"No man is an island."

It was Monday morning, March 22nd of the year 1984, and Mr. Winger was stood in front of his junior English class, droning out a poem by John Donne. At the back of the class sat none other than John Bender, known as simply 'Bender' to many, John to some and Jonathan to those with a death wish. On any other Monday morning, Bender wouldn't have been listening to Winger; he wouldn't even be in his seat. He would be sat underneath the bleachers with a selection of other kids he classed as friends, though they were all too cool to speak and held each other at an arms length at all times, smoking and staring up at the gaps between the wooden seats trying to make up his mind what he would with his day. Would he trash the men's toilets on the second floor? Would he give Dick a visit in his office and fuck around with him? Would he simply smoke numerous joints in an attempt to make the school day a little more lively? These were the things he commonly asked of himself.

But today was different, and Bender had other questions on his mind. So instead of going to the bleachers, he went to class-which was a first for a Monday morning-he wasn't too late, and he wasn't causing trouble either, much to Mr. Winger's slight pleasure. No, John Bender was sat quietly, feet leant against the table, arms crossed, and mind wandering in a way that was almost completely out of character for the teenager. Not that anybody noticed, because he was Bender, and nobody cared what he did anymore.

Mr. Winger repeated the sentence again: "No man is an island," and this time Bender paid attention. His eyes darted to the man stood at the front of the room, giving him a look that almost showed a slight desperation; surely that couldn't be true? Surely Bender could count himself as an island? A vast secluded land full of secrets that were impossible to reach because they weren't obvious, because he kept them hidden. Bender had always seen himself as an island, or a loner, for as long as he could remember. At home, no one cared, and the same followed for school. By high school he could count his friends on one hand, and two of those friends were his dealers. Didn't that make him an island from the world?

But starting from Saturday, things were different. Things felt different, like something had stirred inside of him and hit some string that unsettled his whole body.

"Every man is a piece of a continent."

They included him as if they made up a continent, different countries coming together and belonging together. The Breakfast Club. The name made him gulp, just as it had when he read Brian-Brain--write it down in the note to Dick at the end of detention. He didn't want to be a part of some club, and not just because they were 'lame', but because it made him feel contained. Being a continent and belonging with other people made him feel claustrophobic in a way he would never confess to any other soul on the universe. Not even Cherry, despite the physical confession they already shared last Saturday.

He was back to thinking of her again. The princess. A tease, frigid right down to her toes, with the hair color of a fire-burning; Claire Standish.

All weekend he had attempted to get her off of his mind, and when he arrived at school on Monday the reason he had got to class so fast was to avoid him from thinking of her again. It was uncool of him to actually think of a girl so much, and he knew his few friends would rip it out of him if they found out. It wasn't just his credibility at stake when it came to Claire, though: it was his whole being. For as little as he had cared for her this time last Saturday, and as much as he wanted to remain as an island within himself, he was still wearing her diamond earring in his ear and constantly fighting the urge to tug on it to check that it was still there, just as he had when he woke up that morning.

Mr. Winger ended his class with the last lines of the poem: "And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee," and requested that the class come back next Monday having taken the time to think about that line. Bender was the first to get out of the door once the bell had gone, and he nonchalantly leant up against the nearest lockers while watching the rest of the class leave. All of them had ignored Winger. None of them were discussing the poem or anything of relevance, and instead had drifted onto topics of whatever mindless interests they had. But today, it didn't seem to bother him so much, and he started down the hallway.

Elsewhere in Shermer High School, Claire Standish was opening her locker to put her books away. She was stood by herself, feeling very much alone in the crowded hallway as students rushed to and from one class to the next. Second period on a Monday was Calculus with Ms. Grier, but today she wasn't rushing to get to the other side of the school building in time. Instead, she placed her books one by one into her locker, slotting them into a neat order that she kept up constantly in a way that gave her some kind of sick pleasure. She liked things neat and tidy and clean, like the way she kept herself. The cut and folds of her clothes were always neat, her hair kept in place by spray or sometimes bobby pins so it looked tidy, and her skin bathed in various lotions to keep herself clean. Claire kept control of her life, because she could afford to do so. Just like she could afford to be late to her next class.

The students that passed her by in the hall took no more than a glance at her. She looked around at a few, meeting their eyes, but none of them carried on looking. Perhaps this time last week she would have thought the looks were stares, and everyone was interested to know why she was alone and five minutes late to the next period. But she learnt something new at the weekend, which had changed the way she felt about things like that. Something was off about her today. She looked back at the other students, but now she noticed them turning away, acting like she was just another student and no one special. Because that was all she was. Alone, she was just a girl standing by her locker in the hallway.

Claire inspected herself in the mirror she had tacked to her locker door at the start of the year. Around it were pictures of her and her girlfriends taken on her polaroid camera, that she had grown so accustomed to seeing that she ignored them in front of her. Instead she looked right at herself, felt at her face and rubbed her eyes, but only gently to avoid smudging her makeup. She didn't look any different, but inside she felt extremely so.

When she dragged her eyes away from herself, the convoy of other students was beginning to thin out and she was almost alone. Quickly, Claire grabbed at her books, taking no care in this and leaving her locker unorganised. She slammed it closed and began a brisk walk to her classroom, the slight heel on her shoe clicking on the floor as she went.

It was strange for her to walk alone; she had grown used to a constant group surrounding her. It was a rarity that she ever had any alone time, time to think, so she did it now as she led herself to class. Her mind took her to John Bender, and she found herself smiling.

But despite the fact John was on her mind, she didn't know exactly what she was thinking about him. He was there and present, his plaid shirt was an even deeper red in her imagination, his skin olive and tan, and his brown hair looked even shinier, but every time she thought about him this weekend past, she never came to any conclusions about him. She liked him, she could admit that much to herself. But then she also liked Allison, and Andrew, and even Brian, too. In a unison they had all taught her a lesson on Saturday; to accept them each as they came. She accepted Allison's dark clothes and hanging hair, and although she had attempted to improve her appearance towards the end of their time together, she knew she would have liked Allison for however she turned up to school on Monday, and she would always consider her now as a friend. The same with Andy; Claire had known him for all the years she had been at this high school, but now she saw past who he was friends with. He was more than just a jock, champion of the school's wrestling team. He was an individual, and when she had seen him with his friends earlier that morning, she knew something had shifted in him just as something had shifted in her. Hell, she knew something had shifted in all of them, but she still wasn't sure about Bender.

By the end of Saturday, Claire swore she saw something softer wash over him. When she came to find him in the basement, he looked different to her, and she knew it wasn't the poor lighting. He treated her differently, too, and she knew for a fact she hadn't imagined that. In her mind-something she wanted surprisingly badly to believe-she had found the real John Bender; she was the one to have found his secret island.

But where it went from there, she didn't know. And she pushed the rest of her thoughts away for the whole of second period.

Third and fourth period came and went, and by lunch time John Bender and Claire Standish had not yet met again. During this time Claire had felt herself grow more and more antsier until she felt like she was purely going to be sick all over her lunch table. She had refused food or anything to drink, in fear that she wouldn't be able to keep it down, and once everyone in the lunch hall had settled down she felt herself growing even more sick as she spotted Allison settling down next to Brian on a table with all of his friends. One of Claire's girlfriends, Heather, followed Claire's stare, and then nudged the girl.

"Claire, why are you staring at the academic dweeb table?" Immediately, Claire snapped out of her daze.

"Was I? I was daydreaming."

"Oh." Heather looked over at the two other girls sat with them, and each shared a look with each other, but no one said anything else on the same subject. If Claire hadn't known any better, she would have thought they didn't care about her weird mood at all, but she'd known these girls since they had started middle school. They wouldn't ask her outright what her problem was, but as soon as she left the room they would turn to each other and immediately start discussing it. If she wasn't sick enough already, she felt even more so now.

"I'm going to go get some water." And with that, Claire stood up, picked up her handbag and walked away from the table, her skirt and her hair swishing with movement as she went.

She really had meant to go buy herself a bottle of water, but as she approached the vending machine she caught sight of Allison and Brian again, and she watched them for a moment as they shared a joke and the whole table began to laugh with each other. She found that even she was smiling as she watched them, unable to drag her eyes away from her new friends. There was something she loved about the scene, and she knew it was the fact that Allison had kept her word to Brian. She had made the effort to keep up their friendship, going farther than just waving or smiling at each other in the hall, by sitting with him and interacting with him. And Claire knew deep down that it wasn't just because Allison had told them all she had no friends. She was just that sort of person; completely honest. And she'd never looked more honest to herself than she did today. Her hair was pinned back from her face, which was still covered in her black stuff, and her clothes were earthy colours that to Claire's sharp eye clashed, but it all somehow worked. It was all so Allison. Maybe it was because Claire knew she was trying to open herself up more to new people. She was even joining in with the conversation on the table with Brian and his 3 friends, something that would have seemed alien if she was still the same Allison she had been when she walked through the library doors on Saturday.

But she was still the same girl at the same time, that was the thing. There was nothing different about her other than the clothing, which was still hers. She had it within herself all along to branch out straight away, so why was Claire so scared to see Bender when she knew she had it in her too?

Her thoughts were interrupted when someone standing next to her coughed once. Claire snapped her head round to the culprit and saw Andy Clark standing next to her, his hands buried into the front pocket of his sweatshirt and a slightly lopsided smile on his face. Claire smiled back at him.

"You were staring."

"I was thinking about what drink I wanted from the machine," she offered back in response. Andrew nodded, raising his eyebrows as he did so.

"You know, I would believe you, but I'm not dense, Claire. I was looking at the same thing, too. I figured you might want company to go over there." Claire looked from Andy back to the table with Allison and Brian, and then behind them to the table she had just come from. The girls weren't looking her way. "Oh, come on, you're not still worried about what your friends are gonna say after last Saturday, are you?"

"I don't know. Are you?" Andrew glanced over to the side to the table he had come from; the jock table. They sat there every day and the conversation never seemed to change. Claire had sat there once when her friend Amber had been dating one of the school's basketball players, and the whole lunch period had been filled with talk about game positions and game ranks and game times and nothing but game, game, game. After that day, she had vowed to never venture over there again, and had passed all of the jocks off as mindless airheads. Claire could definitely see why Andy wasn't sat with them.

"Not even a little bit," he replied, and then nodded his head back towards Allison and Brian. Claire took that as a motion for them to head over, so she began to walk.

Bender was back to being under the bleachers, his back leant against one of its metal poles, taking the 3rd drag of his 4th cigarette of the day-not that anyone was counting. His packet of Marlboros was all he had on him for lunch today, the same as every day, but today he almost wished he had a reason to sit in the school cafeteria. He wouldn't even have entertained the idea of entering that room if it weren't for the fact he knew the sort of people you could find sat at one of the cheaply made lunch tables, one of them being Claire. He breathed out the smoke from his cigarette through his nose at the thought of her name.

"John Bender is an island," he muttered to himself under his breath, staring down at his feet. One of his hands went up to his ear to play with the diamond earring, her diamond earring, as he continued to stare down.

"You say something over there, Bender?" one of his friends, nicknamed Scissors, asked him. Bender shook his head, still not looking up, and smoked again from his cigarette. Every time he put the damn thing to his mouth, his mind went back to Claire smoking next to him in the library. He pictured her holding the roll up between her fingers in that sophisticated way, wrapping her lips around it and inhaling deeply, looking over at him while doing so, never knowing how much of her a tease she really was. It caused her to cough at the time, but he'd never found anything so sexy before in his life. You'd think, after having seen his first porno at the age of 14 thanks to his dad's badly hidden VCR collection it would take a lot to turn him on, but Cherry had captivated his mind in a way he wasn't too sure he liked so much.

The taste of the nicotine and tobacco in his mouth suddenly tasted foul to him, and his head was spinning differently to the familiar feeling of the smokers head rush. He quickly flicked his cigarette away from his persons and stood up, stamping on the thing with his heavy boot while doing so. With a nod to the rest of his group, he buried his hands in his oversized coat's pockets and turned to walk back towards the school building.

If every man is a piece of a continent, and Bender now belonged with Andrew, Brian, Allison and Claire, where was his continent now? Shermer wasn't that big of a school to lose them all, even for a guy like him who barely went inside the building. In slight defence, he had seen Allison earlier in the day. He had noted that, like him, she had kept a souvenir from her weekend detention, it being the patch from Andy's jacket, now sewn onto her jacket. It made him smile, in a sick kind of way. Sporto managed to score for a better team than the school's. Allison wasn't with Andy when Bender acknowledged her in the hallway, but she made damn sure that people knew something was up with that. And if anyone was to take the time to inspect Bender, maybe they would notice his earring as his attempt at bringing something to light.

Nobody wants to be an island to themselves, even John Bender.

He was the most unlikely of all people. He liked to lock himself in his room, chair pressed to the door, sometimes his whole bed if his dad was especially drunk. He enjoyed shop and hated everything else at school, even free periods and lunch time. He spent his evenings and free time smoking pot and doing things outside, sometimes he would even help his neighbour with his manual labour job if he was really bored, but he had always enjoyed fucking around all day in the streets of his town the most. He liked his life as a loner, but he knew now he couldn't go back to that. He couldn't shake the memories of belonging to something, having people to lean on and talk to, people who would put you back in your place if need be. And even though he gave them all shit for who they were, that was the person he was. And they still liked him despite all that.

Bender found himself smiling as he walked, the knots in his stomach were disappearing and he was even starting to feel a bit more like himself. But then Bender looked up, and on the other side of the field, no more than 10 yards away, was his continent; the rest of the Breakfast Club.

There was Brian and his oversized backpack and too small coat, trying his hardest not to look awkward in himself as he stood, smiling at Bender. There was Andy, arm around Allison's shoulders, who was biting her lip to keep from smiling too much in the most un-Allison-like fashion, wearing what Bender assumed to be Andrew's varsity jacket secured round her slender waist. And most importantly there was Claire, cherry red hair shining in the sun and walking towards him now that he had seen her, causing him to stop in his tracks as he stared back at her.

"You lost?" he said to her when she was stood in front of him. She folded her arms, almost in an act of defiance against him, a playful smile breaking out on her face. A memory of the basement on Saturday came into her mind, and his, too.

"Allison said we'd find you out here. We sat together at lunch but it wasn't the same without you there, too."

"Oh, so you weren't too high and mighty to ignore everyone today, then?"

"Well, I'm talking to you now, aren't I?"

"Good one, cherry." He tried to keep a straight face as he shook his hair out of his face, but he couldn't stop himself from smiling at her as the rest of the group joined them in the middle of the field.