The Grass Was Always Meaner

The sod was still damp when I pressed it to the wall behind his desk.

Not the floor. That would’ve been too ordinary—too expected. A prank. A protest. A gesture that could be explained away.
But I wasn’t looking for legibility. I was looking for somewhere to put the ache.

So I started building a wall of turf.
Behind his desk. In his sanctum.

Mr. Sunderland—Roker to us, after the football ground—ran the sixth form like a tight ship and kept his office like a museum.
Nothing out of place. Not a paperclip astray.
It was the kind of room that dared you to fall apart in it.
So I did. Very quietly. With mud.

I’ve already written about the first rupture in Never Spoken Twice—the school’s refusal to acknowledge my mother’s death, the mock exams they made me sit through, and the moment Mr. Sutherland, visibly uncomfortable, chose silence over apology—and let me be lumped in with the usual suspects.
That piece carried the rage.
This one picks up what was left—quieter, stranger.
Not exactly retaliation.
But not nothing.

The turf had arrived unannounced.
A mound of thick sod, 18-inch squares stacked like loam-bricks just outside the sixth form block.
Something to do with landscaping, probably.
Or maybe another beautification project for the narrowboat—eighty tons of steel parked for years outside our window, a monument to ambition that didn’t include us.

We didn’t get a common room.
We got oxidizing steel.

There was no real plan. Just a tug. A ridiculous, persistent impulse.
So one day—I think it was after school, though that memory’s grown soft at the edges—I started moving sod.
One or two slabs at a time, up two flights of stairs.
Past peeling posters.
Past the door no one ever closed softly.

It was slower work than I expected.
The turf was thick, wet, strangely warm in the middle.
The first row went up fine.
The second started to sag.
By the third, gravity was staging a coup.
I compromised: a half-wall. A feature. Something between a cry and a joke.
A verdant insult.

Then I pushed the desk back into place and stood there.

It should have felt good.
It didn’t.
It felt like laughing too hard at a joke no one else heard—then realizing it was about you.

Shame arrived slower than rage.
I stood for longer than I meant to, looking at what I’d done, and felt the kind of regret that doesn’t ask to be forgiven.
I thought about undoing it. About reclaiming the pieces before they dried out or got discovered.
But I didn’t.
I slipped down the stairs like a thief who isn’t sure what they’ve stolen.

The next morning, I heard whispers.
“Vandalism.”
“Disrespect.”
“What kind of person would do that?”

I kept my head down.
Said nothing.

Maybe it was a prank.
Maybe it was grief.
Maybe just a seventeen-year-old trying to grow something alive in a place where the only thing that ever grew was rust.
And even now, part of me still waits to be found out.

The turf was gone by Monday.
The boat stayed for years.

They gave us a boat.
I gave them a wall.
I don’t know which held more weight.