Chapter 1: Prologue

My mom has forgotten that High School isn't the golden years. It's a battle zone. If she'd remembered that, she wouldn't have named me Petunia. She wouldn't have taken me shopping to squeal about cutesy outfits that no self-respecting kid would be caught dead in, never mind a seventeen year old, especially if she looks like she's only twelve. She'd be buying me some fricking battle armour.

So here I am on my last, first day of school. I've only got ten months to survive before I go out into the world to learn what is so bad that it makes High School look good.

The doors of the school are painted a fresh bright blue.,our team colours in fact. We're the Punkie's Hounds High Blues. You'd be blue too, if you had to live in a place called Punkie's Hounds Corners. I mean, really? Our claim to fame is that in the back end of nowhere, seven roads meet at one corner at the most complicated set of traffic lights on the planet. I think the surveyor wrote that on his map because it was too early in the day to be drunk enough to write what he should have written on that map. Of course if he had, we wouldn't have the name of our town printed across the front of our T-shirts now, would we?

Scratched in the fresh paint of the doors was Rickard is a dich. That gave me my first good laugh of the school year. Only a football player could screw up simple graffiti that badly. According to my mom, we are all like super heroes.

In that case, my super-power is sarcasm.