Free The Sick Rose by Erin Kelly Page B

the way people were really nice to him in front of the teachers but had stopped playing with him at break times because of how he’d stop without warning and stare into nowhere, bypassed by the football and ambushed by tears.
    On his first day he wore a blazer that cracked at the elbows like dry skin. With his little frame in the big coat he felt like he was wearing a suit of armour. At the gates to Grays Reach High, which incorporated a metal detector and were patrolled by Community Support Officers, he wondered very seriously if he might need one. He had never seen so many people in the same place all at once. For one bewildering second he thought that the staff were wearing school uniform too and then as one of the ‘teachers’ burst a bubble of gum over his tongue and slung a schoolbag over his shoulder it dawned on him these six-foot creatures, these men , were schoolboys like him.
    The other Year 7s’ main concern was coming to terms with the concept of a timetable and the constant shifting from room to room, but Paul had another fear uppermost in his mind. From week one it was horribly apparent that at Grays Reach there were opportunities for blood to escape everywhere. His junior school had presented nothing more hazardous than round plastic scissors and the odd grazed knee: this building was one big flesh wound waiting to happen. The school knew that the kids carried knives and they were good at spot checks, but confiscating the blades didn’t mean he was safe. There were design and technology classes with lathes and craft knives, food technology classes with huge steel blades and science laboratories full of glass jars and test tubes, any one of which might splinter into a dozen lethal shards. The compasses in their brand new geometry sets had points sharp enough to break the skin and if you snapped one of those protractors or set squares in half they would have a jagged edge like a sheet of glass.
    Paul knew that he was only of average ability – he worked hard for his B-grades – but at Grays Reach he was considered the class intellectual. Despite this handicap, he was assimilated into a loose posse of boys in his form. None of them shared his passion for reading fantasy novels, but you couldn’t have everything. He had people to walk home with and people to eat lunch with and until he found a kindred spirit (in books, you always found your kindred spirit eventually, after a long and arduous journey), they would do. He’d once gone to a lunchtime chess club meeting hoping to find some like-minded people – he couldn’t play, but he liked the idea of the game with its antiquity and mystery – but it had been just him and Mr Bradley, his history teacher, who didn’t bother to hide his disappointment when nobody else turned up but had taught Paul the basic moves nevertheless. After three weeks Mr Bradley’s dejection was more than he could bear, and although he was getting into the game, he felt that it would be kinder to release the teacher from his commitment.
    He survived most of his first year intact and then, at the beginning of the summer term, they studied genetics in biology. All of them were sticking out their tongues, trying to see if they could roll them into a pipe or not. Miss Grewal, who always wore a white coat like a doctor, couldn’t roll her tongue. Paul could do it: the boy next to him was a double roller, making a sort of wavy pattern like the letter W that no one else on their table could do. Miss Grewal had explained that tongue rollers inherited this ability from their parents: if neither of your parents could do it, you would never be able to, no matter how hard you tried, and if they both could, it would come easily to you. If one parent was a tongue roller and the other one wasn’t, you had a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting it. Their homework was to find out how many people in their families could roll their tongues and plot it on a family tree diagram and see if there was a