Steven stopped, and two or three of the kids ran into him. He turned to look at Gilly, and saw Steve Shaw and Ian Brady fanned out on either side of him. Gilly and Brady were wearing silly lopsided grins as if they knew something he didn’t. Snake looked concerned (that’s Shaws’ nickname because he had this nervous habit with his tongue. He and Snake actually got on quite well mainly because they always seemed to be placed together. They always seemed to do that, as if it was the easiest way, put them in alphabetical order. Whenever they had to form any sort of queue he was always directly behind Snake.) His tongue was doing its bit at a hundred miles an hour, and Steven knew that the speed was relative to the amount of nervousness being experienced by Snake at any given time.

“How ya goin’ Snake?” he ignored the other two.

Snake looked toward Gilly and damn if his tongue didn’t start working at closer to two hundred miles an hour. Now Steven was worried.

“Leth juth go Gilly” said Snake.

As a consequence of his habit Snake lisped and he was now lisping badly. Steven worried a bit more and thought it was premature for Gilly and he to begin killing each other even though he knew it was bound to happen sooner or later. Gilly was just one of these mean kids who for no reason other than he was bigger (and dopier) than most his age, liked to play the bully. What happened next would go down in school history.

Brady would recount to others that he didn’t see Staggers move, but he’d decked Gilly with one punch. Snake would just nod in agreement, happy he wasn’t the only witness probably.

Steven knew that it was all just blind fool luck, that if Gilly intended to bash him, then he didn’t stand a chance especially as Brady and Snake were obviously there to assist. He saw red fury and just stepped forward and struck in the general vicinity of Gillys’ face. It was a punch that Mike Tyson would have been proud of, striking Gilly immediately under the nose and above the top lip. Steven stood there above Gilly, not knowing really how Gilly came to be on the ground at his feet, oblivious to Snake and Brady standing there open mouthed. Even Snakes’ tongue seemed unable to move, also stunned at the speed of the event. Steven held up both arms and formed peace signs.

“Luv ya’s, luv ya’s all.” And then he turned and ran.

He stopped running when he hit the top floor of the music block and then walked slowly toward the open door where he knew Miss Hartley was waiting. He heard voices and knew that she was there probably talking to one of the other of her ‘gifted’ children.

Steven used the time to draw in some deep breaths, check that his shirt was still tucked in, and then he realized that there was blood on his right hand. He was reaching into his pocket for a hanky when he realized that the blood might be his and not from Gilly’s face. He looked closely at his fist and saw a small incision on his middle knuckle, the blood just slowly welling into it. He held the hanky tight on top of it but every time he pulled it away the blood would ooze slowly again. He wrapped the hanky around it tightly and then placed the bulk of it into a ball in the palm of his hand and curled his fingers around it. He hoped it would look normal or at least innocuous.

He stood in the doorway and surveyed the room, chairs in a semicircular pattern with music stands in front of and between each two chairs. Posters of musical instruments and composers adorned the walls. Miss Hartley was across the room kneeling in front of a young female first former explaining something about the recorder to her. He looked past her out of the far windows and heard the noises of the street as kids left for home, in buses, on bikes, in cars with their mums or in groups on foot on their way to the local servo take away. He saw the top of the milk bar across the road, which was out of bounds to school kids until three p.m. on school days, and knew that there would be fifty kids in there by now, buying lollies and milkshakes and whatever else they could afford with what they didn’t spend at tuck shop.

Miss Hartley rose and the girl smiled at her, tucked her recorder and a sheet of music under her arm and jumped up and started walking toward the door. Steven didn’t see her until she was immediately in front of him. He smiled at her, made a mental note that she would be cute one day, and stepped in and to one side to let her pass. She stopped when she reached him and turned back to her teacher.

“Thanks heaps Miss Hartley”.

She didn’t so much say it as chorus it, like she was still in class with 20 other kids saying the same thing all together.

“That’s okay Rebecca – just keep practising.”

Steven closed the door after her. He turned around and was startled as Miss Hartley was only a few feet from and moving toward him, an arm coming up as if she was about to grab him. He was just about to throw his arms around her when she spoke.

“I think that should stay open, school policy you know”. She said it so personally than he didn’t feel offended but he still backed up against the door and said “No”, and held up his hand with the bloody handkerchief. Her eyes opened wide when she saw the blood and he felt powerfully mischievous at her concern. “What have you done?” She was so concerned that she forgot about the door. “What happened”? She reached for his hand now instead of grabbing the door handle and he let her lead him to the closest chair.

“It’s okay, I just scratched a knuckle playing football.”

She unwound the hanky anyway, the bleeding had ceased and the blood welling into the cut had started to congeal, but it still looked worse than what it really was.

“Let’s get you down to the infirmary” she said.

“No, really, it’s okay.”

He felt himself getting excited as she continued to express her concern at his well being. She was standing and leaning forward toward him, her eyes intent on studying the cut. Her blouse could do nothing to defy gravity so he enjoyed the unobstructed view of her white lace bra cupping her small breasts. He felt himself sigh uncontrollably, and she looked quickly at his face, her concern still quite apparent.

“Are you sure you’re alright?”.

“Yes, I’m absolutely on top of the world” he said without a trace of a lie.

“Well, okay then, but you make sure you have your mother look at that when you get home”, he was nodding before she finished. “Now, tell me about your ducklings”.

She stood and moved the chair from beside him so that she was sitting in front of him now. He had no idea why she always did that, but she would sit down directly in front of him. He supposed it was something they train them to do to make it more personal or something, or to make the kid feel more at ease, whatever, it didn’t matter, but since his first ‘counseling’ session with her at the beginning of last year she had always done it. The big difference was he hadn’t noticed any other teacher doing it except Miss Hartley who was young, attractive and always wore skirts. He recalled that first session when she sat down and crossed her legs, he could immediately see straight up her skirt to a pair of pink panties. From that day on he was in love with her. The strangest thing was that she never seem to realize he could see or was even looking up her skirt. It was no problem for him to “arrange” the extra counseling as she was his teacher in English and Music and was always willing to provide assistance.

Today though, today was the best yet though it did not start out that way. She sat with her legs straight out in front of her. Worse still, she clasped her hands in her lap which meant he could not hope to see a damn thing. They shared some inane conversation about ducks, he willing her to cross her legs, never understanding why she did not see him continually glancing down to them. He was becoming jittery and impatient and he was pushing the discussion without really thinking about what he was saying, knowing that the longer he kept going the more likely the chance of her doing it. Once she lifted her hands slightly and sat back in her chair, lifting her right foot slightly off the ground. He leaned forward expecting her her to cross her legs finally but instead she leaned forward also and her foot came back into contact with the floor. Again, he sighed audibly. When he did this she leaned back again and this time, lifted her right leg with no pretence other than to cross them.

As she lifted her leg the door to the classroom opened and Mr Reinfeldt entered announcing loudly “Miss Hartley!”

Her reaction was to hesitate with her leg up and then instead of going through with the movement, she moved it instead to the right, thereby parting her legs and granting all Steven’s wishes for the next ten Christmas’ at once. For that split second before her right leg came down followed by her left to stand up and face Mr Reinfeldt, Steven stared into her open crotch, silky black panties stretched across what he dreamt was his idea of heaven, even wisps of downy light brown hair peeking out in a few places. Steven spent many hours thinking about that second in his life, how imprinted it became on his mind, how vivid it had been considering the short length of time it actually took to occur. It was the first and only time he had seen her in anything but light coloured panties and it took his breath away and gave him an instant erection.

He didn’t always see anything at every counseling session but the expectation and thrill when he did was incomparable to this time. He could even see where her buttocks began to sensually curve out but it was the sense of what lay behind that black veil that always remained with him. He didn’t want to stand as his erection lay uncomfortably obvious, at least sitting he was able to hide it with his hands.

Reinfeldt was not happy. “Smith here has been fighting”

Erection gone. Steven knew he was in trouble now. He looked down and smiled as he saw that he had placed his hanky back into his pocket sometime while he and Miss Hartley had been talking.

“When?” she demanded.

Steven looked up at her with a curious frown, this was a different voice than what he was used to. Reinfeldt must have also been taken by surprise because he visibly stepped back.

“Some first formers reported that three bigger boys were fighting with a younger boy as they were leaving school.”

“Nonsense, it could have been anybody, and besides, Steven arrived here before the bell and the first formers would not have left the classroom until the bell went off”.

To Steven it wasn’t accurate but he liked it. He supposed as Miss Hartley had the other little girl with her when he arrived she might have thought that he had been there waiting since the bell.

“That’s right Mr Reinfeldt, it weren’t me fighting, I had an appointment here with Miss Hartley and I’m never late, and if I been fighting I would have been late”.

It sounded like crap and he wished he hadn’t said it, but he didn’t really care anymore because he realized that he had got far more than he could have ever hoped for this afternoon anyway. Miss Hartley turned back to face Reinfeldt and Steven looked at her profile, trying to switch on some sort of x-ray vision so that he could see her standing there in those black panties. He thought he could make out her panty line as she shifted weight from one leg to the other.

“Mr Reinfeldt, it would also be preferable if you knocked before entering my classroom”.

Steven beamed with pleasure, obviously she believed him.

Reinfeldt squinted at Steven.

“If I find out that it was you, it will be the cane, not for fighting, for lying, and (turning to Miss Hartley) it is this schools’ policy that after school assistance is conducted with open doors”.

He turned to leave feeling that he had just had the last word.

“It was a confidential counseling session Mr Reinfeldt not just assistance with school work, and how would you feel if Mr Murray our esteemed Principal held his personal interviews with you with his door wide open for anybody to walk past to see and hear what was going on?”

Steven was impressed. Reinfeldt obviously was not.

“Well we may just take this up with Mr Murray Miss Hartley”.

He strode out the door. And left it open of course. Miss Hartley looked around at Steven, a little smile playing at the edge of her lips.

“Well, did you like that?”

“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world Miss Hartley”, and Steven knew what he was talking about.

Funnily enough, from that time on at school, Gilly was almost friendly with Steven, well courteous most times. Steven often caught him looking at him when he thought he wasn’t being observed. The look was almost always the same, a strange sense of studious interest or curiosity mixed with a little annoyance. And he called him Stag. Steven wasn’t fooled one bit though, he knew that deep down, Gilly had been severely embarrassed before not only two of his mates, but also in front of what Gilly perceived, was all the first formers, as if Steven had arranged for them to be there as witnesses.

Gilly wasn’t a total fool, he now knew what Steven was capable of but he also harboured half a belief that it may have just been blind fool luck (Steven knew this as a certainty but there was no way in the world he was going to let on to anybody, especially Gilly). Gilly was going to play this game a little more careful from now on, study his opponent a little more, get to know him better, maybe even befriend him if he had to. But when the time was right, he would plan it down to the most trivial detail before striking. And strike he would, he told himself every day.

The most perplexing thing for Gilly was Stevens’ reluctance to boast or even casually mention the incident to anybody. Gilly himself wanted to discuss it with Steven because he wanted to be sure in his own mind that Steven wasn’t some black belt in Judo, or Aikido, or some such thing. Gilly waited oh so patiently for Steven to mention something whenever one of the other kids asked him how he had done the deed but every time, Steven brushed them off or shrugged his shoulders as an answer. Even Snake and Brady said that Steven wasn’t saying anything different whenever Gilly wasn’t around. And of course, after a couple of days, nobody talked about it anymore because it was old news.

To Steven, this was the coolest thing he could do. He let people think whatever they wanted to about how he managed to deck Gilly. He wasn’t going to add or take away from it knowing full well that they would eventually come to their own conclusions that he was in fact something more than he was ever going to let on about. That was the cool thing, you achieve something by sheer luck and you get turned into a legend by basically acting ignorant.

Even some of the teachers looked at Steven now with a little bit more respect (Reinfeldt wasn’t one of them). Steven showed no interest and absolutely no aptitude for mathematics and old Mr Temple (the boys called him Shirley, but not to his face of course) had given up a year ago trying to get him to do anything positive about it.

“Steven, would you like to give me an answer to this equation?”

Temple asked him in class the very next day. Steven was shocked, Temple had hardly said two words to him in class in almost a year, and now here he was asking him to act as if he was a normal member of the class. Steven looked at Temple and saw a glint of hope in his eyes. He shook his head and wondered how in hell punching somebody one day made him any different in maths the next but there was Temple, looking expectant and hopeful.

“Ah, Mr Temple, if you could just move away from in front of the board?. I’m sorry Mr Temple…”

Mr Temple resumed normality almost immediately, totally oblivious that he had placed such high hopes onto Steven just because he had slugged a bully yesterday when nobody had expected him of being capable of such actions. Temple realized he had clutched at straws, he knew Steven to be bright but as they say, you can’t lead a dead horse to water. Or was that flogging a dead horse? Whatever, it didn’t matter anymore, the boy was just as dumb as the Gillespie kid that he had punched. His attention in an instant, was on his more favoured students, knowing that the right answer was but seconds away.

Steven graduated from High School with excellent results. He excelled at athletics and ball games such as softball and cricket and got high distinctions for English (of course), Geography, Social Studies and History, distinctions for Science (“it was rigged”! ) and Technical Drawing, and a pass for Maths. Such was the education system at the time, because Steven sat for advanced classes, his maths exams were marked according to his student rating. He couldn’t fail even if he didn’t answer one single question! You just went down a level as far as your mark was concerned (or two levels in Stevens’ case). Steven was not amused to discover this fact as he knew he would have done the same for geography and probably tech drawing as well, and that way he would have had more time to do the things he wanted to do, like English, or girls.