Verboten

Alex walked in to Jack’s room the next morning with his face hidden. The first bell had just rung, signalling Registration, and his form were slowly filing in. Alex took his seat – although not strictly assigned, his pupils seemed to sit in the same places every day – and started to jiggle his leg up and down nervously, and tapping his right hand on the desk in a quick, frantic rhythm.

“Alex,” Jack said quietly as another group of students traipsed in, Amy among them. Alex looked up at his teacher reluctantly, his face flushed with embarrassment. “Can you come up here for a second?”

Alex stood, looking for all the world like he was being asked to repeat Hercules’ Twelve Labours, but stomped over to the desk, narrowly avoiding a collision with Amy, who laughed it off and settled into
her usual seat next to Alex’s.

“I just wanted to say,” Jack muttered, “that you have nothing to be ashamed of. What happened yesterday doesn’t mean you’re weak, or that I think anything bad of you, it just means that now I understand what’s going on in your head a little better.”

“Really?” Alex whispered through cracked lips. They looked as though they had been bitten several times since Jack had seen him last, and he hadn’t bothered to straighten his hair that morning. In fact, it looked like he had barely slept last night.

“Really,” Jack replied. “You were having a panic attack, Alex, and you weren’t in your right mind – you were seeking comfort, and that’s understandable.”

“Thanks, sir!” Alex appeared to brighten up and almost skipped back to his seat. He greeted Amy and they both chatted happily.

Jack cleared his throat for attention and took the register quickly, and then just as rapidly read out the sheet of notices for the day. “Bell’s going to go in five minutes,” he called, glancing at the clock, “feel free to chat while you’re waiting.”

Jack clicked through his emails and sighed as he read several messages from the Head Teacher criticising the behaviour of a few individual members of his form. He groaned inwardly – he would have to make some phone calls that night.

The bell rang, and Jack jumped to his feet, yelling, “Stand behind your places quietly, please.” He waited for compliance from the students and then dismissed them, bringing up the PowerPoint he needed for this lesson on his computer screen.

“Alex,” he said, sorting through papers on his desk, “I was thinking as we’ve only started catching up so far, you could spend this lesson copying up the work we did last night, and I have some additional worksheets here for you.” Jack let out a small, triumphant cry and retrieved the papers from his desk. He leant over his desk and slid the papers over to Alex, who was tugging his book and own papers from his bag, along with his pencil-case.

“Thanks, sir,” Alex said, smiling at his teacher. Jack felt suddenly weirdly happier that his pupil was looking cheerier, but as the rest of the students filed into the room he pushed the thought from his mind.

***********

“Hey, Mr. Barakat,” Amy said, approaching his desk. Jack glanced up and smiled in greeting, accepting Amy’s proffered book.

“Hello, Amy, what can I do for you?” Jack asked, scanning the page in front of him.

“I was just wondering about whether I’ve done the essay you set us right, I wasn’t really sure…” Amy’s voice trailed off as she began to chew her nails and fidget.

“Let me see…” Jack muttered, “It seems alright, you’ve definitely got the right idea, you could expand a little bit more on a few of the points you’ve made.”

“Yeah, I had to finish it in a bit of a hurry, I got distracted chatting to Alex,” Amy grinned, readjusting her bag on her shoulder.

“Oh? What were you talking about?” Jack asked interestedly, yanking his red pen from his drawer and writing a couple of comments on Amy’s essay.

“Just about his old school and stuff like that, he’s been really badly bullied in the past and he’s hoping he’s not going to be here.”

“Why was he bullied?” Jack frowned. He wasn’t horrible; he was a sweet, kind boy, as far as Jack could tell, and he wasn’t ugly – in fact, the opposite.

“He’s gay,” Amy replied, in what seemed to Jack in a far too casual manner - as if she was trying to show that she didn't care at all about his sexuality.

“Ah,” was Jack’s reply. He handed Amy’s book back to her and smiled as she exited the room.
Inside, Jack’s mind was fizzing and bubbling like a chemical reaction, and his insides suddenly felt strange. He shook his head and picked up a pile of textbooks, shoving them roughly into the cupboard to distract himself with the task. However, his mind wandered and he soon found himself thinking about Alex again, distracted by the images of him tossing his head to flick his hair out of his face, and when he smiled and an adorable dimple appeared in his left cheek.

Jack shook his head again, as if the physical motion would force the thought to fly from his mind, and stood up, slamming the cupboard doors shut. He frowned, rubbing at a crease set in the back of his neck like he always did when he was plagued by a nagging thought, the kind that rested in the back of your mind and were constantly an itch that you couldn’t get rid of.

Jack settled back into his chair and sighed, drumming his hands on the arm rests. His mind flicked back to Alex again, annoyingly (or maybe not so much), and a new idea blossomed.

He pulled open the lid of his laptop and waited for the slow internet connection to take him to Google, and then typed rapidly ‘anxiety’ and hit the enter key. While he waited for the search results to load, he sprung from his chair and hurried down to the Student Support centre, luckily only a thirty-second walk from his classroom. Relieved that it was empty – not that what he was doing was illegal or against the rules, he just didn’t want to have to explain his actions to anybody at that moment – Jack slipped into the office and pulled out the drawer in the filing cabinet called ‘Year Ten’. He flipped through to find ‘Gaskarth, Alex’ marked in the untidy scrawl of the secretary and tugged it out, closing the drawer again.

He closed the office door after himself quietly, even though there was no one there to hear him, and stepped back to his classroom quickly. He plonked himself down in front of his laptop once more, clicking on the first website that had come up and ruffling through Alex’s file.