A to Z of You and Me by James Hannah Page B

Ease.

D
    Diaphragm
    â€œRight, well, if you’re going to persist in showing the capabilities of juniors, I’d better treat you like juniors. Who can spell diaphragm for me?”
    Mr. Miller stands at the front of the class in his weird blue blazer with its six gold buttons and those ever-present musty trousers.
    â€œWhat sort of blazer’s that?” mutters Mal to me and Kelvin. “It’s like it’s from the nineteenth century or something. Who does he think he is? King Dickface the Turd?”
    Kelvin and I crease up laughing. Dickface the Turd.
    â€œKelvin!” says Miller. “Well done. You’ve just volunteered to spell it out on the board. Come up here.”
    Kelvin reluctantly leaves his lab stool with a wooden creak and shuffles up to the front.
    I look at Mal and do an eye roll. “What is it about Kelvin that makes him Miller’s whipping boy?”
    â€œOK,” says Miller, handing him the chalk. “Off you go. Oh, and I forgot to mention. Anyone who gets it wrong gets a detention.”
    A prickle of suppressed outrage crosses the class.
    â€œKelvin?”
    Already resigned to his fate, Kelvin fumbles the chalk, drops it, picks it up, and then tries to hold it like a pencil.
    D .
    Miller places the eraser on the board next to Kelvin’s tremulous and malformed letter D . Kelvin looks up at him, questioningly. “Carry on,” says Miller. “It’s going very well so far.”
    Chuckles from around the room.
    I .
    â€œExcellent!” Miller cries sarcastically.
    A . Kelvin pauses, and Miller’s head shifts fractionally, sensing the kill.
    R .
    â€œNope!” Miller whips the board eraser across Kelvin’s efforts, knocking his hand away and flicking the chalk across the room into a table of girls.
    â€œDetention for Kelvin, and the chalk’s landed with you. Up you come.” He points a knobby finger at one of the girls. She gathers up the chalk and tries to brush its mark off her sweater, before replacing Kelvin beside Miller.
    Kelvin dumps himself back on his stool beside me.
    D , she writes.
    â€œGood—”
    Y .
    Miller pauses awhile before mugging around to the rest of the class. Then he wipes her away and picks the chalk up himself.
    â€œ D , I , A , PEEEEE , H , R , A , GEEEEE , M . Anyone who gets that wrong after I’ve spelled it out so plainly will deserve the detention they get, OK?”
    Spirits broken, we mumble our assent.
    â€œRight, now, as you’ll hopefully remember from last year, the diaphragm is a membrane, just here in your chest, and when you breathe, you are using your muscles to pull on that diaphragm, and in pulling, it draws the air in through your nose and throat and into your lungs , which enables you to breathe .” Miller scrawls breathe tetchily out onto the blackboard and underlines the final e about eight times. “Now, that is exactly what you can’t do…” He picks up the large book that has been sitting on the bench in front of him all this while. “Can’t do…” He struggles to find the page, and an adventurous few begin to giggle. “If your lungs look like this .”
    He cracks the book open at a double page that is completely taken up with a photo of a pair of lungs, branched through with black, like burned cheese on toast.
    One of the girls pipes up: “Ah, sir, that’s nasty.”
    â€œAnd that,” concludes Miller with a self-satisfied flourish, “is exactly what is currently growing inside one of you.”
    A sudden hush. He paces the room, bearing the chalk eraser before him, in his usual manner of dramatic pause, loving it. Loving it.
    But what can he mean? What can he mean?
    â€œThe only question is, which one of you currently has this growing inside them?”
    From the left three-quarter pocket of his big blue blazer, he teases out a pack of cigarettes and wields it between thumb and index finger in