Inhuman

Foreword

Before I begin, I'd like to take a few moments to give you a bit of background on this story...

So, when I was 16, I sat down and I wrote this story. I finished it around age 17 and a half. A majority of the main characters were based off of myself and my friends, the only one not based on someone being the love interest. Once I finished I began to try to get it published. This continued for about three years until something I never expected to happen... happened...

The real-life James passed away.

So, for around 4/5 years, I haven't been able to look at this story, and it has sat untouched on my computer. Sometimes I would open it, read a few lines and close it down, unable to read about him and the way he had been. And I didn't really write again after that.

Recently I started trying to write again, and told a friend about all of this. After I said it aloud, I decided to sit down and make myself read it.

I was surprised by what I found. I give my 16 year old self credit, she managed to capture the way we had been as a teenager well... the way we all were as teenagers. While all of the events in the story were imagined, all the ways they would have reacted were nothing short of identical. I realised I had this wonderful snapshot of my friends at the end of our school lives, forever immortalised at 16. In some ways, it was like a beautiful gift.

But what to do with this gift? I was entirely in two minds, mainly because of one of the last chapters in the book, based on a real conversation I had with the real-life James, which now feels like an ironically sick joke life thought would be funny. Did I hide it and never let anyone see it or affect the way that anyone remembered him? Or should I share it and let people see him the way I did when we were young?

And so after going through it, rewriting a section or two which didn't seem quite right between my character and the love interest, I decided to share this with the world. Mainly because I want people to know him the way I knew him, to know all of us as we were.

So I dedicate this story to all of us. To the 'usuals', to those who I couldn't have made it through school without... and most of all, to Callum.