All the Things That Could Go Wrong

by Stewart Foster

  ‘He looks like one of the sharks at the aquarium,’ whispers Sophie.

  ‘Yeah, with its nose all bashed up against the glass.’

  Alex starts to walk to his seat. His guitar bangs against a table.

  ‘Alex,’ Miss Harris says softly. ‘Have you forgotten that your guitar should be left in the music room?’

  ‘Sorry, I was thinking …’

  Miss Harris half smiles at him. ‘You were thinking, “Yes, miss, it’s a good idea to leave my guitar in the music room.” But it’s okay. Just remember next time. Leave it here for now.’ She points to the corner by the door, but accidentally touches Alex’s shoulder. He freezes like Miss Harris’s hand has turned him to ice (which would be really cool if that could actually happen).

  ‘He’s even weirder than usual,’ says Sophie.

  Alex puts his guitar down in the corner. Miss Harris steps out of the way as he walks past Elliott Gibbs and sits down in front of me by the window. I see he’s got a new patch on his bag to cover the hole Sophie cut in it. And he’s wearing a different sweatshirt after we pushed him over in the playground two days ago.

  Sophie sniffs. ‘He smells like a toilet!’

  Alex smells like the bleach the cleaners use to clean the toilets after school. He spends all breaktime in the toilets and when he’s in lessons he’s always wiping his hands and his pens and his books with disinfectant wipes. My mum told me it sounds like he’s got OCD. That’s when people can’t stop cleaning the house or worry that they’ve left the oven on or forgotten to switch the lights off when they go out. Alex doesn’t touch the oven controls in cookery and I’ve never seen him touch the light switches, but he does lots of other weird stuff. Right now he’s wiping the zip on his pencil case. All the teachers notice, but they don’t say anything about it.

  Miss Harris starts reading. She tells us how the Black Death came to England from boats that landed in Cornwall and Dorset and ate its way up the country, to London, then north to Manchester and on towards Scotland and how the Scottish people started to fight the English because they didn’t want the Black Death there.

  Miss Harris looks up from her book. ‘So,’ she says. ‘Does anyone know what the symptoms of the Black Death were?’ The class goes quiet. Some of them look at their books, pretend they’re reading, and some look around like the answer is floating in the air.

  ‘Miss, miss!’ I shout.

  ‘Dan, what have I told you about putting your hand up?’

  ‘Sorry, miss.’ I raise my hand.

  ‘Yes, Dan.’

  I start to sing. ‘First you feel a little poorly, and then you start to swell. Then you start to spit some blood, and then you really smell. Then you know it’s time—’

  ‘Okay, Dan, that’s enough.’ Miss Harris holds her hand up. ‘Let’s have another answer, a sensible one.’

  ‘I’m being sensible! It’s a song from Horrible Histories – then you know it’s time to ring your funeral bell and along comes Mr Death and swishes you to Hell—’

  ‘Dan! That’s enough.’ Miss Harris claps her hands. ‘So, Year Seven, let’s have someone else.’

  I sit back in my chair. It’s not fair. Just because I mess around doesn’t mean I’m thick. Mr Francis would have found it funny.

  ‘Anyone?’

  The class goes quiet like they’re too scared to answer.

  ‘Alex?’

  Alex stares at his ruler.

  ‘Alex? The symptoms of the Black Death?’

  He glances sideways, then answers quietly.

  ‘People got a rash and black spots, and the spots grew under their skin and burst and the infection got into their blood.’ Alex squirms in his seat like the germs from the Black Death are wriggling inside him.

  ‘Yes, Alex. Anything else?’

  Alex looks nervously over his shoulder towards me. ‘Yes, they got delirious … and imagined horrible things …’ His voice fades away.

  ‘And?’ Miss Harris puts her hand up to her ear.

  ‘And then staggered around the street like they were drunk.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I said!’ I shout.

  ‘Dan! Do you want to go to isolation?’

  I put my elbows on the desk and look out of the window. I knew the answer, but she was too busy listening to squeaky-clean Alex. All the teachers like him. I have most of my lessons with him, except for maths and PSHE, and they’re always asking him to answer. He knows everything and smells of disinfectant. It’s like he’s been decontaminated, then sent from outer space to Earth to learn all about us.

  ‘Shall I?’ Sophie’s got another piece of rubber loaded on her ruler.

  I nod. The ruler springs forward and the rubber flies through the air. Alex puts his hand up to the back of his head like he’s just been shot.

  ‘Yes, Alex?’ says Miss Harris.

  ‘Nothing, miss.’

  ‘I thought you had your hand up.’

  ‘No, miss. I—’

  ‘He’s got nits, miss.’

  The class start laughing.

  ‘Good one, Dan,’ Sophie says.

  Alex glances at me, then looks back to the front.

  ‘Okay,’ Miss Harris huffs. ‘Read the rest of the section on your own and I’ll come round to answer questions.’ Emma C. puts her hand in the air. Miss Harris walks to the back of the class.

  I slouch down in my chair, stretch out my foot and kick the back of Alex’s chair.

  ‘Alex, Alex!’ I whisper urgently.

  Alex keeps his head down, reading his book.

  ‘Call him Shark Face,’ Sophie says.

  I kick Alex’s chair harder this time and it squeaks across the floor. ‘Shark Face! Turn round!’

  Shark Face turns round slowly.

  ‘Ha,’ says Sophie. ‘You know your name already.’

  ‘That’s not my name.’

  ‘It is now,’ says Sophie. She looks around the class. Most of them are reading, James Tadd and Leah are talking and Miss Harris is helping Emma read. Sophie leans over her desk. ‘We saw a shark that looked just like you at the aquarium. With a nose like yours all bashed up like you’d smashed into the glass.’

  He scrunches his face and turns away. I don’t think he really looks like a shark, but I can’t say that now.

  Sophie scribbles on a piece of paper.

  WG T G Y S F

  She folds it in half, checks Miss Harris isn’t looking, then taps Katie on the back. Katie looks at the note. Sophie stares at her and holds the note out further.

  ‘Take it!’ she hisses.

  Katie takes the note and slides it in front of Alex. He pushes it away without reading it.

  Sophie nudges me. I kick his chair again.

  ‘Read it.’

  Shark Face looks down at the note, then turns round and shrugs. Sophie grabs another piece of paper.

  We’re Going To Get You Shark Face

  She hands the note to Katie. She glances at it then passes it to Shark Face. As he reads it, his eyes seem to go darker and his eyebrows squeeze closer together like he’s in pain.

  ‘Everything all right here?’

  Sophie screws up the note quickly. Miss Harris is only two tables behind us.

  ‘Liam? Hannah?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Sophie? Dan? Alex?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  Shark Face turns round to his desk. I wonder if this is the day he’ll snitch on us. I feel my heart thud in my chest. Sophie’s looking out of the window like she’s not worried at all.

  ‘Happy with what you’re doing, Alex?’ Miss Harris stops by his desk. ‘All good?’

  I stare at the back of his head, try to force the thoughts out of mine and into his.

  Just you dare. Don’t say anything.

  Shark Face looks up from his book.

  ‘Yes, miss,’ he says quietly. ‘I’m good.’

  Alex: Stomach ache and dead presidents

  I’m walking along the blue corridor on my way
to maths. Boys and girls rush towards me, barging into me. ‘Sorry. Sorry,’ I say, but no one replies. It’s like I’m invisible, being spun round with my guitar on my back.

  I look back down the corridor. Dan and Sophie aren’t following me. They’re not very good at maths so they have Mr Gough and then they go to the Rainbow Room where Mr Francis helps them catch up with lessons they are behind in. At least for a while I can concentrate on doing my work instead of worrying about getting beaten up.

  I put my head down, trying to block out the noise of all the other kids and all the things I don’t want to touch, like the walls, their hands, their bags, but they’re all zigzagging around me like ants. Miss Keeler is standing in the middle of reception, pointing like a traffic policeman, telling us not to run.

  At the beginning of the first term they gave us a little map of the building. It was like a diagram of a fuse box with big square blocks – music, art, science, maths – then the coloured lines – red, blue, green, running down the corridors that join them all up. This school is massive; big buildings everywhere. My old school was just one building surrounded by six wooden huts. I know I have to learn things, but I wish I was back there. My OCD wasn’t so bad then. I didn’t have to take wipes to school and my worries were about normal things, like trying not to forget my sandwiches or avoiding walking on the cracks in the pavement.

  The five-minute bell rings just as I reach the maths block and I hurry through the doors to the classroom.

  Mr Hammond is handing out pencils and rulers. He doesn’t notice me as I sit down next to Emma. She smiles at me nervously, like being bullied is a disease and she’s afraid she’ll catch it. Or maybe she’s worried because she’s not in a girls’ friendship group and that’s why she has to sit next to me. We’re the ‘no friends’ friendship group. Sometimes I imagine that even if you put us all in a room away from the other ‘popular’ kids, we still wouldn’t talk to each other.

  As I pull my maths book out of my bag, I can feel Emma looking at the writing on it. I tried to scribble it out with a marker pen, but I can still see Wimp and Weirdo written underneath from when Dan and Sophie grabbed my bag from me last night. Emma looks down at her book and pretends she hasn’t seen it, like everyone does.

  I take a deep breath and try to stop thinking about last night, but trying not to think about it makes me think about it more. I can’t stop it and it’s even worse when I think that it might happen again tonight. Mr Hammond walks to the front of the class. He doesn’t have to ask us to be quiet like the other teachers. All he has to do is put his hand on his head and look at us. It’s like he’s got a mute switch.

  ‘Okay.’ He draws a horizontal and a vertical line on the whiteboard. ‘Copy this,’ he says, ‘and label them X and Y. Then we’ll plot some points.’

  ‘Like Battleships, sir?’

  ‘Kind of, Liam, but let’s just draw the axis and we’ll find out.’ Mr Hammond turns back to the board.

  Emma looks at me, then back at her book. I wonder if she’s noticed the strap is missing on my bag too, and the new patch to cover the hole Sophie cut in it. But at least I’ve not got a hole in this sweatshirt.

  Did Mum believe me when I told her I’d fallen over? I hope so because I can’t tell her about what’s happening. If I tell anyone and Dan and Sophie find out, they’ll pick on me even more. They might start throwing mud at me or barging me off the pavement onto the grass. The pavement is covered in germs, but at least I can see the marks. I can’t see them when they’re mixed with mud and grass. Or they might rip off my gloves and throw them on the music-room roof like they did last term with Elliott’s shoes. It was Elliott’s turn last term and now it’s mine. His was bad, but it was just Sophie and the Georges. Dan never did anything. He just messed around and made the class laugh, but that was before he decided to be Sophie’s friend.

  ‘Alex, is everything okay?’ I hadn’t noticed that Mr Hammond had stopped talking to the class and was now standing beside me.

  Don’t bend down and breathe on me!

  I nod and pick up my ruler and pencil, but it’s hard to draw a line when the pencil keeps sliding through my gloves.

  Mr Hammond rests his knuckles on the table.

  ‘Alex,’ he says. ‘I know you don’t like to touch things, but unfortunately that’s what hands are for. I think you’re going to have to take the gloves off.’

  I think of telling him about the letter Mum sent to the school at the beginning of the year; he must have read it because it was supposed to be passed to all the teachers. Alex can’t take his gloves off. He doesn’t like touching things and his hands are sore and they’ve got more wrinkles than his nan’s. I made that last bit up. My hands have got more wrinkles than Nan’s but I think Mum just wrote that they were sensitive, like they’d shrivel up like fish skin if they were exposed to the sun.

  Mr Hammond is still standing there.

  ‘Just try it, Alex.’ He sounds like a dinner lady trying to make me eat broccoli. People like Mr Hammond don’t understand. They think that forcing me to do things will cure me, but it won’t. It just makes me stress, and stress makes it worse. I’ve wiped the pencil loads of times, but I still don’t want to touch it with my hands because Emma put it in her mouth by mistake last week.

  I look up from my desk. The whole class are staring at me, waiting for me to take my gloves off like I might have a pirate’s hook under there. My face begins to burn. I thought this was going to be a good lesson where I could get on with my work and not be bullied by Sophie and Dan, but instead I’ve got Mr Hammond and the bad thoughts in my head.

  ‘Come and see me afterwards.’

  I can’t tell if he’s annoyed or angry because his face is always straight. He walks away. I think of telling Mum to photocopy the letter and send it again, but I don’t think Mr Hammond would even read it. He knows what’s wrong with me: he just doesn’t like that my worries control me more than he does. But he’s not as bad as Mr Haynes, my woodwork teacher, who calls me Michael Jackson. I’m nothing like him. He’s dead for a start and even when he was alive he only wore one glove.

  The rest of the lesson passes in a blur with Mr Hammond’s voice all muffled like he’s talking underwater, but at least he doesn’t come and breathe all over me. Eventually I manage to plot the graph points by squeezing my pencil tighter, trapping it between the stitching on my gloves.

  My stomach starts to ache when the lunch bell rings, but it’s not because I’m hungry; it’s because I remember that Sophie and Dan will be waiting for me outside. I wish I could skip lunch and go straight to PSHE.

  The class pack up their things and I walk towards the dining hall on my own. All the time I’m looking over my shoulder just in case they’re behind me. When I get to the queue safely, I breathe out. I’ll be okay here because, even though there are loads of older kids, there are lots of teachers too. All I have to do is try to stop people brushing against me.

  A dinner lady gives me a weird look when I get my food. I think it might be my gloves or it might be because of the chips and jam doughnut on my plate.

  I look around the hall for somewhere to sit. I usually sit on the table at the front by the tills so I don’t have to pass everyone breathing over my food, but some Year Tens are sitting there and some Year Nines and Eights are behind them. They’re all talking in groups, and I don’t know any of them. I look around for someone in my year that I do know, but they all seem to be sitting in groups too.

  I walk to the end of the front row and along the windows without touching any tables or the glass. I sit down at a table on my own. Outside, the sun is shining and some Year Nines are playing football on the grass. Dan and Sophie are sitting on the benches nearby with the Georges, eating packed lunch. I wish it was raining, then we’d all have to go to the main hall. Dan and Sophie wouldn’t risk getting me there.

  I pick up a chip and try to eat, but my stomach is aching so much that I can’t even think about swallowing. I rest my head on my hand. A
few spaces away from me someone puts a plate on the table and sits down. I look up and see Elliott looking at me. I glance out of the window. Dan and Sophie are laughing and shouting. Elliot used to be my best friend at primary school. I think he looks like a scientist because he’s got spiky hair and wears tiny round glasses. We used to talk all the time, but now we have to whisper and talk in code like we’re spies. We can’t even talk properly in the car in case his dad is listening.

  He leans towards me. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Sorry my dad couldn’t wait for you.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  Elliott leans a little closer. ‘What did the note say?’

  ‘That they’re going to beat me up.’

  Elliott puts a chip in his mouth. ‘They made me steal sharks yesterday.’

  ‘Sharks?’

  ‘Yeah and dolphins. They said they’d beat you up if I didn’t.’

  ‘Think they’re going to do that anyway. And they’re calling me Shark Face.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I look like a shark they saw yesterday.’

  ‘No you don’t! You look nothing like it. That’s just dumb.’

  I shrug. I know it’s dumb, but the names they make up don’t have to make sense. They used to call Elliott Piggy. He doesn’t look anything like a pig. It’s just that it rhymed with his surname, Higgs. Last term Sophie and the Georges teased and pushed him all the time. They used to mimic his voice because it’s squeaky like a mouse.

  We both look around the dinner hall and check that no one can see us talking because if they do they might go and tell Dan and Sophie. Elliott picks up another chip.

  ‘Have you got Joe Hart?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Footie cards. Have you got Joe Hart?’

  ‘Yes.’