Stand By Me ~Zouis Family

Eight

Kids are cruel.

It’s a simple fact really, we’ve all heard the saying at some point in our lives. Like when a concerned parent pays a visit to their child’s school, voicing their worries of their child being picked on only to be told: “Kids are cruel.”

It’s true though; kids are cruel, if your family doesn’t have a lot of money, if your fashion sense isn’t ‘cool’ people will judge you if you voice and unpopular opinion, if you’re gay, hell people judge other people’s religions these days. It doesn’t matter what you do, someone’s going to judge you, someone is going to criticize your looks, someone is going to take the piss outta’ you, it’s human nature.

The students at Harry’s school weren’t vocally mean to him, but he didn’t miss the cold stares and judgemental glances cast at him. He didn’t understand why they all looked at him so unkindly, he hadn’t done anything to any of them.

It had been nearly two weeks since Niall and Harry started school, and both were having different experiences with the change.

Niall, as expected, was accepted by the student in his class immediately he’d even made friends with what seems like his entire class, but his favourite is a nice little boy named Luke, he claimed they were best friends.

Luke was only a few months older than Niall, he was taller with chestnut brown hair, his skin was pale and his face littered with freckles, but his most dominant feature was his eyes. They were stunning it was as if they couldn’t decide if they wanted to be brown or green, so they became a mixture of the two.

Niall had settled in perfectly at school, the teachers liked him and even though he was a little behind the others, he worked hard to catch up, even begging his fathers to let him take up guitar lessons.

Harry on the other hand, hadn’t had as much luck. The students in his various glasses didn’t speak to him, barely even sparing him a glance.

This was something so scarily new for the curly haired lad because at his old school, he was right in with the popular crowd, everyone knew his name, but here he was just the new kid, the weird kid. He’d made only one friend, and the term ‘friend’ is used very lightly because Andrew only sat with him in science and Andrew didn’t appear that interested in Harry outside of class.

Harry usually sat alone in his form room, his only company Mr. Campbell, who was also his Maths teacher.

Mr. Campbell was nice. He was more than willing to sit with Harry and go through all of the course work that needed extra attention because the move had really screwed with his consistency to stay on topic and also the fact he’d been working through completely different text books at his old school didn’t seem to help.

Harry liked walking home from school. He liked the peace and quiet. He liked having time to think about everything. It was a way to clear his head so that when he arrived home he’d be calm and his parents wouldn’t suspect a thing because there was no way in hell that Harry was going to tell them that school was shit for him. He liked to think it was because he was too much of a proud person, but secretly it was because he was ashamed.

“You doing all right there?”

Harry glanced up from his algebra text book to see Mr. Campbell standing over him, a ghost of a smile set on his otherwise concerned expression.

“I think so...” Harry replied, “I’m just having a little trouble with question six.”

Mr. Campbell smiled warmly and placed his hand on Harry’s shoulder as he read over the question the sixteen year old was struggling with. “I see where you went wrong- You need to divide x by the quantity.”