The Knife That Killed Me Read Free

chewing gum, but I felt for them with my fingers, and tried to tease them out.
Filthy dog. I said filthy dog. It was so stupid. I should have said something better
. The foul stuff had become so tangled up in my hair that pulling at it just seemed to make things worse.
Why did I say filthy dog?
So I went to the art block, found an empty room and took some scissors from a desk.
Something better. I should have said something funny, something that made him feel small
. Then I went back to the toilets and hacked at the hairwherever it was smeared with the gum. It took ten minutes, and at the end the sink was full of knotted clumps of hair.
Or hit him. Right in the face. Made him eat his teeth
. Then I washed my hands in water as hot as I could stand it, rubbing in the grimy soap, trying to get the rank stench of spit and mint off my fingers.
Filthy dog
. I didn’t have time to take the scissors back to the art room, so I slipped them in my pocket.
But it was me who looked stupid. Godgodgodgodgodgod
.
    I thought about going home. But if I went home after being sent to Mordred’s office, I’d be in bad trouble. That was a definite suspension. Almost funny. You play truant and they punish you by kicking you out of school. But that wouldn’t be the real punishment. The real punishment would be what my dad would do to me.
    But it might all still be OK. What I’d done wasn’t that bad. I couldn’t tell Mordred or Boyle about Bates and the chewing gum, because that would be squealing, but even so, all I’d done was stand up in class and shout, “Filthy dog.” I wish I hadn’t said
filthy dog
. I wish I’d said something better or nothing at all.
    So I went to Mordred’s office, running back through the empty corridors. I could see into the classrooms through the little square windows. There were threads of wire running through the middle of the glass so you couldn’t smash it. Some of the classrooms were full of the brainy kids, the ones who did their work, and I liked the look of the orderly rows and the way the kids listened and the way the teachers taught them things and didn’t just try to stop them from fighting.
    When I started school, I just got put into a class with the thick kids, and so I was one. Or at least no one ever told me I wasn’t. I think things would have been different if they’d just said,
Here, go in this class
, and it was a good class. Because I wanted to learn things, not just about war. But once you’re in a place you just can’t get to another place.
    And then I reached the part of the school with the staff room and the offices. It goes like this. You turn right at the end of the corridor, then the staff room is on your left, and the general office is opposite, on the right. Ahead there are some double doors. You go through there and you get to Mr. Mordred’s room and, beyond that, the headmaster’s office.
    I didn’t know anyone who’d ever been in the headmaster’s office. The headmaster was called Mr. O’Tool. We don’t often see Mr. O’Tool. Sometimes he walks around the school, taking a sort of black cloud of doom with him. He usually says something at the weekly assembly, but even when he’s reading out the sports results and we’ve won at rounders or football, he’ll sound like he’s reading the casualty lists from the Battle of the Somme. Everyone thought that Mr. Mordred was after his job, and Mr. O’Tool looked like he thought there was nothing he could do about it.
    There were two comfy chairs outside Mr. O’Tool’s office, but only a row of hard chairs outside Mordred’s door. Two boys and a girl were already sitting there. The girl looked like she’d been crying, and there were leaves and bits of twig in the back of her hair. I didn’t know her name, but I’d seen her around. I thought she might have been caught, youknow, in the bushes. But not with either of the ones sitting here. They were little Year Eight scruffs, spiky-haired, cheeky, but frightened.