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.Before I could do anything else, the girl behind me grabbed me by the wrist.I was about to struggle when she pressed something soft down firmly over the cuts.She did it so that I couldn’t see them, and I was grateful.Sometimes not looking is the best thing you can do.Later, when they had to rip it from the crusted slashes in the emergency room at Vincent Pallotti, I saw what it was: a bandanna that she would never wear.The thin boy gaped up from the carpet at Kenny.‘What are you doing?’Kenny had stopped crying, or maybe he’d just run out of tears.‘I did this for you!’ the thin boy cried.‘You said you wanted to come!’Kenny looked wordlessly at him.I waited for him to touch his glasses, but it seemed he was done even with that.Everything he knew was untrue, as if he had been bombed back into a past that precluded speech, as if the little dyslexic boy had found him out at last.‘What’s WRONG with you!’ cried the thin boy.It wasn’t a question.‘Not in the library,’ said Kenny.His voice was soft and devoid of emotion.He was stating a rule.He picked up my teaching copy of Othello and held it to his sweaty shirtfront to underline his short speech.‘You fat FREAK!’ screamed the thin boy.He scrambled to his feet and lunged, throwing himself at Kenny, who lifted the book.The thin boy bounced off him and stumbled backwards.He fell back again under his own disequilibrium.I think it was the first time that Kenny had realised that his tonnage could stand for something other than ridicule.But the thin boy was impervious to pain.He picked himself up again, gasping, and repeated his attack – and Kenny fended him off, a little more violently this time.The corner of the book had been crumpled in the assault, like the head of a turtle retreating into its shell.Kenny held it up.‘Look what you did,’ he said to the thin boy.He spoke with a kind of wonder.‘You damaged a book!’The thin boy looked at him in amazement.‘What are you going to do, Kenny?’ he asked.‘Fine me? Are you going to fine me?’The way of the world had come to visit Kenny.He understood, and drooped.The music from the Valentine’s Assembly had come to an end.Somewhere else the headmistress would be delivering a speech on kinds of love apart from the romantic.My pulse triangulated between head, heart and wrist, pumping blood to the cuts.I pressed the wad down harder in the pause between question and answer.That was when the sprinklers came on, soaking everything in their cool, rational mist.It’s standard practice for emergencies now, but back then it was a miracle.The drops didn’t sink in as soon as they landed: they quivered, whole, like water under a microscope.I imagined the people who would come later with their tools, sifting our damp remains, matching femur with kneecap, counting out toes.The rain fell and the covers of the books darkened by degrees, the stains spreading down their spines.The pages would swell to triple their size and the covers would warp.Nothing would fit back between them.The first cellphone rang.The girl beside me squeaked.It was surprise more than anything else.She hadn’t made a sound the whole time I was being cut, or when the boys were fighting.The thin boy was back on his feet.He swivelled towards her.‘What did I say?’ he roared.‘Didn’t I tell you to be as quiet as a mouse?’ He shoved the knife towards his own face and for a moment I thought he would plunge it into his eye, but he only clenched it between his teeth.He marched over and began to drag her out from under the table.She was so light that he only had to pull once to unbalance her.A boy’s centre of gravity is in his shoulders; a girl’s is in her pelvis.She fell forward.The strap on her top broke under his hands.The thin boy simply hauled her over onto her back and sat on her chest.There were carpet burns on her knees.He stared into her face, then he reached down and forced his fingers inside her mouth.He twanged the little red elastics on her braces.Then he tried to yank the girl’s head up by the hair, but the little hooks on her headgear had caught in the carpet and trapped her.The thin boy gave up and then raised both hands above his own head, clasping the hilt of the knife like an Olympic athlete on the podium.It happened so fast, survivors always say, as if slowing it down means they could have done something about it.Before we knew what was happening.The paper heart on his sleeve seemed to pump on the downstroke.At first I thought he had aimed for the heart and missed, but he stabbed her in the throat on purpose.In movies you see blood everywhere, saturating the floor and spraying the walls, but this girl produced only one feeble jet, like the water pistols her classmates would use to terrorise the school for Matric Madness.I didn’t expect the hot slaughterhouse smell of her insides, there among the books.Pig, I thought.Pig, pig.We were seeing the end of fiction.The other girls had their heads in their hands.They hid behind one another.Some of them were sobbing, but they were trying to do it silently: they had seen what had happened to girls who weren’t as quiet as mice.More cellphones rang.The tinny voices rose in an approximation of music, an automaton’s idea of an orchestra.The cellphone symphony rose and seemed to rouse the thin boy.He looked down at what he had done.He touched her mouth again.His voice was flat, as if shock could absorb sound.‘I used to wear braces.But they hurt.Especially at night.This ache, you know?’ He wanted us to understand.‘So one night I got up and I took them off with pliers.’ He laughed at himself.Still the cellphones rang.The girls were crying, louder now.Kenny had sunk back down to the floor again, his stand for the old order overturned.He had let go of Othello, and it had fallen spread-eagled on the carpet, where the inferior ink began to run.Kenny saw the death of punctuation; he watched the lines lose their curly brackets.The words went last, smearing the pages.The paper itself would eventually dissolve back into its constituent fibres, like a time-lapse film, something running in reverse and sending all of us back to the forest.And they say there’s no undoing; they say there’s no going back!The thin boy rolled off the girl’s body.He was still holding the knife.And he came to me, came to do what he had always planned to do, but had been frustrated by interruption and insubordination.The thin boy also had rules.I tried to move off my knees.For a moment there was the sick dream-fear that I was paralysed, that the thin boy had cut some vital wire in the current of my body.But they moved, my joints grinding, old and out of time.I shifted from under the table.The cellphones chorused, the prelude to a performance: bleeps and riffs and phrases from another world, like the recordings NASA sends into space.And I stood up to meet him
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