Snow Day

‘Conal says she’s a screamer,’ said Flint, untangling his headphones as the bus rattled up the hill and past the rec. The snow was gone and the roads were clear. James stared at what remained of a snowman in the centre-circle of the football pitch.

'What?’ he said.

‘Yeah, he text me just after you went. Music?’ He took the headphone and held it to his left ear. Down through the glass he watched the fall and rise of a bristled hedge. A horse flashed into sight and was gone. He closed his eyes.

‘What?’ he repeated as the horse dissolved inside his eyelids, leaving him again.

‘Conal. That bird. He poked her in a field last summer.’

Heartbeat had been on last night and James had watched it with his mum and younger sister. A girl from the village ran off with a rebel on a motorbike. There was a big search and when they were free a song played called ‘Chestnut Mare’. He’d downloaded it because it sounded something like the kind of music Flint had got him listening to recently. In bed, he’d played it till his room started getting light, imagining if Dani ran away with him. How he’d make her laugh the whole time, how at night they would have to sleep in a cave.

‘Oh,’ he said, turning around and doing the fingers, ‘she’s not my “bird”.’

‘I never said she was, mate.’

He turned back to the window and started counting road markings. Twenty-four hours ago, on Sunday, he had been brushing the snow off his grandad’s stableyard. With his headphones in, listening to The Byrds, he had pictured Dani cheering him on from the sidelines, jumping and clapping in that way girls had. As the job went on he had seen her viciously fighting other girls for him, hunting him down through hailstorms. Then he’d imagined rejecting her. A pregnancy test, perhaps. One of the teachers saying, ‘What have you done?’

Boys aren’t very nice, he thought. But then, nor are girls really.

It was later than usual when the bus pulled in to Back Lane. There were little smudges of ice on the verge, a shovel propped up against a hedge – these were the only signs that the snow was ever there. He felt a small sadness, like coming home after a holiday and seeing things – an old mess, some shoes you left – that usually you wouldn’t think about. They scattered onto the grounds, James towards C-block, where the year 10s gathered.

On Saturday night he had dreamed of her. They were on an iceberg together and there were arctic sharks and grey arctic crocodiles that jumped up and tried to drag her into the sea. He protected her with the garden shovel, and when he woke his phone had a new message. It said: ‘Haha yer inow. Hope skwlz off lol. Yer it wz wel cold lol. Thnx 4 lkn afta me, lol! Speak mon xxxxx’. Five kisses, he’d thought. Not bad. After breakfast he had been sick into the recycling bin.

He stood at the back of a group of boys watching Joe Fisher say quotes from a film or TV show that James had never seen. Fisher saw him and immediately said, ‘Hey, Petersburg, are you gonna ride that horse or fuck it?’ He did a wry head tilt and said that it was a classic line. He scanned the yard. By the library doors, some year 11s were doing kick-ups with a size three. Leaning on a bin, Tom Harvey illustrated an unheard anecdote with simulated shagging – Elliot Ewing looked impressed. Elsewhere, boys grouped with hands in pockets, kicked stones, shoved each other, squared-up and laughed, or hunched in groups watching porn on someone’s phone. Shane Hodgkinson yelped as he was grabbed by four of the rugby team and carried away to be skipped. They were friends, really. Shane was in the rugby team, it was just his turn. Everyone followed.

Then, flanked by two friends, Dani glided past the C-block toilets. She was wearing a new scarf. It was red. The boys charged down the steps and into B-block, and James looked back at the empty yard left behind.

‘Skip him! Skip him! Skip him!’ came the chant. James mouthed along, noiselessly.

They came out at the new RE rooms. Twenty yards ahead Shane was already trying to climb his way out over the broken chairs and empty boxes. Through the crowd he saw Dani laughing and running away from a group of boys as Tom Harvey tried to slap her on the backside. There were perhaps sixty of them now, and everyone turned and ran as a teacher came out and shouted, ‘What’s going on here, boys?’ James ran with them until they reached the sports hall and the bell started ringing. He looked at the town on the horizon, breathed in the sickly-sweet air from the biscuit factory, and walked to form.

Three days earlier, on Friday, he shuffled forward into the whiteness and waited for her at the edge of the playing field. Enough had fallen since first period that he could only tell path from pitch by the rise of the curb. The town had all but vanished, a pencil sketch half rubbed out.
‘It’s freezing,’ said Dani. He agreed, as he usually did with things like that, and lacking anything else to say made a chattering sound with his teeth. The two of them carried on silently into the flurry until they came to the main part of school and the new RE rooms.

‘It’s so cold,’ she said again. He thought she wasn’t very good at conversations.

They passed the cricket pavilion, which today looked like a marble palace, and they cut along the alley that separated the boys’ from the girls’ changing rooms. With his head down and his hands in pockets, he dribbled an old plimsoll out into the open, before hurling it back towards the changing block roof where it landed without a sound. She smiled and looked at her shoes. Then one of them stepped on some fresh snow and it makes a noise like a fart.

‘It wasn’t me,’ she said, and he felt sorry for her, made to be alone with a boy like this. He used up the only line he had prepared.

‘Tom Harvey’s a right knob in’t he.’

‘Mm,’ she said, running a finger down the white topping of the sports rails. It had been a safe bet; most of year 10 when you asked them seemed to agree that Tom Harvey was a knob. He’d taken his shirt off that morning and hugged some of the girls down onto the snow with him. They might have agreed that he was a knob, but it hadn’t stopped Lyndsey Allen blowing him off at Ollie Green’s birthday, and then again on World Book Day. Ever since these terrible revelations he had been bothered by a suspicion that there was some secret he hadn’t yet grasped, a secret which his classmates – even the idiots like Tom Harvey – seemed to know by osmosis, or else from some programme he wasn’t allowed to watch.

It was with these thoughts he watched three buses float over the horizon where the road must have been. He was about to mention it when she slipped and grabbed onto his arm, and they carried on, arms linked, through the shaken snowglobe of the A-block yard.

The snow had thickened, and twice she had to clasp him to stop from falling into the sludge. She felt soft against his arm. He imagined he felt bony, hard. He kept looking at her face – her small nose, her dark eyes – against the endless white. As they passed the sports hall, which was more like a huge white cliff, he said ‘It’s fucking freezin’ i’n’t it,’ and, desperate, made the chattering noise with his teeth again. She agreed, more quietly this time, and he decided that she didn’t like swearing.

They skirted along the side of the main building, with Dani leaning on him slightly as they went. Over the noise of the wind he heard the bell fading in to signal what everyone had hoped for that morning. Different classes in brightly-lit rooms suddenly clattered to a stand. He noticed that there were no lights on at the nursery over the fence.

‘Yay - we get to go home,’ said Dani.

‘Mint in’t it,’ he said.

They walked through the doors to the canteen, and he felt a heavy loss when their arms unlocked. There was clanging from the kitchens and he thought of the mountains of food they would soon be throwing away. As they came to the next set of doors, he remembered about ‘ladies first’, but went before her anyway. He didn’t know why he did that. Then she pushed the blue clipboard into the drawer marked ‘10E’ and they walked up the steps, away from the coffee smell, into the loud crowded corridor where he was pushed along to the doors. When he turned around she had gone.

He started a cherry Airwave as he joined the crowd at the bus area. The buses were already packed into Back Lane, chugging off whisps of smoke that vanished as soon as they hit the sky. He stepped onto the Alton bus and sat two-thirds of the way back, next to his best friend Flint. Flint was in year 11 and seemed to know a lot, despite being in low sets. Flint had an older brother.

‘Music?’ said Flint. He took the headphone and slid past to the window seat, noticing for the first time that his socks and hair were soaked. At the roundabout down the road, Flint paused his mp3 player and said, ‘Oh yeah – who’s your bird then?’

‘She’s not my – Danica Chessington - we were taking the register.’

‘You dark horse. Have you got her number?’ He said that he hadn’t. Then he remembered something.

‘Isn’t Conal friends with her?’

‘Do you want me to get her number off him?’

‘If you want.’ He sat back as Flint pulled his phone out and started texting Conal. Then, feeling sick, he pressed his head against the glass and watched the snow fall in the fields.