noticed and punished.
They called me out. They picked on me for the way I dressed, because I didn’t talk. And then they stoned me with chalk dusters.
I begged my parents to let me change schools – one for misfits or deaf and dumb students would be perfect. I came up with every excuse in the book to stay home. I stopped studying. In class I spent my time counting the minutes left before I could get out of that jail.
One morning I was at home with a fake headache and I saw a documentary on television about insects that mimic other insects.
Somewhere, in the tropics, lives a fly that imitates wasps. He has four wings, just like the other flies, but he keeps them one on top of the other, so that they look like two. He has a black and yellow striped belly, antennae and bulbous eyes and even a fake stinger. He can’t hurt you, he’s a nice insect, but dressed up as a wasp, the birds, the lizards, even human beings fear him. He can mosey into a wasp nest, one of the most dangerous and well-protected places in the world, and go unrecognised.
I had been going about it the wrong way.
Here’s what I had to do.
Imitate the dangerous ones.
I wore the same things the others wore. Adidas trainers, jeans with holes in them, a black hoodie. I messed up the parting in my hair and let it grow long. I even wanted to get my ear pierced but my mother forbade me. To make up for it, for Christmas, my parents gave me a scooter. The most popular one.
I walked like them, with my legs wide apart. I threw my backpack on the ground and kicked it around.
I mimicked them discreetly. There’s a fine line between imitation and caricature.
During the lessons I sat at my desk pretending to listen – but in actual fact I was thinking about my own stuff, making up science-fiction stories. I even went to PE classes. I laughed at the others’ jokes, I played stupid tricks on the girls. A couple of times I even answered back to the teachers. And I handed in a class test without answering a single question.
The fly had managed to trick them all, integrating perfectly with the waspian society. They thought I was one of them. That I was all right.
When I got home I told my parents that at school everyone said I was cool, and I made up funny stories about things that had happened to me.
But the longer I put on this show, the more different I felt. The chasm that separated me from the others grew deeper. On my own I was happy, with the others I always had to pretend.
Sometimes this scared me. Would I have to imitate them for the rest of my life?
It was like the fly was inside me, telling me how things really were. It told me that it only took a second for friends to forget about you, that girls are mean and they make fun of you, that the world outside your house is filled with competition, violence and suffocation.
One night I had a nightmare and I woke up screaming. I discovered that my T-shirt and jeans were my skin and my trainers were my feet. My jacket was as hard as an exoskeleton, and under it wriggled one hundred insect feet.
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