School's Out - by Adam Farrer

School's Out Part #4

David saw the chair coming and blocked it with casual ease. School chairs, I realised, were not designed for swinging and I was not designed to swing them. When it came to issuing violence, I was every inch a flower arranger.

"Adam!" my teacher barked. "Go and stand in the corridor!"

I protested.

"I'm not interested," she said. "I will not have that kind of behaviour in my classroom."

I stood there, a failure. David grinned. Everyone grinned. I pursed my lips and flounced out of the classroom. Outraged. Indignant. But from a visual standpoint, everything that David said I was.

The next day I was moved to a desk at the back of the classroom to sit on my own, away from David and his friends. But still within reach of the balled up scraps of paper they regularly threw at the side of my head. After a while I stopped opening them up to read the messages within, already sick of seeing the word queer written with angry force.

*****

I moved on from David, scanning across the rows of faces. Trying to find another specific person. Each set of features I encountered along the way carried their own potted history. Some I associated only with the tragedy that befell them.

I saw Andrea, who slit her wrists and was not found in time.

Eventually I found the face I'd been looking for. Dan. The boy I had wronged. His broad, cat-like face tilted back slightly. His eyes rolled to the heavens.

Dan was different and this being high school, he paid for it. He was mocked and pointed at. For being the school's only vegan. For always wearing a single, tattered BMX glove and a Parka in all weathers. For the way he ran with his legs half bent, as if peddling an invisible bicycle.

He took to eating his lunch alone in the corner of the playing fields. The farthest possible point from the school. Outed and marginalised, I recognised a fellow outsider and began joining him, quickly learning that we shared a mutual love of Prince.

We began trading albums, but where I would just copy them onto a C90 and leave the rest of the tape blank, Dan would fill the excess. With conversational chat. Book reviews. A story read verbatim from the pages of Razzle magazine. Inevitably, I guess, he became bold.

Prince's "Dirty Mind" album is only 30 minutes long and this gave Dan 15 minutes of time to kill. He began with a lecture, adopting the persona of a character he named Sigmund Foond, who spoke in a sozzled, plummy drawl. Over ten minutes he issued a freeform lecture about the sexual qualities of three girls in our class; Vicky, Clare and Gaynor.

"Men have died for these women," he said. "Cities have crumbled. Civilisations have fallen."

He described their curves. Their skin. The elegant fall of their hair. And how history had been dominated by the male desire for their forms. With every passing minute, every new mention of "breasts" his breathing grew heavier. Until suddenly, suspiciously, he became calm.

"As I lay here," he said, sighing gently. "Feeling my suit. Licking my tie. I believe I have reached nirvana."

There was a dull click as the tape was paused then unpaused, and that was when Dan began to sing. Clapping time with a rhythmic, whipping beat. It was primal. Filthy. His musical tribute to the three girls he adored.