Mrs Smith scuttles into English five minutes late. She is always late to Thursday's lesson since her previous lesson is on the other side of the school.

We are supposed to read through our lesson plan - which she courteously writes on the board for us during break - until she arrives, but the only person that reads it is Peter Chamberlin. He sits at the front of the class with his folders next to him in a neat stack.

"Poetry!" Mrs Smith blurts out as she enters the room. Her face brims with glee as she says the word. "Of course, Shakespeare was a poet of sorts, as I'm sure you'll all know through your excessive studying." There is a hint of sarcasm in her voice. Our literature exam is in less than a month, along with numerous other exams that I must try and study for, despite circumstance.

Mrs Smith sits at her chair by her desk, crossing one leg casually over the other. "Today, we are going to look at two different poems, one of war and one of beauty. It will be your job to find the similarities and differences between the two."

She slides a pile of paper across her desk and, without any need to ask, Peter stands to his feet and takes them. They share a brief smile.

Peter hands out the pieces of paper to everyone in the class. When he reaches me, I try to smile at him the same way Mrs Smith did, but he did not smile back. He looked more confused and out of place.

"The first poem is entitled 'Nothing Gold Can Stay'," Mrs Smith begins as Peter returns to his seat. "If you would all take a minute to read through the poem."

Nature's first green is gold; her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower; but only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief.

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

"Robert Frost is perhaps one of my favourite poets, after Shakespeare of course. In this particular poem, I find his writing style, though old fashioned, to be beautiful in more ways than one." She glares out across the classroom from behind her desk, and continues, "Miss Hall, perhaps you can tell us your opinion of the poem."

"Is it about Autumn?" Becky Hall replies.

"Are you asking or are you telling me?"

"It is about Autumn." I see Becky try and sit taller in her seat. Her mousy brown hair falls down her back and over the back of her chair. "Specifically about the leaves and the sun and how beautiful they are, but also about how one day they will no longer be, well, gold. Like the sun, every day it comes to an end, its golden beauty leaving us because it can't stay."

"Very good," Mrs Smith says and nods as if contemplating the answer. She never tells us whether we get it right or wrong because apparently there is no right answer. However, an examiner might beg to differ.

"Would anyone else like to share their view?" Mrs Smith's eyes cast across the room. I feel her eyes on me without having to look up. "Harry?"

I have never wanted to speak in lesson before. I would usually sink down in my chair and mumble that I don't know, and Mrs Smith would pick her next victim. Yet today I decide that I have nothing left to lose. I say exactly what I think.

"It's right. Nothing gold can stay. It seems are job as human is to rip apart every ounce of beauty we find and turn it into dust. That is what I hear when I read the poem. That everything golden can't stay because if it stuck around for too long, we'd destroy it like we destroy everything else."

Mrs Smith looks vaguely impressed. "You've never been quite so bold with your answers before, Mr Mitchell?"

"I never saw a reason to be before today."

Mrs Smith opens her mouth to speak but is interrupted by the door of the classroom peeping open. Calvin steps into the room, an apologetic look painted innocently across his face, but as I see Hope sneak into her classroom across the hall, I know it's anything but.

"Sorry I'm late," Calvin says, taking his place at his desk beside Peter.

"Since it is only a one-time occurrence, I'll let it slide this once, Mr Jefferson. However, it seems as if we are all out of photocopies of the poems. I will go and print one for you now. And while I'm gone, I'd like you to read through the poems and make a few notes on what you think they're about." Mrs Smith heads towards the door of the classroom. "I'll be back in two minutes."

As soon as she was out of sight, I braced myself for some form of torment from the students, my previous answer probably worthy of at least of bit of name calling. Yet, nobody speaks to me. It feels strange not to be the target of the classroom.

Instead, Donavon and Jessie, the usual bullies that sit behind me, start to taunt the ginger girl who sits beside them.

"Ugly, fat and ginger, urgh," Donavon whispers and through the corner of my eye I see the girl look away, her hands starting to shake slightly as she writes something down next to her poems.

I used to do the same thing – pretend to be busy doing something else so it looks as if you are not really bothered by the bombardment.

"Pig!" Jessie laughs and the girl sighs almost as if she is tired of the same repetitive insults. I can see unshed tears in her eyes and unsaid words on her lips that she's either too shy or too polite to say back.

Last year, I would have sat here quietly in fear of being picked on myself, but I have been in her position and the only thing that stopped me from receiving the never-ending torment was when Johnny stood up for me. I might not have been as threatening or as endearing as Johnny, but I currently have the sympathy vote and I figure it might work just as well.

"How about you leave her alone? Or do you enjoy bullying vulnerable girls?" I say, turning around to see the shocked looks on their faces and those around them.

"Excuse me?" Donavon blurts out through braced teeth, his breath almost as vile as him. Jessie places her hand on his shoulder to calm him and mutters something in his ear. The only word I make out is 'Johnny' - as if I am tuned into his name. They both return to their work quietly.

I glance down back at the poem in front of me and try to focus on it, but I can't. I can still see the ginger girl in the corner of my eye, her eyes sadder than any I have ever seen before. Just because people stop saying the names, it does not mean the memories of it leaves. It does not mean the pain subsides.

The fact is that we write poems about artificial things like autumn leaves and the sunset, and we call it beautiful and make it into something more than what it is. Yet, a girl with hair as fiery as the sun and freckles on her face like constellations across her cheeks, we do not choose to see that as beautiful. That is one thing I will never understand about human nature: the common disregard of the beauty that is placed directly in front of our eyes.

The door clicks open and shut as Mrs Smith arrives, handing Calvin his copy of the poems. He thanks her and Mrs Smith asks a few more people for their opinions of the poem. Everybody says the same thing, phrasing it differently to make it sound as though they came up with it themselves.

"The next poem we are going to look at is about war," Mrs Smith says eventually. "It's on the flip side of the paper."

I turn over the page, a joint rustling of paper from everyone else in the room. It is a longer poem this time, so Mrs Smith tells us to read it through ourselves and write notes as we go.

'The Man He Killed' by Thomas Hardy

Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

I shot him dead because--
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although

He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like--just as I--
Was out of work--had sold his traps--
No other reason why.

Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat, if met where any bar is,
Or help to half a crown.

There is no reading between the lines with this poem. It is about a soldier in the war who comes face to face with another soldier who he must shoot, though he questions his motives.

Under any other circumstances they could be friends, he could buy him a drink or lend him some money, and yet both their fates have taken them there because they were out of work, and now he must shoot him just because they are wearing different uniforms.

The poem reminds me a lot of high school in this sense. If perhaps I had met any of the students, even Holland, in a different place, like a bar on a night out or at a mutual friend's wedding, then maybe we could have been friends.

But high school is a battlefield and as soon as we see someone who wears something different to us, we fire.

+++

When I leave the classroom, I spy the ginger girl in the corridor. She is with one of her few friends I had seen her with around school – a girl with a large nose and thick thighs.

"I'll see you later, Jenna," says her friend as she waltzes into a classroom ready for next period. Jenna smiles at her briefly, pushes a few loose tendrils of her thick red hair behind her ear and heads back down the corridor towards me.

I do not think. I just take hold of her arm as she passes me and seize her in her movement.

"Those idiots in there, ignore them," I say and gesture towards where Donavon and Jessie were sat in the classroom, a new group of students in their place. "I think you're beautiful just the way you are."

The words seem to take her by surprise, and I can see the contemplation in her expression as she tosses the words around in her mind. She snatches her arm away from me.

"Thanks for what you did today," she mutters, "But you don't have to lie to make me feel better. I can handle a few bullies."

I should not be surprised at her words and yet I am. She thinks I am lying to her. She thinks that I do not consider her beautiful, and it makes me wonder if she thinks anyone could ever believe her to be.

I imagine her in ten years, with a partner and a family that think she is nothing short of the most beautiful woman in the world, and still, she won't believe it.

"I mean it," I state, but there is still no assent within those eyes.

Fat. Ugly. Ginger. Words that will sit with her forever.

"I mean it," I repeat, with more conviction. "Those people in there only pick on you because you're a different kind of beautiful and they're too bone idle to embrace it."

"Thanks," she adds with a slightly smile and her emerald eyes light up.

"You look prettier when you smile too. You should do it more often." Her smile widens and she turns around to walk away down the corridor, a new-found bounce in her step, but I wonder how long it will last.

In my previous school, I was called every name under the sun. I let each word eat away at me, and I thought about them so often, I forgot other words, and they became the only vocabulary I had left to describe myself.

Scrawny. Boney. Taunt.

When I started my new school my mother told me that I needed to ignore the name calling, and to simply walk away. But in High School we are all bound by sticksand stones.

We cannot walk because they have broken our bones.