Under the Trees

I hated the teachers being away because they would make us go sit under the trees. It was the one green space in the school and there were two very old and gnarled trees overseeing it. The school turned its back on this place, the buildings huddled together around a central courtyard, shrugging off the memory of the green space as if it didn't belong to the school yard at all. It was a place for furtive kissing, wild arguments, secret pacts that played themselves out to devastating consequences. One day we found a Catholic school boy, the school captain of a neighbouring force, tied naked to one of these trees. We lingered and we looked but we didn't cut him down.

The Trees were the domain of the grade ten boys, marking time till their next birthday when they could legally slip away from the grip of high-school and slink off into the hurly buly of the real world.

We sat, the thirty of us, still reeking of the primary school playground. There were only six of them but they had the height and confidence of an army.

I felt my friends peel away from me, slinking off to the relative safety of a bench behind the buildings.

One of the boys took my schoolbag and climbed the tree, hanging it off a branch that I would never reach. I had a practiced bored expression. It was the one I wore when my sister was in the mood for systematic bullying. One eyebrow slightly raised, a question - so what's next then? My mouth a steady and unwavering line, a dash which haults a sentence mid step, anticipating more.

Three of them. The other three sat smoking at another table vacated by my classmates. It was me and them and I should have stood and walked off abandoning my schoolbag, but I didn't.

He put his hand up my skirt and the others snickered. Whatever point he was making was lost on me. I didn't touch my friends in any way. I didn't hug or lean against them. I didn't hold their hands or kiss hello or goodbye. I knew that someone shouldn't put their hand up anybody's skirt. There was some rule about this. I was only 12 but I had already had my first period. I knew that most things of the body should be private and I knew that what the boy did was wrong. I didn't yet know about sex or intimate conflict. I didn't know that this gesture had a name. All I knew was that I should remain impassive. I knew not to cry or to give ground. I sat and stared and they snickered and I watched the grade ten boy lick his finger and I thought about the existence of germs and I wondered how he could do that, and particularly in front of his friends. But I didn't blink and I didn't flinch and they lost interest and slumped away.

Somebody retrieved my bag for me. No body mentioned what had happened. The school day ended.