Chapter 19: Part 19 - Tuesday Afternoon

Part 19 — Tuesday Afternoon

When your heart is breaking, it seems like everything happens all at once. Like a waterfall breaking over a rock face. In reality, it’s the slow trickle that gradually builds until you’re not even aware that you’re drowning. My heart was breaking now. Panic had taken me and gripped me through the chest like a claw. The kind they use for wrecking cars. Which felt kind of fitting, given the car crash my life was turning into. What could I do? My secret was out!

I looked at Jessie, stricken. She still held the two upturned cruci-boob-les to my chest, but her head was tilted now. Sideways. Like she was straining to hear the rest of something unspoken. My name perhaps. There was no Errol Stevenson in this school. I looked to her for help, but there was none coming from her. Help, when it did come, arrived just in the nick of time and came from the most unlikely person in the class. 

“It's pronounced Ella, you dingus!” someone screamed from the back of the class. 

It was Bobby Brandon. 

Suddenly, Mr Nevin’s question wasn’t about me anymore. It wasn’t about who I might or might not be. The continued mispronouncings of some ignorant substitute teacher. There was a sharp intake of breath, that seemed to be collectively drawn by the whole class, at the direct challenge to Teacher Authority. This was about Bobby Brandon. And what he’d just called the teacher. About the dynamic that was forming between the two of them. I could have kissed him for that distraction!

“Brandon?” he said, looking down the half-moons of his glasses at the paper list the secretary had given him. “Bobby Brandon?”

“You got my name right, then?” Bobby pushed, sarcastically.

The mood of the room hung on the thinness of the stares between the two of them. Cut it one way and it slid into humor. Just one big joke. The silly old man and his silly reading glasses. Just misread my name. One big joke. But slice it the other way and–

“Take yourself and your attitude down to detention,” Mr Nevin commanded, calmly. It was that kind of calm like when your parents are raging black and thunderously at you and someone calls them and they pick up and they’re all sunshine and clear skies when they answer, ‘Hello?’ He didn’t need to rage. He’d got The System on his side. Bobby eyed him up, refusing to budge for just long enough to make a point of it. Then his shoulders slumped and he started to move.

“Science is for losers, anyway,” he grunted, finally capitulating.

The class fell silent. Jessie took the upturned crucibles away from my chest and the rest of the lesson continued on in silence. About my own little gender-reveal party: nothing more was said. Yet.

*

“Why did Bobby do that?” I asked Jessie after we’d finished class. 

“Oh, Bobby’s Bobby,” she replied, as if that was some kind of answer. When she saw that I wasn’t satisfied by it, she added, “Why does Bobby do anything?”

Like that was some kind of answer, either. I decided not to press her on it. If I wanted to know why Bobby Brandon had come riding to my rescue — minus his (t)rusty steed this time — I’d have to ask him directly. 

I knew there was no way I was breaking into detention to ask him anything. But I also knew where he liked to hang out after school. And sure enough, when 4 o’clock rolled around and his detention was done, I headed over to the basketball courts to confront him. 

I didn’t go alone, of course. I took my wing-woman Jessie with me for solidarity. And protection. The Sweatpants Incident and Leierna Scott had taught me enough to know that a girl doesn’t go anywhere by herself unless she’s looking for a fight. And I wasn’t looking for that. But I would get answers out of Bobby, I knew that much. 

Bobby Brandon was a pretty tall guy, good looking and with a great physique. I think he even went to the gym, cos he had muscles that none of the other boys my age had. If he even was my age (Bobby was kind of slow in class, and there’s a good chance he’d been held back a year at least once in his life). 

By the time me and Jessie got down to the basketball courts, there was already a game in full swing. I think they call it a pick up game, but I’m not really sure. Bobby was there with three of his friends. They were tall like he was and also had muscles on their muscles. If that wasn’t bad enough, they’d all unbuttoned their shirts and were showing their chests off to the world. It made me feel kinda funny, and I think I must’ve stared longer than I’d intended to. The boys all stopped when they saw me come over. 

“Hey newbie,” one of them piped up. “No girls allowed!”

I still get that little swell of burning pride when anyone identifies me as a girl. But it was tempered here by the hammer of raging misogyny. 

“Easy, Drake,” Bobby chimed in. “She’s okay. She’s in my science class.”

Bobby passed the boy called Drake the ball and headed over to speak to me. “Alright, man,” one of the other boys called after him, “but we’re playing on without you and your team’s down one guy.”

“I’ll be right back,” Bobby replied and jogged over to me. 

Jessie hung back a few paces out of the way. 

He stopped a few meters short of me and looked me up and down again like he had that first time. Like he was hungry and I was lunch. And there it was again. That same knowing look afterwards. Only, it didn’t feel so threatening as it had before.

“Why did you do that for me with Mr Nevin?” I asked him quietly, so the others couldn’t hear it. 

He scratched the back of his head and looked away for a second before replying. 

“Cos it was the right thing to do,” he said eventually. 

I felt my heart skip a beat. 

“You barely know me, Bobby,” I said, looking into his brown eyes. “I could be anybody in your world.”

There was more truth to that than he could know. 

“Know enough to know that you ain’t ‘Errol’ Stevenson,” he replied. “And see enough to know that it might hurt you if everyone started thinking you was.”

What did he mean by that?

“What did they make you do?” I asked, nodding over in the direction of detention. I had visions of him cleaning whiteboards or writing out the dictionary or other mind-numbingly boring chores. 

“Ah, I can handle them,” he replied, dodging my question. “Did anyone give you a hard time after Mr Nevin?” he asked. 

There was concern in his voice. Genuine concern. 

I shook my head to say they hadn’t. 

“I mean, I’ll probably get a few jokes tomorrow,” I added, trying to make light of things. 

“What you do ain’t a joke,” he said quickly, jumping on my throw-away-remark. 

“What I do?” I asked, my defenses rising. 

“What you go though,” he said. “What you have to live with. Everyday.”

He could only be talking about one thing. 

“You don’t know anything about what I live with,” I replied, coldly. Then I repeated what I said earlier on. “You barely know me, Bobby Brandon.”

He looked me up and down again, only this time like I was something on his shoe. 

“Guess not,” he replied. 

“Hey Bobby, you coming?” Drake called after him. 

“Yeah, I think we’re done here,” he replied, still looking at me. Then he turned and left and headed back to the game. 

I was such a clash of emotions. 

The churning terror in the pit of my stomach threatened to burn a hole right through me. 

He knew!!

He’d known from the moment he saw me. 

What else could that, “Haha,” sound he’d made back in the corridor when I first met him mean? 

But if he knew, why had he come to my defense in class? And why had he told no one else? And that was when I felt the other thing. The gnawing guilt at how I’d treated him. He’d tried to help me — had helped me — and I’d done what I always did. Hidden inside my shame-filled coffin and put up such firm defenses that there was no chance of anything getting to me. Even daylight. Even joy. Even the kindness of one human being to another. 

It was then that I saw it. And when I did, I got my answer. 

Jessie had come up behind me to ask me if I was okay. I wasn’t sure that I was. Or even how to answer. She saw it too. But she didn’t know what she was seeing. Only I did. And it changed everything. 

The game of basketball was finishing up (I guess Bobby wasn’t in the mood anymore). The boys were fastening up their shirts and picking their blazers up where they’d dumped them. And that’s when I saw it. 

I saw Bobby Brandon reach into his trouser pocket and pull something out. Something that he placed around his neck. Something that I knew all-too-well. 

It had a black cord, and the gentle sweeping curls of a half yin-yang pendant. 

It was him. He’d given it to me. He was the one who told me he was there for me. And I’d just thrown his gesture back in his face.

Like two halves of a pendant, I actually felt my heart breaking in two.