CECE, DISRESPECTFULLY | ✓

07: RELUCTANT ALLIES

            As loud as a McDonalds at one a.m. and with about as many books, the library at Isaac Evans Community Academy is granted the title as a mere formality. The few books that are stacked on shelves have a decorative function at best. At worst, they get turned into crass black-out poetry or paper aeroplanes.

With no common rooms, the library becomes the primary hang-out spot, save for the "smoking hall" which is a sliver between the gate and the school building where people go to... well, smoke without staff knowing. Don't get me wrong—there's not a chance that every staff member don't know about it but they've got bigger battles. I frequent the latter but I've not stepped in the library since I returned to this school in March.

Pathirana refused to give me back my phone so I have no music as I look over groups enjoying their period off. Diwa sits alone in the sciences section.

I dump my skateboard onto her desk.

A yelp escapes her and she jerks her physics textbook away before sleet and grime tarnish its glossy pages. Her tongue readies to strike me in half.

I cut her off.

'I know I've worms for brains or whatever—' I pull a vacant chair from the table beside hers and sit down '—but I'm really needing to join maths olympiad.'

The fury in her glare dulls into far more characteristic condescension. 'You taking the piss?'

I stifle the urge to feign offence and bolt my voice to true neutrality. State the facts. 'If I don't join an extracurricular, I'll get expelled. And if I get expelled, my brother's gonna send me to West Country.' I roll my eyes. 'Fucking West Country. Dead a hate crime, that is.'

Diwa studies me, convinced I'm joking or pranking her, but when I don't budge and nobody jumps out with a camera, she squares her shoulders.

Placing her pen onto her notes, she watches me with unearned arrogance. 'You're high every day. Ya even know what numbers are?'

'Five comes after seven, right?' I deadpan and instantly cringe. Probably not doing myself any favours. Backpedal: 'I'm well good at maths, proper good. Don't tell anyone, though, I'm not trying to be a nerd or owt.' Fuck. 'I mean, no offence.'

Diwa peels her gaze from mine and returns it to her textbook. 'I'm tryna study.'

'You ever had fun in your life or would you go into anaphylactic shock if you tried?'

Her eyes slash back to mine. 'Unlike you, I'm not gonna be stuck here for the rest of my life.'

It punches me in the throat and I slacken in my seat.

With its ramshackle buildings, it's not hard to see why someone would want to leave Moss Side but it's not aesthetics she's talking about. It's the hunt for blood, the way you carry a knife to protect yourself in case you come across someone carrying a knife to protect themselves.

The way it's never safe to shortcut through a park or ginnel on your way home, which must be much worse for her, being a woman and a feminine one at that. Just last month, two girls got jumped after school. 'They enjoyed our pain,' one had said on the news. Her hideously swollen face develops into a precise photograph in my mind even now.

It's the way crime is woven into daily routines, "Gunchester" still stamped to the southern neighbourhoods of the city. The way police do nowt but escalate problems, add insult to injury, pile more violence onto a growing mass grave.

For a while, we clambered onto a positive trajectory. The city invested in our neighbourhoods, reports of violence went down, new families moved to the fringes. But Moss Side could never wash away the stigma adhered to its name and began to regress. Because what's the point in trying if everyone still treats you as a miscreant?