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Sport 10: Autumn 1993

[section]

There is an ugly huddle of plain two-storey buildings called A Block, B Block, C Block and D Block. Inside are corridors of chipboard lockers and pink sausage-shaped heaters running around the bottom of a wooden divider bristling with hooks for jackets and for hanging short girls by their belts. If you are not the type of girl to find it delightful to be hung up by your belt, if you don't squeal and kick your legs, showing your knickers, if you just kind of hang there listening to your heart bang and feeling the belt bite into your stomach, if your period is due and you are close to tears anyway, then the boys not only laugh at you, they are angry as well. You are not playing the game. But I don't know this game, you want to protest. This is not a game that has lain in wait to be played by me like running or hopscotch or skipping. This is not a game I like. Then their jeering straight grey- jerseyed backs say 'well learn to like it'.

The glass swing doors that lead from the internal stairs to the corridors are heavy and inside the glass is wire, tiny wire squares. I am always lost. There is only a small piece of me that straightens up to meet this place, this college. And I am no longer light, I can't change my shape or pass unnoticed, I can barely move for consciousness of my body. I am in a bad class because they think I am not bright. And I am tired, as if someone pushes and pushes page 15 at the back of my head and it is all I can do to stop myself resting my head on my arms and sleeping, sleeping my college days away.

Rain soaks the bottom edge of my tartan skirt and my socks and shoes. It pushes in through the gaping sides of my parka hood and trickles along the collar of my blouse. The bare stretch of my legs turns lightly mottled and is almost numb, on the stinging edge of being numb. I long for warmth. For a pair of trousers. To be back home, out of the chaos and the weather, not walking the grey length of road between the station and college, beginning the day soggy, cold and miserable. I try to hold my hood on with one hand, my skirt down with the other. I have a grimace on my face.

The accounting teacher has given up on me and my friend. 'You two might as well staple these sheets together and pass them around the classroom,' he says, hanging over us with his dandruff and his cigarette- browned fingers. We laugh and play the game. We are dumb, too dumb to do accounting, too dumb to do maths. The fact is that the sun's yellow beam which spreads over my desk has hundreds of pieces of dust hanging in it, swinging slightly, as though in hammocks, for no reason except that they have gone to sleep there, in that warm yellow arc, on the journey between one place and another.

I long to be older, to be worldly and relaxed about this, to rest against the lockers and say, 'God, I've got maths next with Green,' and look bored and superior, with friends humming around me like bees. In my hand is my blue-and-white timetable. During class it is tucked into the warm pocket of my uniform, and at the end of each class I pull it out to check that I have remembered correctly, yes, it is biology and today we are dissecting mice. I make a rare protest; I will not dissect a mouse, so I am allowed to sit there, at the tall benches in the lab, resting on my elbows and staring out of the window at the dull grey-green of the pohutukawa tree. Some boy calls to me by my surname and I turn around; a mouse's tail lands with a tiny pat beside my open book. My open book with blank silky pages. This is my education.