1 Chapter 1
“Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself, Anton.”
Anton wanted to say, “Are you kidding me?”
The entire class stared back blandly. There must have been thirty-five of them, all lounging professionally. A red-haired boy by the window was chewing gum and staring right at him. A girl with long brown curls was texting, the phone just lying on the desk in the open like she didn’t give a damn. A couple of Asian boys in the back row were playing paper football.
“Um,” Anton said, glancing at the teacher. “I’d rather not.”
The class sniggered, the noise rippling like wind through long grass.
The teacher sighed and rapped her knuckles on the desk. “Quiet!” She was short, with black hair in a tight pixie cut, and blue earrings that swung every time she moved. “Well, Anton, you won’t have much of a choice soon. None of you will!” she added loudly when the class sniggered again. “This term’s PSHE project will hopefully get some of you to buck up your ideas about respecting your fellow classmates—”
“Respect Kalinowski? Not likely, Miss!” a scrawny boy with a face like a rat shouted from the back. The boy by the window with the red hair casually turned around and threw a book at him. “Oi! Polack!”
“Detention, Walsh!” the teacher barked. She jabbed a finger at the redhead. “And not a word, Kalinowski!”
Quiet settled again, but an uneasy sort of one. Anton guessed that Miss Name-He-Couldn’t-Remember didn’t have awesome classroom control.
“Right, well, for now—class, this is Anton Williams. I want you all to make him feel welcome—and no throwing books at him, Kalinowski!”
“What about paper?”
“No throwing anything!”
Kalinowski pulled a face; Walsh disregarded the order and threw the book back, hitting Kalinowski in the back of the head.
“Walsh!”
“He started it!”
“Kalinowski would start a war if it amused him, I expect you to be grown up enough to ignore him!” she snapped.
Anton shifted on his feet uncertainly, unsure if he was supposed to stay where he was or sit down somewhere. A girl at a nearby table shifted her bag off the spare seat and beckoned. “Come on,” she whispered, and he slid into it gratefully. “I’m Emma,” she added in a low voice. “Was it Anthony?”
“Anton.”
“Oops, sorry,” she said, and smiled. She was very pretty: huge, round eyes that were either black or brown, a chubby face with sweet dimples when she smiled, and long, dark brown hair that curled lightly at the ends. “Don’t worry about them, they’re just bored. It’s PSHE first thing Mondays, and it’s really dull.”
“PSHE?”
She blinked. “What school did you come from? Personal, social and health education?”
“Oh,” Anton said, and flushed. “Um, it was just called form time. We didn’t really call it anything.”
“Well, it’s so crap here,” Emma whispered, as the teacher lost her cool and stomped over to Kalinowski to take the book away. “We were doing religions last term, and we totally missed out Hinduism and Sikhism, how exclusive is that, it’s not like—”
“Ems!” a voice shouted across the room. “Stop boring the new kid to death, give Miss a chance first!”
Emma twisted around in her chair. “Walsh, why don’t you take your ignorant opinion, and shove it up your wrinkled, hairy—”
The teacher slammed a book down on a desk deafeningly, and a startled silence shot through the room.
“Quiet,” she said in a dangerous tone.
Quiet was granted.
“Now,” she continued softly, “we have our PSHE lesson for this period, and if we do not finish the lesson in this period, you will all be back here for lunch. And I will continue teaching you in lunchtimes until the PSHE curriculum is complete if you think Monday morning is playtime. Am I clear?”
The chorus of ‘yes, Miss’ was disgruntled, but grudgingly accepting.
“Brown.” Emma straightened. “You will show Williams around and make sure he gets to all of his lessons until he finds his feet.” The door opened, a boy with scruffy brown hair lurching into the room, and the teacher sighed loudly through her nose. “Just sit down, Larimer, and don’t say a word.”
He did. Quiet settled again, albeit a little more tenuously than the first time.
“Now, our project for this term is ‘identity.’ We will be looking at how people can identify with different labels and groups, such as race, gender, sexuality, and so on, and at the protected characteristics in law.”
A groan went up.
“You will be paired up,” she continued, “and work together on a project exploring your own identities. At the end of the project, each of you will present your partner—stop smirking, Larimer, for God’s sake—back to the class. The idea is that, in theory, you will have more respect for each other, something sorely lacking in this year group, and a better understanding of the differences between individuals.”
A hand shot up. The scruffy-haired boy, Larimer, nearly fell out of his seat, he put it up so quickly.
