Born Different (3 page)

It was now the
end of the last summer term of school that Gabe would ever have and
he had been relieved that, so far, it had been a cold damp one. He
preferred the cold, well that was not strictly true, but the heat
was unbearable dressing the way he did, with all those layers. The
fact that he had never peeled off even one item of clothing in his
entire school life, even when there had been heat waves, just
exacerbated the situation and made the other kids view him even
more ‘different’ than they already did.

Weird mentally,
as well as physically, was what they all smugly calculated and
whispered even if they weren’t the type to shout it at him.

He wasn’t
stupid. Did people presume that, because of the way he was, that he
couldn’t hear or be affected by what they were saying? That he
didn’t notice them all stop and point and nudging their friends who
would, unsubtly, turn too and pretended not to stare in his
direction?

Perhaps they
assumed the weird mental thing meant that he couldn’t quite
comprehend them delighting in their own disgust or simply, and more
than likely, they just didn’t care. Judging him made them feel that
much better about themselves. Gabe liked to think that he didn’t
care too, that it sorted the wheat from the chaff. And anyway, he
would never be friends with people like that so it did him a
favour. He didn’t have to bother!

But how was he
going to explain it away anyway? There was not a sufficient enough
excuse for acting like a weirdo other than being a weirdo.

Gabe sniffed
the arm pits of a t-shirt and threw it into the far corner in a
make shift, ‘needs to go in the wash’ pile and he opened his drawer
to see if any clean ones had magically appeared in there.

Not that he
thought it really mattered if he stank, no one ever got that close
to notice. Gabe, like a spare part, had spent his entire school
life sat at the back of classrooms on his own, due to his size and
the potential obstruction to others visibility of the teacher that
his deformity might cause. People didn’t seem to know how to
communicate with him and in all honesty Gabe had trouble following
them. He noticed that people rarely, if ever, looked him in the
eye. They might stare from a distance or even clock him in their
peripheral vision but not one of them ever really looked Gabe
straight in the eye. The ever present paradox of it all was that
Gabe’s deformity that was so obvious, had also made him
disappear.

At least it was
all over now. Gabe had hated school. Hated everything about it. The
teachers had quenched his desire to learn by their insistence on
the forced leaning of irrelevant facts and probably false theories
and one-sided debates. And they had miraculously made even the most
interesting of subject matter, mundane and stressful. Gabe was sure
that it wasn’t just him that thought this as all the other students
were now hysterically revising for these exams. No one seemed to
have actually learnt anything in the two years of sixth form. If
they had, surely there would be no need to revise, they would have
already learnt it in the lessons and stored it for life in their
brains to be easily recalled when needed? But as far as Gabe was
working out, nobody had lucked out on this, there was an obvious
flaw in the system.

There had to be
a better way. Gabe found he learnt more on the internet or even
just watching a documentary on the TV. He could learn the words to
a song after hearing it only a few times, but when it came to
remembering anything he’d been taught in school...it was
impossible. Gabe hoped that one day they would realise that. Maybe
one day the people who decide these things will figure out that no
one really learns without passion and excitement, and to turn great
subjects into monotonous tasks was monstrous.

But Gabe had
his suspicions that the deal of school was to turn out brainwashed
humans behaving like malleable robots that could be easily
controlled. Gabe suspected that the main aim of school was for the
masses to learn to do as they were told in the pursuit of a
civilised society where the rich and powerful didn’t have to deal
with ‘out the box’ thinking and creative minds which would only
causing rebellion and uprising. If the masses were clued up and
free thinking, then those in power would have to share their wealth
and everything would change and people might then start to live
with nature rather than destroying it, and no big business or
current government could survive that. They knew that, as long as
you kept people warm, fed and entertained separately, all in their
own little box of space then they weren’t going to have too many
issues with the world outside their front door. The only issues the
masses would have would be the ones ‘they’ let them have. To
increase fear and thus consumption of whatever it was ‘they’ wanted
you to consume next. It was all business really. Control, power and
money. The three mistresses of the Gods of the modern world.
Everything was just clever tools to manipulate the people through
their inherent human natures and manufactured human desires. Human
beings are easily brainwashed. Gabe was aware of the traps and he
didn’t want to fall into them.

Gabe tried to
do something with his hair, it wasn’t short and it wasn’t long, he
hadn’t had it cut in years but it just seemed to grow up and out
and not down like it was supposed to. He ran his still oily fingers
through it to give it some weight but that only made it look
greasier.

He gave up,
every day was a bad hair day and Gabe thought that everything would
be different in
his
ideal world.

Gabe had long
ago come to the conclusion that he and most, if not all of the
other kids in the city were kept at school more as a mass child
sitting and brain washing exercise as opposed to anything else.
Like an enriching education. School kept them all in one place and
off the streets and off their parent’s hands, so that they could go
to work to pay for it all. School broke their spirit so that they
could all be rebuilt, moulded and controlled, so that everybody was
pretty much the same as everybody else by the time they left. Gabe
thought that this was what everybody strove for; to fit in, to
conform, to join the masses. It wasn’t for him but he had no doubt
that most kids must enjoy school enough; being in an institutional
environment, being controlled and instructed what to do and believe
every hour of their day. Living by the bell. They must do because
most chose to continue to live like it for the rest of their
lives.

But Gabe wasn’t
like everyone else. Gabe would never fit in, he would always be
different. To live like other people? It was impossible, even if he
had wanted to. But, he didn’t want to.

He could have
done better in school if he concentrated the teachers had said. But
Gabe did concentrate; it was just that he was concentrating on all
of the things that interested him, which was not what the teachers
were talking about.
Do the maths
, he thought.

Gabe was
concentrating on what was going on outside of the classroom window.
Gabe was focused; it just was not on the class but on what was
happening out in the car park or on the street beyond or even the
park beyond that. Gabe was studying the colour of the light that
day, or the way the clouds were rolling across the sky. Sometimes
Gabe was observing everything with such a thirst; it was like his
eyes were drinking up every little vivid detail. A sweet wrapper
discarded, a dog taking a shit, a figure in the distance that could
be a ghost, a leaf falling down off a high branch in a swaying
Waltz. These were the things that were occupying Gabe’s mind.

Mostly though,
Gabe just clocked out altogether and went on a mad day dream where
he wasn’t there in the classroom at all. Gabe could go anywhere for
hours in his own head. But more often than not, Gabe was just
wishing that he was back home alone in his studio where he could
paint and just be, free from the bandages.

He tried to
listen to the teachers, he promised himself to focus on the class
but his brain wouldn’t let him. He might hear the first sentences
at the beginning and that would set him to thinking, to
questioning, to daydreaming. Gabe was concentrating on all the
things that you couldn’t necessarily see with the naked eye. Gabe
was constantly thinking, analysing and having ideas and fantasies
and he couldn’t stop doing it as much as he couldn’t stop having
wings.

He hadn’t
wanted to go on to the sixth form, he didn’t know why he couldn’t
just work on his art at home and attend The Exhibition, but that
was not possible. They ‘saw potential’ they had said and Gabe
hadn’t known whether to be offended or take it as a compliment.
They had added that he ‘needed to get some more guidance with his
art and take some ‘real subjects’ too as a back-up plan for the
real world.’

The ‘real
world’? All Gabe knew about the real world was that people just got
into other routines and put their heads into the sand and lived out
there lives like robots. And Gabe thought that perhaps it was wise
not to take advice off of people that didn’t seem to be having
great lives themselves. Why should he take advice off anyone who
wasn’t living the sort of life that he thought he would like to
live? If he’d of wanted to be a teacher in this dirty city...then
sure. But he didn’t, so they could shove it!

But as Gabe had
less idea then than he had now, which was still nil, about how he
was going to go about living his life and his mum and the teachers
had basically insisted with a heavy dose of emotional blackmail.
Making it clear he could not attend The Exhibition if he didn’t
attend the school. What else was he going to do? There weren’t any
jobs to go to, let alone ‘good jobs’. Staying in school would keep
him away from his gang of friends and their dodgy ways of making
money. And, probably as important as The Exhibition, there was
Grace; the girl who Gabe had still not managed to summon the
courage to speak to yet. She would be going on to the sixth form,
so in the end, Gabe had signed up.

Within the
first week, Gabe had a panic attack. He hadn’t had one before. Gabe
had since come to believe that the panic attack was obviously a
warning sign. His body was trying to tell him something. His
rational voice had not been listened to, he was doing something
that he really didn’t want to do and his body had rebelled.

He had been in
the long corridor before classes when suddenly, for no obviously
apparent reason, he felt like he was choking. What his body usually
did without Gabe having to think about, suddenly decided that it
wasn’t going to do it anymore. Like breath. His throat had just
constricted tight shut and his heart had started beating loudly and
faster than he thought was possible. The blood and feeling had
drained empty in his arms and his legs, from the tips of his
fingers and toes up, leaving them cold and numb. And Gabe thought,
after a few long seconds, that he was going to die.

This was it!
Right here and right now in this hellhole place, in front of all
these idiots and strangers would be where he experienced his last
moments on this earth. And as he had struggled to breathe and not
pass out, when he was sure that his whole life was going to flash
before his eyes like he was told it did in your dying moments,
various other kids had stopped and had started pointing and
whispering behind their hands to each other and looking at him with
shocked, repulsed and twisted faces. And as seconds passed in slow
motion, Gabe could see that some had begun to dither about whether
they should approach him or not. He then had the impounding fear
that he was going to be exposed, that someone was going to stroll
over ‘the hero’ and take his jumper and shirt off of him. Someone
would inadvertently reveal his secret. Reveal his wings.

Gabe was then
more petrified about people trying to save his life for fear that
they would see his wings, than of dying! When of course they would
have all seen his wings anyway but at least then he would be
dead.

Panicking
during a panic attack is just about the worst thing you can do.
Thinking back to the incident now, Gabe reddened and shook his head
at the thought of himself pathetically pleading, somehow through
his own blind terror, with the growing crowd not to approach, not
call an ambulance. Just on the small off chance that he might
live.

The worst thing
about the whole incident was that Grace, the Grace that didn’t
usually notice that Gabe existed, had come up to him. She had told
him that everything was going to be OK. She told him to breath, to
stay calm. She had touched his arm, told him that it was just a
panic attack and that he’d be alright in a minute.

He couldn’t
look at her, he had to just close his eyes and try to think, to
focus on staying alive. Focus on an inner light, on convincing his
lungs that it was OK to take in air again.

Soon he was
breathing ‘sort of’ normally and he was embarrassed, mortified,
blushing as much out of shame as lack of air. It had passed,
everything back to normal like nothing had ever happened. But that
fear, that new depth of ‘facing death’ terror,
that
had
never left him.

Sometimes; when
something happened now, like there were too many people in a room
encroaching on his personal space or if he was doing something that
knew he shouldn’t really be doing, which was happening now more so
than ever; Gabe felt it again instantly, usually only briefly but
almost as intensely as those first few breaths into that panic
attack. When everything stops still in suspended animation for a
few long lucid seconds and Gabe recognises that different, dry,
metallic, pungent taste in his mouth. That now familiar taste of
all-consuming fear.

That day, Gabe
had learnt two things; one was the knowledge of a new depth and
dimension of terror and the other was that he now knew, without an
absolute shadow of a doubt, that he would rather die than let
anyone know his secret.