Next one from the circus that was secondary school in Bongland -
The Hill, The Bat, and The Sped.
In the UK, secondary school starts at 11 years old. Secondary schools are far larger than the primary schools (4-11 years old) that feed into them, meaning a single secondary school will probably have a mix of 3-10 primary schools that supply students to it, depending on how rural the area is. This means there's a lot of kids you don't know, so to 'get to know each other' my school decided to have a residential trip during the first few weeks of the new school year, for all the new 11 year olds. Not sure if it's still going on, this was pre-austerity so the school probably had a fair bit more cash to waste on pointless exercises like this.
In any case, it was pretty spartan as far as school trips go - right out in the country (in an already rural area) and the weather was pretty shite. The accommodation was split by form group and sex, so along with ~20 other young lads I was chucked into one big room with inwards-facing beds all around the perimeter. The first night passed pretty uneventfully, just the usual stuff of lads claiming the next morning they'd snuck out overnight and crept down to one of the blocks were the girls were staying and watched them all lezzing out on each other. The second night is where stuff got more interesting.
The block we were staying in was at the top of a hill and had quite a few lights outside it which attracted insects, and in turn those insects attracted bats. We were all lying in bed and chatting, when all of a sudden a bat flies in through an open window. The bat is kind of spazzing out, just doing laps of the room, the thing was rapid as fuck. Anyway, this is when Sped announces himself. He pulls his duvet all the way up over his head and starts screaming non-stop. Eventually a teacher comes in and uses a broomstick to basically guide the bat back out through the window. Tard identified.
The next morning, someone nicks the sped's socks which are rolled up in a ball, he screams "GIVE THEM BACK" and we start throwing them between us, he is chasing after them while screaming and crying. Eventually he just screams "AGHHHHHHRRHHHH" and runs out barefoot into the mud and then the teacher went to go and calm him down.
That was when we became aware that this kid really had something wrong with him, and the next 5 years only solidified this view of him. No idea why he wasn't in special needs school. A few other mini-stories and things to note:
- He was obsessed with Yu-Gi-Oh and would always talk about the characters and cards.
- One time he made a girl very uncomfortable so she sprayed some hairspray in his face as some kind of ersatz pepper spray, he had a complete meltdown in the middle of class.
To be honest, I only really interacted with him a lot during the first year of school. After that, we started to have sets (based on ability) for most subjects and he was inevitably in the lowest set for every subject. Was a bit of a shame, was a good irl lolcow for teenage me and my mates.
