The Knife That Killed Me by Anthony McGowan Read Free Book Online

it.
    “No, sir, it just happened. No biggie.”
    “Well, that’s good. And nice to see your friends dropping in on you.”
    Friends. Well, I couldn’t really call them friends. But, yeah, it was good.
    “And maybe we’ll see you in chess tomorrow? They’re not so bad, you know.”
    “Who do you mean, sir?”
    “The chess nerds.”
    That made me laugh.
    “No, sir.”

No! I did not concentrate. I thought about death as a word, and not about death as a thing, the thing coming closer. I check back to the knife. Is it nearer? Yes, of course it is. The ghost trail of outlines shows that the knife has moved, carrying the boy with it. The water behind me has surged. Hearts have beaten, blood has flowed. The end is closer.

NINE
    I stayed
in the sick bay all afternoon. I think Miss Bush had forgotten I was there, and no one else looked in. I could have gone home. I could have gone back to class. It was metalwork in the afternoon, and I don’t mind that. I’d been making a car out of cast-off bits of metal, just the crap lying around, and Mr. Robinson thought it was quite good. Mr. Robinson was one of the teachers who was nice if you stayed on his good side. But if you did something wrong—say, messed up on the lathe or didn’t pay attention when he was telling us about safety—then he could turn savage.
    So I could have done either of those, but I was liking it there in the quiet room, even if it smelled a bit of old sick. And if I’d gone home, I’d only have had to explain things to Mum.
    I liked waiting to hear the bells at the end of each period, and the other sounds—the rush of feet, the loud voices. Usually the space in between lessons is a time of danger, when someone would smash you into a corridor wall, or trip you up, or take your bag and fling it down the stairwell. But I was safe from all that. And it was pleasant to think about going round to hang out with Shane and his friends. Pleasant, but also a bit scary. Whenever I tried to imagine what we’d do together, everything broke down. I didn’t know them at all, didn’t know what they’d want to talk about. I was always shy with new people. Sometimes with new people I’d clam up. Sometimes I’d say too much. There were all kinds of ways it could go wrong. They might think I was boring. Or I might come out with stuff they thought was stupid.
    I decided I wouldn’t go.
    No, I had to go.
    Things weren’t right in my life, I knew that. Ever since coming to this school things had been going wrong. No, not going
wrong
, going
off
. Like something forgotten at the back of the fridge. I didn’t know how or why, but I had an instinct that Shane was a way out of things, a way back from the edge.
    So, when the end-of-day bell rang, I waited a fewminutes just for things to calm down outside, and then got up from the sick bed and set off home.
    There were still a few kids messing about in the playground by the back entrance. I usually went out the front way, because there were more teachers around and it felt safer. But I was in a hurry, and the back way was quicker.
    They jumped me a couple of meters outside the gates. They’d been hiding behind the wall of the social club. It was Miller and Bates. They grabbed an arm each and dragged me over the grass and down toward the beck. The beck is the stream that flows past the school. It’s dirty and it stinks and you get rats there. My dad says it was worse when he was a kid, and that if you fell in it you’d die—not from drowning, because it wasn’t deep enough (unless someone held you down), but by being poisoned.
    I knew more or less what was in store for me. They were going to chuck me in—something like that. I thought it was because Bates wanted to get revenge—I mean, for me pulling the stupid scissors on him, and it must have been frustrating that Roth didn’t smack me earlier. Weird how Roth had protected me. But he wasn’t here now, and these two were going to make me sorry I’d even thought