Brainfreeze

The world was one enormous baked Alaska. Steam billowed up from every sun-dappled melting snowdrift which shrunk away to reveal the goo underneath. A sodden jam oozed out of the slush. Decomposing leaves and spongy branches and gallons and gallons of chocolatey mud. Sam watched all of this through the fogged-up classroom window like a chef checking his masterpiece through the glass of the oven. The teacher's voice droned on and on and the hot air from the heater blew into the bend of his knees, having the effect of heating his chair and lulling him into a delicious doze. The plastic sagged subtly beneath him as it heated. His classmates were similarly sedated, yawning and propping their heads up from their desks with balled fists. He managed to rouse himself enough the glance up at the radio-controlled clock which had been moved to the teacher's desk - a stark reminder of the tests they'd sat through all that morning. Five past three. T-Minus ten minutes and counting. Mr Roberts took his look upwards to be a sign of interest. 

"What do you think the pattern could be, Sam?"

"Um.. I'm still trying to get my head around it, sir," barked Sam with a jolt.

Mr Robert's attention went elsewhere as he continued his search for his elusive pattern.

"Nice save," murmured Eli through his fingers which splayed across his face, pushing his features into a sort of pudding. "Better get thinking of an answer though. He's not forgotten you."

Sam shuffled his backside around on the slowly melting chair as if the small exertion would push away the tendrils of sleep that were gripping him. He jabbed Eli sharply with his elbow. He checked that Mr Roberts was fauning over a student in the front row before turning back to the window. The blessed chill of the pane was calling to him. He leant towards it, his breath thickening the fog on the glass. Closer and closer he leant, the cold wicking away his sleepiness until... He slowly closed his eyes. Touchdown. His forehead smeared across the icy expanse. A pointed elbow shot into the squishy part beneath his bottom rib.

"What the hell are you doing?", said Eli in an acidic whisper.

"It's cool...". He opened his eyes slowly, face still planted on the glass. "Hey I can see the bikes. The snow's gone from in front of the shed."

"Hold on just a little longer," Eli reassured him. "Five more minutes and we can get 'em."

"I don't know if I can last that long," moaned Sam, almost subliminally sliding down the glass and resting his chin on the windowsill. The cold on his face was starting to become uncomfortable now but the alternative was to answer Maths questions. He focused his eyes and stared down the road that snaked around the school grounds, past a row of squat terraced houses and away into the rising mist. He could see patches of pavement emerging from the snow as it dribbled into the gutters. A torrent of meltwater raced homeward - a bit of foreshadowing for what he and Eli had in mind.

"He's getting ready to hand out homework," his friend warned him. "The stack looks pretty thick this time".

Sam could only murmur, spit pooling behind in his lower lip as the chill penetrated his skull.

"You alright?", Eli asked under his breath, now concerned. He grabbed sam's shoulders and pulled him away from the glass but it was too late. The cold had done him.

"Brrrrainfreeze!" droned Sam, louder than was probably advisable considering the circumstances. Eli tried to hush him and then to turn away and stroke his chin as if interested in Mr Roberts' homework tips.

"Eli," the teacher barked, his spectacles two opaque moons in the warm glow of the strip lighting. His mouth was a ruled line. "Do you want to tell me why Sam is dribbling all over my textbook?"

"He's... what?" said Eli flatly. "Oh... I think he's just tired sir".

With his trademark sarcasm Mr Roberts didn't waste a second. "He's not the only one... Perhaps Sam would rather go through this homework with me after school? After all, I'd hate for him to spend the holiday not knowing how to solve quadratic equations. And what would I do without the pleasure of marking his paper in a couple of weeks?"

Sam blinked the pain out from behind his eyes and slurped up the bungee of saliva with the sound of ripping personal records. He became dimly aware of the teacher's tone, Eli's uncomfortable shuffling and more than one raised eyebrow. A girl two rows in front of them stifled a snort of laughter from behind her bundled-up textbooks. He opened his mouth to speak. The bell rang and everyone forgot about school.

In a flurry of papers and yelling and slamming lockers the school body erupted like a volcano and cascaded out of the doors, fire exits and open windows. The bubbling rush of students was suddenly alive with furious excitement. All residual sleepiness forgotten like animals awoken suddenly from hibernation. Within ten minutes the school grounds were a deserted sludge-bowl, upturned tables, chairs and school books sticking out of the compacted sludge like flotsam. Sam and Eli emerged bleary-eyed from the reception doors like the lone survivors after some environmental catastrophe.

"The first moments of the half term break," said Eli doing his best news reporter impression, "look more like the last days of Rome. At least they didn't clear off with the bikes." Stretching and blinking into the sunlight, the two boys approached the bike shed with excited trepidation. They'd been there all winter and if the cold and the moisture hadn't rusted them to hell, the beating they got every day from the Year 7s who hung around here had probably buckled them as they sheltered from the rain, hormones raging like fireworks. A blob of pure snow tumbled from the slope of the shed roof, breaking apart on Sam's shoulder with a powdery hiss. It really was melting fast. Eli grabbed for the handlebars of the nearest bike, a red mountain bike with chunky tires and a silver metallic trim around the frame, and bounced it hard in its wheel locks. "Bagsy Old Red, the tires still have air in". 

Sam had to smile and make do with Blue, whose thin racing tires hung slightly limp around the wheels. At least she had the lighter frame. If Eli's tires turned out to have a slow puncture, and they probably would given Old Red hadn't been ridden for four months, then he'd be the one with the red face. The boys lugged the bikes off their wheel locks and climbed onto the damp saddles in unison. Sam caught Eli's eye, a signal. "Well, been good knowing you," he said in response. "Don't let the gate hit you on your way through after me."

"You want to bet on that?" sniped Sam. "I win, you do all the homework for both of us."

"It's a deal!" Eli pushed down on the pedal, his other foot still planted on the ground the steady the weight of the red beast beneath him. The back wheel skidded slightly on the sludge as if eager.

"Hold on, shake on it!" Insisted Sam and held out an oily hand.

Sam enthusiastically slapped his hand into Sam's. "Deal... oh"

Sam wrenched his hand towards himself and with a grin he stood up on the pedals, powering down through them like a mighty snow plow, catapulting great globs of slush into Eli's face as he tried to right himself. Sam was flying over the snow already, barely leaving more than a ski-track behind him as he zipped towards the school gate and the open road beyond. Eli didn't waste time cursing. He hopped Old Red upright, face already reddening as the snow brought blood to the surface, and began to pedal hard. With each squeeze the bike protested under him, fat tires wobbling across every divot and pool. He kept his eyes fixed on the back of Sam's neck, even as the bike dipped and trembled. Eli was beginning to pick up speed. He knew that Old Red was heavier, chunkier and slower to get up to speed but that once she got flying there was nothing of this earth that could stop her.

The boys whipped out of the school gate, blue and then red, flinging up white waves as they rounded the corner by the terraced houses. Curious faces wrapped in net curtains gathered in the windows, reluctant spectators to the half-term winter-olympic mountain bike trials. From above, it would have looked like a curious version of scalextric, red and blue running frictionlessly on their tracks through a quaint model village. As Sam weaved in and out of the parked cars that lined the road beside the corner shop he felt a rising, breathless excitement in his chest. He was sure Eli, in second place as he was, could feel it too. It was red hot, filling every inhale with a joy. He couldn't suppress it. It showed on his face as a widening, tooth-filled grin. He was cresting the long hill down to the bus stop now. Would it be clear? Yes it was! The wheels powering themselves now in some kind of possession, he lifted his hands from the handlebars with an ecstatic squeal. School forgotten. His whole boring life forgotten. Until the bike flipped from under him with barely a crunch, the front wheel rising over his head. He didn't have time to scream before his mouth was gagged with snow.

It was a few moments before the pain in his shoulder struck him. Sam lay dumb in the snow, shivering slightly like a jelly in its mould. The squeal of Eli's breaks announced his arrival and he overshot his fallen friend by a few metres, coursing by in a sideways drift before chucking Old Red down and scrambling back up the hill, ruddy-faced and panting. "Mate... woah, you really stacked it!"

Reluctantly accepting help, Sam rose to his knees, still trembling and spitting out mouthfuls of hard-pack. The pain in his shoulder was sharp and throbbing but aside from that, the snow seemed to have cushioned him pretty well. He knelt inside the smudged snow-angel he had imprinted and turned his head painfully to look at what had caused him to crash. Eli was laughing now. "Get back on your bike mate. I've got a race to win." 

From the angle he was kneeling at and the vertiginous slope of the hill, Sam could only see a small tuft of snow sticking up, pushed up like a miniature mountain from whatever had struck his tire. He struggled to one knee and then the other, feet sliding this way and that as he peered over the mound. Peeping up from behind the snow was a baggy, black circle. A tyre. He looked back at the frame of Blue, upturned and partially buried, the empty frame of the bike sticking up at him like a middle finger. His tyre.

A few moments passed. He looked at Eli, preparing to shrug his shoulders and catch his breath with a chuckle. His hand stuffed deep into the pocket of his sodden jeans, Eli was grinning. It grew from one ear to the other like a banana. An infuriating, shit-eating, grin that threatened to burst his flushed face at the seams. Like a magician revealing his secret, he held a glimmering wheel nut. It caught the light like the cartoon shine on a shark's tooth. The laugh that was building in Sam's chest dived back down to his stomach with a sickening lurch. He clawed Eli's coat shoulders with tightening, throbbing fists. All Eli could enunciate was a gutteral sound of confusion. The grin was still plastered on his face like an imprint on a grimy window. In the moment, all Sam wanted to do was break that window.

He pulled back a knee, still holding a trembling, piercing grip on Eli's shoulders and shot it up between Eli's legs. The boy, face still screwed into a rictus somewhere between pleasure and pain, hung as if suspended for a second before his muscles let go and he flopped into the snow with a delicate crunch. Or he would have done, had Sam not still been clinging to his coat with a death-grip. Eli's knees trailed limply in the drift as Sam wound up his knee again. This time it plowed straight into the boy's stomach. Eli let out a low gasp, a blob of spit sizzling on the snow. If the two boys had been capable of even the slightest awareness of their surroundings, they would have noticed the steady chug of a two-stroke engine. It echoed from the brick-fronted faces of the surrounding terraces as the pistons hammered and choked. They would have turned to see the mint-green car lurching over the crest of the hill above, wheels hidden in the snow. They would have felt the rough grip of a middle-aged man's hands on the backs of their jackets, pulling them apart like a single child would pull a Christmas cracker. They did hear his booming voice. It immobilised them like flies stuck on fly paper.

Mr Roberts' car smelled like a pine forest in mid-demolition. The heaters wheezed out a breath of air barely warmer than that of outside and the little tree dangling from the crooked interior mirror swung wildly as the car rattled back up the hill towards the school. The boys sat on their hands in the back seat, knees pressed up to their faces, the footwells jammed with the twisted remains of Old Red and Blue. Faces still red, the boys did anything but look at each other. Sam's forehead rested on the triangular window, Eli's on the opposite. Mr Roberts didn't take his calm eyes from the road as he pulled into the school driveway. "It's really no skin off my nose," he droned. "The caretakers are in over the break anyway and we have the insurance.” Sam's eyes drifted over the the bike shelter as they pulled slowly into the car park. Two lanky year sevens snubbed out their cigarettes on the frosted glass and pretended to rummage through their bags. Mr Roberts pretended he hadn’t seen anything. “It’ll do you good to help out. You'll have plenty of time to put your differences behind you.”