Consequences of Flirting (Teacher x Student)

Chapter 14 - Believe You

"And if I believe you,
will that make it stop?"

- The 1975
If I Believe You

Rocks ricocheted off the walls like bullets as I threw them halfheartedly. I was perched - more like squashed - in a narrow gap between two more or less abandoned buildings. They used to be used as extra classrooms for the lessons the school didn't deem important enough for the main building. New areas were allocated after an unavoidable number of complaints from the teachers who, for some reason, cared about the location of their classrooms, probably due to the lack of aesthetic value rather than the quality of learning. I mean, to be fair, the buildings were just about finding the strength to keep standing - similar to most of the schools occupants.

This place was usually inhabited by the few addicts who couldn't wait 5 minutes for their next fix, but today it was empty, allowing my mental breakdown to take place in private. Well, I say mental breakdown - I still didn't feel anything.

I picked another stone at random, hesitating for a moment before lobbing it towards the bricks. A thought, fleeting but important nonetheless, lodged itself in my mind. Could the rocks feel the impact? After pondering on this for a moment, I allowed the object in question to drop to the ground. Another question; could the earth feel my weight? Could the grass feel anything as it was mercilessly shredded by hundreds of bored hands belonging to hundreds of bored people? Or were these inanimate objects just like me?

I categorised this sudden contemplation as 'probably a result of the lingering scent of weed' and pulled my knees up to my chest.

Had I always felt like this - or not felt anything at all in this case? I couldn't have. I'd felt so many emotions recently; why didn't I feel any now? I was supposed to be devastated, but I just wasn't. I couldn't even force myself to be angry, as if that was a foreign concept to my body.

When I was young, first year of school young, my class were asked to draw our family. We all set out on this seemingly simple task, creating amalgamations of our relatives with unnaturally long arms protruding from unnaturally long faces. My drawing was a self-proclaimed work of art - Picasso would have been proud. It displayed my mum and myself, positioned on separate sides of the provided box.

One of the helpers peered over my shoulder. "Is that where your dads going to go?" she asked, directing my attention to the abnormally large gap between the characters.

I shrugged, "I don't have a dad."

She immediately began rubbing my back sympathetically, offering apologies I didn't fully understand. That's what people did when you were crying - why was she doing it to me? I wasn't crying. Should I have been crying? I wasn't upset. I didn't understand.

When she finally left, I took to colouring my picture, ignoring the sudden uncharacteristic turn of events and focusing on pressing the pencil far too hard into the paper.

A few years later, nearing the end of primary school, I met him. He and several other children joined us after their school closed; he used to ramble about his previous crappy excuses for teachers constantly. And I listened intently, because I found myself wanting to. He 'took me under his wing', aka enjoyed the undivided attention I provided and allowed me to stick around. He was one of the new kids, he knew the deal. They were the most interesting thing to happen to our school in several decades; they were practically the holy grails of the playground. This kid could have been friends with whoever the hell he wanted, but he chose the loser in the corner, probably to boost his public image as if I was some sort of charity case rather than an antisocial 9 year old.