my brain before the exams start. Now I’ve got something else to revise for. Hurrah.

Yesterday I sat through four hours of questions about baby prep that we should all totally have figured out by now, but the midwife running the class felt we needed to go over. She wasn’t wrong — half the people in there make me look organized. I can only assume their older brains are worse affected by all the pregnancy hormones. And they had so many questions. Dear God, it was like they thought we had all day. Don’t they know that when it comes to revision lessons, the faster you let the teacher tell you stuff, the more likely you are to get out early? Don’t they have better things to do with their weekends than sit in a room that’s all windows, melting in the heat as the midwife answers yet another question about the first stage of labour. THE FIRST STAGE. We didn’t even get to the second — the important bit — before the end of the session.

That’s what we’ll be talking about today. Giving birth.