The hair
by Zella Compton
Chapter one
Here are the six worst things about being a kid.
One. Finding a hair in your armpits.
Two. Someone else seeing the hair in your armpit and telling everyone.
Three. Grown-ups telling you what to do.
Four. Grown-ups not believing you.
Five. Being told ‘when I was your age’.
Six. Finding out that your best friend is dead.
The first, number one, is what happened the day that God spoke to me in the upper school’s boys’ toilets. Swiftly followed by numbers two, three and four combined. Being bossed around and not believed by a parent.
So Danny, who I have been going to the same school as, in the same year as, in the same class as, for the last six years, saw me getting changed. I pulled my T-shirt over my head, sweating a bit from gym (lots of flinging bean bags most of which hit me), when he saw the hair. He must have been peering so intently, so closely that his nose could have tickled me; I’m surprised he didn’t keel over from the smell because, even though Mum yells at me to use deodorant every day, I sometimes choose not to hear.
Everyone heard Danny’s roar. The children in 3B looked up from their desks in horror, 4C stopped creating, yellow paint dripping from poised but unfocused brushes, the whole six form, both classes, quit reciting French and turned to find the source of the noise. My year, that’ll be five, my class, just looked, frozen as gazelle before the lion, then they turned into vultures and started pecking at the remains of my pride.
Which is when I ran to the toilets. I crouched in the left cubicle. No one uses the right, on account of the window being jammed open a bit and getting drips of water on you when it rains. When you come out everyone knows you were in there pooing by the fact you have one wet shoulder.
My fingers were trembling, shakily doing up the buttons on my shirt. I could hear the howling, jeering and racket outside even though my ears were burning so hard you’d think they would go up in flames. I needed to pee, but instead I crouched my body against the cubicle door and hoped the world would go away.
Which is when God spoke to me. Well, not to me really. I’m not that important. He just spoke, voice up from the pan beneath me, swirling through the mess that 90 boys make in a day. I knew it was him, because he was ethereal (which means heavenly or celestial), a mysterious, far off voice.
He didn’t tell me that he was God, not that day or about my history teacher being the devil, and to be honest, I couldn’t understand much of what he was saying. It was a monologue, which means he was just talking to himself, and I know this because we’ve been learning about monologues in English. And I had ethereal in my spelling test last week.
There was lots in God’s monologue about having to do everything, all the time, and didn’t he deserve a break? I suppose he must have bad days like the rest of us. This was a really bad day for me.
After the bell rang for my next class I crept out of my toilet and went to history. It was much the same, old people going on quests, and setting tasks and overcoming obstacles. I did not want to look at anyone else, and no one wanted to look at me, being as I have a hair in my armpit and all, so we were all sitting there with our heads down until Danny flicked a spitball at me. I knew it was him because it was green and it’s only Danny who chews paper, rounding it in his mouth, before sticking it up his nose for a bogey coating.
