Daisy Fletcher studied English at Oxford, where she won the St Peter’s poetry prize. She then joined The Evening Standard and The Independent, where she was a journalist and an adviser to the newspapers’ owner. Since then, she has worked for various businesses, most recently Freddie’s Flowers, as COO. Below is her short story, ‘Double Chemistry’. She is also working on a novel.
Email: daisycfletcher@gmail.com
Double Chemistry
We all said it differently, as if to keep a mouthful of him for ourselves. Engraved on desks, on wrists, on books; scribbled on folders and scrunched up handouts in a tangle of teenage hearts and squiggles. Mr Perelle.
We all changed to Double Chemistry for Mr Perelle. We put on bronzer in the bathroom, folded down the waistband of our skirts and hitched up our ponytails. Some of us undid our top buttons, others undid the top two. Then we filed into his classroom in a haze of lust, bubble gum and Victoria’s Secret body spray.
We sat for an hour facing his shiny whiteboard. He called us his mini periodic table. Twenty-five outfits and melting points arranged in neat rows in front of his desk. We stared at the back of his head, the thick strips of muscle in his neck, the smudge of sweat on his shirt just above his leather belt. He held his stubby pen between his finger and thumb. We watched it run along the board, spilling loop after loop of words for us to swallow.
We wrote lines of devoted notes in ink pens. Equations in different coloured gel pens. Pencil diagrams of boiling tubes and colourless liquids, our notebooks framed with sacrificial rubber shavings.
Before he finished a question, our hands were already up, reaching for him somewhere on the ceiling. Sometimes, forgetting the answer we’d half-prepared, we giggled and covered our mouths with fingers. Sometimes we got it wrong. ‘No, not quite – someone else like to have a go?’ Then we shrivelled and shrunk and prodded our thighs under the desk. When, other times, we got it right, his smile melted into warm pools in our tights.
Mr Perelle loved the experiments. We loved them too, he knew. We stood at our desks in plastic safety goggles and lab coats, counting out pipettes of hydrochloric acid into Pyrex beakers. He loves me, he loves me not. Sirens at our wooden islands, we wailed for him at our desks as he walked past in brown trousers. He gave two thumbs up or a pat on the back and a toothy smile. He had big teeth, a gap between the front ones. Amy wanted to climb inside his mouth and squeeze them together for him with her hands. Sometimes he crouched down next to one of us and helped read a rising thermometer, the glass tube spindly in his fingers. ‘Wow, so hot!’ he’d say, watching the liquid cross a faded line. At this, the whole class would stop, their Bunsen burners blazing, and turn to watch the lucky girl he chose to help. She would look down at the floor, bite a smiling bottom lip and fiddle with the hem of her pleated skirt.
For complicated experiments, he gave us demonstrations first. He liked to pick a different girl each week as his assistant, but halfway through Spring Term that changed. He started using the middle desk in the middle row, where Bex and Tilly sat. Tilly had been off sick so long we didn’t know if she was ever coming back. So Bex became his volunteer, although he called her Becky or Miss Green, which the rest of us disliked. Bex had thick, puffy lips and a birthmark on her neck. While he talked, she stroked the splodge of brown below her chin like she was trying to rub it out. As we stood gathered round Bex’s desk, our eyes moved in angry triangles, from his face to hers, to the experiments they made. Sometimes he asked her to unpop the stopper in a conical flask or hold a plastic funnel while he poured. We watched her shrug and giggle as our gaze fizzed across her skin.
When Bex spoke she chewed her cuticles and had traces of a lisp – a slip of tongue snaked through her teeth as she said her name out loud. Sophie in the front row tried to copy her, but she spat too much saliva and made a slushy sound. ‘My tongue’th bigger than her’th,’ she said, and when we all agreed, Sophie gave up carbs and fizzy drinks, but her tongue stayed just the same. At home in front of mirrors we all tried out private lisps, but they came out wet and wrong and never made it past our bathroom doors. There were other tics and tricks of Bex’s we tried to imitate: the hearts she drew to dot an i and the bubble font to write her name. We borrowed her blue gel pen too and her bendy orange ruler, rifling through her cat-shaped pencil case for the thing we didn’t have.
A few weeks before that term ended, Bex assisted the demonstration, this time making magnesium oxide over a thick and tall blue flame. We gathered round the middle desk in our wraparound plastic glasses. Bex passed Mr Perelle heat-resistant tongs and turned the flame up high for him, then played with the lopsided gold heart she’d started wearing round her neck. When the magnesium ribbon burned it flashed and went bright white, and Gemma swore she saw Bex wink at him, and Mr Perelle wink back at Bex. At lunch, we cross-examined Gemma and made her re-enact it all. Could Bex have really made a move? Mr Perelle would not have wanted that, we thought, our foreheads bunched and lined.
Although Gemma always lied and her story felt made-up, our forearm hairs went prickly still and stood up from our skin. ‘Bex’s eyes are too close together,’ Reeva said, picking at a soggy broccoli floret, and we tended to agree. But we each felt a new queasiness tie up our insides beneath our non-iron, multipack white shirts. We loved him all together and apart but only if we could share. There were other thoughts, unthinkable ones, we tried to Tippex them away.
We were always slow to leave Chemistry, but the next week we lingered and loitered and made the school run wait. While Mr Perelle sat on his desk edge, we cornered him, groupies in navy blazers. We grasped at questions – about next week, the homework, anything at all. That day though, he tried to brush us off, we felt him willing us to leave. His broad back turned, he wiped the board too clean and tucked our stools in while we watched. Then propping the fire door open with a hand, his sleeve rolled halfway up the arm, he gestured to the corridor. Slouched, shoes squeaking on the lino, we filed out one by one. Tara thought she was the last to leave the room, and turned round to wave at him as the door swung slowly shut. But among the lab coats hanging up, wearing lip tint Tara thought looked new, she saw Bex, chewing at her nails and staring at her chunky, Kickers shoes.
The news seeped through the corridor. We ran out of the science building, laces untied and buns unravelled, and raced to the staff car park. From there we peered up to the second floor, where two classroom blinds were closed already, which they hadn’t been before. Then as if he knew we waited there, we saw our teacher reach for the final beaded chain and roll the last blind down. As he did our eyes flickered to a pair of hands that folded round his waist, then one slid up to turn his head round by the chin and orchestrate a kiss. We gaped and squinted through the window at Bex holding the back of our beloved’s head, her lips pressed into his. Anika cried out, Martha dropped her flute in its plastic case, tears ran down each of Emma’s rounded cheeks. Amy aimed a biro at the window, but it hit the brick instead.
After that there was no doubt that Bex had gone too far. On the bus some girls talked tactics over green and orange Tic Tacs, others whispered behind hands in the backs of cars or walking down the street. At home Lou dusted off her diary to write down a rare entry and Liv told her older sister, who told her not to tell their mum. Amy rang Agatha who rang Alice, but hung up when Alice’s dad picked up the phone.
The next day we moved quickly, swarming through the open school gates. We stuck up A4 printed posters in the assembly hall of Bex in pyjamas dotted with smiling teddy bears, her skin pocked without foundation. We taped tampons to her locker by their strings and condoms blown up like balloons, then graffitied it with lipstick, black Sharpie pens and a tube of strawberry lube. We queued up early outside the classroom, checking through the frosted door pane for foul play. We marched in single file, our eyes running laps around the room in search of evidence or clues. Then we gathered round Bex’s desk just like we always did, but this time she wasn’t there. We squeezed ketchup sachets across her desk and rubbed Pritt Stick on her stool. We unpacked stink bombs and BB guns borrowed from our brother’s bedside drawers. Sophie had a dozen Free Range eggs which she handed round the room. Rach, who forgot to bring something in, bent a stray paper clip out of shape. Then she found a loaded staple gun and practised shooting on the wall.
When Mr Perelle came through the door we were all waiting in our seats, simmering in silence. Katherine poked a compass into a clammy palm, Clem punched the gym bag in her lap, Mia tore up Post-its into tiny, irate squares. We peered behind him, waiting hungrily for Bex to walk in. He looked perplexed, stared at her middle desk, his eyebrows pushed together. Then silently, he turned to face the board, and so the lesson began. He didn’t mention where Bex was and we didn’t want to ask. We just uncapped our pens and took down notes, twiddling charm bracelets and woven friendship bands like rosaries while he spoke.
In the first lesson after Easter break, gossiping and giggling, textbooks clutched to budding chests, we sat down in our assigned places. Lottie had a tan and her shoulders peeled like chewing gum. Priya showed us her cartilage piercing that looked a bit infected. Alex carried a new green water bottle that told her how much to drink each day. We checked our compact mirrors, rearranged our bras and rubbed our sticky lips. Then as we unzipped our pencil cases and smoothed our notebooks to an empty double page, one by one we started to realise. Not only was Bex not in her place, but the person behind the teacher’s desktop screen was not Mr Perelle. On his chair, sat a woman, with big hoop earrings and a peroxide blonde pixie cut. She looked up at us, then wrote down notes with a purple fluffy pen.
Her name was Ms Greg. She would be our supply teacher, she said. ‘Yes, he sends his regards,’ she frowned. ‘No, he hasn’t been injured. The school has decided Mr Perelle should take some time off.’ We paused, we gulped, we adjusted our hair. In the front row of desks Nat’s ink cartridge exploded across her white shirt. Bella had a coughing fit and gestured for her inhaler. We sat heavy on our stools, blinking quickly in our blusher and blue eyeshadow.
The classroom went quiet from that day on, we pursed our lips and crossed our legs. We applied much less mascara, sometimes none at all. In every lesson we felt time slowing down, it warped and buckled and ached. Our notes became sloppy and slapdash: words crossed out and coloured pencils uncoordinated. Some girls gave up listening altogether, their chins resting in a frown on their hands, slumped and catatonic.
Staring out of the window at the throbbing blue sky, we all daydreamed about Mr Perelle. We felt his half-life pulsing, radioactive inside us. It dripped out into the class, in swirly biro arm tattoos, felt-tip doodles, and whines to the woman who stood where he should be.
‘Mr Perelle said –’
‘Mr Perelle said –’
‘Mr Perelle said we didn’t get homework on Thursdays? And H2O + SO3 → H2SO4, not the other way round?’
Ms Greg was patient with us, her lovesick class. She tried jokes, silly voices and role play. She let us watch videos in lessons and brought in Krispy Kreme’s on our birthdays. We detonated Mentos in coke bottles, set deodorant alight and made bath bombs to take home. She tried every explosion to defibrillate us, her class of heartbroken molecules. But we didn’t want to be fixed. We just poured our sadness between beakers, careful not to lose a drop.
As the weeks passed by, we moved through stages of grief, states of matter. Liquid became solid as we built a wall of teenage disapproval, freezing out Ms Greg. She didn’t know what we’d been through; we were misunderstood. Her explanations and instructions were met with raised eyebrows, side eyes and silence. Her questions went unanswered, clogging up the stuffy, summer air. If she turned to face the board, we sniggered and moved seats, or threw pen lids and frisbeed textbooks across the room. We passed round notes while she talked and mocked her smile behind her back. Class experiments were botched: test tubes smashed, acid spilled across the desks. We were agitated, fidgety – Hannah snapped a pack of black and yellow HB pencils in half one by one. But it didn’t matter what we did, nothing could bring him back.
Whatever patience Ms Greg had, it dried up after that. The experiments stopped, the jokes folded back into a cupboard, no more explosions or sweet treats. She became shorter in front of us, hoops shaking as she wagged a stubby, bitten finger:
‘Stop doodling.’
‘Stop chewing.’
‘Stop whistling.’
‘Stop leaning back in your chair or you will crack your head open, and I am not mopping brain off the floor at lunchtime.’ Margot even complained to her parents, who wrote in to the headteacher.
One Friday, towards the end of term, Ms Greg was late for our lesson. We waited at our desks, enjoying time to copy homework and colour in the vowels inside our books. Eventually we heard the muscular growl of an engine outside. Looking through the classroom windows, only a few of us at first, we saw a motorbike pull up in the staff car park below. On it were two passengers, one tightly holding the other’s middle. We gathered at the edge of the room, watched as they dismounted. They took off their helmets: Ms Greg and a tanned woman, with tight leather trousers and a long, brown plait. The woman leaned forward towards Ms Greg and kissed her quickly once and then again. Our lower jaws fell open, revealing post-retainer wires.
When Ms Greg walked into the class, flushed pink and adjusting the earring stuck in her hair, we were silent. Our eyes were glazed and soft-lidded. Sitting upright on hard stools, shirt buttons strained and rollerballs poised, we quivered. The room, with windows firmly closed, was heavy with oestrogen and adoration and acidic teenage sweat. We didn’t tell her what we saw, we kept that for ourselves. But as she wrote out diagrams, we daydreamed. Oh boy, we daydreamed. We felt kisses on the back of our necks while we rolled the handlebar’s throttle grip. We traced the dolphin tattoo on Ms Greg’s wrist, the dimples on the small of her back. We pulled Ms Greg’s hair. We lay naked together, staring, stroking, saying: that was so good.
We came alive that lesson, two dozen electrons thawed and bouncing. We nodded and smiled and vigorously volunteered before she’d even asked. We took a handout and passed them on, each holding the paper too tight with our damp and grabby hands. Next, we highlighted whole pages, our desks a fluorescent sunrise, and scribbled down every word she said in shades of coloured pens. We etched the new equations Ms Greg taught us inside our aching skulls. When she handed back marked homework, we pressed her red crosses with our thumbs, hoping they were wet enough to leave a mark. She looked at us through narrowed eyes that day, her head tilted on one side like she was waiting for a punchline or a prank.
The next week, without discussion, we gathered in the bathroom at breaktime. We put on heavy eyeliner, hoop earrings, and tied our hair back in plaits. We strutted into the lesson, smelling of fake tan. Softened in the July heat, our thighs stuck to plastic stools and our hair stuck to lip gloss. Drops of moisture trickled down the insides of our shirts and glistened on top lips. We waited, watching the clock’s hands tremble on, willing the lesson to begin. We drew hearts and bikes and pixie cuts. We checked our painted nails for chips.
After a while, the door handle rattled, and we saw a shifting shape through the pane of fireproof glass. We shuffled forward in our seats, eyes sucking at the door. An old man walked in, with sloping shoulders and a salt and pepper moustache.
His name was Mr Leslie. He would be the supply teacher for the rest of the term, he said. ‘No, Ms Greg hasn’t been injured’, he said. ‘No, she hasn’t passed on a message.’ He itched his nose. ‘She has just decided to take some time off.’