I WAS JUST TRYING TO BE FUNNY | ✓

▬ 04: but you wouldn't get that

               Sufsdale is shrouded in clouds, and though it's not raining, water clings to the air so that by the time I reach the school's paved forecourt, my clothes and hair are vaguely damp. It'll cling to me until Zuhr like a shiver that never comes.

I shove my bike into the shelter littered with crude vandalism and one reprieve of a Totally Spies sticker. As I unravel the chain from the handlebars to padlock it around the skeleton, I scowl at the letters bolted to the front wall: North Chapel Independent Secondary School and Sixth Form College. More like a circle of Hell they forgot to include in scripture.

I keep my eyes on the taupe linoleum floor even as everyone else's glue onto me. My stomach knots. Maybe the lavender braids weren't such an intelligent choice for half-hearted teenage rebellion. To pretend I'm too busy and cool to notice people staring, I dig out my cell to text Iya.

'Nice hair, Leech.'

Tristan rips the Nokia from my fingers when I'm three words in and tosses it to the opposite side of the corridor. The battery pops out and propels several meters away.

'Everyone knows you're bent. No need to advertise it anymore.'

Unbothered to look higher, I watch the shined heels of his and Lysander's shoes as they pass me, then pick up my cell, the back cover, and the battery, stuffing the fragments into my pocket.

I'm not even gay. I've been attracted to people who aren't men. Not that Tristan would care.

Perhaps it's more honest to say I've never been attracted to anyone I've known in real life, and how could I possibly be gay if boys too are so terrifying I don't dare to play with the thought of acquaintance?

Revisal: I've been attracted to people who are men and who aren't men when they exist in books or the telly. I can demand to understand characters to their core because they don't have the sentience to hurl my perception off its tracks and rip back the curtain that'll prove me a fraud, they can't resist the version I've nourished in my head. No extraneous variables. It's easy, comfortable.

As far as I'm aware, there's only one other queer person in our year, David Sheffiled, who came out before GCSEs. There's not even a performative sense of solidarity between us.

Unlike David, I never got the privilege of coming out. It was done for me as soon as my peers were old enough to recycle terms they heard from their parents or the radio, pelleting them at me until they battered through my skin and rooted colonial settlements in my body which spread propaganda with toxic fumes that eventually rose to my brain.

Though I've healed most of my mind, a spot still remains in the periphery, like a bloodstain on white cotton that won't come out because I made the mistake of scrubbing it under hot water instead of cold. I think it'll be there for the rest of my life, benign, but out of reach for surgical tools.

The classmates I share form time with are split into two clusters as they wait outside the room, neither of which I join, though my gaze finds Lysander and Tristan on instinct. Miles isn't here yet; the bus from East Trough only arrives with a few minutes to spare.

I've barely had the thought when the clicking of zipper pull-tabs against the sliders prefaces his arrival and he turns the corner, fingers already coiled in the knot of his green tie to loosen it.

Miles's college in Leeds didn't require a uniform and regressing into it has transfigured every seam into sandpaper and the buttons to beggar's lice hitchhiking in the knit of a jumper. His fingers are incessantly tugging at it. At home, he's always dressed in athletic wear, as if he might, at any moment, get the impulse to go on a run and doesn't want to be thwarted by the need to change clothes.