David Shaw

Naughty Schooling

The best fun I had at school was when I got in with Jodi Malenger's gang.

This was in England, way back, but Jodi wasn't English, he'd been born in Estonia or somewhere like that and his family had moved over when he was young.

Anyway, wherever he was from, he was the toughest and cleverest kid I'd ever met and anybody lucky enough to hang out with him was guaranteed plenty of fun. Partly because his family was well off, but mainly because

Jodi seemed to be able to get away with anything where girls were concerned. You could take the poshest, most stuck up bitch in the school, and she'd like nothing better than being dragged off somewhere by Jodi.

What's more, most of them didn't seem to care much if his friends tagged along with him. But what really showed me how good Jodi was happened one afternoon when we had Linda Beresford trapped in the gym storeroom at school.

We'd been after her for quite a while, and she knew it as well as we did.

She was a plump little half pint of a blonde who giggled a lot, especially when Jodi goosed her. This particular afternoon we'd seen her hanging around down the gym area just as everybody was leaving. Now she must have known that Jodi had bribed the caretaker into giving us a spare set of keys for that area; every other kid in the school certainly knew it. She must have known as well that to hang around near the sports storeroom at the end of the day was tempting fate. If you were in that corridor when the last bell went, and you happened to be a halfway decent looking girl, then it was trapping territory. Jodi would suddenly appear at one end of the corridor and two more of his gang would come around the opposite corner at the same moment.

One minute later the storeroom door would be unlocked and the girl – or girls – would find themselves on the other side of it. Then the door was locked and the squealing began. But this time we got careless and didn't lock the door as soon as we should have done.

It was Linda's fault. She'd obviously been waiting a while for a chance to be the centre of attention and she was really stacking on the drama as we ruffled her feathers. Every time a hand grabbed her there was more noise than a catfight. Not that it stopped her giving us coy "come on" looks from underneath her disarranged hair as she weighed the opposition up. In fact she had unusually heavy odds to face that day because there were five of us there. Jodi was the one who really mattered though – short and broad shouldered, with the face of an angel and the mind of a sewer rat.

The rest of us just followed whatever he did.

There was Will, the biggest and oldest of us all, not very bright, but always strong and willing. Micky and Jacko were both highly respected in the school because they'd fight anybody any time. I was there because I was pretty handy with my own fists. And each of us would have followed

Jodi into just about any situation. Incidentally, my name's Andy.

Anyway, we'd made a circle around Linda to give her some heavy petting, just as an introduction. She was making it more sporting by trying to keep pushing our hands away, although with odds of two against ten most of the grabs getting past her defences, which was why she was making so much noise. After a few minutes though she changed her tactics and just stood there, giggling and telling us we'd better let her go or else we'd be in trouble.