I summoned my best schoolmaster’s voice and leveled my sternest gaze on the boy. “I beg your pardon?”

The freckled boy sniggered again. He looked about fourteen; half grown, with nicotine stains on his fingers. “Fucking pervert, chatting up lads.” He gave me a look like that of a dog unsure of whether to bite or run. Alone, he probably would have run; but the presence of the other boys gave him a kind of bravado.

“Give us a tenner and I won’t report you,” he told me, his grin broadening.

“Give him twenty and he’ll suck you off,” chimed in one of the other boys. “Assuming you can still get it up.”

For a moment, I stared at them. Yes, I’ll admit it, I was shocked. Not so much by the language—after all, St. Oswald’s boys can swear as roundly as the best of them—but by the hard and cynical look in those teenagers’ faces. Some of it was a joke, I knew; but beneath was a stratum of knowledge. Boys may be children during the day, but at night they can become predators. And in a world that turns on fear, suspicion, and entitlement, they have learned to manipulate those levers that make adults afraid.

Afraid of what? They were only boys. I work with boys almost every day. And yet, boys have an instinct for fear; they sense it as a shark scents blood. I’ve seen it happen often enough at St. Oswald’s—at St. Oswald’s and elsewhere. Teaching is a game of bluff, in which the smallest weakness shown can mean the end of authority. And everyone has a weakness. Mine was a word. Just a word, but a word that can tear a schoolmaster apart.

Pervert. There’s a dangerous word. Of all the accusations that could be made against a Master, that’s the one that does not need the slightest shred of evidence. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words—that word—can obliterate every part of a man’s life: every good deed; every kindness; as if the man had never lived.

I tried to summon my schoolmaster’s voice, but for once there was nothing. No sarcasm; no anger; no joke; not even a Latin epithet. I’m ashamed to say that I actually ran—head down, as if against the wind—hearing their laughter behind me and with the invisible finger pressing against my breastbone with a dreadful persistence.

A thirty-second run is as long as I manage nowadays. Even so, it was enough to take me out of their orbit. I slowed to a shamble behind a row of laurels and finally reached the gates of the park, my heart now beating uncomfortably fast, and bent over like a runner at the end of a long race.