hard asphalt of the playground outside.
Malcolm shuddered to a halt, staring, open-mouthed, through the window as the book made its hopeless trajectory. “What the hell did you do that for?”
Tracey grinned. “Because I felt like it, you little poofter.”
“God, you really are a bloody cow, Tracey Grasby,” Malcolm said, his voice cracked and hollow. Then he turned away from her and began walking back toward me. He marched, his shoulders hunched, his face folded in defeated fury, so that his eyes seemed nothing more than flickering lashes and his lips were compressed into a hard, flat line.
I knew that look. It was the one I had worn so many times myself. I also knew the helpless anger and humiliation that Malcolm carried, the way he must be struggling to hold back tears. I glanced at Tracey, her eyes wide and shimmering, her smile a crescent of satisfaction across her face. I had seen that look, too—on the faces of the girls and boys who had taunted me, their pleasure rising like heat as my hope plummeted as fast and inevitably as Malcolm’s book had fallen and hit the ground.
“What the hell are you doing hanging around with her?” Malcolm demanded when he reached me.
I pictured his battered caravan. I saw myself standing beside it on a crumbling cliff edge, where the soft boulder clay of the East Yorkshire coast cascaded down to the sea. I could stay in place, on safe ground with Tracey, or I could step toward Malcolm, to the very edge of that cliff, and risk tumbling into the relentless waves. It was a choice that was easy to make.
“Tracey’s my best friend,” I said, folding my arms across my chest and looking into his eyes.
I saw him flinch, step back. Then he looked me up and down, as if he was conducting a quick reassessment of me. When he was done, he let out a disgusted snort. “I thought you had more sense than that,” he said before he turned away and continued his march down the corridor and through the door of the main entrance.
For a moment, I felt a pang of regret as I watched him stride onto the playground to retrieve his book. I had an odd sense of having lost something, and it wasn’t just Malcolm; it was something intangible, something inside myself. But then Tracey strolled back to me and placed her arm across my shoulder.
“Hah, that showed him, didn’t it?” she said. “Good job, Jesse.” She leaned into me, and any sense of loss was gone. “I can’t bloody well stand him. Such a little homo,” she said. “And such a bloody know-it-all. Always has his head in some stupid book. I never knew he lived in a bloody caravan on the edge of a cliff, though. I bet he has fleas as well as being queer. You want to watch it, Jesse—you were standing a bit too close to him. Maybe you’ve caught something.” She jumped away from me, a look of mock horror on her face. “Hey, maybe we’ll have to have you fumigated.” She let out a sharp laugh.
“You think so?” I asked, making a performance of scratching my head, my arm, my stomach, and, as Tracey started giggling, my buttocks.
“You’re funny, Jesse.”
“But not half as funny as Malcolm Clements,” I said, making my voice high. “Funny peculiar, that is.” In an exaggerated imitation of Malcolm, I took a limp-wristed slap at the air.
Tracey sputtered and folded forward, wrapping her arms around her stomach and laughing helplessly. And although I couldn’t quite find it in myself to laugh along with her, I watched her, smiling, buoyantly happy that I was with her, on firm ground.
OUR FIRST LESSON OF the day was history, and the teacher, Miss Nutall, spent the lesson lecturing us about the triumph of William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings. History was followed by maths, taught by a tall man named Mr. Whitman, who simply wrote a series of problems on the blackboard, told us to solve them, and then sat at the front of the classroom, his feet up on his desk, perusing a magazine with a racing car on its cover. While history had been painfully boring, I quite enjoyed this lesson, since my ability to solve all the problems without much difficulty seemed to greatly endear me to Tracey and the Debbies. “I told you she was a brainbox,” Tracey said, addressing her three friends as they passed my exercise