putting his hand over his eyes. “It’s called having a vague interest in the storyline.” Then he puts his fingers briefly on the bridge of his nose and breathes out.
“But—” Alexa says, cheeks even redder.
“I can see my time here is well spent,” Mr Bott interrupts. “And on that encouraging note, I am going to go and collect some more textbooks from the staffroom. At least three members of this class appear to be reading Romeo and Juliet, hoping I won’t notice the difference.” He sweeps a look of total disdain round the classroom. “Entertain yourselves for five minutes. If you can.”
And then he leaves. Like a circus master who has just bashed an angry tiger on the nose and then locked it in a cage with his assistant.
I turn slowly to face Alexa, and somewhere in the distance – outside of the terrified buzzing that has just started in my head – I can hear the sound of thirty fifteen-year-olds sucking in their breath at the same time.
“Well,” Alexa says eventually, turning to look at me, and I swear she sort of growls. “I guess now it’s just you and me, Harriet.”
It’s always totally predictable, and always totally expected, yet the heroine is always shocked and surprised, as if it’s out of the blue. I’ve never understood that. I mean, how dense is she? Couldn’t she see it coming a mile off? Couldn’t she feel the gradual build-up of tension, like everyone else?
Now it all makes a little bit more sense. You don’t see things happening to you. Only when they’re happening to somebody else. Alexa’s passionate, inexplicable hatred for me has nowhere else to go. It has come to a big pulsing head and now it’s going to come bursting out.
I look at the door desperately. Should I try to escape? Or keep my head down and try to get through it? We’re at school. Just how bad could it be? And you know the scary bit? There’s still a part of me that’s about to correct her grammar. “You and I,” I’m tempted to reply. “Not you and me. Now it’s just you and I, Alexa.”
“Well,” Alexa says again and I can tell the whole class is still holding its breath. “Harriet Manners.”
I swallow and take one step towards my seat.
“Oh, no. No, no. You’re not going anywhere.” She grabs the back of my school jumper and pulls me to the front of the class. It’s not a violent tug; it’s gentle, almost like a mother trying to stop her child from walking across the road when a car is coming. I stop and stare at the floor, making myself as small as possible.
“Could you have made me look any more stupid?” Alexa asks, almost conversationally. “I mean, ostensibly? Did you actually use the word ostensibly?”
“It means ‘apparently’,” I explain in a whisper. “Or ‘supposedly’.”
Why didn’t I use ‘supposedly’?
This seems to make her even angrier. “I know what it means!” she shouts. “God, you really do think I’m thick, don’t you!”
“No,” I whisper.
“Yes, you do. You and your smart little comments and your crap little facts and your geeky little face.” She pulls that expression again: the one with the crossed eyes and protruding teeth. Which is really unfair: she knows I had my braces taken off years ago, and my left eye is only lazy when I’m tired. “You really think you’re better than everyone else, don’t you, Harriet Manners?”
“No,” I mumble again. The humiliated burn has spread to my neck and my ears and is creeping up my scalp. I can feel the entire class staring at me the way they stared at the monkey at the zoo with the red bottom. “I don’t.”
“I can’t hear you,” Alexa says more loudly. She walks closer – way past my personal space boundaries – and for a brief second I think she’s going to slap me. “I’ll rephrase. Do you think you’re better than everyone else, Harriet Manners?”
“No,” I say as loudly as I can.
“Yes, you do,” she hisses, getting even closer, and even in my shock I can’t believe the expression on her face: pure, almost shining, hatred. As if it’s burning on the inside of her and lighting her up like one of those little round candles with pictures of penguins on the outside. “You have no idea how much of a loser you really are.”
“That’s not true,” I whisper.
Because I totally do. I know exactly who I am. I’m Harriet Manners: A++ student, collector of semi-precious stones, builder of small and perfectly proportioned train sets, writer of lists, alphabetiser and genre-iser of books, user of made-up nouns, guardian of twenty-three woodlice under the rock at the bottom of her garden.
I’m Harriet Manners:
GEEK.
Alexa ignores me. “So I think it’s time we put it to the test,” she continues and then she looks around the room. I can feel my eyes filling up with water, but I’m totally frozen. Even my tongue feels numb. “Who in this room,” Alexa says slowly and loudly, “hates Harriet Manners? Put your hand up.”
I can’t really see anything because the whole room is wobbling.
“Toby,” Alexa adds. “Put your hand up or you’re going down the toilet every lunchtime for the next week.”
I close my eyes and two tears roll down my face. I think it’s really important that I don’t see this.
“Now open your eyes, geek,” Alexa says.
“No,” I say as firmly as I can.
“Open your eyes, geek.”
“No.”
“Open your eyes, geek. Or I will make this worse for you today, and tomorrow, and the day after that. And I will keep making it worse for you until you realise what you are and what you are not.”
So even though I know precisely what I am – and even though I’m not sure it’s even possible to make it worse – I open my eyes.
Every single hand in the classroom is up.
I wish she had just punched me.
And, with that final thought, I burst into tears, grab my satchel with GEEK written all over it and run out of the classroom.
