Here’s a short story written during my fiction course at the National Center for Writing.
Andy was always fond of the way I could cross the yellow line. I would skip backwards looking up at the sky, unaware of my straying steps, before coming to a sudden stop, sensing that something was out of place, tilting my head to look down at the ground then back towards the long thin yellow point of transgression now several steps away from me. I’d feign surprise that I’d crossed it - this always made Andy laugh. Then, unfazed by my forbidden location and the oblivious gaze of the teacher on break duty, I would do aeroplane wings with my arms and run out across the Junior playground towards the painted targets on the old redbrick air raid shelters, splattering myself into them with a flurry of hand movements and over-acted expressions. Andy would point and laugh and at that moment I would often think that Stephen could see me too.
We spent many hours in the Infant playground, enclosed by the yellow line, examining all the other lines and shapes painted on the concrete, the circles and squares and grids and numbers, searching for hidden worlds and strange new games. The big circular clock became the head of a giant Cyclops from the old films on TV and we’d be knights fighting skeletons on top of the head as the Cyclops lumbered along. We’d try not to fall off and plunge to our doom as the rocks lurched below us with each gargantuan stride.
Andy used to say that I didn’t look exactly like a boy. He said I could sometimes be a boy but I could also be a big ant with a green face. If we were playing dinosaurs, I would be an iguanodon because it was scary when I pointed my thumb up like a single talon - in fact I might actually have resembled an iguanodon and had a talon, because everyone broke off running and screaming when Andy pointed towards me and shouted ‘Iguanodon!‘. It took them a while to calm down before they eventually regrouped to sit on the paving stones by the assembly hall, catching their breath and laughing out their last bits of fear.
My most ingenious if somewhat ungainly adventure was when Stephen said he could see me and Andy and Stephen both hid me in a big metal bin outside the canteen which they said was full of baked beans. They said the dinner ladies would get the shock of their lives when they emptied the beans into the big metal trays and out I’d come, a giant green ant covered in tomato sauce. They said I’d get eaten by the whole school with chips and beans and then all the kids would drum on the tables for more with their knives and forks because Anty was so tasty, apart from the kids who had a packed lunch because they weren’t allowed hot dinners.
Of course, I knew the metal bin wasn’t full of beans - it was full of bin bags with refuse from the previous day. Andy and Stephen thought it was full of beans because it was next to the window where they heated the beans that actually came in wholesale-sized tins. Still, I played along, floating in the rubbish before quietly vanishing from attention, becoming nothing more than a hibernating dream as the school bell rang to signal that lunchtime was over.