Chapter One – The Best Years Of Your Life
Ariadne sat in Geography, bored out of her brain. She glanced up at the clock, her mind muting the teacher's rambling. Ten-thirty. Ten minutes until recess.
Her pencil lay unused on her notepad; she picked it up and started to sketch a maze on the clean page. She continued to do so until the bell shattered her daydreaming and the world started up again around her.
Truth: objective or subjective?
Dom gazed down at the question on his page. He tried to concentrate, but he was distracted by his girlfriend's smile across the room. She looked over at him and nodded downwards, her glossy curls bouncing with the movement. He looked down. The boy beside him held out a curl of paper with his name on it. He picked it up and unfurled it, grinning at the message: Loving the jacket. Love, Mallorie. The bell rang, and he stuffed the note into the pocket of his leather jacket and waited at the door for her to join him.
"Robert, you can do better than this."
His father's voice cut through his head. Robert, or Fish Face as he was elegantly nicknamed, grimaced down at his test paper. The problems seemed like they were in a foreign language, and even the numbers made no sense to him whatsoever. The voice kept on judging him. Minutes slipped past with no work being done.
All at once the answers came to him, the second he was able to block the voice from his mind. He scribbled down each calculation with unmatchable speed, and his pen left the final page as the bell rang for recess.
"Faggot!"
The voice ricocheted off the locker room walls. Arthur tensed up, closing his eyes. Just ignore them, he insisted to himself. He swept waves of his dark hair behind his ears and imagined that he was the only one there.
But the taunts kept coming. He changed quietly in the corner, keeping his back turned away from the other boys. Suddenly a hand gripped his shirtless back and swung him around. It was Marcus, the sports prefect. "Thought you could keep your type hidden in a co-ed school, huh?" he spat in Arthur's face. He grabbed Arthur's nipples and twisted them as hard as he could. "You like that, faggot?" Arthur winced, but the pain was easy to bear. The real damage was under his sweatbands, self-inflicted.
The whole locker room was chanting "Fight! Fight! Fight!" as Marcus pinched Arthur's cheeks so hard that they raised red marks. You cannot hurt me nearly as much as I can hurt myself, he mused. Suddenly a voice rang out amongst the cheers and claps. "Get away from him."
Marcus sprang back from Arthur, for the voice sounded like one of the teachers'. But it was the new quarterback of the football team. "If I ever see you harming that guy again, there'll be trouble," he said, his tone menacing. Marcus gulped.
He grinned, stepped away from Marcus, and said cheerfully to Arthur, "Don't worry. I'll keep the wolves at bay." Then he turned to his sports bag and began to change.
Arthur gazed at his knight in shining armour with newfound respect. The boy turned around again, his muscles gleaming on his chest, and said, "Oh, and I'm William. But you can call me Eames."