Hello Darkness Read Online Free Page B

a phone, nut-job,” Wilson called after me as I swung the door shut in his face.
    I went straight out into the Upper School playground. This was the set-up: the front of the school was for years seven–nine, the back of the school was for years ten and eleven. The Sixth Formers could go wherever they wanted, but usually just hung out in their common room. Any Lower School kid who strayed into the Upper School playground would be lucky to escape with nothing worse than a debagging, and any older kid who ventured into the realm of the Lower School would be mobbed and pelted and harried until he got the hell out.
    But the side of the school was different. It was called the Interzone. It was a no man’s land, where, in theory, anyone could go. It was also a dark and dangerous place. There were long fissures in between different school buildings where the sun never shone, folds and wrinkles in the school’s skin, where lurkers lurked and shirkers shirked. This was where you’d find the goths and the emos, the psycho kids and the skins, the demented and the tormented. There was the corner where the Lardies ate their pies and currant buns. White-faced kids would gather round a Ouija board, or consult with some fake witch about love charms or wart cures. And deep in the dark heart of the Interzone was the foul and sordid alley where the Bacon-heads sought oblivion in their highly-processed, pig-flavoured drug of choice.
    It hadn’t always been like this. Before the New Regime, the Interzone was nothing more and nothing less than the side of the school. But Shankley’s crackdown had forced all the seediest elements – as well as the innocent outsiders, anyone odd or freaky or just plain different – into that murky world. There they were left, boiled and sweated down to a toxic concentration, like tree-frog poison.
    I began to walk towards the Interzone, but the Interzone wasn’t my destination.
    I had a pair of chopsticks in my hand with the initials L. M. on them, and I was headed for Chinatown.

CHAPTER SEVEN
C HINATOWN
    CHINATOWN wasn’t part of the Interzone, but it was as close as the “real” world came to that place of dreams and nightmares. Chinatown was the corner of the schoolyard bordering the Interzone. It wasn’t like they had an ornamental arch there or dancing dragons. In fact, it was no more than four concrete benches, but it was where the Chinese kids hung out, and someone had given it the name and the name had stuck.
    This wasn’t my first visit to Chinatown. And it wasn’t the first time I’d seen these chopsticks.
    I’d noticed Ling Mei on my very first day at the school. I’d moved from out of town, and I hadn’t met anyone Chinese before. She sat two rows in front of me, and even from behind I could tell she had something. Then she dropped her pencil, and somehow it rolled back to me, even though it should, by all the laws of physics, have rolled forwards. I bent and picked it up, and she reached back and smiled with her lips together, then looked down and then up again, still smiling. She was simultaneously demure and innocent, and hopelessly exotic. Her hair, so densely black you’d think it came from the heart of a dead star, was yet light enough to move in a breeze you could barely feel. The soft caramel of her skin was utterly flawless, so perfect, in fact, that you craved something – a mole or a freckle – to stop the heat of its perfection from burning your eyes out.
    But I was twelve, and I could no more sweet-talk a girl than I could milk a yak. So it was two years before I finally asked her out for a coffee, and that was only because of the onions. We were working at the same bench in the domestic science class. We were making a Spanish omelette, and had to chop onions. Even then I hadn’t said much, though my chest was beating as if some kind of big bird was in there, trying to flap its way out.
    Then the onions got to work on our eyes. Soon there were tears streaming down our