Page 31 of From Now On

‘Duke?’ Miss Greenly smiles warmly.

He stands slowly, feeling slightly sick as he picks his way to the front, head down, his mind humming ‘All The Things You Are’ to block out the other kids.

‘Don’t rush, we have all day,’ that boy, Jayden’s mean voice cuts through the song. A wave of laughter crashes over him. Duke picks up his pace and is almost, almost there when Jayden sticks out his foot. Duke trips. For a few seconds he is suspended in mid-air and he feels like a superhero and wishes he has the power of invisibility. Then he crashes to the floor, hears the crunch of his nose and feels the warmth of the blood, and he thinks at least now he’ll be able to go home. Then he remembers he doesn’t really have a home anymore and there, sprawled on the floor in front of thirty strangers, he begins to cry.

It is lunchtime. Duke has spent the entire morning with the school nurse. She has cleaned the blood from his face, held an icepack to his nose, and although she hadn’t sent him back to class, she hadn’t sent him home either. She’s brought him to the cafeteria and just… left him here. It’s noisy, full. Long grey tables with benches stripe the hall in straight rows like someone has measured them with a ruler to space them evenly, the way Duke had carefully calculated the distance between the furrows he would dig with his trowel in his vegetable patch before he planted his seedlings.He has been somewhere like this once before, a day trip to the zoo where he’d been given a red balloon that tugged against its string and had his face painted like a tiger. He remembers how he’d growled and acted fierce and he tries to replicate this now as he stalks over to the table, eyes swivelling from left to right seeking out danger but danger is everywhere he looks.

He isn’t sure where he’s supposed to sit, so he slides onto the nearest empty bench and opens his lunchbox. Wrapped in clingfilm is a sandwich. He unwraps it and separates the pieces of bread, pulling a face when he sees a pink slab of ham atop of a thick spread of butter.

Gross.

Aunt Violet feeds him meat almost every meal despite him telling her that he’s a vegetarian, that Mum was a vegetarian.

He never eats it.

Whatever, he isn’t hungry anyway. His nose is still throbbing.

There is also a yoghurt, strawberry, which is okay, and an apple.

‘Duke, isn’t it?’ It’s that boy who tripped him up, Jayden, with his two friends. ‘I think we got off to a bad start. This is Luke and Brandon.’ He gestures to two boys but Duke doesn’t grasp who is who. They look identical with their soft pudgy faces and hard stares. They plonk themselves down on the opposite bench and the bench Duke is sitting on lifts. Wouldn’t it be cool if he was catapulted into space and never has to come back to earth? The thought of this makes him smile.

‘Something funny?’ Jayden’s voice is hostile, his eyes too.

‘No. I was just…’ Duke lowers his gaze. ‘No.’

‘What you got for lunch? Anything good?’ Jayden pokes around in the lunchbox. ‘Want to swap your sandwich and yoghurt for some custard creams?’

Duke nods. Aunt Violet doesn’t believe in snacks. He thinks of the New Year’s Eve cookies and how they had turned to dust in his pockets. Jayden helps himself to Duke’s lunch and then stands.

‘Where are my biscuits?’ Duke asks.

‘Biscuits? What biscuits? Oh… you thought…’ he laughs, looking at his friends until they laugh too. ‘Nah, it’s cockney rhyming slang. Custard creams is dreams. I’ve swapped your lunch for my dreams and my dreams are—’ he tilts his head to one side in the gentle way Billie does but there is nothing gentle about this boy ‘—that you’ll piss off.’ The three of them wander off, laughing.

At a loss, Duke picks up his apple and crunches into it so the chunk of fruit can push down his emotions but the space in his throat is closing and he begins to choke. While he grapples for breath, he swipes at the tears that stream down his cheeks, not wanting the other kids to think that he is crying, even though he is.

He is dying and nobody cares.

Was this how his parents felt when they were drowning, their lungs burning as they tried to draw in air?

There isn’t enough air.

He is dying and nobody cares.

All around him is chatter and noise. Laughter. Nobody asks if he is all right. He feels his eyes bulge like the frog that lived under the rockery as he seeks out a teacher, a dinner lady, anyone who might help him but nobody notices him.

He is dying and nobody cares.

Pressure builds in his skull and just when he thinks his head might explode, splattering the walls and ceiling with his brains and blood, there is a hard thump between his shoulder blades. The lodged piece of apple flies from his mouth and lands on the middle of the table with his saliva and his fear.He wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his blazer and warily studies the freckled face who has saved him.

‘Hi, I’m Evie,’ she says as she sits down next to him. ‘I’m in your form, not that you probably noticed as you spent most of the time you were there face down on the floor.’ She pulls a half-eaten bag of beef crisps out of her pocket and offers him one.

‘I’m vegetarian,’ he says, almost apologetically, expecting her to get up and walk away.

‘Me too. There are no animal products in these.’ She shakes the bag.

His throat is sore from the choking but she is the first person who has been kind to him all day, so he takes a crisp and pops it onto his tongue, letting it dissolve so it won’t be so sharp when he swallows it.

Evie tips the packet up to her mouth and empties out the crumbs. ‘Where did you go to school before here?’

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