He was the pale, broken thing from your attic.

Straight and skinny. Eyes with dusty grey shadows all around, the blue of the irises too transparent. That colour had never seen the sun.

He wore black and purple. Always dressy clothes. Other schoolchildren longed to put black and purple on his skin, too, but his older brother had friends in soaringly high places, and he kept them away.

The boy would pull his backpack out of his chipped locker, and whip round to punch you in the gut if you touched it.

Who knew such a wispy hand, such stick-like fingers, who knew they could knock so much breath out of you?

.,.,.,.,

Some boys caught him when his brother was away. They pounded him and left him outside, bent out of shape like a barbed wire clothes hanger.

The next day, the boys had lost reputation, lost respect, lost everything. The girls that used to hang onto the edges of their group, floating around like bits of sticky, clingy cobweb - they were gone, too. There was so much gossip about it all. Delicious stuff.

Because the oddity whose face they had ground into the playground pebbles knew all their secrets, and had given them all away.

He saw the truth in their shoelaces as they walked away, in their smiles and clothes and their laughs.

.,.,.,.,

It was decided that Sherlock Holmes was better left alone.