By the time I reached intermediate, I already knew I was different.

Being adopted had always sat quietly in the background of my life, like something everyone could see but no one talked about. I knew I was Māori, but I didn’t know how to hold that knowledge. It felt safer not to mention it. Beneath everything else was the unresolved weight of what had happened when I was younger — something that had settled into me without language and shaped how I moved through the world.

I started intermediate with two friends from primary school, including a neighbour I’d known since early childhood. Familiar faces helped, but they didn’t change much. I was small, shy, easily influenced, constantly adjusting myself to fit whatever space I was in.

School became harder. I drifted through lessons, present in body but often elsewhere. I’d been prescribed glasses years earlier, but I refused to wear them. I didn’t want another reason to be noticed. The board was a blur. Words swam. I copied what I could, guessed the rest.

I didn’t like how I looked. I avoided mirrors. My hair was big and unmanaged because I never brushed it. My lips drew comments I didn’t know how to respond to. My uniform was second-hand and faded, marked by an old paint stain that never came out. I felt like the poor kid, the small kid, the one who didn’t fit. In practical classes, my hands didn’t seem to work the way everyone else’s did. Laughter followed. I shrank.

That was when another boy entered my life.

He was confident, restless, drawn to trouble. My neighbour and I followed him easily. With him, I tried my first cigarette. I drank beer from a can. I shoplifted once and froze with fear. I kept going back because being included felt better than being alone.

One morning before class, we went into an abandoned building beside the local dairy. It had been empty for years. No one had secured it. The door hung loose on its hinges.

The sun was already up, the air cool, school bags heavy on our shoulders. Delivery crates were stacked behind the dairy, the sour smell of old milk and concrete drifting through the space. It didn’t feel hidden — just forgotten.

Inside, the floor was dusty, littered with broken glass and rubbish. The walls were tagged. We weren’t meant to be there, but nothing stopped us.

Trying, again, to prove myself, I flicked a lighter.

The flame caught faster than I expected. Heat flared. Smoke climbed. For a moment, everything froze.

Then shouting.

The dairy owner came running out, yelling. We scattered without thinking, splitting apart in different directions.

By the time I reached school, the bell hadn’t rung yet.

From the staffroom window, an adult was already watching us.

Arms folded. Face unreadable.

They didn’t come out. They didn’t call out. They just watched.

Later, bags were searched. Items appeared in mine that hadn’t started there. I said nothing.

Not long after that, something worse happened.

Late one afternoon — around four-thirty — we found a massive wooden cable wheel on school grounds. I don’t remember now whether it was a school day or part of the holidays. We hadn’t been there long, maybe forty-five minutes.

The wheel was enormous, taller than we were, its wooden spokes rough with age. It took all three of us to move it.

We pushed it up the hill.

The slope wasn’t steep, but it stretched longer than it looked. Shoes slipped. Breath burned. Houses sat on small rises overlooking the school, their windows facing down toward us. I didn’t think about that then.

At the top, we let go.

The wheel gathered speed and slammed into the side of a classroom with a deep, hollow bang that echoed across the grounds.

For a moment, no one spoke.

Then sirens.

They arrived within minutes — too quickly to feel accidental. Vehicles pulling in. Doors opening. Voices.

Only later did it occur to me that we’d been visible the entire time.

We ran.

I bolted down one of the outside classroom alleyways, narrow and concrete.

At the end of it, the police were already there.

I stopped.

The others didn’t. One disappeared. Another may have been caught — I never really knew. If he was, nothing seemed to come of it.

I didn’t give any names.

For two months, my Saturdays were spent cleaning classrooms — empty rooms, rubbish, walls — long after everyone else had gone home.

By then, something in me was thinning. Learning felt further away. Days slipped past. I moved through school half-present, doing just enough to get by.

Near the end of intermediate, something else found me.

Music — the kind that made your body move.

I crossed paths with a boy who was already into breakdancing and bopping. He had his own friend, someone he’d been dancing with longer, but we started practising together anyway — copying moves, rewinding tapes, trying to get our bodies to do things they didn’t yet understand.

He recorded music straight onto cassette tapes from the American Top 40. That’s what everyone did then — finger hovering over the record button, waiting for the DJ to stop talking. The tapes filled up with whatever came through: Chaka Khan, Irene Cara, the Pointer Sisters, New Edition, Herbie Hancock. They got shared, replayed, worn thin.

Other kids were into it too. We practised together. Shared steps. Laughed when we got it wrong.

We even performed at a school assembly — nothing elaborate, just confidence and timing holding it together — but standing there, moving in sync, I felt something unfamiliar: focus. Belonging that didn’t require pretending.

At the time, it was just dancing.

Later, music would stay with me, deepen, become something steadier. But back then it was simply a doorway.

When the boy who had pulled us into trouble moved away, I felt lighter. I thought things might finally settle.

They didn’t.

College was waiting.