Flightless Bird

Prologue

I was never very popular in secondary school.

It wasn't like I didn't have friends, because I did, and I absolutely loved them. But I wasn't in a huge group of all the 'popular' people. I preferred to spend my lunchtimes talking to a few friends, but mostly, I liked to read. Adventure, mystery, crime, classics, I read anything. But by far, my favourite were the romance novels. Books full of ultimate relationships, epic drama, and most of all, love. I could almost feel in the words how much the writer put into the book of themselves. What they had felt and what they wanted themselves. I would spend hours on end at home reading endless romance novels, sourcing them from school, charity shops, car boot sales and online. And every single one of them had one thing in common; there were two people (all except this very strange book I once read about a man and his dog that was frankly quite disturbing). Unfortunately, I was a lone freak at my school, sitting in solitude in the library. I never minded, because when I read I could pretend I wasn't alone, and I had friends too. That all changed when I left year 11. I had to change schools because my parents were moving to New Zealand, but I didn't want to go, so I was staying here alone. Today was my last day at home, since I would be moving to a boarding school in Kent to attend the sixth form college there. Tomorrow would be a whole new story, and an adventure of my own.