All of Me Read Online Free PDF

the trouble. I couldn’t avoid it. Sometimes it just seemed like I was being set up. As if the whole class was in on a joke and I’d just walked in at the last second. Even my various form teachers during my time at West Thornton seemed to be in on it. On another occasion, after I’d left Mrs Baldwin’s class, I was staring at the blackboard, trying to work out what was on it. I could see words although a second ago there had been numbers. Before I could ponder further, I heard the teacher’s raised voice.
    ‘Right, you’ve had enough warnings.’
    I was concentrating so hard on the blackboard it barely registered. Who’s for it this time? I wondered without looking up.
    The teacher grabbed a wooden ruler from his desk and stormed across the room. He stopped between me and another girl, Irene. She looked terrified.
    ‘Hand out,’ he snapped.
    Wonder what she’s done?
    Then the teacher glared at me.
    ‘Both of you!’
    What?
    ‘But …’
    ‘Hand!’ As he spoke he grabbed my wrist and delivered a stinging crack across the knuckles with the ruler.
    Instinctively I put my knuckles in my mouth to try to soothe them. It had the opposite effect. It felt like my hand was on fire.
    ‘Don’t suck them, Irene,’ I said to my friend as her knuckles got the same treatment. ‘It makes it worse.’
    That was wrong as well.
    The teacher spun back round. ‘Still talking?’ Then he took my other hand and whacked me again.
    ‘Anyone else got something to say?’ he demanded, scanning the room. Not a peep. The only noise you could hear was Irene sobbing quietly. My hands felt like they might burst but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of making me cry. But, God, I thought I was going to be sick from the throbbing pain that jolted through me, like waves, every few seconds.
    With two hands out of action I couldn’t pick up a pen, so that was the rest of the lesson wasted. I just sat there stewing, sore and humiliated. And, as usual, utterly, utterly mystified. What was his problem? I hadn’t said a word to Irene. In fact, I couldn’t remember speaking to anyone at all that day.
    It’s hard to appreciate while your joints are pulsing like Belisha beacons, but knowing you’re being punished for nothing is almost worse than the punishment itself. Physical pain heals eventually but mental torture stays with you. You can’t relax. You can’t afford to let yourself believe for one moment that everything is all right. Not when a teacher can haul you out of your seat with zero provocation.
    I remember occasionally looking at other kids misbehaving and thinking, They’ll be lucky to get away with that. Usually the teacher was on the same wavelength and it would end in the familiar way – whack! The teachers always seemed to have a reason for dishing out the clips round the ear on the others. I couldn’t get my head around it. They didn’t lash out randomly with anyone else. Just me.
    Like the punishment itself, if something occurs regularly enough it becomes the norm. My default position, if you like, was to be told off. Even to myself I sounded like a stuck record sometimes. ‘It’s not fair, it wasn’t me. It’s not fair, it wasn’t me.’ I went for days when that’s all I remembered saying. But I truly believed it. I was innocent. I hadn’t done anything.
    Even when I wasn’t being punished, I always seemed to be being made to do things I didn’t want to. On the day I’d got covered in black paint, I’d been sent to the head and shouted at. Then I was despatched to the staff office to get some fresh clothes from the ‘lost and found’ basket. Usually it was only kids who’d wet themselves who were sent there.
    I trotted along to the office and knocked on the door. A teacher took one look at me and knew why I was there.
    ‘Come on then, get those things off,’ she said kindly, and began rooting through the supplies.
    I didn’t move.
    When she turned round holding a new blouse and skirt she