Edited*
Harry took a deep breath. He let himself have a few more seconds before he had to get out.
“Do you have your lunch money?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you take your phone with you?”
“Mum.”
“I’m just so worried for my little baby! I can’t believe you’re going to school! Isn’t it exciting?”
“I’m going now.”
“I love you!”
“I love you too, Mum!”
Harry closed the car door behind him and took in the scary sight of his new school. His first school – at the age of 16 he finally got to go to school. Year 13.
He was glad to skip a grade but didn’t know if his classmates would be of the same opinion.
He turned around, walking backwards to wave goodbye to his mother and nearly got a heart attack when a car raced by behind him.
His mother looked just as shaken as he was but he smiled awkwardly and made sure to look where he was going as he set out towards the school’s gates, growing less and less certain about this whole decision of wanting to have one real school year.
The big wooden doors looked extremely terrifying and someone pushed him out of the way to get through them more quickly. Harry’s nerves were nearly tearing apart as he stepped up the remaining steps and entered the school and was momentarily blinded by the neon lights that hung on the ceilings above him.
The hallway was filled with teenagers and the volume of their voices was as loud as that of animals resting at a watering hole – very loud.
Big ones, short ones, tiny ones, tall ones, some with colourful hair and others with clothes that blended in with the background populated the scenery of the school’s entry.
A few guys were passing footballs back and forth and some girls were redoing their hair and makeup.
There was a group of guys with long black hair that were banging their heads to the beat of hard-rock-metal-goth-punk music with earphones on and a few very young looking girls were dancing to some soft-pop boygroup song.
Harry was so fascinated by all the commotion, by the different species he encountered that he cringed violently, utterly frightened by the sound of the bell ringing, with his arms protectively forming a shield over his head.
He looked up frantically after several seconds of not dying, almost expecting all the students to have run off and fled. Instead he heard a unison sigh from everyone in his vicinity and the teenagers slowly started dispersing and shuffled off to their respective classrooms.
Harry was rooted to the spot, still stunned by everything he had just witnessed. It all seemed so outrageously stereotypical - but maybe that’s what school was like.
Perhaps the youth had to go through this process, this stereotype ritual to become adults who were fit for society. Harry wondered where he would fit in. He had just hoped to befriend some nice people and live a happy school life.
Harry slammed into somebody as he rounded another corner. He tripped and stumbled and gravity pulled him down and he landed with a hard thud.
He felt legs and arms and general body parts beneath him, felt a chest heave upwards, downwards, up, down and heard a strangled yelp of pain that sounded quite feminine. Harry wasn’t a pervert but he could tell that he hadn’t landed on a girl because they had breasts – he waspretty sure of this.
