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  “Hidden? Our Stol?”

  We had a good laugh about that. But it did set me thinking. Most of the boys I know are probably like me—spend practically all their time behind a mask. You slap it on when you leave home as if you're in some play. You only take it off when you feel safe, playing peekaboo with next door's baby, or on a car ride with your mum, or in the shower.

  Stol isn't like that. He comes out with all the stuff the rest of us keep for dark nights. He doesn't try to act tough. If something hurts, he makes a noise about it. And if something worries him, he says it straight out, even if everyone else has their ears pinned back, listening.

  Last week he said to Mrs. Garabour, when she was chivvying him into line, “You know, I don't believe I even want to go in to Assembly. I've been getting quite scared of God lately. He doesn't make sense. And the world's full of horrors.”

  Mrs. Garabour gave him a slice of tongue pie as she pushed him into place. But nobody teased him. And that's the weird thing about Stol. Maybe it all began because he brazened out this business of not being able to tie his laces. But now he's like one of those jesters in Shakespeare who are allowed to mock the king. He's outside the rules, and allowed to come out with what the rest of us are feeling.

  And just come out with it he does. Over the years, he's said a heap of things in class that made me suddenly not quite sure I wanted to be sitting next to him. I'd wait for the barracking to start, only to find that instead of getting an earful of jeers or a faceful of pellets, our double desk has set off some serious class discussion, and it's not just the teacher looking interested and nodding.

  You take the time Melissa claimed boys don't have proper feelings.

  “Nonsense,” said Stol. “When I was dumped by Tabitha, I was destroyed.”

  I was about to remind him Tabitha had been purely imaginary, when I noticed that everyone had turned round and was listening.

  “While she was with me,” he went on, “my life had felt as if it had some kind of sense to it. Before, my days had been a sort of blurry mess, and she put order in them. ‘Let's play this tape.' ‘Come for a walk with me.' ‘We'll talk tomorrow.' And I felt more myself, too, as if I'd been some sort of flappy be-anything, go-anywhere bag of skin till she came along, like a tough frame, to put a bit of shape in me.”

  I stared. If I'd said anything remotely like that, I'd have been hooted from the room. Stol says it, and they're sitting up and some of them are even nodding as if he's finally put into words some anguish they've been feeling.

  “After she left, it was as if my only true support was whipped away. I felt saggy. With no purpose. No direction.”

  And I was glad I hadn't splatted him when, moments later, he came out with something I myself thought needed saying.

  “And when it comes to showing your real feelings, school doesn't help. It's just not good for people.”

  Mrs. Garabour sighed.

  “I can't think of anyone in this classroom who wouldn't be a good deal the poorer for not bothering to come.”

  “That's not true,” Stol insisted. “School is definitely a two-edged sword.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well.” Stol waved an arm. “Look at us! I can remember when most of us were back in nursery. And, apart from the odd grumpy day before we came down with chicken pox or something, we were all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

  I waited for the snorts of contempt, but nothing happened. Everyone was still plugged in, listening.

  “And most of us thought we were really big cheeses. Then we moved up to junior school. And by the time half of us had been seriously picked on for being small, or fat, or stupid, or ugly—”

  One or two of them were pitching in now, with real bitterness in their voices.

  “—or poor.”

  “—or wearing funny clothes.”

  “—or having a weird sister in another class.”

  Stol took up his point again. “Well, by then probably half of the people in this room had to take a very deep breath and show some real courage to get through those gates every morning.”

  Mrs. Garabour was staring and everyone was silent.

  “And look at us now!” Stol scrambled to his feet, and this time, when he waved his arm around, he took in all the class. “Things don't get any easier. In fact, they get worse. Now we live by the Invisible Scorecard. Nobody talks about it, but it's there, all right. Who's smart. Who looks good. Who's good at games. Who gets invited to things. Who's never teased or bullied. It just gets tougher and tougher, and you can't talk about it, not to anyone. In every class there are a few winners, but I bet most of the people in this room spend a lot of the time practically wishing a bomb would drop on them to save their lives from being made so very miserable in little bits for so many hours each day.”

  She made to interrupt him, but he interrupted her back. “Oh, I know it's all only tiny things. But they add up. And there's no way of complaining. Make a fuss and you can practically see the teachers thinking you're just being silly. And, though girls cry more, it's far worse for boys. When things get really mean, a boy can't run out of the class like a girl can. We have to sit and take it. We're not supposed to even flinch.”

  Nobody's arguing. Not even Melissa. Not even when he said, “Melissa says boys don't have proper feelings. I reckon most boys have to stop their real feelings showing. And I think it's so sad when what you truly are inside gets to be nothing more than an embarrassment. Something to hide.”

  Mrs. Garabour turned to the line of boys who sit at the back on the window side. “So is that really how the rest of you feel?”

  Stol didn't even give them the chance to answer. “Yes. That's how they feel. Except that some of them keep the bag so firmly over their heads to protect themselves that they don't even feel like proper people anymore, but just a list of things they do. School, games, wind band, and homework, or whatever.”

  “You don't,” said Mrs. Garabour.

  “No,” Stol said. “I don't.”

  Someone at the back said, “Well, Stol's different.” But no one sniggered. There were no catcalls or jeers. I think, at heart, we all knew he'd been speaking up for us. It was as if his rising to his feet in class to say all that was somehow a sign that all the rest of us might, someday, manage to get the awful bag of trying to fit in properly right off our heads (the way Stol had been born) and get a real life. He'd flapped his arms about as usual, explaining. (My dad says, “Cut off Stol's arms and he'd be dumb.”) But to me, watching, I have to say it was as if he'd spread, not only arms, but huge wide glowing wings as well, and offered the whole lot of us something to hope for.

  fearless

  The thing about him is that, right from the start, he was absolutely fearless. Not physically. No one could slope off round a corner swifter than Stol if any biffing started. And he was as often to be found letting one of the girls read him poetry or paint his nails as kicking a ball round the dustbins in break time.

  But in things no one else would dare do, he was reckless. No other boy I know would call his stuffed koala Hermione and keep on bringing it to school long after the rest of us had relegated all our soft toys to the end of the bed. In the dark. And in private.

  No one but Stol would fuss to be one of the Ugly Sisters in the school play. Quite a few of the boys might have been secretly pleased if Mrs. Enderby had chosen them; but they'd never have begged her. (“Or Cinderella, Mrs. Enderby! I don't mind being Cinderella.”)

  And no one but Stol would give the talk he gave last term in oral English. Art and Myself: An Account of the Influences That Have Gone into the Making of Stuart Terence Oliver. There was a tide of barracking as he began. But once he got into it, everyone settled down because it was interesting. He told us which of his nursery readers had given him nightmares. (That bit was illustrated with some pretty good slides knocked out by one of Esme's specialist advertisement layout consultants, and I must say, I wouldn't like to meet Pansy the Dancing Elephant's wick
ed uncle on a dark night. And Bulldozer Bill was positively creepy.) He quoted the first poem he'd ever voluntarily learned by heart, off a park bench where his aunt Tilly used to sit while she was weeping:

  If you with litter will disgrace And spoil the beauty of this place May indigestion rack your chest And ants invade your pants and vest.

  He told us how disappointed he had been to learn he wasn't the first person ever to notice that some names were written the same forward as backward. Apart from Hermione the koala, he'd chosen palindromic names for all his favorite toys. (I'd never realized.) Eve the tin snail. Anna the bath frog. Otto the cuddly lion. Bob the seal. Ava the clockwork beetle. Even Leon Noel, the plastic guerrilla fighter.

  He told us about the very first time, in a theater, he'd realized that you could enjoy being terrified. It was the Giant's pet spider in the pantomime of Jack and the Beanstalk that had furnished this revelation. The lights went down, and suddenly all there was onstage were two red eyes glowing evilly through the dark, and a hint of hairy tentacle. “Then,” Stol said boldly, “I was so scared I nearly had an accident. Now I seek out the daredevil frisson of horror.” He spoke of things on television that had upset him so much he couldn't sleep. And the music that first made him weep. And the best books he'd read. And the way he thought himself into computer games. And the stories he made up if he was out walking down streets on his own, and the songs that he sang in the privacy of his bedroom. And the things that he hated most about school, and the things that he liked best. And that he was writing a novel called Victims of Slime.

  When he'd finished, we gave him a great spontaneous Standing O. And Mrs. Garabour said he had almost cheered her up about being a teacher, and since no one could follow that, we could leave early.

  No one else could have done that. And not just no one else I know.

  No one. I truly believe that. No one.

  party time

  Not that he couldn't be just as outspoken about other people's lives. I remember my last birthday. (It's on the seventh, because that was Nurse Sarah Deloy's lucky number.) After the film and the beanfeast, when everyone had finally dribbled off home, he picked up the book that was a present from Nancy.

  Know Your Birth Hour? Then Work Out Your True Horoscope!

  “Excellent! Your mum won't send us off to bed too early on your birthday. We'll have time.”

  “Yes,” I said acidly. “Time. But not the time.”

  He sat wrinkling his brows. I thought at first that he was worrying if we didn't even know this was my exact right birthday, how could we even begin to work out my horoscope? Then I thought he might be wondering if it would be rude to suggest doing his stars instead. After all, it was my book.

  But, as it happens, he was thinking about something else entirely.

  “Ian, do you suppose your mother thinks about you on your real birthday?”

  I knew exactly who he meant. But just to put him right on one thing, I made a point of answering, “No. Mostly, today, she's been thinking about her computer exam tomorrow.”

  “I meant your real mum.”

  “Birth mum. I haven't thought about it.”

  “It's a strange idea, isn't it?” While he was talking, he rooted down the back of the sofa for the unopened pack of party poppers we'd stuffed there earlier, out of sight. He emptied them between us. “Just choose a day, any day, and have a birthday!” He divided the poppers into two piles and popped a streamer over me. “How old were you when they told you?”

  I popped him back. “They never ‘told me.' I can't remember ever not knowing.”

  “Does it feel weird?”

  “What?”

  “You know. Not being sure which bits of you are coming from someone else you don't even know. Like how you still suck your thumb when you're tired, or the way your lips go funny whenever you eat pineapple.”

  “I do not still suck my thumb.”

  He didn't argue. He was off on a fresh tack. Popping another streamer over me, he started off, “We don't even know what happened to your mum, do we? Or your dad. I bet your dad, at least, is still out there somewhere. He probably doesn't even know you've been born. He probably broke up with your mother even before she realized you were on the way.”

  I popped him in the face. He scraped the streamer off and kept on going. “You realize what might happen. You might be walking along the street someday, minding your own business, and see a person who looks exactly like you except twenty years older.” He popped another streamer over me. “Like looking in a Mirror of Time.”

  I stole one of his poppers. He scooped up his last few and tucked them behind him. “Maybe you even have brothers and sisters out there. Have you thought of that? Real brothers and sisters you don't even know about. Maybe, after you were dumped in that dustbin, your real parents—”

  “Birth parents.” “Birth parents met again, and this time they married and had kids and were happy. Maybe they lie awake each night thinking about you.” I waited till he opened his mouth again and popped a streamer. He picked the damp flecks of colored tissue from his mouth. “Maybe they sob in their pillows because the one thing keeping them from perfect happiness is that they can't find you.”

  I wrapped the next streamer round his ear. “They could if they wanted.”

  “Perhaps they don't know that.”

  “If they were looking, I'd know. There's a register. And if you're on it and the other side wants to get in touch, people like Doris arrange it.”

  “Maybe they're waiting already.”

  “No, they're not.”

  “Maybe Sue and Geoff are lying about it. Maybe they love you so much, they don't want you to know that your real parents—”

  “Birth parents.”

  “Whatever—are desperate to have you back. Maybe you've been sent millions of letters and your parents have burned every one. Maybe this family you don't even know about are living in misery, unable to sleep, waiting for the post each day, praying there'll be a letter from you or from Doris.”

  “Not very likely.”

  But nothing stops Stol when he's on a roll. “Maybe before she adopted you, your mum would have liked to be an actress. Maybe this is her finest role, brilliantly keeping you off the scent of your own real parents.”

  Just at that moment, Mum poked her head round the door. “You two! Clear up this mess, please.”

  “Maybe your real parents—” This time I couldn't be bothered, but he corrected himself. “Birth parents—are really easygoing, not like Sue, always making us clear up. Maybe they even have servants who pick up after parties. And maybe they live in a really swish house, and have holidays in exotic places. And maybe, for birthdays, instead of films and stuff, they jet a group of friends off to amazing fun fairs in Florida and California, or do exciting things like stock-car racing and windsurfing.”

  Best let him run down, like a clock. I just stopped listening. Mum says one day I might want to know more. When I have my own kids, maybe; or if people keep asking, “Is there diabetes in your family?”

  Maybe. But right now, if I'm honest, I'm not bothered at all. Sometimes I even feel guilty, as if adoption might be wasted on someone like me. Sometimes I think it would have been a whole lot fairer if it had happened instead to someone like Stolly, with the imagination to use it.

  tom dunn's exam

  Sometimes this gift Stol has of seeing things not as they are but as they could be comes in useful. Take Tom Dunn's exam. Tom was one of the school layabouts. Last year, all he seemed to do was grow taller, get tougher, and go on about wanting to be a gunner in the army.

  “Armies have uniforms,” Mr. Fuller kept reminding him. “And a good deal of what you choose to turn up in most mornings bears no resemblance whatsoever to this school's chosen garb. Perhaps it's time to consider a fresh career path.”

  He'd send him home. Sometimes Tom came back dressed more like the rest of us. Sometimes he didn't bother.

  Mrs. Garabour would go mad. “This isn'
t the old days, Tom. To get on in the army, you need qualifications. And that means passing your exams.”

  He'd grunt and ignore her. When time got pressing, Mrs. Garabour lifted the imaginary submachine gun out of his hands and had one of her little chats with him. “Scorched off my socks,” he said later. “Gave me lunchtime and after-school detentions right till the exams, just so I'll get the work done.”

  And so he did, under her steely eye. The problem came when, on the morning of his first two-hour paper, he showed up in hip-hop flappy trousers, one of his dad's old striped sweaters, and a pair of grubby sneakers. As he strode into the exam hall, Mr. Fuller caught hold of him. “These are school hours,” he reminded Tom. “And candidates for public examination should be in proper uniform.”

  Tom probably would have got away with a deep sigh and a ticking off, or another detention. Except that, in a fit of exam nerves, he was daft enough to respond, “Well, I don't care. You can't stop me.”

  So he was thrown out.

  That's how, just as the maths exam was supposed to start, Mr. Kinnear found him wandering past the girls' lavatories, clutching his ruler and calculator and looking as dazed as if some other army's gunners had given him a pounding. “Tom?” he said. “Why, after all Mrs. Garabour's hard work, are you still to be found skulking in the wrong direction along corridors of underachievement?”

  Tom looked quite blank. Stol, who was hurrying along to the exam after a bit of trouble with his laces, translated for him. “What he means is, why aren't you going the same way as me and Ian?”

  “Thrown out,” Tom grunted. “Said I wasn't dressed right.”

  Mr. Kinnear looked horrified. But it was Stol who solved the problem. Quick as a flash, he stopped Madge Henry on her way into the girls' lavatories. “Quick!” he said. “Take off your top and skirt.”

  “Go boil your head, Stol.”

  “No,” he explained, already tugging Tom's striped sweater off over his head. “He needs proper uniform to sit an exam. You're in it. Quick! Get out of it!” Already he was ordering Tom out of his flappy trousers. “Come on, Madge. Your country needs you. Help Tom join the army.”