Still Falling THE ERASED SCHOOL LIFE
Primary school and the split — 2006–2008
Val learned early that warmth could feel like a knot you were born inside.
The playground hit him before the bell most mornings — rubber under sneakers, a shoulder shove with the easy roughness of kids who had known each other since they were small, the grin that always lived one step behind the contact. Ashley was in the orbit before he had a word for it: a year younger, faster to laugh at the wrong moment, always there when the day needed a spark. Liz ran quieter beside her, sharp-eyed, the kind of friend who noticed when Val went flat and pretended not to. Alex completed the shape they made on asphalt. Primary-school history braided tight enough that Val assumed it would survive any timetable change.
Mina shared classrooms through Grade 7 — acquaintance warmth that never became daily gravity, close enough to recognize but not inside the knot. He did not think about the gap. He was a boy who took belonging where it was loudest.
Grade 8 arrived as a timetable change nobody framed as loss. His parents picked a school. Ashley and Liz landed at another. Alex took a third path. The group chat thinned — one fewer reply, then silence that felt accidental until it didn't. Mina had his number from primary. She never used it. Val told himself people got busy and stared at the empty inbox anyway, thumb hovering over greetings he never sent. Drift could look like maturity if you didn't say it out loud.
Transfer — January 2009
January smelled like wax and wet wool. His parents wanted the transfer to Highschool A: better education, better future, no real choice at the dinner table. Val complied the way he had always complied when adults decided his future was kindness.
The reunion hit before homeroom. Ashley shrieked his name — one year of separation erased in noise. Liz smiled softer behind her. Alex hugged him hard enough to turn heads. For one breath the warmth felt genuine, the old knot retied with new string.
Then James's table found him at lunch. Boys talking over each other, someone waving him over like a seat was the same as being chosen. Val sat where the noise was thickest because noise had started to feel like proof he still belonged somewhere. He waved to Alex on Tuesday, saved a seat on Wednesday. By Friday the saved seat was gone and he stayed at James's end anyway, telling himself crossing the cafeteria was harder than it was.
Mina smiled when their paths crossed. John laughed too loud at James's jokes. Val went home thinking he had people again. He had volume. The library would teach him the difference.
Karen — May–November 2009
May brought an outing Val did not want and could not refuse. James's crowd planned something loud for a Saturday. Karen looked up when he arrived, sighed like his presence had subtracted fun from the room, and said it where everyone could hear: the outing would have been more enjoyable if he had not come. He had not done anything wrong. He had only followed along the way he always did.
No one defended him.
Val left mid-outing and went home on a bus that smelled like rain on upholstery. Nobody texted to ask where he had gone. After that he ate alone in the library most days — headphones in, book open, chair angled toward the wall. James lunch happened out of guilt when the guilt built high enough. The ratio tipped toward silence and never really tipped back.
Karen found him alone in November. Corner by a stairwell, no witnesses, her voice flat in a way performance never was. What was his problem, she asked. Why did he hang around like he belonged when nobody wanted him there. Val asked what her problem was. She said he was ugly. She did not need a reason to dislike someone. That was just how the world worked.
He walked away with it stuck under his skin like a splinter he could not dig out. He did not tell anyone. Cruelty did not always need an audience. Sometimes it was quieter and sharper and just as true.
Mina — 2010–2011
Ashley's family moved schools mid-term in March 2010 — abrupt, not cruel on purpose but cruel in effect. Val stood at the gate the last morning she had at this building and tried to joke. Ashley hugged him too hard and told him not to be stupid. Liz cried where she thought nobody saw and punched his arm when he noticed anyway.
The orbit thinned overnight. Mary, Jennifer, the rest of the names that had tolerated him through Ashley vanished with her timetable. Only Liz remained from the primary knot, and Liz could not be everywhere.
Mina filled space without trying to. Shared lunches in the library, bad coffee from the vending machine, flashcards spread between them through exam season. She texted memes that made no sense and expected him to laugh anyway. She asked how his weekend was and listened to the boring answer like boring was allowed. Val called it friendship because friendship was the floor. Under the floor something else grew — watching her hands when she talked, the laugh that came out wrong when she was nervous. He did not name it. Naming it felt like risking the one good room he had left.
John had been drifting into Mina's lunch orbit for months, moving between James's crowd and wherever she sat, smiling at Val in hallways like they shared a secret they did not share. Val smiled back because the alternative was a fight he would lose socially if not physically. He did not read the pattern until too late.
Liz teased him once about blushing when Mina's name came up. He denied it badly. She let him.
The sentence stayed in his mouth across a dozen bus stops, study sessions, purple-sky evenings cut short by arrival times. Then the world moved first.
John, and after — May–December 2011
May confirmed what Val had been refusing to read.
John and Mina were dating — official in the way school made things official, whispers and linked hands and the cluster rearranging itself around a couple Val had seen coming and still resented himself for not stopping. Mina stopped talking to him the way she had before. Not all at once. Messages first — slower, shorter, gone. Lunch invitations that never came. A corridor wave that did not turn into a conversation. Val dropped the interest because dropping was the only dignity he had left. The drop hurt anyway.
Graduation was handshakes and photos and nobody staying.
He walked the yard in the same shoes he had worn through three years of choosing wrong and called it ceremony. Mina passed him once with John at her elbow — polite smile, the smile for someone you used to know well and now know only by history. Val smiled back and kept walking. Liz hugged him hard enough to hurt and told him he was allowed to be angry about all of it. He said he was fine. She did not believe him. She hugged him anyway.
Alex nodded goodbye across the courtyard. Morris and Joshua were silhouettes leaving the gate. Chris clapped his shoulder and said he would hit him up sometime. Hollow ping hiding inside the promise.
Phones stayed quiet after. Everyone walked off as if the years had meant nothing. Val stood in the heat a moment longer and understood, quietly, that he did not really know what had happened to most of them — and would not.
The exception would take years and still would not be closure.