5
5
Y OU HAVE BEEN AT this school for, what, twelve months? And it feels like all you’ve done is run, run, run. Your little legs are sore and tired. Your little feet are blistered and tired. You are so tired that, every day, you long for the hour that it is acceptable to fall asleep.
You can’t fall asleep. Not now. It is eight a.m. and you must do exactly what the PE teacher – a man with a face like a rat – says. The PE teacher tells you to do all manner of things. He tells you to squat, jump, scramble. He tells you to lie down, sit up, and rotate your body from side to side.
The exercise feels horrible. It makes you feel weirdly aware of your body, sinews, and muscles stretching and etching their way longwards and sidewards. It makes you feel exactly what you are: an alien consciousness trapped in the body of an over-evolved primate; a sack of blood, muscles, and veins attached to the soul of an extraterrestrial life form.
You can’t sleep. Not right now. You have to run to one side, then to the other side, then to the other side, faster than the bleep, slower than the bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep—
‘Focus! Fo-cus!’
You look around. Your heart does a little sink, swoosh, flutter. The other children have stopped running around and moved on to the next activity. Hurriedly, you throw yourself into what you fear will be a never-ending series of headstands, which come to a halt when you lose your balance and fall. When you hit your head on the blue mats that cover the floor, there is a sound that sounds like thwack . One classmate gasps.
‘Whoa,’ another classmate says.
You do not know if they are being empathetic or mocking or neither of the above.
No matter, the blue mats are there for this very eventuality – to protect the heads, limbs, and torsos of children who stumble and fall. And yet, you can confirm that they feel harder than the floor. For a full minute, your skull rings in a way that is wordlessly painful.
‘Oi!’ the teacher yells, looming over you.
You get up, half-heartedly throw your body upside down, and fall over again. Your stomach feels a little stirred up, then a lot stirred up, then really, really stirred up. You are throwing up. A partially digested version of your breakfast is releasing itself onto your sports uniform, feet, and floor. You sense that there is more vomit to come. With this in mind, you lurch towards the exit. But alas, you are sick again before you get there, and end up throwing up pretty much everywhere: on the balance beam, at the base of the scaffolding, at the bottom of the radiator, and on various classmates too.
You manage to reach the exit. But now you are on your knees again, the contents of your stomach leaving your mouth. This process repeats itself over and over again. It’s incredible. You didn’t know there could be so much in you to puke up. It just doesn’t stop. You feel dizzy from the sheer exertion of it.
A stranger walks in, and you vomit once more, this time on their shoes. The stranger’s shoes are pink. When you look up, you see they are a child of school age. The child of school age has dark curly hair, cut to the length of a bob. Much like the shoes, this haircut is feminine. And yet, the child is wearing masculine clothes: blue jeans and a navy T-shirt with a picture of a dinosaur on it. From your experience on Planet Earth, you know that this design indicates the stranger is a boy.
Next to the boy, there’s a woman you assume is the boy’s mum – such is the nature of her curly hair – the head teacher, and her deputy.
For a moment, all four of them look at the boy’s vomit-covered shoes. Then they look at you lying on the ground, also covered in vomit. Then, the teachers carry on as if nothing is wrong. They don’t acknowledge your presence. They do not acknowledge your vomit. They don’t even acknowledge the looks of revulsion on the boy’s face, the looks of bewilderment on your classmates’ faces, or the look of apoplexy on the PE teacher’s face. Instead, they engage in the polished prattle of salespeople, ignoring both the smell of sick and the growing cacophony as they gesture at the facilities.
‘The light in this hall is excellent for healing troubled souls,’ the head teacher is saying.
The boy and his mum look around, apparently confused by the sights they are seeing: a dilapidated sports hall propped up by antique scaffolding, children trying to wipe vomit from their clothes, and a PE teacher with anger issues getting redder and redder.
After a long pause, the mum speaks. ‘And this thing,’ she says, falteringly. ‘What is this?’
‘The scaffolding?’ the deputy says. ‘Oh, it’s just a temporary structure.’
You try to get up. When you do so, you slip on your own sick and sit back down.
‘How long has it been there?’ the mum says.
The boy gesticulates animatedly. ‘She was sick on me,’ he says. ‘It’s gone all over my shoes!’
‘Yes, indeed,’ the deputy says.
‘She was sick on me!’ the boy repeats. ‘Why does no one care she was sick on me?’
‘Well, my Bobby boy,’ the kid’s mum says. ‘It seems she was sick on everything. Don’t worry. We’ll wipe you down in a minute.’
The head teacher coughs. ‘Shall we move on to the dining room? All this talk of exercise is making my stomach rumble.’
The deputy agrees. ‘Mm,’ he says. ‘I agree.’
Exactly why the stench of vomit is making them hungry is beyond the scope of your comprehension. In any case, the four of them start to leave, the son leading the way with his mum behind him.
But before exiting the sports hall, the head teacher gives you a good looking at – brandishing one of her clipboards as she does.
‘Pleased with yourself?’ she asks.
You narrow your eyes. You don’t like the head teacher. Since your arrival, you feel like she has been following you around. Sometimes, after watching you for an unspecified amount of time, she jots something down and smirks.
You look at her steadily – a chunk of vomit still visible on your chin. You don’t know how to answer her question. You don’t know what ‘pleased with yourself’ really means.
Behind you, the cacophony rages on. One kid has a splash of your sick on him, and is therefore crying. Another is running around in circles, emitting a high-pitched whine. Apparently, the PE teacher has placed a couple of yellow signs on the ground near your various sick patches. The yellow signs warn of wet floors and slip hazards.
He approaches you. ‘You’re it.’
‘What?’ you say.
‘She’s it!’
You are annoyed. You have just been violently ill. You want to lie down in the nurse’s room for an hour or two. Perhaps someone could even phone your parents to let them know you need picking up early. Surely you cannot be expected to run around when you have no sustenance left in your little body, and are already so poor at all this sporting activity. Surely the other kids can’t be expected to run away from you, not when half of them are covered with your spew.
But apparently, running is exactly what you are expected to do.
You can’t keep up with the other kids. They are nimble. You are not. You have just thrown up. They have not. You are slow and weak and tired and in the throes of what could be a concussion. You try to catch up with one of them. You do not.
You aren’t putting in any real effort. You are hating every second of this activity. You don’t want to be chasing your classmates around the sports hall in your vest and pants. Chasing your classmates around the sports hall in your vest and pants will not earn you social currency. You need social currency, not exercise. You need clout. Not exercise. You need to mind that blue mat because you are going to trip and go flying—
‘Get up!’
Later that day, you try to explain to your parents what happened. You are all sitting around the kitchen table, eating jacket potatoes. You still don’t feel quite right. You also don’t know how quite to explain how bad your experience was without coming across as overdramatic.
You prod the tuna, sweetcorn, and mayo topping.
‘This new kid walked in,’ you say. ‘And I was sick on his shoes too.’
Your mum beams. ‘That’s great news.’
You frown at her. ‘What?’
‘You’re not the new kid any more! And hey, maybe he can be your friend.’
You continue to frown. ‘I was sick on him.’
Your mum does a dismissive wave of her hands. ‘He won’t remember.’
‘No?’
‘Next time he sees you, he’ll just think, oh, who’s this interesting girl?’
Somehow, you doubt what your mum is saying is true, though you think it wise not to probe further. You nod mildly, look at your potato, wondering why it seems particularly unappetising today.
‘Dad,’ you say, eventually, ‘would you mind passing me the salt?’
Further reading:
Is Your Child Just Pretending to Be Ill?
10 Signs of Concussion
All in the Mind: How to Overcome Your Brain Injury