ONLY THE LONELY

Students replenish the deserted, tarmacked playground of St. Jessop's Academy. A car pulls up opposite the school gates, and a girl steps out, with her bag trailing behind her. She's fifteen years of age, five foot tall, has long, blonde hair, a blazer, pure white shirt and a midnight black skirt. She sways her fringe over her left ear and smiles to her mother, Stella, who is sat in the driver's seat of the car. The window drops down.

"I'll see you later, Maya. Have a good day at school, sweetheart. Love you lots." Says Stella calmly, before raising the window again and driving off speedily.

Maya crosses the road carefully, and enters the school via the gates. She trudges through the innumerable amount of students conversing in the playground, before halting by three steps which lead up to a corridor. She pulls out a piece of paper from her blazer pocket and mumbles to herself: "Geography, P.E., English, Science, French. Great." She sighs before putting her timetable away and lifting her left leg onto the first step. However, she stops immediately. She looks like a model with a pleasant posture, posing so gracefully, bulking herself up with a seductive, melting look. A roar of wind flushes her long, blonde hair backwards behind her face, and goosebumps form on Maya's hands. She shivers ferociously. The heavy, unpleasant wind disarranges the naturalness of the hair, making Maya look rough.

"Really?" Maya mutters to herself. She then continues walking up the remaining two steps before traipsing down the congested corridors. But, as she walks, three girls, all of the same height, same clothes, same bag thrust her into a wall. Maya places her hands on her ribs as her ribs make fierce contact with the wall. She grits her teeth together and takes a deep inhalation. The trio look back, analyse their victim with their sharp eyes before giggling.

"Maya, we didn't even push you that hard. You're such a drama queen." One girl replies sternly.

"Why did you even try and walk into us? Try and bump a bit of beauty out of us and into you? You look rough, Maya. A bit like you did in your picture. You know the picture I'm on about." Another girl adds.

Maya lifts her head abruptly after the second girl finishes her sentence.

"Ah, you do know the picture. Haha, see you in Science, loser." Finishes the third girl, before they strut off to their first lesson.

The crowd of people in the corridors fails to die down, and no one takes notice to the incident which just occurred. Maya takes her hands away from her ribs and traipses down the corridor to a classroom door with the plaque 'Geography' on it. She pushes the door open.

Inside the classroom there are four clusters of four tables conjoined, to which each single table seats two pupils. The bell suddenly rings, and within two minutes the students fill the entire classroom. There's a teacher perched on his desk, approximately six foot tall, scruffily dressed, like a tramp, with a foul body odour contaminating his surrounding area. He has a name tag, and it says "MR L D RICHARDS". He snorts a little, before spitting the next few words to come out of his mouth: "I've decided to set-up a new seating plan, it's about time you interacted with people who excel in more than one subtopic of our module, compared to those who, to put it nicely, lack the necessary social skills and instead arse about fiddling with themselves for the hour. You're year ten, we don't fiddle, we learn. So, look closely at the Whiteboard and acknowledge who you'll be interacting with for the remainder of the year."

Maya looks at the Whiteboard, and a birds-eye-view map of the class is projected onto the plain white screen. Maya searches eagerly for her name, but then freezes. Her perfect green eyes widen, and her skin begins to crawl. Her face adopts the features of a banshee, and the world closes off around her. She gulps, worryingly. She takes a deep breath before walking over to her assigned seat. She's been ordered to sit by a young lad, fifteen, by the name of Alex.

She pulls her chair out, but before she's able to sit on it, Alex pulls it from under her. She falls to the floor and hits her head on the chair. The class explode into laughter, and Maya's face turns a bright red with embarrassment. She places her palms on the floor next to her and with great strength pushes herself up, but her bag becomes hooked on the chair, and it flips over. Students continue to roar with laughter, while Maya, who's never experienced this sort of embarrassment before, picks the overturned chair up. She puts behind her and sits down.

The teacher arises from his chair behind his desk, before filling his lungs with air, preparing for an explosive row with the class. "All of you, shut up!" He begins going a light red from the anger. Alex, one of the students in the room sniggers, before telling Mr Richards he looks like a red traffic light. The class fall silent as they hear the comment which slips from the child's mouth.

"Alex, shut up. You're so childish." Maya replies calmly to the uncouth teenager, breaking the dead silence. Alex focuses his eyes on Maya, before letting out a high-pitched scream as he laughs uncontrollably again.

"Shut it you slag. Oh, and in future, take better photos." Maya's heart thumps against her chest. She falls silent, and once again, so does the class. It's Mr Richards who breaks the silence and, like a volcano erupts at Alex. Maya feels uncomfortable, while the comment lingers in the back of her mind. A voice inside her head repeats itself again and again. Every time it repeats itself, like a knife, it stabs deeper and deeper into the flesh of Maya; worming it's way into her skull, before consuming her thoughts.