No one from 11C has found somewhere quiet and alone like Mr Clark suggested, nor are they working on revision timetables. They’re sunbathing together in the middle of the running track, with bundled shirts for pillows, noisily reliving their end-of-term prank.

There is them, and there is me. I don’t know if they’re watching as I pound out a lap of the grounds. They may well be, laughing at my lurching stride, the hand on my privates, the cut of my lost-property uniform, my twitching mouth, the facial expressions that react automatically to the noise of thought.

I veer and stagger through the, narrow gap between the tennis court and the school’s boundary. I grab at the chain-link fence to steady myself and look over again at the rest of my class. At this distance, they are silent. The image of them shimmers in the heat haze that hovers over the empty court. I don’t need to be able to hear them to know that they’re happy. Of course they are. This is their last day of school and the grounds bask in the perfection of it.

How is it that we can be looking at the same thing and seeing it so differently? How can their thoughts be so content when mine wrestle and tumble like a crowd caught in a crush?

A roar of sitcom laughter escapes from an open upstairs window in the main building, 200 metres away. It’s too far away to be about me, yet pricks as sharply as if that unseen class are delighting in the ridiculous figure of the boy standing alone in a place where standing together is the only way to survive.

Reaching above me, I clutch at the thin wire of the fence until there is no circulation in my fingertips, until the pain washes along my arms. I force my face against the little metal squares. My cock throbs, trapped vertically downwards, stiff against my thigh. A wank might help, restore some order as they do, but it’s a half-minute I do not have spare.

I need more time. I fantasize about being able to pause everything; to walk home through the freeze-frame, sit in Gramps’s shed one last time and put everything in order while no second hand is free to erase the little space left between now and my deadline.

I close my eyes and squeeze my face as hard as I can into the mesh of steel. The pressure on my eyelids turns my vision into a spiralling kaleidoscope of yellows and blues. I look for Aunty Kaye’s face. I listen for her voice. They won’t come. I manage no more than an approximation, like a caricature drawn by a stranger working to my description. The picture melts. I’m on my own here.

Is it out of my hands now? They’re on the field, not in the classroom.