Pray Before the Dawn

Chapter Seven

The next morning was the same as every other. Alison dropped her sons off at their respective schools, and by 8:45am Chris was stood outside school being taunted and repeatedly shoved into a wall and spat on by a few kids.

Jonny was staring from a distance. He watched as Chris struggled to walk into the school building, barely fighting back as a girl roughly pulled him back into a group of kids. She obviously enjoyed it as her friends took turns seeing who could slap and kick him the hardest.

"Oh, don't get involved in that," said Jessica, as she noticed Jonny watching the dramatics from afar. Jonny had met Jessica and her two friends Liam and Marcus yesterday, just as he had said bye to Chris, and they invited him to hang around with them. Jonny, too shy to say anything else, had said yes.

That break-time, Jonny was playing football with Jess, Liam, and Marcus. "So, why can't I go talk to him?" Jonny asked them. He now stood in the chill of the wind as they kicked a football around. However, he was more preoccupied by Chris who sat alone in the corner.

Chris was growing hungrier by the minute. He was already counting down to when he could go home. Any packed lunch or snack would always be stolen or thrown away, or sometimes poured over his head. He also refused to ever step foot in to the canteen for fear of what happened last time. Plus, he had a complex where he felt he just didn't deserve to eat. So of course, food occupied most of his thoughts during school hours. He sat there watching all of the other kids eating cereal bars and carrot sticks, and thought that if it weren't such a sin and if he weren't such a goody-two-shoes he would consider stealing from them. It was hard to navigate an eight-hour school day with only breakfast, and it would mean that Andrew was beaten at his own game. Still, Chris knew he was too much of a wimp to do anything wrong. Andrew knew this too, and he learned to use it to his advantage years ago.

"Because you can't, you just can't" Liam jumped into the conversation and spoke to Jonny as if it was some kind-of rule ingrained into the school's culture. As if it was glaringly obvious, he explained that hanging around with Chris meant loneliness, and this stuck to Jonny like tape on paper.

"Don't get involved. Come on, pass me the ball"

Jonny booted a football to Liam, who booted it to Jess, then Marcus who struggled to even control it under his foot. Arranged into a square, Liam started venting about his older brother taking his favourite VCRs to his friend's house and losing them. Surrounding them were tens of hundreds of teenagers. Conversations and the scampering of feed bounded them as the usual circular patches of dried dirt formed on his trousers where the football kept landing.

When Jonny next glanced away from the game, Chris was gone. Like a ghost, there was nothing there to let him know that he'd not imagined a lonely boy in the corner, holding his knees and quietly wishing the world would end before he had to face even another hour at school.

Jonny didn't think much of it. In fact, he scurried back towards the main school building with these three kids, said his goodbyes to Marcus and Jess, and sat with Liam in Geography. They had a football beside them and laughed over a few jokes cracked by Malcolm.

The rest of the month followed this pattern.

Liam soon started always saving Jonny a seat when he was running late (usually from trying to reclaim the football with Jaime, who occasionally played with them). At first, Liam would rush to class in order to get Jonny 'the best seats together', and Jonny found his eagerness to sit with him quite honouring. Soon, Liam felt confident enough that Jonny would sit with him given the chance, and the days where they strolled to maths laughing and joking without a care in the world were some that Jonny looked back on fondly when telling his friends from his old school about his new place.