• The car door opens, I am petrified, my mother ushers me out of the car. Her soft smiling face encourages me as I step out onto the wet, grey pavement. The school stands before me, ancient and wise. The gate swings and squeaks in its old age. I begin the nerve wracking walk across the playground to the door. My legs shudder as a cold breeze passes them by. The door opens; I am engulfed in the frenzy of children going to their next classes. I hold mothers hand in fear that someone will push me into a wall. The crowd disappears in an instant; a boy of my age is the last to leave, fumbling around for his locker key.
    The teacher appears to show me round. His smiling face could give anyone a scare. Yellowed teeth, rotted to stumps, thinning hair, skin mottled and wrinkled like that of a shar-pei. He looks at mother and then at me, “shall we proceed to explore the school?” he says though it sounds like a groan of discomfort. I nod, shaking like a lamb come in from the cold.
    The tour is plain, silent as the ecstatic children laugh and joke in bare walled classrooms that are all disgustingly coloured with rotting paints of beige, blue, green and pink, all brownly tinged. The lighting is even worse, so dim that you can barely see past the desk preceding yours. The windows are barred and dusty with peeling yellow paint. Teachers look stressed, tired and bruised. With voices so easily taken back by. You realise that they were once able to shout, not now. The children have driven them all to silence and creaking, discomforting voices that you have to lean towards to hear even faintly.
    “Now, my boy, you will be in class 7D, the room nearest to my office, I hope this is satisfactory to your needs, I leave you here.” The teacher walks to a room at the end of this corridor and disappears through the door. I am left at the entrance to the classroom; 7D it sounds so plain, so sad. The door opens and I am engulfed again in a conundrum of voices.
    My day gets worse and worse every hour. The teacher’s pitifully quiet voice painfully aggravating and the voices of riotous children loud and fidgety as I crouch over my work with a pen and a frown. A girl behind me is writing a love letter to the chief troublemaker, a spotty boy with sleek brown hair and blue eyes. She watches him as he opens the letter and reads the words on the page. She is skinny, with auburn hair with a touch of black at the edges. Her eyes remind me of a starless night. Dark, cloudy blue in colour. My heart melts as the boy screws his face in disgust. He rips the letter into pieces and throws it onto the dirty floor.
    “Like I’d ever love you,” he says as her smiling visage turns to that of disdain. “You are a nothing to me, a fleck of dust, maybe, but nothing more.” The girl’s face crumples into a red blur of tears and I shake my head. What is wrong with these people? Can they not see how much a single, kind gesture can be meaningful to somebody?
    The old-fashioned bell rings for lunch and suddenly the room is but a blur of children heading for the door. The teacher looks at me as I nervously go towards the door. She smiles at me, with a look that says “it’s OK, I won’t bite.” I smile back and she sits at her rotten wood desk.

    The canteen is old and dreary, the cooks worse. They are old and wrinkled. All thin and bent over, like their backs have been folded. They try to smile at you, but end up grimacing evilly, like a cat does to a mouse. They cackle maliciously as they shovel mounds of grimy muck onto your plate. The children creep to their tables to sit on crumbling chairs. Dirty knives and forks dig in to the pus-like gruel forcing it into the ill-mannered children’s halitosis-friendly mouths. I sit there. Stare at the food, thinking that it could jump off my plate at any second and fly into my mouth. Or make an odd slurping noise and bubble on the plate. I feel sick; I can’t look at it let alone eat it.

    The bell rings again to signify the beginning of class again. I sigh, another few hours of torturous voices and raucous laughter. I nod my head as I begin the steady descent down the dark and dreary corridors, taking in every damp patch and cobweb in sight. I’m going to hate it here, I’m really going to hate it.