Chapter Text
David had one more general studies lesson before lunch, and he was hardly surprised to find it enormous. He felt like there was an obvious answer to the disparity in class size, but he was too busy dealing with more important matters to work that puzzle out. The more pressing matter at hand was the buildup of rumours circulating about him, of which he was powerless to stop or control. Just as Fry had turned a blind eye to his little chat earlier in the day, he allowed others to have their own discussions about whatever they liked, so long as they didn’t disrupt the rest of the lesson. By the time the bell rang for lunch, David already knew his life was over. He tucked himself away in his usual fashion, knowing that if he couldn’t stop any of it from spreading, he could damn well hide from it.
Returning to general studies after lunch proved that hiding away may not have been the best strategy to dealing with classroom rumours. It wasn’t what he heard within the room as he readied himself in his seat, so much as what he saw. As the room filled up around him, attention turned his way as more and more of his classmates wanted a fresh look at the boy who had made Wozniak lose his mind in the middle of a lesson. To say he didn’t feel great about the event or himself was an understatement.
Bill didn’t want to sit next to him anymore either. Neither did Alex and his weird friend. The girls had all chosen to sit as far away from David as possible, which was hardly a surprise. But this was the first time he had been actively avoided by everyone in the room. Even as the room filled up, and there were fewer seats available, stragglers who came in late tried to find seats anywhere other than next to him. In the end, he was joined on one side by a boy who seemed much older than him and bored by everything around him. He sat down without a word, settled a little brass service bell next to his exercise book, and immediately began playing with his phone. David thought about saying hello, but he found himself far too intimidated to even breathe in the other boy’s direction.
Just before the bell rang, another boy David didn’t recognise ran through the door in a scrambled flurry. He was spared any chastisement from Fry because Alan came in after him, moments after the bell. While Fry and Alan shared what David had already come to accept as their usual friendly sparring, the first boy looked around the room and found the only empty seat to David’s right.
“Hey,” he whispered harshly at David. “Do you mind if I have a look at your notes? Mine are a bit shit the last few weeks.”
David looked at him, not quite sure what to make of him or his question.
“Why would you think I have any notes at all?” he asked.
Just to make a point, he showed his nearly-empty exercise book, hoping it might remind the other boy that David was new to the unit. Then, as if in direct response, the other boy looked at him very deliberately.
“Yeah, you’re the new kid,” he said, acknowledging David’s exercise book with a nod. “I’ve heard you’re a bit of a swot. I thought you might have good notes.”
David had never felt so offended at the truth in his life. He gaped and felt himself leaning away at the implied insult.
“Well, I obviously haven’t got any notes. Go ask someone else,” he said.
The other boy rolled his eyes. “Fine then,” he said. Then he leaned even further forward. “Hey, Julian.”
On David’s other side, Julian barely turned to acknowledge either one of them. “Fuck off, Lee,” he said.
The boy apparently called Lee sat back heavily in his seat. “Well, I’m sure you two will be very happy together,” he said.
David decided to ignore both of them and turned to listen to Fry introduce whatever tenuous theme he had in store for his structured torture this time. But he’d already missed something pertinent and began checking out almost at once. He couldn’t keep up with the rapid changes of topic as the lesson got started, and thanks to Lee he didn’t even have a theme that might have guided him in the right direction. All he could do was listen to Fry witter on and hope to catch something that made a bit of sense. At the moment, it was something to do with lizards.
On top of it, David still didn’t even understand what all this note-taking business was all about. He looked to Julian for guidance, but Julian only leaned against his desk and listened impassively. When David dared to look at Lee, he found the idiot scrabbling about in his bag instead of listening at all. Looking around the room provided little help in the notes department as well. Nobody seemed to be writing down anything. If they did write something down, it was a quick scribble and that was it. David simply had no idea what he was meant to be doing at all. He stared down at the blank page before him and wrote down a note for himself, just to put some ink on the page.
‘ What the fuck am I doing? ’
He didn’t have an answer to that. But it didn’t seem to matter, because soon Lee knocked into him, which made David want to jump out of his skin.
“Hey. Do you have a pen I can borrow?” Lee asked in a harsh whisper.
“No,” said David, gripping just a little more tightly to the pen in his hand.
“Let me use that one then. You’re not using it,” Lee said.
David looked over at where Lee had emptied half his bag onto his part of the desk and found himself wondering why Fry hadn’t told him to stop yet. He briefly considered bringing this disruption to Fry’s attention, but just as quickly as the thought had occurred to him, David realised what the hell he was even supposed to say. Instead of getting Fry’s attention, he addressed Lee’s idiotic statement instead.
“What does that matter?” David asked. “I’m not going to give you one of mine just so you can lose it as well. Find yours in that mess there.”
“Oh, so now you do have an extra one?” said Lee, gesturing like he’d somehow won the argument. “You’re just being a prick about it, then?”
With a deep breath, David decided he was going to play this game his way. “Yes, I am. Now find your own fucking pen,” he said.
David didn’t get enough time to enjoy the baffled look on Lee’s face, which was possibly the most unfair thing to have happened to him all day.
“David, would you care to tell me what’s so important this time?” asked Fry from the front of the class.
Several people – presumably those who had been present the last time he had been told off for talking during a lesson – laughed, while the rest seemed to grow nervous. But this time, David didn’t think he’d done anything wrong, and he was going to make sure Fry knew it.
“He wants to borrow a pen, but I don’t lend mine out,” David said. “They’re nice pens, and I never get them back when I do lend them out. I can’t afford to keep replacing them all the time.”
Fry let out an exasperated little sigh. “Lee, how in the hell have you already lost all of your pens? It’s only Monday, for Christ’s sake.”
David couldn’t help but feel a little bit smug about that.
“I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I actually brought any today,” said Lee.
Fry looked like he was trying very hard not to say something he might regret, while the atmosphere in the room only grew more and more uneasy.
“And anyway, I don’t see why the new kid can’t share. How expensive can one pen be?” Lee asked, knocking into David again.
“Stop it,” David said, swatting back at him.
“Lee, come on, now,” said Fry as he shook his head.
But Lee had put Fry into a predicament, and David already feared the outcome. He tried to plead silently from his seat not to be made to lend this half-wit one of his pens, but he knew in his very core that this was exactly what Fry was going to do.
“Lee, where is it you go next? PE, isn’t it?” Fry asked.
He sounded tired, and David didn’t exactly blame him.
“Aye, that’s right,” said Lee. “And then home after that. And then back again here tomorrow.”
His attempt at a joke fell flat on the floor, but nobody was looking at him. All eyes were on David, which rather gave him the feeling of wanting to disappear into the wall behind him.
“All right. David, I promise Lee will give you your pen back,” said Fry. He gestured to David to give Lee one of his spares. “I’ll personally see to it that he does.”
He only needed to keep his mouth shut. He was already causing too much trouble, but it was bubbling away in the back of his throat, needing to escape. How difficult would it be to just hand his pen over and be done with it?
Too difficult, clearly. Without any intention his part, he found himself shaking his head.
“I don’t believe you,” he said, internally screaming at himself to just once shut the fuck up.
That should have got him thrown right out of the room. He was surprised when it didn’t happen. Instead, Fry laughed rather thinly and nodded.
“I won’t let him leave until he returns it,” said Fry.
David still didn’t like this. It still felt like he was going against everything he knew about how the universe worked. But the entire room was silent, and everyone was staring at him, specifically, and he needed to do something to save this situation from himself. He was the kid who had made Wozniak go absolutely mental during a lesson. Now he hadn’t even been in this unit for a full day, and he was already defaulting to his same self-destructive habits.
The only thing he could do was reach into his bag and pull out a spare pen. Lee was cautious about taking it from him, and at first David let himself think maybe things might be okay. The way the entire room remained silent as lee looked at the pen – a blue retractable gel pen – should have been his first clue. Without warning, Lee gripped the pen in both hands and bent it until the barrel snapped. For a moment, there was laughter. David could hear Fry shouting over it, but he didn’t take in a single word. He was too focused on not losing his tempter. He kept his jaw clenched so tightly shut that it made his teeth hurt, because he didn’t know what might come out of his mouth if he allowed himself to open it. He kept his fists clenched tightly against his desk, because he didn’t know if he wanted to attack Lee or flee from the room, and he didn’t want to find out. All he could hear was a deep rumble in his ears, and his own drawn-out breathing. The room had gone silent, and Lee’s self-satisfied grin melted into confusion. There was something else playing across Lee’s face in that moment, but whatever it was, David didn’t care. All he knew was that he had already made his first real enemy, because he had buckled and done as he was told.
Something pulled at his attention. Something that wasn’t Lee. He tried to ignore it, because he only wanted to be righteously furious with Lee, but it was still there, persistent in the silence of everything else.
“David,” Fry said gently. “David, would you like to go outside?”
David slowly turned to look at Fry at the front of the class, wondering how many times his name had been said. He had completely lost track of everything around him until that moment, but now he was all too aware of how hot and uncomfortable he felt.
“Sorry, what?” he asked, annoyed with his own voice for shaking.
“Would you like to go outside for a bit?” Fry asked again.
He did not include the implicit ‘to calm down,’ but he didn’t need to. The whole room had seen him barely avoid a meltdown of epic proportions. Going somewhere else to calm down would have probably been the best thing for him to do. It would have also been the worst.
“No, I’m fine. I’ll be fine,” David said, forcing himself to ignore the way his voice still wavered.
It wasn’t an easy thing to ignore, because he wasn’t fine at all. But he thought staying in his seat and being furious with Lee was better than immediately gaining a reputation as the kid who needed to be sent out of class because he couldn’t control himself over a fucking pen. David looked down at his hands, still balled into tight fists pressed against his desk, and focused on trying to relax.
“Look, I don’t know why I did that,” Lee said. He looked around the room nervously, but no one was helping him either. “I’m really sorry. I also don’t know what just happened, but it’s clear most of you lot do, and I can’t help feeling like I really fucked up just there.”
A few people laughed at that, but David didn’t think he deserved to be laughed at. For some reason, Lee’s stupid quip getting even the smallest titter of laughter only managed to piss David off all over again.
“David, I am really sorry. I’ll buy you a new pen. I promise,” Lee said.
He was actually pleading now, and David didn’t know how to respond. He knew the gracious way to respond; the polite way that had been drilled rather unfairly into him throughout childhood. He knew the correct way to respond, to accept Lee’s apology and pretend as if nothing had happened. But he sure as hell wasn’t going to do that. Even more than he hated being made to apologise when he didn’t mean it, David hated accepting someone else’s apology when the thing being apologised for still hurt.
Luckily for both of them, there was an adult in charge who could sort this mess out for the both of them. “Eddie, would you be a dear and swap seats with Lee?” Fry said.
“New kid’s not really my type, but sure,” said Eddie.
David ignored what he suspected was a joke at his expense and watched Lee scramble to shove everything back into his bag. With it barely closed, he scurried around the edge of the room to take Eddie’s vacated seat, earning even more laughter and irritating David all over again. As Eddie sat next to David, he ignored her, watching instead as Lee was very quickly and very obviously brought up to speed on the brand new psychopath in the unit. Even from across the room, David could see Lee speak the words ‘That was him?’ without needing to hear him.
Watching Lee look back across the room at him, eyes wide as the boy next to him filled his head with gossip that probably wasn’t even true, David wished he had been able to live up to whatever was being said about him. Then he might have actually had the balls to punch Lee in his stupid face, and not give a fuck about the consequences.
“You’ll be happy to know I’ve brought my own pen,” Eddie said suddenly.
David looked over at her as she flourished a glittery red gel pen in her fingers. As she showed it off, David noticed that it almost perfectly matched the shade of her nails, and he wondered if that was deliberate. Then he wondered how she got away with painting her nails, when such things were entirely against uniform code.
He ignored all of that and gave her a weak smile. “I feel like I should apologise,” he said.
Eddie laughed. “Don’t. Little bastard needed a good scare.”
Drawn back to Lee again, David watched as Fry dug through a drawer in his desk and came out with something for Lee to write with. When he handed it over, Lee looked at it with disgust.
“Oi, that’s a crayon, that is,” he said, shaking it in Fry’s direction.
“Yes, it is,” said Fry. “And if you eat it, I’m not giving you another one.”
David watched in horror as Lee physically struggled against doing exactly that while Fry directed everyone’s attention back to the question he had previously asked. Lee held his mouth open and put the crayon in his mouth, while straining against biting down on it. It was like he was a creature driven on spite, and spite alone. But now with the class more or less refocused, Fry ignored him and continued on with his lesson. David was still too pissed off and wound up to even pretend to care about randy ostriches.
“I know it’s shit advice, but just ignore him. He’s an idiot,” Eddie said quietly. She leaned in too close, making David want to lean away again. “We all are, really. I think it’s a requirement for winding up here.”
David’s immediate response to that was to be offended at the insult. But it hadn’t been one, really. Sure, David didn’t go around eating crayons, but part of him did have to admit that on some level, idiocy had got him where he was. He wasn’t sure what to make of anything he’d heard about Alex, but both versions of the story there were certainly idiotic. If he was being entirely honest, Bill hadn’t seemed terribly bright either.
“So what about you?” David asked, trying to keep quiet so he didn’t become the centre of attention yet again.
Eddie smirked and leaned back in her seat. “I’d say it was more a culmination of lots of little things, rather than any one single event,” she said.
On David’s other side, Julian snorted. He had ignored the entire disaster with Lee, and still leaned against his desk while watching Fry spout nonsense, but his attention was obviously elsewhere.
“Yes, and I’m sure Ms Beaton catching you getting a blow job from your girlfriend had nothing to do with it,” he said.
He chuckled quietly to himself, even as Eddie gasped in offended outrage.
“Julian, shut up, you hag,” she said as she reached over David to jab Julian with her pen. “Like you’re any better.”
Julian still didn’t look back at them. “No, I’m not,” he said with a playful edge to his voice. “But I never pretended to be either.”
David was confused all over again. On one hand, this unit could have very easily been a SEND unit with everyone in it seeming being some sort of moron. On the other hand, David had found himself apparently surrounded by criminals, which felt an awful lot like the behavioural and referral units he’d been in before.
Dear god, what if this was somehow both? A unit for all the especially stupid criminals. With this possibility now in play, even David had to admit that with his grades and behaviour, he wouldn’t exactly be out of place. Hell, he hadn’t even been there a full day and was already barely avoiding fights.
“Well, if you could both start spreading the rumour that I’m actually a massive coward, I’d greatly appreciate it,” David said.
The last thing he needed was for people to think he could actually hold his own in a fight.
“Are you really?” Eddie asked. “That’s too bad. For a second there, I thought someone might finally beat the snot out of Lee. He’d have deserved it, that’s for sure.”
“If you ask me, he needs something else beaten out of him,” Julian said.
Even without Eddie laughing, David knew he would have been able to work out that Julian had made some sort of filthy joke. With Eddie laughing, it was crystal clear. But David was far too embarrassed to let on that he had no idea what Julian had meant. He was even more embarrassed that Eddie noticed.
“Julian, stop it. You’re confusing the child,” she said.
Julian finally turned round to get a good look at David, in turn affording David his first good look at Julian. He looked more bored than possible, which cut a stark contrast against his sharp eyeliner and sparkly blue eye shadow.
“Oh. What year are you?” Julian asked, making it sound like an insult somehow.
David found himself too nervous to answer suddenly. He had to gather up the courage to even form the words now that Julian had decided to look at him directly.
“Er. Ten,” said David finally.
Julian rolled his eyes. “Please, he can’t be that innocent. He went to public school, after all.”
David didn’t know what that meant either, and now he didn’t dare ask. But he did look down at his uniform, beginning to understand that it had probably contributed to more of his problems than he’d realised. He was going to have to do something about it, clearly.
“So, er. What year are you then?” he asked instead.
“Twelve,” they both said at the same time.
Julian turned back around to face the front of the room, and David decided to copy him. And it was just as well, because he needed to work out how this lesson was meant to work if he was going to have any chance of passing it. But then he abruptly registered what they had both said.
“Hang on, you’re in sixth form?” he asked.
He looked around the room and began to make sense of the disparity in class sizes. His maths lesson must have only been for pupils of his own year. General studies was the hell everyone in the unit was made to endure together.
“Oh, yeah,” said Eddie. “For sure. It’s not real sixth form, of course. God forbid. But they still make us take the same A-levels as them, so it’s just as horrible.”
She shook her head dramatically and looked down at her exercise book.
“I don’t understand,” said David. “I– how? I’m not even taking enough lessons to sit my GSCEs.”
Eddie waved her hand at him. “Oh, don’t worry about that. Nobody does at first. Think of it like, you’re in jail right now–”
“I’m in jail?” David asked, starting far too loudly, and having to force himself to be more quiet.
“Yeah, it’s a terrible metaphor. Just roll with it,” Eddie said. “You’re in jail right now, but if you behave and get your grades up to snuff, it’s like you get parole.”
“More like work release,” said Julian.
“Fine, work release,” said Eddie, waving her hand at him. “They let you pick more lessons, so you’re not stuck in this hellhole all day. But only if Stephen signs off on it.”
It was too much information for David to take in. “Stephen? Who’s that?” he asked. Was it some other teacher he hadn’t had the misfortune to meet yet?
“Fry,” both Eddie and Julian said.
David looked up at Fry, then at Eddie, then at Julian, and back up to Fry. Calling a teacher by his given name was about eight steps beyond his comfort zone.
“Fry decides whether or not I get to take other lessons?” he asked.
“Now you’re getting it,” Eddie said.
It was terrible metaphor, but David thought he understood. And then he thought back to the hellhole that was maths.
“And what if I don’t get my grades up?” he asked.
“Then Fry at least notices something you are good at and works his arse off to make sure you pass as many GCSEs as possible.”
That sounded unlikely. He couldn’t imagine where Fry might find the time to give even a single pupil individual attention. Still, David tried to follow along with this bizarre metaphor.
“I was told if I get my grades up, I can go back to normal lessons,” he said.
Both Eddie and Julian snorted, telling David everything he needed to know.
“Don’t be silly. That never happens,” Julian said.
David had already worked out that Coles had lied to him, but this was betrayal beyond words. And it was making David angry all over again.
“Oh, sure. I mean, you can if you want,” Eddie said quickly. “It’s just no one ever bothers. And the only people who do bother don’t make it out.”
She tipped her thumb toward the far corner of the room. David carefully looked toward another group of likely sixth form pupils, none of whom were even pretending to pay attention.
“Right,” said David. “But I could. If I wanted.”
It wasn’t a question, but Eddie nodded all the same. “Oh, yeah. A clever boy like you, it should be no problem.”
Eddie winked at him, making David wonder just how often such a thing actually happened. But it had given him some new and useful information, at least. A back-up, in case he never managed to dig himself out of this hole he’d found himself in now.
He needed to dig himself out, and that started with navigating his way through these lessons. He thought about asking Eddie for her notes, since that was apparently allowed, but if she was studying for A-levels David thought it was more likely that anything she found noteworthy would be of no relevance to him. At the same time, he still didn’t understand what notes he was meant to be taking. He started by writing down each question Fry asked – ‘Have you read 1984?’ ‘Where do loofahs come from?’ ‘What’s the best way to find out if someone is drunk without using a breathalyser?’ – to try to understand the relevance of any of them. But it wasn’t long at all before he gave up and accepted that he was going to be stuck in this hellhole for as long as he managed to keep himself from being kicked out entirely.
By the time the bell rang, David’s anxiety about the whole thing was already beginning to give way to a familiar depression. He had hoped to at least make it through the first day with at least a shred of optimism remaining, but that was never going to happen. Not when some inconsiderate prick had put PE down for his final Monday lesson.