Do You Remember the First Time?

going to love it,’ said Fallon, her voice instantly softening and her head dipping in that annoying Princess Diana style.
    ‘Tempt me,’ he said.
    Surely not. Well, we were young, after all. But it looked to me as if Fallon, and every other woman in the world, was going to be very disappointed by young Ethan indeed.
    The idiocy of what I was doing – standing, letting myself be completely humiliated – suddenly dawned on me. I grabbed on to the last remnants of my adult brain.
    ‘Come on, Stanz.’
    ‘Oh, don’t you want to stay?’ said Ethan.
    ‘You could ask her out if you like,’ said Fallon.
    ‘No thanks,’ said Ethan.
    I’m a grown-up. This is a child. A very camp child, I reckoned. Whom I have never even met. How can this possibly make me so embarrassed?
    ‘This is fucking lame,’ I said.
    ‘This is fucking lame,’ said Fallon. Ah, imitation: world’s easiest way to be completely annoying.
    I finally de-rooted my feet from the paving stones and walked off.
    ‘I think you’ve broken her heart,’ I heard Fallon crow as I went, cheeks flaming. I was even close to tears.
    ‘It’s hormones,’ I told myself. ‘Just teenage hormones. You are better than this. You are so much bigger than this.’
    But I still had a little sniffle in the toilets by myself.
    It was almost a relief to slip into detention, which wasn’t full of people from my class who knew everything that had happened at break time and were sniggering and pointing throughout the afternoon. It always amazed me, first time round, that teachers wouldn’t be aware of the simmering tensions and ongoing sieges in any class situation. As an adult, of course, all teenagers look the same to me. Until they’re at eye level.
    I took the same seat as last time and started in on today’s hot topic, five hundred words on ‘Why Detention Works’. Justin came in late, and I barely glanced at him. OK, I deliberately made a huge point of not looking up. I didn’t want his interest and, more importantly, I didn’t want his pity. It would remind me a little too much of somebody else who was kinder than Ethan, but probably hadn’t liked the poems much either.
    ‘Hey,’ he said.
    ‘Hey,’ I said, writing furiously, ‘Detention may only be regarded as superior when compared to the method of repeatedly beating children’s skin with birch.’
    He shrugged. ‘Sorry about … you know, that, today.’
    ‘Honestly,’ I said, ‘in the scheme of things, it doesn’t matter.’
    ‘That’s a good attitude,’ he said. ‘I know girls can be pretty rough to one another.’
    ‘It works out for the best later,’ I said. ‘Apparently.’
    ‘Really? Huh.’
    I bent my head back to my page and wrote, ‘It also starts to look pretty good compared to the whip, and steady and repeated buggering.’ I wondered if Mr Rolf would let me get away with that one. Probably not. I have to say, there was a tiny bit of fun still to be had in a world where one wrote with pencil. I rubbed it out.
    ‘You know, I shouldn’t worry too much about Ethan.’
    I lifted my head again.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Well … you know, he never really has a girlfriend.’
    ‘Justin, he’s queer as a coot.’
    ‘Miss Scurrison! Quiet, please.’
    The look on Justin’s face was absolutely something to see. I’d forgotten just how unthinkingly bigoted and homophobic teenage boys were. Everything was batty to them, and homosexuality hugely amusing and terrifying at once. I almost felt sorry for them; with their penises bobbing up and down at the slightest provocation, probably male and female, they were panicking at being marked out from the pack. God, poor Ethan. He probably hated being a teenager even more than I did. I wanted to tell him not to worry, he’d be very popular when he grew up.
    ‘He’s not,’ whispered Justin fiercely. ‘He just doesn’t have a girlfriend.’
    ‘Because he loves the world of men,’ I said, in a mock news announcer’s voice.
    ‘Just because he doesn’t fancy you, he’s a poof?’
    ‘Well, yes, partly that, obviously. Tempered only by the obvious fact that he’s gay. Give your friend a bit of support, won’t you?’
    He stared at me while I wrote, ‘Detention is also to be preferred to the sacrifice of teenagers to Inca gods, widely practised at one time in South America.’
    He was still staring at me, in that gauche way young boys have. I stuck my tongue out at him.
    ‘You,’ he said finally, ‘are not at all what