A-levels were a fucking joke. All that effort trying to inhale the information like I’m some sort of impoverished child seeing a good scran for the first time to just regurgitate it out in the exam hall like I got some sort of disorder.

I repeat, it’s a fucking joke. Grades or no grades, kids like me don’t make it out the shoddy council estates we grow up in and I’m tired of fucking acting like otherwise. Seeing that prissy eejit, Shane Rosen shove his head up the teachers arse so high up that it explains his mankey breath is truly pathetic. You’re on free school meals, idiot. They’re not letting you in.

Not oxbridge. Or the schools for the rejects.

I stare at myself through the mirror, the blunt lit in my hand but eyes boring at my own reflection. The scar that ran through my eyebrow, cutting the hair and refusing for any more to grow, twitches. The sterile lights blaring at me until they sunk through my hair and burnt my fucking scalp.

I hated this fucking school. I hated maths, physics and economics. I hated my parents. I hated my brothers. And I hated the fucking religion that kept them from aborting the three of us.

The crucifix might as well burn my chest in its shape, it’d be easier because, at least I wouldn’t have a choice but to wear, I wouldn’t have three false free will to take it off if I wanted and maybe it’d be less of a smack in the fucking face and salt in a bullet wound if there was no possibility of me taking it off. But there is, I could take it off but that’d mean I could break a bone or four.

It’s either be a good hearted, fully fledged Protestant, or eat shit at the hands of dear old dad.

And to be honest, I finally knicked enough shit to make enough money to go to that Playboy Carti concert at the O2 this summer and I don’t wanna show up in a goddamn neck brace.

So praise the baby Jesus it is.

Loud, painfully loud, sirens started flailing across school seems like my blunt finally ticked it off. Rolling my eyes, I kill the blunt, forming a small black ash-coloured notch on the poorly painted, cracked wall before beginning to make my way outside.

Ignoring the panicking staff and students as I walk down, step by step, in the cramped stairway with massive and old, dirty windows.

Then, my throat feels dry—And fucking judge me all you want, I’m not in fucking danger, I know the cause—and I make a b-line, slipping through the first floor doors to outside the deserted library where my locker was situated to get out my lucazade sport.

Then I hear her.