The French teacher jumped out of the window just before registration.

She was the first to die.

It was my birthday.

It was only a week after Mr Humble was in the papers. We were all still smarting from his departure and I was feeling more isolated than ever. I suppose most teenagers go through this to some degree but to know something about yourself which you cannot talk about and which would make you a pariah can make you feel like you have nowhere to turn. 

Reading my diary now, of what I felt when I was thirteen, it seems like a world away but at the time I was alone, confused, emotional, and sometimes in despair. Especially when the only mutants you hear about are those on TV; like that dog-guy who became famous on That’s Life for saying ‘sausages’, or the androgynous one with dislocated jaws that ate motor cars and had a hit record.

Mum and dad were too preoccupied with what was going on in London to pay much attention to me. We had a new Prime Minister called Jim Jaspers. BBC Breakfast Time reported on a huge fight taking place in London. 

While I was eating my birthday Weetabix Selina Scott was describing some terrifying monster called The Fury. I was trying to listen but my sister was playing some godawful soft rock record on the stereo and my lip reading days were yet to come.

I thought about using my mutant powers to rectify the situation but I wasn’t ready to come out to the family yet. Though it was tempting to fry the record player or my sister’s brain and I’m not sure which would’ve been more satisfying.

I boarded the school bus carrying the usual in my bag; a lunchbox, my schoolbooks, some Dungeons and Dragons figurines and the latest comics.

 I walked into the playground to a hubbub of half-truths and rumours about the events in London. Stacey was singing Chaka Khan. She felt for me. Apparently she thought she loved me.

Stacey and I had an uneasy truce. Her support for Mr Humble had endeared her to me and she had responded to my friendship overtures, firstly with disbelief but lately with a bemused smile. We had nothing in common and we were hardly chums but she stopped taking the piss out of my geeky ways and as I was now sitting on her table in science she realised I could be a useful source of answers to tests. She liked Adam Ant which was something I didn’t get but each to their own.

I found Colin and Simon talking in excited whispers. Colin had heard a rumour that we were to get a new mutant teacher at school. His dad was on the school board so it had a ring of truth to it. Colin told us it was a woman who had been interviewed. Before he could tell us more we heard the sound of glass smashing a few yards away.

Mademoiselle Chartreus jumped out of the window just then, in full view of the lower school. We watched her scream as she slid on the icy ground and a rake thrust its way through her skull in a splash of crimson. Bits of flesh and bone flew through the air, the majority of which hit Jane Dowling square in the face. Jane wailed. It was an unearthly sound, a mix of deepest horror and darkest shame that went right through you and touched your soul, chilling in its journey and unstoppable in its aim.

At least that’s what I wrote in my diary at the time. I was a kid; forgive the melodrama.

Stacey screamed then but she denied it afterwards and I wasn’t sure enough later to argue with a fist in my face.

I felt Mademoiselle die.  He final thoughts were lodged in my brain. Something about walnut coffee cake. It was bizarre. And at the same time I felt the murderer.

That was even more terrifying. Somewhere nearby I knew someone had planned this and was experiencing the warmest pleasure. And I knew this was only the beginning.

A flood of teachers appeared then and ushered us into the assembly hall, stifling any chance I had of pinpointing who the murderer was. We were kept there til lunchtime.  I was in pieces. I knew the teachers thought it was a terrible accident but I couldn’t correct them without giving myself away. Whoever the murderer was kept their thoughts to themselves as I didn’t catch anything untoward. Then again I’d learnt to shut things out or else drown and lose myself in other peoples’ ponderings so I may have been sitting next to them all along. That would have made Colin or Simon the murderer though, which was absurd.

Mr Hall, our headmaster and the kindest bumbling man you can imagine, walked in just before twelve. He told us everything would be ok. That was when he started frothing at the mouth and collapsed jittering uncontrollably and contorting every limb in almost impossible ways. His face was a picture of agony as it turned red then purple.

I think we all screamed then. At least it felt like it. The world was going mad and we were all falling into a darkness that would swallow us whole. I could feel his death and it was no teatime snack this time, it was sheer excruciating pain.

I woke up to find Colin and Simon standing over me. I’d collapsed with the sense of pain emanating from Mr Hall. They said I’d fainted. As if. Simon was holding one of my comics in his hands so they were so concerned they’d had time to rifle my bag for reading matter while I lay unconscious on the floor. I grabbed it off him and shoved it back in my bag. At least he had the decency to blush.

The police were all over the school by then, though most of them were still preoccupied by events down south. When they were talking amongst themselves they referred to Jaspers and the Fury and the ever-present Captain Britain. Didn’t they realise something was happening here on their doorstep? Something just as important?

It’s easy to look back and blame the authorities. Who would know that the result of events that day would lead to what they did.

Two down.

We couldn’t be sent home; most of our parents were at work. The majority of the teachers were hysterical; they wanted to go home too.  The police were still milling around and trying to look like they knew what they were doing.

It was around one o’clock. They’d ordered fish and chips for us all. Things had calmed down a little and I managed to swallow a saveloy.  The smell of grease and batter was all encompassing. I was fondling a bag of chips and drenching them in Brewer’s condiment when I saw Tina. She was standing at the door to the gym, where most of us had been herded at that point as the assembly hall was now a crime scene.

She looked a bit odd like she’d swallowed a wasp. She sailed into the gym and headed straight for my favourite P.E. teacher. Mr Hale never saw what hit him.

A kid called Toby something or other caught most of Mr Hale’s intestines in his fish and chip wrapper. Tina had gutted him with a huge kitchen knife and was kneeling in his blood and licking his spilt innards insanely.

The police grabbed her and dragged her out of the gym while the rest of us looked on in a mixture of shock and disbelief.

Somebody from the council turned up then and told us our parents had been informed and we were to go home. Then he saw Mr Hale and disgorged fish and chips all over his brown sensible shoes.

I don’t remember much of the rest of that day. My diary ends there but I think I was tucked into bed with some Horlicks and a Findus pancake.

I found out later it wasn’t the half of it. Two more teachers were killed that day. One of them was mowed down by a runaway rhinoceros, which when you think about it in the middle of the city centre is positively insane.

The other stuck her fingers in an electrical socket. She survived that but died on the way to hospital when an ambulance carrying the rhino victim ran a red light and hit her car.

I had my birthday party a week later. It was pretty subdued but that was how I wanted it. Colin never turned up. We never saw him again that year. My sister played Dungeons and Dragons in his stead, which was a novelty in itself.  They re-opened the school the same day but I didn’t go back for another week. Mr Wimbourne was the new headmaster.

Mr Wimbourne. We didn’t find out about him for years. My mind still can’t believe how blind we were.

I was thirteen. I was a mutant. And unbeknownst to me I was soon to be on the hit list of most of the criminal super teams in the world. Life sucks when you’re thirteen. 

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Twelve 28/01/2012
 
When I was twelve I realised I was different to most other people. It wasn’t something I realised all at once, but something that crept up on me when you realise that not everyone thinks the same way and what you take for granted is something that would not enter most peoples’ heads.

I was lucky and managed to hide it from my family and friends at school, unlike the few I met who were, well, to put it bluntly, more obvious. People would whisper when they walked past in the school corridors or snigger behind their backs. There was one in my music class called Matthew. They used to spray water at him from the back of the classroom and laugh when he flinched. Matthew never said anything to the teachers though; he just got on with his life and never gave it any thought.  At least that’s what I thought. Until the day they found him dead at the bottom of the school swimming pool, a tyre tied round his neck and his clothes piled by the side of the pool with a note detailing his every pain and his agony at living life that way. As a mutant.

Matthew’s suicide left a mark on me. Part of me still feels guilty for not saying anything to him, for not being his friend, for not letting him know there were others like him and that not everyone thought he was a freak or something to be afraid of. He was always smiling. That’s how I remember him when I think back; a happy friendly kid who just happened to have electrified skin.

A year later the school hired a mutant teacher. I’m not sure how that got through the school board; all I can think of is the meeting must have happened when most of the parent governors were away. He was called Mr Humble. Yes, seriously. His first name was Glen but we only found out after he’d left the school and his name was plastered all over the papers. He wasn’t overtly mutant in the way Matthew had been; no weird skin, or hair, or horns. His eyes were a regular greenish-blue; he was blond and slightly overweight. He always used to wear clothes that looked like they’d come from a charity shop and his hair was scruffy but in a non-threatening way. It was only when he opened his mouth that you could tell.

I think Mr Humble knew about me. He never said anything but he always smiled and seemed to listen to my opinion more than other teachers, always encouraging when I couldn’t get my words out the way I wanted. He taught us English literature.  It was through Mr Humble I learnt all about Chaucer, William Golding and Gerald Durrell. He also let us read comics sometimes when it was the end of term. Most of my classmates used to spend those hours chatting, putting on make-up or talking about football. I used to whip out the latest superhero comic and talk to my friends Colin and Simon about them like they were the latest news from a mysterious and alluring world. Although the stories were usually retellings of real events that had happened months before it was still exciting to see them and imagine yourself there rather than hear about them third hand on the news after watching Blockbusters.

I never liked Captain Britain much, even if he was the local superhero. He always seemed a bit of a tit and a snob. He was from some super rich family and had about as much in common with me as I did to an earwig. His sister was a supermodel at the time. No-one then knew she was also in the X-Men and would later turn into a ninja. You really couldn’t write this stuff.

Anyway, that day we were discussing something to do with a Canadian super-team. I can’t remember the exact details but in any event there was some argument about whether Marrina was a mutant or not; Colin was adamant Marrina was whereas Simon and I thought she was an alien or something.

So that was when Colin turned to Mr Humble and said “Sir, Marrina’s a mutant, just like you, isn’t she sir?”

You could have heard a pin drop. Even Stacey Kennedy, the class mouth, managed to keep her cavernous gob shut.

He looked at me then. Not for long, just a quick glance but I saw it. Then he leant back on the desk where he’d been sitting, listening to our conversation, and, while answering Colin deliberately looked around the classroom at each and every curious teenage face.

“No Colin”, he began, which elicited a few disappointed looks before continuing with, “she’s an alien, not a mutant like me.”

Jane Dowling gasped. A few others looked horrified. Most of the class, to give them credit, looked more fascinated than anything else. My heart was pumping nineteen to the dozen.

It was one thing to be a mutant. Another thing entirely to admit to it. 

Not that no-one knew. Mr Humble had teeth like Dracula and the longest tongue you have ever seen. Stacey Kennedy used to tell people she’d seen him buy locusts at the local pet shop and posited they were for his tea. Which was nonsense of course as he often used to talk about his pet geckos in class. But Stacey wasn’t one to be interested in facts.

Anyway, the next thing Jane Dowling runs out of the classroom crying and Mr Humble looks flustered for a second before asking her friend Tina to go after her and make sure she was OK. 

I remember Stacey making a comment about how good he must be in bed, which made the back of the class snigger. I didn’t get the reference at the time. Mr Humble ignored the comment and reminded everyone about homework before the bell went and we grabbed our bags to head to the dining room.

That was the last our class saw of Mr Humble. A few weeks later the papers ran a story about a mutant teacher terrorising children with interviews with Jane and Tina’s parents. I was livid. So were most of my class. He may have looked a bit odd but even the wayward kids at the back of the class adored Mr Humble; he was firm but fair and always used to crack jokes in class.

Stacey punched Jane Dowling and got suspended for two weeks. She came back a hero. 

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