Verboten (Jalex)

Chapter 5

The bell rang its usual sharp trill, signifying the end of the last lesson. The hallways suddenly transformed from the silent, empty passages into a crowd of noisy, shouting teenagers, their footsteps thundering as they all scrambled for their freedom.

Jack held his wooden door open, absent-mindedly stroking his thumb along the solid, round handle of brass. He smiled and returned his students’ farewells as they passed, waiting for the last of them to clear out before winging the door shut with a firm clap of noise and muffling the sounds outside.

Jack started to re-arrange the desks back into their usual formation; they had been moved as his last class had been working on group projects. He swore as he saw the scattered scraps of paper that decorated his carpeted floor, and at the number of scissors and glues still left out on the wooden surfaces.

“Are you okay?” came Alex’s voice.

Jack whirled around, taken by surprise, his hand still clutching his messy quiff in frustration. “Alex! Sorry, didn’t hear you come in.”

“It’s fine, sir.” Alex shrugged it off nonchalantly and dropped his bag by Jack’s desk hesitantly. “You sounded angry…?”

“Yeah, no big deal,” Jack said, puffing out a large break of air. “Year Sevens don’t know what the words ‘tidy up’ mean, judging by this.”

Alex laughed as he surveyed the scene in front of him. “I’ll help,” he offered, kneeling down on one knee to collect paper.

Jack, momentarily dazed by the sight of Alex bent over in tight jeans, replied, “Yeah, thanks.”

Together, the work was quickly done, and only five minutes had passed when they started to slot the desks back together. “That’s the last time I’m letting them do a group project,” Jack commented ruefully.

“What was it on?” Alex questioned, pushing a desk against the wall neatly.

“Henry VIII,” Jack replied, “and his six wives. I gave each of the groups a wife and they had to make a poster about her. They got a little too excited at the prospect of cutting and sticking, as you can probably tell from his bomb-site.”

“I remember doing the Tudors,” Alex said conversationally. “We mostly did Elizabeth I, though.”

“We’re moving onto that soon,” Jack replied, chucking the last of the paper into the recycling bin.

“I wish I’d been at this school since Year Seven,” Alex said, with a slight hint of bitterness underlying his words.

Jack cleared his throat and began awkwardly, “Alex, Amy told me something…”

Alex tensed suddenly from where he was bending over to retrieve a pair of scissors. He straightened up and threw them into the plastic blue box. “Yeah?”

“She told me about how you were bullied at your last school…for being gay?” Jack bit his lower lip, worried how Alex would react.

The student sighed and clasped his hands behind his neck. “Yeah, I was…” he admitted.

Jack moved towards Alex slowly, touching his shoulder tentatively. “I don’t have any problem with homosexuality.”

Alex turned to face him, looking suddenly anxious. “I didn’t think you did, sorry if you thought that, I just-”

Jack cut off his babbling with a calm utterance of, “Alex, Alex, Alex.” When he stopped apologising and regarded his teacher with wary eyes, Jack sighed and continued, “You didn’t give off that impression at all, okay? That was the wrong way for me to say that – obviously, with your anxiety, you’re going to worry about offending people a lot. I just wanted to let you know, yeah? I’m always here to chat because, I mean, I went through the same thing when I was about your age.”