The day after the fight in the empty classroom Kieran Judd approached me in the main corridor, pulled me aside and told me that it wasn’t finished. He seemed distracted and spoke calmly, like he was saying that maybe the weather could turn to rain. I asked what he meant but he just said that I would see and walked off. I tried to stay in busy places and made sure that I wasn’t left alone. I braced myself. I jittered and jumped every time someone brushed past or a hand was rested on my shoulder. And for day after day nothing happened. So I persuaded myself to forget about it and I let my shoulders drop. We’d had a fight and I’d smashed his head open and that was all I needed to remember.
Now Jon was living in town it was easy for him to walk to school and we agreed to meet on his first day back outside the front gates. It had been three weeks since he’d been discharged from hospital and he was looking stronger and healthier than I’d seen him. Dad dropped me off as usual and I stood and watched the gaggle of burgundy blazers rush and dawdle and splinter and group, as clumsy as a herd of cattle, up the road towards me. Even this early there were arguments and shrieks, squeals and flirting, everything being set up for the day. I tried to ignore the hubbub; I was on the lookout for one lone head amongst it all, bobbing along, eyes to the floor, with a too-big bag slung over his shoulder. Gradually the pack thinned and now it was just down to the stragglers, racing up the road, not even glancing at me as they shot past, intent on beating the bell. I was about to give up and answer the bell myself when two sprinting figures slipped into focus and I saw Judd and Laycock charging towards me. They swept past like red arrows and just for good measure Judd gobbed in my ear. I was reaching into my pocket to find something to mop it out when he shouted back to me, ‘When you find him, make sure you tell him it’s your fault.’ I shouted, ‘Where?’ but they were already gone and my question only banged into the closed doors of the school.
I rubbed at my wet ear with my sleeve and set off. The Theobalds’ house was on Cowper Avenue which was a ten-minute walk or a five-minute run. I ran straight down the school road, right past a couple of scruffy tennis courts, across an old iron bridge over the River Hodder and onto waste ground where some falling-down garages stood. Cowper Avenue started just two roads behind here and I threw myself along these quiet morning streets as fast as I could. But I made it to the end of Cowper Avenue and had found nothing. I stopped and tried to think and wondered for a second if it had been a wind-up. The only place I could think where I might have missed him was the wasteland with the tumbledown garages so I ran back and started trying the doors of the garages, shouting his name. I peered through mucky windows into dark spaces full of crap and nothing but he was nowhere about. Unless they’d had time to drag him further away he was safe at school and I was late. I turned to walk back to school and heard the shout.