On my way to Mr Catling’s English class, a Year Eight boy holds his hand up for a high-five. I ignore it and walk past. He’s bold, given what happened six weeks ago. That’s when a gaggle of Year Eights formed a perfect line down the corridor leading to my locker, and each had their palm up—fully synchronised and ready to offer germ-filled high-fives to me. Jimmy ran ahead and pulled out a deodorant can from his locker. He sprayed it into the face of one of the kids before I got there. They all squealed and scattered away like little cockroaches.

Not everyone here is trying to make fun of me, though. Some just don’t know about me. Like Henry Nguyen, the Year Twelve approaching me now. He calls himself ‘Henny’ and is Jimmy’s school idol because he can rap half decently. He comes up to me in the corridor and says that the beat I made for Jimmy’s last song was dope, and that Jimmy’s rapping is getting better too. I thank him and he extends his fist. It hovers there and my eyes fixate on it for too long. As he starts to draw it back, I nip it with my knuckles for a nanosecond then scuttle away.

Some people say it was a 1940s baseball player who popularised the fist bump—Stan Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals. Like me, he was well schooled in the dangers of disease transmission through high-fives and handshakes, so he fashioned the quick knuckle contact as a responsible way to celebrate with teammates.

It’s a pretty big deal that I touched Henny at all. As a result of it, though, I’m now sitting in Catling’s class sanding my knuckle skin down with a refresher towelette.

There are a few schools of thought on the most hygienic method of hand sanitation. I had a three-month alcohol-based sanitiser phase at the start of the year. I kept a bottle of it in my pencil case and carried a little tube in my pocket. I’d dollop it on after handling anything or if I couldn’t recall the last time I’d used it.

I got sick of sanitiser because it didn’t leave my hands feeling clean. So I went on a water bender for a couple of months. I’d use a paper towel to turn the tap on and off, and would lather my hands in liquid soap then douse them in hot water. But then, because I never dried my hands, a mossy green bacterial substance started sprouting up through the cracked skin on my knuckles. I was morphing into some sort of tree-man, a human terrarium.

The doc bandaged my hands up, and for two weeks I could barely do a thing. After that, I made a vow to Mum to not let the moss return, so we agreed that keeping a stockpile of individual refresher towelettes was the best solution. Trav picks up a stack for me whenever he has a shift at Muchacho’s Mexican. They’re surprisingly effective—I can build up a rich lather and it evaporates in seconds.

In the classroom, Leon, Tyson, Jimmy and I have taken our usual spots in the corner. The desks are set in a U formation. Naya is sandwiched between Sophie and Brianna, three desks away. A couple of desks away from them, Shitty is showing Kelsey his phone and she’s wheezing with laughter. ‘Classic,’ she croaks. She supposedly acquired her rusty chainsaw of a voice from drinking from a can of petrol when she was a toddler.

Catling is tugging at the ropes to bring the blackboard down over the digital whiteboard. He installed the blackboard himself at the start of the year because he loves the sound and feel of chalk.

Faces around the room contort in pain as he drives the chalk into the board. He scratches out:

ESQUIRE BENEDICT CATLING PERFORMS: HAMLET

Throw away your textbooks!!!

‘Go on.’ He turns to face us and adjusts his glasses. ‘Discard of them. You won’t need your witless textbooks for studying this pièce de résistance.’

But we don’t have a textbook for Hamlet, because it’s not on the curriculum. So we’re confused.

‘As all of you should know,’ he says, ‘I portrayed the eponymous protagonist in the critically reclaimed Banarang Players’ production last year. It was the first time in a decade that a play not concerned with an uncouth, bearded maniac with a litter receptacle for a head was performed in this backwater town.’

Ned Kelly, the bushranger who killed a couple of corrupt cops, is still pretty popular in Banarang. He didn’t live here, but he did escape from a jail in town once. The council tried to rebuild that jail twenty years ago with tin sheets from the tip. It looks cheap, flimsy and nothing like the original, but it’s Banarang’s only tourist attraction.

‘From henceforth forward,’ Catling bellows, ‘I will be delivering the play as Shakespeare originally deliberated: a solo enactment. But as a means of framing it in a medium that philistines are au fait with, I will first treat you to the celluloid delineation from nineteen seventy-two.’

I swear Benedict Catling has had a thesaurus surgically implanted in his head without the ability to see that not every synonym is interchangeable. I use a thesaurus website a lot too, but I know to look up the definitions of the synonyms themselves to make sure I’m using them right. Catling often brags about having an IQ of 170, but I want to see the test he took. What annoys me most, though, is that the more time I spend in his presence, the more I start talking like him. Erroneous verbosity is contagious. I don’t ever want to be like this man.

Catling rolls up the blackboard. He flicks on the projector and the dull colours of mediaeval costumes sputter onto the whiteboard. He turns the volume up loud and dramatic music blares through the tiny computer speakers.

Within seconds of the film starting, almost everyone is tapping on their phones in their laps. Catling is oblivious; he’s immediately engrossed in the movie and mouths the words as each character speaks them.

I look away and stare into space, which is coincidentally the same space that Naya is inhabiting. She catches me looking and sticks out her tongue. Why would she stick her tongue out at me?

‘See Shitty and Kelsey there,’ Jimmy whispers. ‘Word on road is they banged at Schmelpsy’s eighteenth on Saturday. Apparently he hit it raw too. Lucky fuck. She was wasted, but he was too—so it’s okay.’

Kelsey is meant to be a real catch. She’s got dirty blonde hair, she’s thin and she apparently only ‘puts out’ at parties once every couple of months. She wears a G-string every day that peeks out over her hips—you can see it when she bends over to open her locker on the bottom level. If you’ve got nothing else to talk about with guys at Banarang High, you talk about what colour Kelsey’s ‘G-banger’ is today. Even I’ve done it to fit in.

‘Apparently the poh-poh was called in too,’ Jimmy says. ‘Music was mad loud, dudes was brawling and all the hoes were skinny dippin’ in the pool.’

Though that’s probably not true, I’ve got to admit that I’m curious about these debaucherous eighteenth-birthday parties we hear so much about. Every Monday a new story surfaces about what went down over the weekend—hook-ups, fights, drunken impairment. Most of the talk is about that last subject, though—how drunk kids got. I reckon Banarang kids have more words for being drunk than anything else:

wasted, ratshit, maggot, smashed, sauced-up, plastered, pissed, paralytic, para, drunk as fuck, off his/her face, off his/her head, gone, gassed, tanked, spastic, sloshed, retarded

I haven’t been invited to an eighteenth yet, but Jimmy still talks about his brother’s party from last year. He says he kissed three girls and got a blow job in the bathtub. No one else can verify the story, but that’s understandable because the girls were from out of town. Jimmy’s brother definitely got with girls that night, though. No one ever doubts his skills. He’s at uni now and Jimmy says he’s ‘still killing the pussy’.

My mind creeps back to Naya. She’s curled over her desk, writing in a yellow notebook, while Sophie and Brianna gossip with each other over her head. She’s probably developing her twelve-step plan to save Banarang.

‘She’s cute, bruz.’

‘What?’

‘Naya.’ Leon’s caterpillar eyebrows wriggle up and down.

‘What? I don’t care.’ My voice squeaks out of the whisper range.

Catling spins around to face me. The wine-clogged capillaries on his cheeks bulge.

‘Carter!’ Catling’s magpie eyes zero in on me. ‘I demand quietude when the bard is in session.’

Shitty and Jimmy are the distractions in Catling’s classes, not me. I never say a thing. But he hates me the most. I don’t know why. If I cared more, I’d try to find out.

I get a kick from under the table and Jimmy drops his phone into my lap. I watch the Snapchat video of Shitty and me in the quad, just the bit where he asked me why I was being a dick and me saying ‘I am what I eat’. There’s a red doodle of a penis being forced into my mouth. The caption reads: ‘He is what he eats.’

How original. I put the words in his mouth. Or my mouth. Whatever.

I hear the snickers now. I look around the class. Kids are stealing glances at me and whispering.

I don’t care. I’m used to it. This isn’t the first uninventive video he’s sent out. There was the one where he put my head on a rat running around a house. And one of him chasing me with a dirty football as I tried to dodge it. And others. All of them mediocre. But kids have low standards at this school. I’m glad my phone is so old and crap that I can’t use Snapchat, so I miss most of it.

Then I notice that Naya’s looking at me too. How is she already Snapchat friends with Shitty?

She looks sad. The kind of sad you look when you’re watching a documentary about child soldiers or mass starvation. That kind of ‘it’s not fair’ sad mixed with ‘you’re pitiful’ sad.

I feel a level of humiliation that I didn’t know I was capable of. I’ve been the weird one at school all year, so I’ve become pretty numb to the stares, but I feel Naya’s sympathy burn even when I turn away. The blood boils around my temples. My head throbs and doesn’t stop.

I don’t need her sympathy. Thank fuck holidays start tomorrow. Kids have short memories.