Seeing it coming

Sasha Yates is/was a middle-aged British man. I believe I went to school with the pyrsyn; it was then an all-boys' school, mostly for boarders. The spelling "Yates" rather than, oh, "Yeats" is a tip-off. So clearly David did not "identify" as female then.

I am aiming for the side of caution when I speak of our past, but will note here - for now - that we were in the process of more-or-less becoming friends, at first. This was the "third form" which Americans call the eighth grade. Yates and I were in the lower-level classes, where the bulk of the student-body had Latin and French; I approached this school with no Latin and with one year of French. Kids gotta hang together or they hang separately.

At some point the Yates I knew approached me to become Friends. I could hear the Capital-F in his emphasis. I associated "Friends" with some harassing phone-calls I'd received, at my parents' home, in earlier years. My initial reaction was that here was coming more harassment my-a-way. I figured that, whatever was going on in Yates' head, I didn't need that head anywhere near my person. So I distanced myself from him. Later I heard about some older - like 17 years old - boy who had been Asked To Leave for being perverted, named "Clements", or so I spelled it in my own head. Other boys in our mutual acquaintance rumoured that Clements' victim, and I hold fair to assume that he was a victim, was Yates.

Anyway Yates was already a misfit, and unlike my head Yates' head wasn't getting any smarter, so he left whilst I stayed.

I've hinted above that, when I came to this school, I did not come without some baggage. I hold fair to assume that Yates had come with some baggage as well. How we handle this baggage, would seem key. Sometimes I made poor choices, sometimes I didn't have choices; later I worked to make better choices, but I cannot say that I have lived my best possible life. I suspect that I have made better choices, overall, than Yates has made.