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hand over, palm facing upwards revealing my paler wrist, then turned it back over. So this was how people saw me.
    For the first week, my classmates ignored me with aggressive indifference. They moved around me slowly, a snake coiling, squeezing tighter and tighter. In my loneliness, I looked for the polite boy. I imagined us becoming friends, but I never saw him again.
    A seed of uncertainty was planted in me at Draycott. Or maybe the seed was there all along and Draycott merely fertilized it. But, I was suddenly very aware of white boys in the world. Even when I was alone, I felt myself carrying their presence in my body. There were no words to name this, but I sensed that I was not the same person I had been when school began.
    At the same time, I was secretly curious about white boys. At ease in the world, they seemed to follow poor rules of hygiene, appeared not to worry about proper enunciation, mumbled incomprehensibly, called each other bad names as a sign of affection. They were reckless, flighty, dishevelled. Yet their surnames—Underhill, Bridgewater, Forbes–Heathcote, Clayton—carried the weight of things accepted and traditional.
    I was introduced to the school tradition of “Colours,” awardedfor academic and sporting achievement. A wooden spoon was a mock award, a disgrace usually given to an individual or team that had come last in a competition, but sometimes also to runners-up, i.e., the ones unable to throw heavy balls at people with alarming speed. The prefects, I discovered, were more intimidating than the teachers, marching around like brawny thugs, bellowing “Consequences!” whenever they saw anyone misbehaving. They could turn you in to the headmaster and get you three strokes of the cane if you weren’t careful.
    I learned how to scan my surroundings, interpret everything in terms of potential risk.
    Despite such precautions, there were moments of inevitable horror. For example, there was the day we read William Blake as part of a unit on verse and poetic structure. Halfway through the lesson, thirty boys turned the pages of thirty copies of
Songs of Innocence
to a poem called “The Little Black Boy.” All of a sudden, it was as if a bright cone of light had beamed down on my head.
    Then there was the time the teacher asked the class to write a poem beginning with the words “Your locks.”
    The boy seated in front of me read first:
    “Your locks are coils of light
    They bounce me to the sky
    Like a clean, fluffy bed.”
    When it was my turn, I read fiercely:
    “‘Your locks are torture.
    But I will get even. My fingers are swords.
    I am the prince of air who escapes …'”
    The teacher, with a face hardening into ice, interrupted: “Thank you, Marcel. That will be all. You may sit down now.”
    “But I’m not done yet.” I was just about to read a line about Houdini.
    “I said thank you, Marcel. That’s quite enough.”
    Oliver, of course, received a call from the headmaster and a letter from the teacher asking if there was some situation at home that might explain my aggression.
They,
the teacher and the headmaster, just didn’t know what to make of it. But strangely, my standing among my peers improved for several days. The other boys walked around me with a new attitude of respect, almost admiration.
    By my second month, I had garnered the nickname
Malay.
It was a mild taunt delivered with little ill-feeling. Geographically incorrect, yes, but after the racial fuzziness of
nignog–chink–coolie
(among other rude names I had heard on the street), it was almost a relief to be tacked to a map.
    During my third month, there was a lice outbreak. This was blamed on the school’s Ethiopian caretaker who, despite immaculate standards of cleanliness, was suddenly accused of slapdash hygiene. Draycott Grammar School was not the only English school experiencing an epidemic of lice that year. In London, it was a virtual Lice Olympics, with athletic pests leaping indiscriminately from