Five minutes to three. My eyes have been glued to the clock for the past hour, and finally it’s only five minutes to three. I glance at the girl who’s sat beside me. Her eyes are cast down, gazing unseeingly onto the desk. I look down too, scanning the heavily graffitied desk for Cheryl’s sloping, curling handwriting. I wondered if she’d ever written on that desk, scrawling some now long-forgotten ex-boyfriend’s name onto the wood. The same handwriting that I’d watched her bruised hand form, clutching at a leaking biro and stab the paper almost angrily, ink bleeding out of the nib. The way she wrote her name was like an art form. A tall, sloping ‘C’, dwarfing all the other letters as it curls across the page. Confident. Beautiful.
The overhead projector has a fan that makes a faint humming noise, vaguely annoying but somehow comforting too. The windows are closed, and the room feels stifling. I can almost feel Cheryl’s body heat beside me, and as I breathe I can taste her scent on my tongue. Cheap cigarettes and something lighter, not even attempting to mask the smell of tobacco. I try to concentrate on what the teacher is telling us, but instead I find myself flicking through the book on the desk in front of me. It opens on a page where someone has scrawled “James is a dikhed” in blue felt-tip along the top of the page. I scan my eyes along a random line.
‘And so do I. I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water and altered the colour of my mind’
I put the book down on the desk and glance for the first time at the cover of the book, and then to the girl who is sitting beside me. She hasn’t said a word to me all day, and either she’s deliberately avoiding my gaze or she’s engrossed in the book. Her oily black pupils zip backwards and forwards, devouring the words on the page so fast it makes my own eyes hurt just watching them. I blink and look away.
Now I watch the second hand closely, squinting my eyes as it moves closer to the number twelve. I hold my breath. Three seconds, two seconds...
And when the bell goes the room erupts, bags are packed, screwed up work is thrown across the room. The classroom is filled with noise and scraping chairs, laughter and shrill cries. And Cheryl is gone like a sprinter from the blocks, in a flash of skin tight white shirt and chocolate coloured hair.
I pack my books into my school bag slowly, aware that the classroom was steadily emptying around me. I could hear a football being kicked along the corridor outside, bouncing from the wall to the sticky laminated floor.
“Kimberley?” I stuff the last of my books into my bag and turn around to face my teacher. I smile half-heartedly, the corners of my mouth only raising for a fraction of a second.
“Yeah miss?” I ask. I’m suddenly terribly aware that my accent is already steadily creeping its way up north, I shape the words slightly differently to how I did at home. I can even see my friend’s laughing faces swimming in front of my eyes. They’d laugh with me. They’d say I was fitting in fine.
“How did you find your first day?” the teacher asks. She looks concerned in a patronising kind of way. I shrug, just like all the other kids, nonchalant-but-almost-aggressively.
“Alright” I mumble. I can feel the teacher’s eyes skimming over my face. I look away.
“Kimberley-”
“Look, I’ve got to go, okay? My little sister-” It was a lie of cause, just a tiny lie, my mum would never trust me to pick Amy up from school, not in a million years. But it’s worked, she believes it and now I’m already moving towards the door and the deserted corridor beyond. The teacher clears her throat, but I’m sliding though the maze of upturned chairs and wobbly tables and out through the classroom door without a backwards glance. Behind me I hear her sigh through her nostrils. I walk faster, the laminated floor squeaking under the rubber soles of my converses. I can see the huge double doors looming up in front of me now, and I speed up even more, almost running as I pull them wide open.
