Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,139
six. But it’s only one night.”
“That’s all right for you to say. But you should be the one that’s in detention, not me. You got me into trouble. You deliberately—”
She sidled up to me. “Oh, come on, Jesse,” she said, threading her arm through mine. “That was great what you did, taking the blame for me. I only gave you the filter paper because Adolf would kill me if he’d caught me with it. I had detention with him five times last term. I wouldn’t put it past him to send a note home to my mam and dad. And then my life wouldn’t be worth living. You really kept me out of the shit there, Jesse.” She leaned into me and smiled.
I blinked back my tears. “You think so?” I asked, looking into her beaming face.
“Yeah,” she said, giving a decisive nod. “And you know I appreciate it, Jesse, I really do.” Then she tugged me forward, into the stream of students moving toward the school’s main doors. “Come on, I’m supposed to meet Greg by the school gates and I don’t want to be late.”
BY THE TIME I arrived at detention the next day, there was already a short queue outside the door, most of them boys who were always getting into trouble, and a smattering of girls who made a habit of wearing clothes that weren’t part of the regulation uniform or smoked in the bike sheds. While I wasn’t shocked to see any of these usual suspects, I was a little taken aback to see Malcolm Clements standing at the very end of the line. He looked me up and down as I took my place next to him and then looked away. I was surprised at how much his contempt stung me.
“All right, you horrible little wretches,” Mr. Matthews boomed, making me jump as he burst out of the chemistry lab. “Get inside. And anybody that breathes one single word without my permission during the next hour will find themselves in detention again tomorrow night. Am I making myself clear?”
A couple of minutes later we were sitting, heads bent over our exercise books, copying down the long series of indecipherable chemical formulas from the textbooks Mr. Matthews had handed out.
Time passed with excruciating slowness, expanded, it seemed, by a silence punctuated only by the scratch of pencils over paper, the turning of pages, and the hollow staccato of coughs. Eventually, five o’clock came around and we were released. Since I had half an hour before the bus arrived to take me home, I didn’t gallop away like almost all my fellow students. Instead, I ambled slowly along the corridor, breathing in the pungent smells of floor polish and disinfectant as I passed mop-wielding cleaning ladies.
As I made my way to the exit, I saw Malcolm walking in front of me. His satchel was unbuckled and bounced against his hips, and as he turned the corner of the corridor its flap flew wide and something fell from it and fluttered to the floor. When I reached the corner, I bent down to pick it up. It was several pieces of paper folded together, covered in tight paragraphs of tiny, scrawled writing. Without thinking, I picked up my pace.
“Malcolm,” I called.
He spun around. “What do you want?”
I waved the papers at him. “You dropped this.”
“Oh.” He took it from me. “Thanks.”
Without knowing why, I realized that I wanted to keep him there. “It’s probably not important,” I said, “but I thought … I thought … Well, you never know what someone has written on those little bits of paper. I write things all the time and I, well … I just thought you might need it, that’s all.”
Malcolm looked at me steadily, as if he were trying to solve a puzzle in my face. Then he let his lips ease into a slight smile. “Actually, those are my notes for the history essay I have to write tonight. I spent ages writing these. I’d be sort of lost without them. So, really, thanks a lot.” He put them back into his satchel.
“I’m glad you didn’t lose them,” I said as he buckled up the flap. Then, not knowing what else to say, I turned to make my way to the school’s main doors. I was surprised, though, when Malcolm matched my pace to walk beside me. I was also surprised and rather pleased when he seemed to want to make conversation.