The Quiet Kind

Red: Chapter 1

I have one friend now, my step-sister Rachel. Throughout the summer, we watched films, ate Doritos, and occasionally spoke. She cries a lot now her boyfriend left her.

Today's film was Notting Hill. We were at the point where Anna Scott stands in front of William Thacker and asks him to love her.

'Rachel, if she loved him, why was she with that other guy?' I asked.

'I said no questions Red.'

'Does she love him?'

'It doesn't exist.'

Susan, Rachel's mother, told me that Rachel is heartbroken because her older boyfriend broke up with her for another girl. I asked why he did that. Susan replied that it was because 'boys are arseholes'. I asked if I was an arsehole. She said no because I wasn't like normal boys. Often my father, Darren, told Susan not to say words like 'arsehole' in front of me. Now she only saying them when he isn't around.

I just wish I was considered normal, but not in an arsehole kind of way.

That evening I took a stroll through the countryside, it reminded me a bit like home. I sat on top of a hill and watched the sunset, it's innocent beauty, bleeding yellows and reds across the sky, making everything around it seem much purer, brighter even. It was the kind of morning that I would wake up for and want to be outside, submerged in the beauty. It was one of those perfect kinds of mornings where the world seemed a little bit smaller, quieter.

I walked to school with Rachel, after refusing to accept Susan's offer of a lift.

Rachel saw her ex David in the school carpark. He was chatting to another girl. I asked if she was okay. Rachel told me to shut up.

My first experience of school was pretty abysmal, a word I learnt in science class today, not because Mr. Marshall taught it to us, but because I overheard someone loudly using it to describe his teaching. Rachel wished me good luck and Rachel explained how to get to the reception before being beckoned over by her friends. I hoped her apparent popularity made her feel a bit better, and made her stop loving David a bit less.

As I walked through the school doors for the very first time I was met with a surge of life and white noise. People rushed past me like schools of fish, leaving me unnoticed. I mean, who was I kidding? I couldn't blame them for not stopping to look at an average height lanky, asian boy with a screwed-up piece of paper trembling in his hand, staying as close to the walls as possible so I didn't get in the way.

I wanted to run. That was human instinct right? Fight or flight and all that. Instead, I smiled as I had planned so that I could try to fight the monopoly of anxiety that grew deep within my stomach. I was lost. My head was spinning as the other students' hawk eyes occasionally locked onto me, judging me. I wanted to run. I wanted to go home. Logistically, I knew that would be hard. Home was about 400 miles away. But I would walk it if I knew my mother was there waiting for me at the end of it all. And given I was lost in a fairly straight school corridor, I highly doubted that I could find my way back home.

Instead, I tapped a boy on the shoulder as he rushed past me.

"Excuse me," I said. He looked down at me but did not say anything. "Do you know where the reception is?"

"What?" He muttered and pulled an earphone from his ear.

"The reception?" I muttered again but tried to be louder this time. My voice choked on a lump which had formed in my throat, making it croaking and nearly incomprehensible. Without a hint of emotion on his face, he nodded to the room at the end of the corridor above which read 'Reception.'