“More like his spokesperson, sir,” said Mo. A ripple of laughter passed through the class.
“Right,” said Mr. Coleman. He dropped his eyes to the register and drew a tick beside Will’s name. “I take it back. Now I’ve seen everything.”
* * *
Will spent the first part of his lunch break in the caretaker’s cupboard. He often spent some part of his school day in there, not because he enjoyed the smell of industrial cleaning products or the sensation of sitting in a darkened room for prolonged periods of time, but because Mark and his gang had once again locked him in there after ambushing him on his way to the cafeteria. This had been happening since the day they’d discovered, while up to no good, that the inside handle of the cupboard door was loose and could be removed with very little effort, thereby creating a makeshift holding cell for their hapless victims that could only be opened from the outside. Will had the inauspicious honor of being their very first inmate. He was also the longest-serving, having once been trapped in there for two whole periods, although given that those periods were maths and science, he didn’t exactly go to great efforts to liberate himself.
He actually quite enjoyed the silence and the solitude of the cupboard these days. He didn’t even put up a fight when they locked him in there anymore (which ruined their fun slightly, but not enough to stop them from doing it). Nobody could laugh at him or mock him or insult him in there. Nobody could call him an attention-seeker (something that Will found particularly annoying given how much effort he put into not being noticed), and nobody could beat him up because the people who usually did the beating were the same people who had locked him in the cupboard to begin with. Also, nobody was pretending to know how he felt. Nobody was comparing his situation to their own because they’d once had a sore throat or lost their voice for a week. Everybody just left him alone. The only downside to the arrangement was that he got hungry, so when Mo texted to find out where he was, Will was about to text back when he heard Mrs. Thorpe’s voice in the hallway.
“Oh, hi, Dave.”
Sue Thorpe was the head teacher. Unlike many heads of school, however, slate-faced disciplinarians with nose hair longer than their tempers and an inability to look at a ruler without wanting to whack somebody with it, regardless of whether they were a student or not, Mrs. Thorpe was funny, personable, and generally well-liked by the students, even if she had to sometimes suppress the urge to assault them with stationery.
“Sue, good to see you.” It took Will a second to recognize Mr. Coleman’s voice.
“How was it this morning?” she said.
He heard Mr. Coleman sigh. “Well, you know that feeling when you look around the classroom and everybody is listening to what you’re saying and you can almost see them getting smarter, and you stand there and think to yourself: This is why I became a teacher. This is what it’s all about?”
Mrs. Thorpe paused for a moment. “Not really,” she said.
“Exactly,” he said. Will smiled.
“Business as usual, then?”
“Business as usual,” said Mr. Coleman. “Actually, no, that’s a lie.”
“Oh? Do tell.”
“What do you know about a boy called Malooley?”
“Will?” she said.
“Yeah,” said Mr. Coleman. “The quiet one.”
Will shuffled over to the door and pressed his ear against it.
“He’s a nice kid. Good student. Why do you ask?”
“Can he really not talk? Or is this just part of my new teacher initiation ceremony?”
“He can talk,” said Mrs. Thorpe. “He just, well, doesn’t want to. Selective mutism, they call it.”
“Wow. I wish my kids had some of that.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Has he always been like that?” said Mr. Coleman. Will was painfully aware of what Mrs. Thorpe was going to say next.
“His mum died about a year ago. Car crash. She hit an icy corner and went straight into a tree. Will was in the car at the time, poor kid. He hasn’t spoken since.”
Mr. Coleman muttered something that Will didn’t catch but presumed to be an expletive. Whatever it was, Mrs. Thorpe agreed.
“He gets a bit bullied about it by the older boys, so keep an eye out. I’ve had a few words with them, but you know what teenagers are like.”
“Sadly.”
Their voices grew fainter as they walked off together down the corridor.
Will stayed in the cupboard for another few minutes, his appetite suddenly gone, but the room felt darker than it did before, so he texted Mo to come and let him out.
CHAPTER 4
The school bell rang and a flood of children poured from the entrance and across the yard. Danny scanned the sea of red uniforms for Will until he and Mo emerged with Mark and his goons on their heels. Gavin was throwing peanuts at Mo and Tony was repeatedly treading on the back of Will’s shoe, causing him to stumble. Mark walked behind them, proudly grinning at his well-trained underlings until, noticing Danny glaring at them, he grabbed his mates and faded into the crowd.
Will waved good-bye to Mo and slowly crossed the road with his head down and his hands in his pockets.
“Who are they?” asked Danny, nodding towards Mark.
Will shrugged and shook his head.
“I’d sue my parents if I looked like that.”
Will cracked a smile that was more like a prelude to a proper smile that never arrived.
“You’d tell me if they were giving you a hard time, wouldn’t you?”
Will nodded. Danny looked unconvinced.
“Come on,” he said.
* * *
Will stared at the ground while his dad scanned the epitaphs, all of which looked cold and dull beneath the pigeon-wing clouds that had gathered overhead.
Danny knew precisely where they were going, but he still took his time, not because he wanted to be there—he didn’t, and he knew Will didn’t either—but because despite more than a year having passed since the accident, he hadn’t yet processed his grief to the point where he could fully accept that his wife was dead, at least not in the conventional sense of the word. He knew she was gone. That much he understood. What he couldn’t understand was the idea she was gone forever. Instead he imagined her gone in the same way his father was gone: not dead (or so he assumed, although he really had no idea, nor did he care to know), but not present either. It was, in some ways, an even crueler concept of death than death itself, because it did what death could not, which was to give him hope—no matter how small—that he might one day walk around a corner or through a door and find his wife standing on the other side of it. Sometimes he was sure he could smell her perfume in a room he’d just entered, or hear her voice on a crowded street, or feel her hand against his face as he roamed the lonely periphery of sleep. Other times she felt so close to him that all he had to do was turn around, but she’d be gone by the time he looked over his shoulder, her body swallowed by the crowd, her voice carried off by the wind. It was as if she occupied a world that ran parallel to his own, like two strangers living in a high-rise who could hear each other’s movements but never crossed paths, which was why he was always so reluctant to visit the cemetery. Nothing destroyed that illusion more than seeing his wife’s name etched into a cold and lifeless slab of granite.