Bitter Sixteen by Stefan Mohamed

Author:Stefan Mohamed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Salt Publishing Limited
Published: 2015-03-16T15:55:20+00:00

The twentieth of May comes every year. It’s inevitable. You can’t stop a day from coming, and it shouldn’t be a surprise when it arrives, but sometimes particular dates sneak up on you, like they’re doing it on purpose. Like this one did.

I woke up and I just knew. I hadn’t been in school since March, and even then I’d only really kept track of what day it was because of the play, but I knew. Today was the last day, the last day for my year group before they started study leave and exams. Today they’d all be getting their school shirts signed, picking up their official yearbooks, having their own personal leaving books signed with messages in multicoloured pen, taking photographs, pissing about on the field, just like we’d seen so many top-year students do since we’d started school. The top-year students had always seemed so much older, impossibly older, but now that was us. Well. Them. The ones I’d left behind. Today everyone was supposed to be friends. Everyone getting a piece of cake. I should have been there, having people sign my shirt and write in my book.

But I wasn’t. I was working in a comics shop for an eccentric millionaire. I lived with two people I barely knew and a talking dog. My cousin was a bouncer. I could move things with my mind and fly. I was living the kind of fantastic story I’d always dreamed of, and I wanted to be back at school, doing normal, boring things. It was ridiculous, stupid, and if the Stanly of four or five months ago could travel through time and see me now, he’d probably have a few choice words to say on the subject.

The fact that I’d missed the Prom also upset me unreasonably more than it should have, considering the stance I generally took on such cheese. I wondered if Kloe had gone, and who with. I was struck by a mental image of her signing everyone’s shirt and everyone signing hers, and her dancing in a beautiful dress with some faceless new boyfriend.

Well, you haven’t called her in two months.

She’s got every right to find someone else.

My stomach was bubbling. I clenched my fists and the bookcase in my room fell forwards, emptying its contents on the floor in an avalanche of heavy thuds. I caught the bookcase with my mind before it could hit the floor and shoved it roughly back against the wall, but I left the books where they were. Daryl jumped up, woken by the noise. ‘Woah!’ he cried. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. My voice sounded strangled. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to cry or scream. There was just too much going on in my brain. Different strains of anger wrapping around one another, anger at what I was missing, anger at myself for caring so much, anger for the time I was wasting, the powers I was wasting.

Misery at what I was missing out on. Who I was missing out on.

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