Fight Or Flight

Chapter 2 - Media Studies

Chapter 2 - Media Studies

Mr Mason, our English and Media Studies teacher, had this idea that when you work in class as a group, you should be split into 'home' and 'away' groups. In your 'home' group you could sit with your usual mates and piss around, but in the 'away' group you could be put with all sorts of people, people he usually couldn't pay you to sit anywhere near.

Ed and the new girl, Layla, were in my 'away' group, along with a lad called Adam Patterson.

I knew Adam didn't want to be in our group. I can still remember the moans and groans as we were told by Mr Mason to go and sit in our 'away' groups for the first time.

"Do I have to?" sulked Adam, flopping back in his chair, after he realised who he was about to be sitting with. He remained seated at the back of the class, despite being told to move again.

"Do I have to?" he asked again.

"No, of course you don't. I'll make an exception for you, Adam," Mr Mason replied.

At first, Adam began to stand up again. Then paused, unsure if Mr Mason was being serious or his usual, sarcastic self. Realising he was being ironic, he smiled at sir, then dragged his chair across the floor, so it scraped the ground and produced a really annoying screeching noise, then shoved it beneath the desk, next to my chair.

I kind of hoped he was pissed off because he was told to sit with Ed and Layla, rather than me. As he joined the group, he pushed his seat closer to mine and whispered, "No offence, Sami, it's not you; it's the other mongs," he shook his head. "State of them."

I looked to Layla, who stared straight through me; her eyes unflinching, her gaze sure, untroubled and seemingly uninterested in all which surrounded her.

We'd all heard the rumours of why she'd suddenly turned up at our school at beginning of Year 11. It was a strange thing to happen, with our final GCSE exams less than nine months away. I overheard somebody in the cafeteria say that she was involved with Kelly Stone, a fifteen-year-old girl who'd strangely disappeared that April. We knew Kelly had attended a neighbouring school - a posh, all-girls school called St Cecilia's - three or four miles away from our town. The story caused a stir for a while. The papers said Kelly and her best friend - rumoured to be Layla - had left their bikes on the side of the road while they sought shelter after being caught in the rain while out cycling one day.

Then something happened.

And a day or so later, Kelly's body was dragged from the reservoir about ten miles or so from our town.

The unnamed friend - still rumoured to be Layla - was said to be traumatised by the incident, and it was reported she could hardly speak about what had happened.

As I looked to Layla, on that first day we sat together, I could not put her alongside the picture of the glowing, smiling girl, whose face filled the front page of the local paper for a few days that April. The smiling girl, from the newspaper front page, looked too normal, too straight to be hanging around with somebody who looked like Layla.

Ed looked more her type, I thought. Meek and lonely, an outsider who may have worn the same uniform as everyone else but looked completely unlike the rest of us.

Ed and Layla were in the same tutor group, too, and I could see why they had gravitated towards each other. They looked like they shared the same interests, the same fashion sense, the same musical tastes. All that punky, gothy stuff I imagined.

The day we first had to sit together in English, I could still see traces of misery and hurt in Ed's hollow eyes. I could still imagine every punch, every corridor trip, every flicked bit of spit, every word of abuse he'd endured in all the years he'd been at The Brook. I could imagine him walking around the school, doing his best to avoid Waugh and Beattie and those hangers-on who wished to impress that pair.