It didn’t help that Connor had been drinking the night before, probably not the best idea he had ever had before the first day of school. A new school, a chance to make a new impression, a chance to wipe the slate clean and become someone else entirely. Could a person reinvent themselves at sixteen? He had no intentions of being the same Connor he was last year, or even last month. Moving to England would be his new beginning; as much as he hadn’t wanted to be here, he had to try. He would stop listening to that voice in his head that made him believe that he would fail so why bother, that everything he touched turned to crap. His father’s voice. This time he was determined to be different.
School uniform was a new feeling – a cheap polyester blazer and the alien sensation of a tie around his neck. The emblem on the school badge was some kind of bird, like a heron or something, silver and gold. His tie was black with a red stripe through it; he noticed other people with different stripes on theirs, house colours he expected. It was a relief not to have to wear his own clothes – new clothing was way down on the list of Jacob’s priorities and Connor wasn’t exactly overly consumed by labels himself. Nice not to have to think about how much they didn’t have for a change.
He was inside the building now, and he felt claustrophobic already. The size of the school was significantly smaller than the school he had left in America. He tried to make a note of all the exits and remember the layout of the building. He had already been seen by admissions and had some forms to fill out, which he did dutifully. Nowhere to hide. He noticed a few kids looking up from under their fringes, but mostly everyone just got on with it. As they disappeared into their classrooms, he observed that there didn’t seem to be the same cliques and divides as there were in his high school back home. Maybe it could be different this time.
He walked through the empty halls until he found the room he was looking for and headed in. The kids were all getting settled into place, pulling their mathematics books out and whispering. There was one seat left at the front left-hand side of the class, so he pulled the plastic chair out and slumped into it. Connor could tell he’d caught some people’s attention in the way fresh blood always did.
‘I hope you have all finished your half-term assignments because there will be no extensions granted.’ Mr Cross walked into the classroom and perched himself on the edge of his desk. He looked over the class, his eyes settling on Connor.
‘I’m new here, just started today,’ Connor said, aware of how alien his Californian accent sounded, noticing the stir it caused.
‘Ah, yes. Welcome, Mr Lee.’ Mr Cross stood up and wrote Connor’s name on the white board. ‘Class, we have a newcomer – this is Connor Lee, who will be with us for the rest of the year. Let’s all give him a warm welcome.’
The class started to clap. Connor heard whistling from the back and wished he could leave. He turned to look at his classmates and gave a small wave. There was a girl sat diagonally across from him, and already he could see she had that look in her eyes, a familiar look of lust directed straight towards him. Her hair was a silky white blonde pulled up into a bump at the front with a long sheet of dead straight hair beneath. She smiled and looked down, pretending to be coy, but Connor knew her, or at least he knew girls like her. Escaping his past wasn’t going to be that easy if he kept falling in with the same types of people wherever he went.
He turned his attention back to the front and tried to concentrate on the class. Everything about it was different to back home; the tables were arranged in a horseshoe with a block of tables in the centre, unlike the individual desks facing the front that he’d had back in the US. Connor watched as the kids continually ignored the teacher, huddling together in whispers while he spoke. Mr Cross didn’t seem to care much either way, he just got on with the lesson. There was a general air of going through the motions, a let’s-get-through-this-together type of camaraderie. Mr Cross ran through his well-rehearsed lesson plan and then instructed the class to work from their textbooks until the bell rang. Occasionally, Connor heard the row of girls behind him giggling and got the feeling he was the source of their amusement.
After the class had finished and people began to file out of the classroom for break, Connor looked to see where all the smokers were going. He really wanted to go for a cigarette and he knew that there must be somewhere – there was always somewhere.
‘Hey, Connor.’ The blonde girl came bounding towards him, her skirt folded up at the waist to make it shorter, the short fat stump of her tie resting on her breasts. She was reminiscent of the cheerleaders in his form back home.
‘Hi.’ He kept it short.
‘I was in your maths class just now, I sat across from you.’
‘Oh right, hi. Sorry, my memory isn’t so great,’ he lied.
‘I’m Pippa.’ She held out her hand for him to shake; he took it reluctantly, but she seemed even more reluctant to let it go. ‘So where do you come from? I haven’t seen you around here before … plus, you know … the accent thing.’
‘You know everyone in town?’
‘Everyone worth knowing,’ she said, blinking slowly with a tiny smile at the corner of her lips.
‘Maybe I’m not worth knowing then,’ he said.
Connor pulled out the top of the packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. Desperate for a smoke, he looked at Pippa with one eyebrow raised in a question. She smiled and grabbed his arm, pulling him outside and down the corridor towards a large grey building at the side of the school field, beside a row of hedges. It looked older than any building in his home town in California.
‘Behind here.’ She pushed the hedge to the side and slipped in. He followed her to find a couple of other kids hiding behind there smoking too; it was completely obscured from the view of the school windows. Pippa held on to his arm, keeping him to herself.
He took a cigarette out and lit it before handing it to Pippa. She took a drag, then handed it back to him, her eyes just peeping out from under her eyelashes. She was making sure he knew she was interested; it couldn’t have been much more obvious.
‘What is this place?’ he asked.
‘It used to be a church or something, like a little chapel, back when this was a religious school. But it stopped being one, like, a hundred years ago and so now it’s used for all the sports equipment, the big stuff, for like, sports day.’
‘It’s cool.’ He ran his hand along the brickwork. Some of the pointing crumbled and fell away beneath his fingertips.
‘Are you doing anything Friday night?’ she asked him, taking the cigarette from his hand again and dragging on it before handing it back.
‘Yeah, I’m going skydiving,’ he said with a cheeky smile, unsure why he was flirting. He didn’t need to.
She cocked her head to the side, knowing full well that he was talking crap.
‘A bunch of us are going to hang out, you can come if you want?’
‘Um … sure. I can skydive anytime.’
Pippa skipped triumphantly backwards and out through the hedge, calling over her shoulder, ‘Cool, meet us by the back gate after school on Friday.’
She disappeared and he finished his cigarette, thinking. Maybe things would be better here. Maybe he could make friends after all.
Connor managed to escape the first day of school unscathed. He was already popular, even before trying out for the rugby team. He liked doing after-school sports – it was a legitimate