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Classified - Day 1

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Classified

Day One


My school has this policy to make two kids clean up the classroom every lunchtime. Classroom monitors, they call them. It’s on a rota system and it’s designed to teach kids responsibility and stuff. Personally, I think it’s just an excuse for teachers to drink lots of cups of tea.
Being ten years old, I wasn’t up to much critical analysis of the British education system, but I knew that allowing two aliens to become classroom monitors was not very responsible.
Of course, teachers never believe you.
"They're not, they're just new students."
"But I looked in the dictionary and it said--"
"Matthew! They're just new students, now drop it."
Entirely unsure of whether my teacher knew I had a worm in my hand or not, I decided to play it safe and put it in my back pocket.
I went outside for play time as usual and plotted against the aliens.
As soon as I got outside, however, I was hit in the groin by a football. This was initiation into the game. As soon as I found out who kicked it, I joined the opposing team and played for revenge.

Following the break, in which I failed to avenge my groin, we had history.
As you probably know, history is a pretty broad subject. Luckily, it seems anybody really nasty was cut from the curriculum, which meant that history was now a very narrow subject, which consisted only of a few Egyptians, Henry VIII and a small chap known as Siddhartha Gautama.
However, Siddhartha Gautama was too hard to say, Henry VIII introduced anti-homosexuality laws and killed his wives and the Egyptians ran a massive slave labour outfit, so generally all we did in history lessons was colour things in.
I was colouring in a rather nice diagram about Egyptians mummification. It was all very subtle, of course, which meant it was pretty boring. Also, being set in the desert, the demand for yellow crayons was enormous.
This is where the real interesting bits of history lessons lie, politics.
It stands to reason that the bigger, stronger kids control most of the resources. They can just beat up anyone else. But their short sightedness is often advantageous for the cleverer kids.
The pencil crayons that usually have a highly consistent demand are things like black, blue, green and red. The most common stuff you find in history, you know, outlines, sky, grass and blood. The rarer stuff is in less demand, stuff like yellow and pink and orange and brown.
This is where the clever kids came into things. A bunch of them quietly amassed a large stockpile of these rarer colours. The stockpiling worked because each table had its own pencil crayon supply, stored in a large ice cream tub.
Then this history lesson turned up and the demand for orange and yellow soared. There’s a lot of sand in Egypt, you know. The few yellow and orange crayons that remained on the global market were soon soaked up by the greedy, strong kids who were not into the whole sharing deal. And then it happened.
Suddenly, the nerds had a complete monopoly on the entire classroom. People were trading everything from gum to apples to large stocks of black crayons for the elusive colour of sand.
I decided I needed the yellow. I went to talk to them.
I walked over casually, giving the impression I was just stretching my legs. I reached the nerd table and leant against it, looking out of the window.

“Bugger off,” one of the kids said, “the price is 3 black crayons.”
“Oh come on!” I cried, getting to my knees, “I don’t have those kind of crayons!”
“No blacks,” he said, “no yellows.” I was confident that would never make it to print.
“Oh please!” I pleaded. I was pulling out all the stops. I hardly ever pleaded.
“Look,” one of the kids said, talking to the other, “the lesson is about over now.”
“So?!” argued the other nerd.
“So, we might as well get rid of a few yellows!”
The kid arguing on what I hoped was my side was a guy called Iain. He was really nice, always pleasant and polite. That’s why he was on the nerd table, he drove everybody else bonkers.
“What do you mean?” said the nerd.
“What I mean,” replied Iain, “is that the market is full of yellow now. We can’t leverage a monopoly on it any more. We’ll still keep a few, but we can let this guy have one, right? Yellow’s no use to us any more.”
The nerd went “aaaaaah!” in realisation, as did I.
“My god,” I whispered.
I was in awe. Before my eyes, the true power of nerds had been revealed. In the space of one lesson, they had pulled off the most amazing stunt. A coup d’crayon. They had turned a useless amount of yellow pencils into hugely valuable black pencils! Come next lesson involving colouring, they’d be kings of the classroom.
“So,” I said, “what’re you gonna do with all your new found power?”
“We’re probably going to hold the class to ransom, or something.”
I sighed. The meek had inherited the earth, and were being terribly bad winners about things.
They gave me a yellow pencil, which was the sign to leave. I got off my knees and made my way back to the table. As I left, they started talking about primarily export based economies. I didn’t really know what they were on about, but it sounded evil. Anything with an ‘x’ in was always evil.
I sat down at my table and prepared my colouring paper in front of me. There was a special angle to be achieved before colouring could commence. Before I could put pencil to paper, however, the girl across the table spoke to me.
“Oh, you have a yellow, could I borrow that please?”
I looked up from my paper.
“After you’ve done with it,” she said.
I thrust the pencil in her direction.
“Nah, you can have it now.”
She slowly took the pencil from my hand, smiled and said “thanks.”
This was amazing. And by amazing, I mean really amazing. Nobody said thanks. I hadn’t heard that word between two kid’s since, well, ever. I looked across at her in amazement, then shook my head. I had colouring to do.
I pulled the ice cream tub across the table and rummaged for another colour to use until the yellow became available. It was pretty strange about the ice cream tub. I often pondered where they came from. I tried to imagine someone actually thinking that it would be a nice idea to clean out the empty tub of ice cream and donate it to a school to store pencils. I don’t know about you, but after I’ve eaten a tub of ice cream, I either want to be sick or go to sleep.
I finally concluded that ice cream makers must send empty tubs to schools. I could think of no other logical reason for how they got there.
After a while, the girl across the table handed me the yellow back. She offered to sharpen it for me, but I politely refused. I remembered she was a Catholic girl, very well bought up. I couldn’t really remember her name because she was the kind of person nobody really notices.
I like people like that, because that’s what I’m like. Or try to be like.
I managed to get my desert finished by the lunch time bell. Colouring was fun, but nothing compared to eating or break times.
The game we played that break was Hide Thomas, which involved forcing the fat kid, Thomas, into an unlikely place and telling him not to move or we’d steal something of his, usually his clothes.
Then we’d run away, sit down and watch him get attacked my wasps.
He was currently hiding in a bin, with his head poking out of the top. Many months we had played this cruel, but horribly entertaining game, and so being attacked by wasps was currently having little effect on him.
During our discussion, we looked across the playground at him and laughed. We turned to face each other, talked for a moment more and looked back.
The aliens were there.
My group of friends fell silent, none of them comprehending how they could have moved so fast without us seeing them.
Then I remembered.
“Oh god, I just remembered! You know those people! They’re aliens!”
“What?!”
“Really?!”
And that’s how the resistance was born. I wish we had put all our hands together and then gone “hooah!” and raised our fists about but I forgot.
They, that is, the aliens, were talking to Thomas and looking over at us, while calmly flapping away wasps.
They were forever serious, which, to us, was a pretty grown up thing.
This was not the only reason I knew they were aliens, of course.
After they had finished interrogating Thomas, they slowly walked over to us.
A boy and a girl, they were, almost identical in appearance, apart from the hair and slight variations in build.
“Why is Thomas in the bin?” asked the boy.
“We’re playing Hide Thomas,” I said, being the bold leader, I tried to act casual, but I think I ended up sounding constipated. This is something of a recurring theme in my life.
The girl looked back at Thomas, his fat little stupid round head still poking out the top of the bin.
“He’s not very well hidden, is he?” she said.
My brow furrowed, as did my comrades.
“So?”
“So are you not very good at this game?”
“Um.”
We had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. I presumed she thought the goal of Hide Thomas was to hide him and not, as we thought, to inflict maximum discomfort (on Thomas) resulting in maximum amusement (for us).
Definitely an alien.
They said nothing more and walked off. Out of earshot, we began feverishly discussing them.
“Definitely aliens,” said Brian.
“Brian,” I said, “you’re my second in command.”
He beamed.
“Oh yeah, definitely aliens!” chimed in Louis.
“Louis,” I said, “you’re my third in command.”
“Yeah, aliens,” said Thomas.
We turned and looked at him in silence.
He waddled away hurriedly. The wasps followed.

The lesson following lunch was loosely termed “art”. Everyone was given a large amount of paper, a brush and water. Paint was largely optional.
This was effectively a license to arse around in the name of artistic freedom.
I wasn’t really in the mood for art, with the aliens weighing so heavily on my mind. With the art lesson, there was ripe opportunity for wandering around the classroom to perform espionage.
I sauntered across the classroom to my second in command, Brian.
“Brian,” I said, “find out what the aliens are up to.”
He put his brush down carefully and looked at the paper he was painting on. He had a picture of his mother being hanged by what I presumed was the grim reaper. Either that, or Brian envisaged his mothers end at the prongs of a coat stand.
“Okay,” he said.
With that, he pushed his seat back and began to crawl under the table, to my horror. That wasn’t the plan! He was supposed to walk over and pretend he wanted to borrow something.
Just before he was out of reach, I grabbed him by the ankle. He jerked his leg forward without realising it, pulling me sharply forward and bringing my head into hard contact with the table. I let go of his ankle and fell backwards into his chair, which slid backwards with me. My fall was slowed by the chair, but the chair slid further away and I fell off the chair, banging the back of my head on the floor.
Brian had turned under the table and was looking at me sprawled out on the floor.
“What’re you doing?”
I managed to push myself up to my elbows and looked at Brian. He was looking at me with arched eyebrows.
“Get out,” I said.
“Get up,” the teacher said. Telepathically, I tried to communicate with Brian.
“Stay there,” I projected.
“What were you doing on the floor?”
I struggled up to the chair, my head swimming. I would have guessed that being hit on the front and the back of the head would have cancelled out the pain. It turns out that this was not the case.
“Urghh,” I said.
The teacher glared at me swaying on Brian’s chair. Despite my obviously degraded mental state, I had to hide the fact Brian was under the table.
Being under tables was a very suspicious activity and would only draw unwanted attention for at least a week. Not that I wanted Brian under there in the first place, hence I tried to stop him. In the mean time, I had to cover up.
I pulled the chair closer to the desk and picked up the paintbrush at what I hoped was the correct end.
It wasn’t.
“Is this your painting, Matthew?”
“Mm,” I articulated, adjusting the paintbrush in my hand slowly. The pain in my head was beginning to subside. My eyes widened as I realised what the teacher was looking at.
I was planning to destroy Brian’s painting while he walked casually over to the aliens. Psychoanalysis was fun, but I couldn’t afford to lose Brian, so I was going to protect him. Now the picture was mine.
“Is this what I think it is?” she asked, lowering her voice.
“Art is open to all kinds of interpretation,” I replied.
“I am interpreting this as a picture of your mother being hanged by Death.”
I groaned. She’s interpreted it properly. I kicked Brian under the table, and spoke to cover up his yelp.
“Actually, she’s hanging a coat.”
“Hanging a coat.”
“Yes, that grim reaper is actually a coat stand. It’s represented as a grim reaper because.. it’s so hard.. to hang coats on..”
“So why does your mother have a rope around her neck with her tongue sticking out?”
I begin searching the very depths of my soul for an answer.
“That.. is.. because.. it’s so tall, she needs a rope to hang coats.. with. Like a pulley system! The tongue is out because it’s such hard work.”
I felt my appointment with the psychologist slip away.
“Why are her eyes dangling out of her head?”
“Er.”
“Dripping blood.”
“It’s just a.. representation.. of how hard it is to hang coats.. on the coat stand.”
The teacher peers over the paper to glare at me. I’m resting my head on my hand, and fumbling with a paintbrush in the other. I’m still holding it the wrong way round, but I fear if I move, the pain would return.
I smile faintly at her. She places the paper back on the table.
“Very well,” she says.
Phew.
“I can see you’re having financial trouble at home, or your mother is suffering some illness. I’m booking you in for the child psychologist.”
“Shit.”
“What did you just say?”
“Nothing.”
“You said shit, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Stay inside for tomorrow lunch.”
I looked down at my table.
“Yes, Mrs Benson.”
She stormed off to book me in to the psychologist. I slowly bent to look under the table and told Brian to come out.
He crawled out and stood by the table.
“Why did you grab my ankle?” he asked.
“Because,” I said at length, “I was going to tell you to just walk over and pretend to borrow something so you get a good look at what they were painting.”
Brian bit his thumb nail. “Yes, that sounds like a better plan.”
He turned and quickly began to walk off.
“No!” I said, grabbing him by the arm. His momentum pulled me off my chair and I sprawled out on the floor.
Looking down, he said, “What now?”
“Don’t bother now,” I said, looking up, “we have bigger fish to fry.”
Brian frowned.
“I’m allergic to fish.”


I stood up slowly and walked over to the classroom monitor list. I knew it wasn’t me tomorrow, so I had to check who would be in the classroom with me during my dinner time detention.
Wednesday – Sam and Chris.
The aliens.


It was the short afternoon break. Art was over and I had recovered from my massive head trauma by eating several humbugs and by drawing a large explosion on a piece of paper.
I sat with my core members of the resistance.
“I’ve got detention tomorrow dinner for swearing,” I said, “and I’m going to be stuck in the classroom with the aliens.”
Brian gasped.
“Brian,” I said, “you already knew that.”
“Oh yeah.”
Louis looked across he playground.
“That could be a problem. You don’t wanna be alone with them. You don’t know what they could do.”
“Indeed,” I said darkly.
“What’re you gonna do?” asked Brian quietly.
I said nothing while my brain ticked over. It wasn’t up to full speed yet. After a few moments, I raised my head and turned to Brian. A smile grew on my face.
“It’s not what I’m gonna do, it’s what you’re gonna do.”
Brian and Louis raised their eyebrows. My smile grew wider.
“You two have gotta get in detention too.”

The afternoon break finished and we had one more lesson until the end of the school day. This meant we had 3 more lessons until tomorrow lunch break, and we had work to do. Getting a lunchtime detention and nothing more severe was going to be tough. During the break, we discussed the plan.
Brian would be proceeding with the same action I took, swearing. Louis said he had a plan of his own, which he would do tomorrow, so we could avoid suspicion. Louis was clever, I left him to it.
“Brian, we have maths. I want you to answer a question and get it wrong. Then you swear.”
Brian sucked in his bottom lip.
“I’m not very good at maths,” he said.
I looked at him. “That doesn’t matter,” I said slowly, “you have to get the answer wrong.”
“But how do I know what the wrong answer is?”
The end of the break was drawing short, so I decided to take the simple route in navigating Brian’s thought process.
“The wrong answer is 7,” I said.
Brian smiled at me. “You’re so clever, Matt,” he said.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Of course, I did neither.

Break finished as I began to wonder how Louis was going to get himself detained. We walked back into the classroom, Brian looking nervous.
“Good luck, soldier,” I said to him.
“Thanks, uh, Matt,” he replied.
We took our seats and, after the ritual ten minutes pen finding, book acquiring rites, the maths lesson began.
I was seated far across the classroom from Brian because we usually got up to so much fun when we were together in a dull lesson.
I looked at him and caught his eye. As the class was quietening down at the teachers insistence, he held up a piece of paper for me to see.
On it, in a thick red felt tip pen was written ‘8’. He quickly put the paper back down and gave me a thumbs up, beaming.
I smiled wanly back and gave him a return thumbs up, looking away from his eyes as quickly as I could.
Brian had learning difficulties, apparently. I did my best to cover up for him, help him out and occasionally destroy teachers reports on him. He was often criticised for being lazy and awkward, but we knew full well what would happen if they knew the truth.
Besides, I had an image to maintain. I couldn’t have my best friend going into the special class.
We were doing division, much to my disdain. I had high hopes for maths, but it had so far failed to live up to expectations. I was holding out for the module about robots before I cast a final judgement, though.
“Thirty divided by three.”
Sam, the female alien, raised her hand.
“Sam,” the teacher said, smiling down on her relatively new, but shining supernova of a student.
“Ten.”
“Correct!” the teacher clapped. Sam acknowledged yet another right answer by blinking her left eyelid. I recoiled in my seat. She blinked again, normally. I looked away before she caught me, but she definitely had blinked wrong.
I would have to inform the others. There could be more we don’t know about.
“Eighty four divided by two.”
I’d told Brian to draw attention to himself so that she would ask him a question. The entire school career of most pupils involved the tuning of ones body and soul to avoid being asked questions, but few devoted such care and attention to it as I did.
I told Brian to make sharp movements, sit up straight and take a deep breath. He did all of these things.
“Sam.”
Damn.
“Forty-two.”
Brian deflated and looked across at me. He was looking worried again. I nodded my head to encourage him.
He nodded back, all worry washing away, replaced with grim determination. To the casual observer this could appear to be slight constipation.            
“Well, I can see we’ve almost got division wrapped up, after last lessons introduction. We’ll do some exercises in our book and I will do a final mark for you all.”
My eyes were wide in horror. The plan couldn’t work like this. Brian looked at me and I looked back. I shrugged helplessly.
Brian, desperate, tried one last trick. He did the deep breath.
Taking matters to an extreme, he inhaled something and began coughing violently. It wasn’t an act, but he manipulated it wonderfully, banging his fist on the table a few times, before sitting up and trying to look innocent and in obscure.
The teacher regarded him coldly. She never liked Brian because she never knew he had learning difficulties. She just assumed he was an awkward child.
“I suppose,” she said, “we could try a really hard one before we go to the next level.”
Brian raised his eyes a few times to meet hers, before looking away. Just like I’d taught him.
“Brian,” she said, grinning, “ninety-six divided by... twelve.”
He looked down at the paper in front of him and looked up. My brain ticked.
Oh no. He looked down again and looked up at the teacher.
“Er,” he said.
No no no.
“Eight?”
The teacher was silent. She regarded him quietly then continued.
“Correct,” she said.
Brian clenched his fist and screwed up his eyes. Then he froze. He slowly opened his eyes and looked up.
“I.. I am?”
“Yes. Well done,” the teacher replied icily.
Brian unclenched his fists and looked across at me. He was right, so how could he swear in a rage?
I shrugged helplessly again and floundering, Brian acted quickly.
“Arse!” he shouted.
The teacher, who was preparing to find the necessary exercises to bridge us from concept to practise looked at Brian. She was mustering her fury.
My mouth gaped. I looked at Brian in sheer horror. It was the stupidest thing he could have done, it was too obvious.
“Arsing.. yes!” he shouted, raising his fist in the air, looking triumphant for more than one reason. I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Brian! Lunchtime detention!”
He instantly looked very sad, and lowered his fist from the air. He kneaded his hands on the table and murmured acknowledgement. I was almost moved to tears by the sheer depth of emotion Brian was exerting.
His bowed head moved slightly, and he winked at me. He was grinning widely and I realised his bowed head was to hide his smile.
We’d done it. Brian was in. Louis could handle his detainment by himself.
I sat back in my chair, breathing a sigh of relief, and got my mind back to the task at hand.
Division. I wrote the answer to the first question down, felt something was missing, and kicked the girl across the table in the shins.
The resulting conversation had me amused for the rest of the lesson.
“Did you just kick me?” the girl across the table said.
“Me?” I replied, “why would I kick you?”
“Well, why would anyone kick me!?” she cried. She turned to the guy next to me.
“Did you just kick me?!”
“I’ve only just sat down!”
“How convenient!”
“What?!”
“Aha!”
As most arguments with people in my class go, the original point was usually lost. By the time the end of the lesson was upon us, she was accusing him of killing her dog three years ago.
“You probably fed him that tumour!” she cried.
“What?!”

The bell sang it’s sweet, sweet song signalling the end of the day and the class erupted into leaving. About five minutes before the ending bell goes, everyone begins getting ready to leave. However, you’re not really allowed to do this, so the entire process has to be done in secret. Pens are put into pencil cases, shoelaces are tied, school bags are prepared and fights are finished.
Most of them, anyway.
“I don’t even know what a tumour is!”
“Oh yeah, right, I’ve heard that one before.”
I left them to it, pleased at how easily I had managed to make maths interesting. I’d got no work done at all, which was particularly impressive. I never usually devoted such energy to slacking.
I found Brian as I walked down the school drive and congratulated him on his success in the lesson.
“That was some quick thinking back there,” I said.
He nodded, smiling. “Yeah I thought I’d completely messed it up when it turned out I had the right answer. Honestly, I thought you were good at maths!”
I sighed and contented myself with saying, “I guess I’m so good, I can never actually be wrong!”
Brian found this particularly amusing and, for not the first time since I’d known him, I wondered how much he really did know. He seemed to guard his wisdom well.
We walked to the top of the drive and parted, because he lived in the complete opposite direction to me. I said my goodbyes and he said he was terribly excited about something.
Sausage rolls, I think. I didn’t pursue the matter.
I usually walked home alone, but it wasn’t far to my house. I lived in a dense residential area, the kind that is completely incomprehensible on all maps and completely perplexing when you were there unless you lived there.
Then a miraculous system of furtively hidden alleyways opened up and allowed you simple access to pretty much anywhere. The alleyways were a brilliant designed, concealed behind fences which, from the top of the road, looked just like another garden.
My area was upmarket and free from any sort of anti-social behaviour solely because all the kids that caused trouble generally got rather lost, so avoided the area completely.
Someone on a moped tearing down those alleyways could be lost for days. They’d run out of petrol before they ran out of that place.
Casually walking into one of the alleys, there was a spring in my step. This was largely the fault of the small stone, which was also in my step.
I employed all known methods of removing a stone, apart from the most effective one. The best way to describe how I was trying to get the stone out while I was walking is to say I was doing the hokey-cokey, except instead of putting my left leg in and then out again, I just kept thrusting my leg deeper and deeper in. Also, instead of putting my leg in, out, in, out and shaking it all about, I generally just shook it all about all the time. To continue walking, I had to hop. As I was hopping along, trying to remove this damn stone from my shoe, I turned a blind corner in the alley and kicked a dog in the head.
“Oh god! Oh I’m so sorry!” I cried.
“What the hell are you doing?!” shrieked the owner of the dog, who had a startlingly similar expression to that of a pitbull.
You remember that old saying, how you end up looking like your pets? Well this woman had a poodle, so she was looking like someone else’s pet.
“Do you have a pitbull at home?” I asked, crouching down and stroking the dog.
“Why, you wanna kick that in the head too?!” she wailed.
She yanked the dog’s lead, causing it to emit some kind of vague sound which is probably the sound of someone being strangled so much no more noise can be emitted on account of being strangled so much.
She bent down, picked up the dog and began rubbing her face all over it, calling it things like “shnookums” and “baby”.
I apologised again and began to walk off, before remembering about that stone. I danced all the way home, trying to get the stone out, at times stopping to kick a lamppost in order to aid my efforts. It wasn’t really working, but I wasn’t giving up. I got home before I got the stone out.
About the only thing I like writing, nowadays. It is a big valuable child in my arms.

Day One - [you're here!]
Day Two - Morning - [link]
Day Two - Afternoon - [link]
Day Three - Morning - [link]
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skyrose's avatar
I laughed til I cried and couldn't see the screen anymore. I love it. I can't really believe they're ten, though. Maybe twelve?

I'm going to read the next part now. :)