High School Aroha

Chapter 1

Summer in New Zealand is brutal with thirty degrees celsius plus not being anything to raise eyebrows at, and nowhere else in the world did Ben Dillon think existed where the heat was more brutal than inside a New Zealand school class room during the first term of school.

Even though the summer holidays had since passed the stifling summer heat still clung to the March atmosphere. All the windows in Ben's maths class were flung wide open in an attempt to attract the non-existent breeze in the scorching heat of the afternoon, and  the door was propped open with a spare desk chair trying to invite the cool air from the corridors in. None of these futile attempts by the maths teacher was working and as the afternoon progressed the sun shining in through the large glass windows  made the room became more like a glasshouse with the students ripening like tomatoes inside it.

The classroom was silent, everyone drowsy from the heat, with the occasional scratch of a pencil on paper, flick of a page turning, tap of calculator keys and a sharp intake of breath followed by a heavy sigh from one of the fed up twenty five other members of his class. Nobody felt inclined to do work on a day like this, but at the same time nobody wanted to talk to each other either. The heat did that to all of them Ben included, sapping the energy from the room leaving an exhausted silence.

Sweat dripped slowly down everyone's faces as they perspired, turning some people crimson as the light magnified by the windows burned into them. Girls mascara ran and foundation cracked and smeared as the sweat trickled down from their foreheads and the acne on the boys faced seemed to become more pronounced. The navy curtains made of heavy fabric, designed to keep the heat in in winter, had been pulled over some windows in an attempt to block the sun's attack, but to no avail as the sun found a way to snake its burning fingers through the gaps and roast everyone in the room.

Even the summer uniform of navy polo shirt, beige shorts that looked more on the lines of starched stiff stubbies with a little more length for the boys, and a white short sleeve blouse with a dark blue and black tartan skirt up to the knee for the girls wasn't enough to keep everyone cool. If it was acceptable Ben would have taken his polo shirt off and sat shirtless the late summer heat just like he would at the beach, but he knew it would just attract unwanted attention from the teacher currently on his laptop at the back of the class. It was during New Zeland days like this one that being in a classroom with no working air conditioner was not for the faint hearted.

Some students had already surrendered to the heat and were pretending to work while they snuck their phones out from their pockets and hid them amongst their open pencil cases, in the folds of their skirts underneath or in books and bent their heads over so that at a glance they appeared to be studying their open text book instead of  their social media apps.

The only person doing neither of these things was a extremely beautiful blonde haired girl sitting at the desk next to the wall to his right. The desks were arranged into pairs in columns down the room and he had been paired with her, arguably the smartest girl in his year at maths and the hottest girl in the entire school, in an attempt by the ever frustrated maths department to get his failing maths grades up. Ben was secretly thrilled at this, even though he would not let on to anyone. It wasn't just the heat of the classroom that was making his heart pound. Just the sight of her could send him wild and make him tongue tied. Such a perfect opportunity to get to know her, but when ever he tried to talk to her his throat swelled up and he couldn't get any words out so for the past three weeks since term one began. He had been sitting silently like stone trying to get his tounge untied. She worked steadily, the heat not seeming to affect her at all. Her phone had not moved from her school bag under the desk and she hadn't looked up apart from a quick greeting when he sat next to her at the beginning of class which he failed to return apart from a nod of his head.