I Want to Tell You a Bit About Something That Happened to Me When I Was Ten

Jake

I want to tell you a bit about something that happened to me when I was ten.

I liked Jake right from the off. He was cheeky to Miss Brown on day one and she was still kind to him, probably because it was his first day. He said no when she asked him to sit down and stuck his tongue out at her. I don't know how he had the nerve because I would never do that even when I wanted to. Miss Jones used to ask us to do a lot of things we didn't want to do and most of us just sat there and took it, but Jake didn't. Right from the off, as I said, he said no. It was brilliant! And Miss Jones then started to ask him very politely to sit down and he just wandered about and sat down later, when she'd stopped asking him. He was cool.

Perhaps I should say who I am. I'm Christine, Chris for short, but Dad says if he'd wanted me to be called Chris he'd have christened me Chris. So, when I'm with Dad I'm Christine and when I'm with my friends at school and some of the teachers and my mum when I see her, I'm Chris. Actually, Dad's family calls me Chris when he's not in the room as well. He very fussy about stuff like that. It doesn't matter to me one way or the other, except with Jake. I told him my name was Christine, Chris for short, and he said, like Dad, he wanted to call me by my proper name. I looked more like a Christine than a Chris, he said. I'd never thought about that before. How does a Chris look different from a Christine? I said to him he was very brave and it was funny the way he'd cheeked Miss Brown and he said he wasn't always like that, but Miss Brown was just a teacher and had to be shown what was what. Whatever that was. I just looked up to him straightaway. He was so confident.

Anyway, back to me. I was ten years old and went to the local primary school. I was always really good at English but rubbish at Maths and Science. We had this Literacy hour every day and I always did really well although it was pretty boring. Miss Brown said the government said we had to sit round in a circle every day and check how our vocabulary was doing and spelling too. As if it was in a glasshouse, like a plant. I liked History as well and Geography, but I hated gym.

So, from the first time I set eyes on Jake, I knew I was going to like him. A lot. He was everything I wasn't. Confident, brave, tall, and loads of attitude. Everyone seemed to like him, except the mingers. You get those in every class. Those kinds you just don't want to hang out with because they don't understand anything and they're pathetic. Usually, they don't look very nice either and looks matter a lot, especially at school. Then there are the Swots and nerds, those kinds of kids. I mean, if you liked a subject, you didn't make it obvious. You found ways of doing the homework that didn't interfere with your friends and hanging out with them. You did it like Jake. I never once saw him trying hard at anything, but he regularly came top in tests. And it didn't make any difference what subject it was either. And then, when the results were read out (why do teachers do that?) and he'd come top again, he'd be playing at something at the back of the room: he wasn't even listening. He made out like he didn't care about it at all. I think that's why he got away with it. Miss Jones always praised him up, which shows what a stupid teacher she was. Really stupid. I mean, talk about singling out a kid. Why is it teachers know so little about kids? Were they hatched as grown-ups or something? And it wasn't fair - I noticed at the time - that one time Andy came top at Maths and Jake second and she praised Jake and not Andy. That's just favouritism, and if there's one thing a teacher shouldn't do it's have favourites.

'Yeah, whatever!' Jake would say, when someone clapped him on the back or praised him, or accused him of being a swot. His 'whatever' was tossed over his shoulder in such a careless way, no one could say he cared. I never found out if he did.

Apart from his attitude, the first thing I really noticed about Jake was the gloss on his dark hair. Gloss out of a bottle it wasn't, though. It was just naturally shiny and really nice-looking. He was a head taller than me and most of the rest of the class and so you noticed his hair wherever he was standing in the room. I wondered at first whether he'd missed a year of school or something and was a year older than us (because he was so tall, I mean) but apparently he'd only just moved here. He was our age. His birthday's in April. Mine's in May, so quite close really.

At break on the first day a lot of kids made a circle round him on the playground and asked him questions. Where he lived before and what his favourite band was and so on. He knew lots of things and he'd been to some interesting places and we listened and compared his answers in our minds with the coolest answers he might have said, and he did pretty well. He was quickly one of the in-crowd. When we went back into the classroom when the bell rang, he and two of the boys, Kevin and Andy, one on each side, were walking together as if they'd always been a threesome.

I suppose you could say the trouble started during the second week. Jake had been winding Miss Brown up in the first week, but he stopped doing it in the second week. At least that's how it occurs to me now, thinking back. Andy and Kevin had had three detentions between them during that first week, and most of it was because of Jake. Miss Brown never told him off, though, which was weird, and Andy and Kevin started to get a bit fed up with that. Jake was nice about it, saying to the teacher that he'd been with them and stuff, but she just ignored it. We all thought it was a bit odd, but then adults were always doing weird things we didn't understand and never told us why, so we just used to gossip about it, but it didn't make us turn against Jake. At least, not at first. Not, that is, until one morning when Andy came into school with a note from his dad. He didn't look very happy about it, giving it to her, I mean, and didn't look at us when he passed by our desks on his way to his seat on the back row with Kevin, Jake and Pete.

Miss Brown opened the envelope. We heard the tearing of the paper. For some reason, we knew something big was happening and we were all quiet, watching and waiting. What for, we had no idea, but there we sat, all quiet. Miss Brown opened the paper, folded in half and began to read. She went pale, nervously biting her lip.

'Er. Christine, please come and call the register, would you?' she said suddenly, standing up. 'I've got to make a phone-call.'

I got out of my front seat and went to her desk. Sometimes when there was an emergency, I did the register so Miss Brown could go and do something in the office, or something else. Actually, she never told me why she was leaving the room, but I felt quite proud to be her assistant, so I didn't mind at all.

'Bagshawe, Andy,' I started, as she left the room.

'Yeah,' he said dully. The door clicked shut behind Miss Brown.

Immediate uproar! What was all that about? What was in the letter? Where's she going? Who's she phoning? And all questions like that. The whole class was jabbering on, until Mr. Hewitt from next door came in and told us to be quiet as his class was sitting a literacy test this morning and where was Miss Brown? I was still standing poised over the register and looked up to see Andy at the back, next to Jake and then Kevin as well looking really fed up. Jake was sitting straight up in his chair, not moving at all, looking over at me, and Kevin was thick as thieves with Andy.

We settled down and then I started calling the register again and after a few moments, Miss Brown came back. She looked flustered and her wavy hair was sticking up on top as if she'd run her fingers through her hair several times and it had got stuck on the way down.

'Good, Christine,' she said to me shortly. 'Jake and Andy, can I see you both, please?' They scraped their chairs back on the wooden floor and followed her out of the classroom. We all craned our necks to get a good look at them and then when they passed up the side of the building, we watched them walking in single file, Miss Brown in the front - looking like a duck with her chicks - as they walked towards the teachers' office round the back of our classroom.

The class was subdued now. When I'd finished the register, I asked whose turn it was to take it to the admin office and Tracy said Miss Brown hadn't asked anyone, so I took it myself. As the teacher's office is next to the admin office I thought I might see or hear something interesting.

I peered in at the window as I neared the office, and saw Miss Brown seated at one of the desks and the two boys standing in front of her as if they were both being told off. Both had their heads bent, and at one point, Andy smirked and looked over quickly at Jake. Jake looked angry, but didn't turn his head to look at Andy, and then Mr. Hewitt saw me staring and told me to hurry along, so that was that.

It was a good fifteen minutes after I went back to the classroom that Miss Brown returned. She checked that we knew what we were doing and said she'd organised for a supply teacher to come in to sit with us and he should be arriving soon. Great! Supply teachers are always good for a laugh. They don't know anything and it's really easy to play tricks on them. Except for Mr. Elliot. Last time he came in, Patty went to the loo and when she came back she said she'd met Mr. Grieves (headmaster) and he was looking for him and he needed to go to the office immediately. The idiot went. He was furious when he came back, though, and gave Patty detention for a week. She said he had no right to give her detention because he wasn't a real teacher and he got furious then and made a complaint to Patty's mother and demanded that Patty make an apology, which she had to do otherwise the headmaster said she'd be excluded for half a day and the mother worked and everything and there was no one to look after her. Anyway, apart from Mr. Elliot, supply teachers are good for a laugh.

'And Kevin, I want you to come with me as well,' Miss Brown said, face flushed and looking really worried about something. We were all ears at this point. Something really important had happened, obviously. They were getting a supply teacher in, Miss Brown had hauled three boys out of the classroom after a mysterious letter from Andy's parents and she was going out again. What was going on? She told us in no uncertain terms to be quiet, because Mr. Elliot (oh no!) wouldn't put up with any nonsense and the way she was feeling neither would she, and it was too much what teachers have to put up with these days, blah, blah, blah. What about kids, I say? We have our fair-share of 'putting up' with teachers to do, thanks very much.

Mr. Elliot walked in on cue. He glowered at us before sitting down and slapping his leather briefcase on the teacher's desk in front of him.

'Now, remember what I said!' Miss Brown told us, and left the room with a reluctant Kevin.

'I'm sure we'll all get on really well this time, won't we Patty?' he said, looking the poor girl straight in the eyes.

'I don't know why you're picking on me!' Patty began angrily. 'You always pick on me. I'm telling my mum of you!'

'And I'll tell my mum and my mum's bigger than your mum!' he said coldly, snapping shut his leather briefcase and placing it neatly beside his seat in an upright position.

'Right, kids. Today we're looking at peninsulas in Geography. Who can tell me what a peninsula is?'

I could go on and on about what a boring lesson it was, but I'm not sure you'd be interested. Ha ha! I'll go on to tell you about what happened at break-time, or at least what didn't happen. We were all bursting to get out of the room and when the bell went for break, we were like a herd of buffalo racing to water in the desert. We just couldn’t wait to sort our chairs out, or put them under desks, or leave them standing in some cases. We just herded out and there was nothing that Mr. Elliot could do about it. He tried to get us to do all the usual things, like putting chairs under desks and filing out and stuff, but honestly, there was no way…

We all ran round to the teacher's office building. We were like a stampeding herd I'm not kidding. Kids dashed out of our way to right and left as we rampaged round. There was no way we were stopping. But Miss Brown and the three boys weren't in there. At least not as far as we could see. We strained to get as high as we could, standing on tip-toe and pushing anyone who wasn't in the top year out of our way, craning our necks to get a good look, but nothing. Where could they be? What was going on? Anyway, after a while, Mr. George came out of a side-door and told us to scram. He wasn't nice, Mr. George. No one liked him. He'd got hair growing out of his nose as well. Yuk.

We all drifted away into our small groups and started talking about what we thought. Perhaps they'd stolen something. Someone said at an assembly, Mrs. Hutton I think it was, that someone's purse had gone missing. She meant stolen, because she said it in this voice as if it had speech marks round the word, so you knew she meant not 'missing' but nicked. Alan said he thought perhaps the boys had got up to something together outside school and Andy's dad had found out and was telling Miss Brown about it in the letter, and it was so bad, that's why she went pale. Patty went up to Mr. Cross who did playground duty most days. He's the only teacher I know who likes playground duty. God knows why. Anyway, she asked him where Miss Brown was and he said she had gone to the interview room and was meeting some parents. Was it an emergency? Could he help? Er no, she said, she'd see Miss Brown later, but thanks, Sir.

Anyway, nothing happened at break, but just after. We filed into the classroom because Mr. Elliot was standing at the door and wouldn't let us back in unless we passed by him in single file. Hitler! He told us to shut up too, but we still whispered. This was, let's face it, the most exciting thing that had happened to us at school in ages. We weren't going to shut up and he'd have to get used to it! I looked at the back row when I went back in. I was the last but one to go in (Patty was last, craning her neck round to see if she could see anything happening). Anyway, at the back of the room there were no students sitting at the back. Where was Pete? He should be there!