Murphy's Law.

Three - piss off, I'm being charming.

School basically turned into a game of 'The Bachelorette' after my mother's revelation of a date being required to attend my own brother's engagement party. Except, you know, no one knew they were actually playing.

I swear, if she was getting this wound up about the engagement party, I didn't even want to know what she was going to make me do for the actual wedding.

"What about Ian?" Dana suggested, her eyes following the boy in question as I shoved books into my locker. "He's pretty cute."

"He's also called Ian. I mean, who does that to their child?" I shut my locker, raising an eyebrow at her.

"I happen to think it's a pretty cute name," she sniffed.

"You think everything's pretty cute, Dan," I chuckled.

"Whatever," she said childishly, my responding laugh drowned out by the bell overhead.

I shoved the last of my books for the next few periods into my bag, bashing down most of it with my pencil case.

And my teachers wondered why my assignments were always so crinkled.

"I'll see you at lunch," I called over my shoulder as I walked away from Dana, my next destination a module my high school deemed mandatory for all seniors. Life Skills.

To be honest, we had spent the last two months learning how to cook packet pasta and blatantly ignoring our teacher as she tried to talk to us about paying electricity bills and when to call your landlord. Some might call it a waste of time.

I would definitely call it a waste of time.

Ms Gupta was your typical fresh out of college graduate teacher, who could spout off entire paragraphs of her textbooks on command, but didn't have the first idea how to control a class of rowdy adolescences. Her entire wardrobe consisted of flowery skirts, cardigans and coloured tights for God sake. I'm fairly certain she was terrified of about ninety eight percent of our class.

In her defence though, Life Skills teachers never lasted long in our school.

I expected that day to go like every other had gone up until then, Ms Gupta would come shuffling in with an armful of books and hunched shoulders, and for her to spend the entire period stuttering through her pre-planned speech while havoc reigned all around her.

However, I was wrong.

She slammed her books down onto the desk, and took a deep breath as silence descended on the classroom.

"Okay class, today's going to be a very exciting day," she said. A chorus of snorts and scoffs immediately followed this, which she seemingly chose to ignore.

"As most of you may know, after last years... incident, the Baby Simulator module has been scrapped, meaning the principal and I have put together a new senior project for Life Skills," she said, an excited gleam in her eyes.