Wishbones

It’s the longest Monday ever. I find it hard to concentrate in lessons because my brain keeps buzzing all over the place: I make up healthy recipes for Mum and think about the Slim Skills meeting on Tuesday and how Mum’s actually coming and about how Jake’s promised to sort things out between our mums and about how I have to work out a way to get Dad on board. Anyway, thinking about Mum makes quadratic equations and Mount Vesuvius and iambic pentameter seem pretty pointless. The only lesson that I feel remotely interested in is Miss Pierce’s History class.

‘I thought we’d do some poetry today,’ Miss Pierce says.

The class groans.

‘Aren’t poems for English?’ Jake calls out.

That’s another reason girls like Jake: he makes them laugh and he’s not afraid to stand up to teachers. Take Amy: for a second, she’s stopped drawing hearts on the back of her file and is looking at Jake like he’s some kind of hero.

Sometimes I worry that if I wasn’t the only person Jake’s age living in the village, if our mums hadn’t brought us together when we were babies, he wouldn’t even notice me.

‘Poems are for every occasion Jake,’ Miss Pierce looks straight at him with her sharp, blue eyes. ‘And in the case of the First World War, poetry was one of the only ways that the men could truly express what they were going through.’

Jake has some teachers totally wound round his little finger, but Miss Pierce wins every time. And Jake doesn’t mind because he likes her just as much as I do. She’s one of those teachers who cares more about pupils than about impressing the Head or his millions of deputies, which means she actually talks to us like she’s interested in hearing what we have to say rather than waiting for us to come up with the right answer.

‘Don’t we have textbooks for that?’ Jake asks.

‘Textbooks tell us facts, Jake, poems tell us the truth. And they bring us together: they teach us about our common humanity, about how the past and the present are connected, about how a man sitting in a trench a hundred years ago writing a love letter to his girlfriend back home might feel the very same thing as you feel when you pass notes to Amy under the desk.’

The class erupts in laughter.

That’s another thing about Miss Pierce: she always knows exactly what’s going on.

Jake blushes and stares down at his desk.

Amy grins stupidly because she’s got attention, even though she probably doesn’t understand what she got attention for.

‘These two men have given us the greatest treasures from the First World War,’ Miss Pierce says, switching on the projector. The black and white faces of two young men flash onto the whiteboard. ‘Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.’

‘Didn’t they meet in a loony bin?’ Matt calls out from the back of the class.

‘They met at Craiglockhart Hospital, Matt, where soldiers were recovering from shell-shock.’

I’ve heard that term before but I’ve never really got my head round it. I put my hand up.