Binding 13

6

Awakened Hormones

Sha

I had a moderate concussion that resulted in an overnight stay at the hospital for observation followed by the rest of the week off school.

To be honest, I would have preferred to stay in the hospital the entire time or return to school immediately because the concept of spending the week at home with my father breathing down my neck was a special form of torture that no one deserved.

Miraculously, I managed to survive the week by holing myself up in my room all day, every day, and generally avoiding my father and his tumultuous mood swings like the plague.

When I returned to school the following week, I had been expecting a downpour of mocking and taunting to incur.

Shame was a problematic feeling for me, and sometimes it made it hard for me to function.

I spent the entire day in a sweaty, panic-ridden mess on high alert, waiting for something bad to happen.

Something that never came.

Aside from a few curious stares and knowing smiles from the rugby team – as in, they knew what I looked like in my underwear –I had been left generally unscathed.

I couldn’t comprehend how a humiliating event like that could go unspoken about.

It didn’t make sense to me.

No one brought up the incident on the pitch that day.

It was as if it had never happened.

Honestly, if it weren’t for the lingering headache, I would have doubted it happened at all.

Days turned into weeks but the silence remained.

Nothing was ever said to me.

It was never brought up again.

I wasn’t a target.

And I had peace.

Almost a month had passed since the incident on the pitch and I found myself falling into a steady routine with Claire and Lizzie by my side.

I found myself begi

It was the strangest turnabout of my life, considering for the majority of my life I had loathed school, but Tommen had become almost like a safe place to be.

Instead of the usual feeling of dread when I stepped off the bus, all I felt was immense relief.

Relief to get away from my house.

Relief to be off the bully-radar.

Relief to get away from my father.

Relief to be able to breathe for seven hours of the day.

I was used to coping alone, being alone, sitting alone, eating alone…you get my drift.

I was forever alone so my latest predicament, or should I say the latest development in my social status, was an unexpected one.

They say there's solidarity in numbers, and I was a firm believer in this.

I felt better when I was with my friends.

Maybe it was a teenage insecurity, or maybe it was a result of my past, but I liked that I didn’t have to walk to class on my own anymore, and that I always had someone to sit with or tell me if I had something in my teeth.

Their friendship meant more to me than they would ever know, giving me a support system that I desperately needed, and a buffer in times of panicked uncertainty.

At my old school, I was so stressed and anxious during my lessons that I fell behind a lot in class and had to work late into the night most nights to catch up.

Without the constant threat of attack from my peers, I was keeping up in my classes with little problem, inhaling my lessons like crack.

I even managed to pass most of my pre-junior cert exams, with the exception of Maths and Business Studies.

No amount of studying seemed to help with those subjects.

But I had scored my first A since first year in Science, so I took comfort in that.

During lunch, I had the girls to sit with – not a pity seat with my brother and his buddies – but an actual group of people.

I'd never had this level of normality before.

I'd never felt safe.

But I was starting to.

And I had a feeling he had something to do with it.

Joh

I mean, he had to, right?

I didn’t have that kind of power, so that left him.

It wasn’t a coincidence that the whole event had been erased from everyone's minds.

I had seen him plenty of times since that day, having passed him countless times in the hallways between classes and in the lunch hall during break, and while he never approached me, he always smiled at me in passing.

To be honest, I was surprised he smiled at me at all considering my mother's reaction towards him outside the principal's office that day.

I didn’t know whether or not to apologize for her behavior towards him or not.

Mam had overreacted to the point of being borderline threatening towards him, but then again, Joh

Approaching him now, after almost four weeks had passed by, would just be weird.

Through my friends – and the hushed whispers and rumors from girls in the bathroom – I had learned all kinds of details and information about Joh

He was in fifth year – something I already knew.

He was originally from Dublin – again, no surprises there.

He was incredibly popular – okay, so I didn’t know that but it didn’t take a genius to realize that, what with him being surrounded by students all the time.

He was a massive hit amongst the female student body – again, a blind man could figure that out.

And contrary to his terrible inaccuracy with the ball and his blatant maiming of me, he was supposed to be very good at rugby.

He was the captain of the school rugby team, and with that status came popularity, girls, and some fierce pull with both the faculty and the students.

I had no clue about the ins and outs of rugby, our family revolved around GAA, and I cared even less about the popularity ranks at school considering I was usually dumped at the bottom, but the way the girls at school portrayed Joh

According to the girls, he was aggressive, intense, and a complete snob, with a body to die for and a horrible attitude.

They made him out to be a cocky, rich, rugbyhead who was obsessed with sports, played hard on the pitch, and fucked harder off it – evidently much older girls were his thing.

Okay, so it was quite possible that he did in fact do all these things, but it was hard to piece that information together with the person I'd met.

My memories of that day were still cloudy, the events leading up to my accident still hazy, and the ones afterwards a jumbled mess, but I remembered him.

I remembered the way he had taken care of me.

How he had stayed with me until my mother came.

The way he had touched me with big, dirty, gentle hands.

How he talked to me like he wanted to hear what I had to say.

And then listened to my rambling like it was important to him.

I remembered the embarrassing parts, too; the parts that kept me up late into the night with flaming cheeks and a mind full of disconcerting images and fumbling words.

The parts I didn’t dare acknowledge.

I did keep the envelope though, the one I had found in my locker the week I returned to school, with the hastily scrawled, 'From my people to your people' on the front.

The two €50 notes I had given Mam when I got home from school, but I had tucked the envelope into my pillowcase for safekeeping.