during that same school trip on the evening of our arrival at the sort of small hotel or whatever which our school were staying in a small group of us walked away from the hotel a few hundred metres and looked into the forest there and said a few things but then we just walked back. i was so nervous and socially invisible. i was the shy, nice, socially underdeveloped kid who tagged along and never said much. it was all i could muster and as time went on i watched with a mixture of sadness and envy as people my age were developing into confident, experience young men and women. on the same school trip i remember my friend had last pick of the beds and had to sleep on one which was adjacent to the patio window in our small room. it was quite sad because when people were running around in and out of the rooms his bed ended up being really messy and i think there were muddy footprints on his bed also. i felt bad for him. we played basketball in a sports hall near the hotel (or hostel, i'm not sure what it was really) and i remember this young female teacher who must have been no older than twenty-seven playing with us and really joining in and being fun and at one point i carried someone in my class on my back so they could score a point and another time i put the ball under my shirt and tried to run around people. later that evening or the next day she was discussion the basketball game with others and she mentioned what i had done and it felt nice for her to show me attention and seem to like me. one night i remember people were saying that some of the more mature and popular people from my year were sitting with the teachers in a lounge or whatever and i couldn't imagine myself doing that.
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