What the fuck am I supposed to do?

I whine the question over and over, as if I’m expecting a voice to reply.

What do I say to Sophia?

My eyes sweep from one side of the school grounds to the other, the panorama of sun-drenched calm prospectus-perfect. My memory flips back to the last day of Year Ten, right before the summer holidays began. Just as it is now, it was a day of airless classrooms, glaring whiteboards, negotiable uniform policy. I remember the feeling, as we played five-a-side out on this very field, that our impending six-week escape seemed more liberating in the final hours of school than it possibly could during the break itself. I, like all of them, had been furnished with my report. Addressed to Gramps, I’d picked it open all the same. It was split into two columns: one grade for attainment, one for effort. The former grades were As straight down the page, sullied only by a C in sports. The effort grades were mediocre by comparison, and it was from this that I took the most satisfaction. It would go on to become one of the last additions to Gramps’s Wall of Ollie.

I think of that same evening, of the house party at Matt Alford’s. With the exception of Lei Pang and Craig Lowe, we’d all been there. A smile almost creeps on to my face as I remember the gladiator joust I fought against Joey Mackie with two banister spindles that he’d wrenched free of the staircase. And I think about Amit and me sharing Nate’s joint in the back garden. We only dared take a couple of puffs each and were certain it had no effect on us. Flickers of the expansive philosophical conversations that followed as we lay on the lawn come back to me: theories about what exists beyond the limits of the universe, musings on the continued existence of monkeys despite us evolving from them, that sort of stuff.

It’s like a memory from a different life. In September, we’d all returned here. Our names and faces the same, everything else different.

Could I still be one of them? I kill the question, stamping on it like a wasp careless enough to land close by.

But I can’t stop myself staring at them again. The hatred won’t rise within me. Only panic. It’s like I don’t care enough about making the Plan happen. At the moment I most need to care. This is how I work – I am the saboteur of my own success, crusher of my own dreams.

‘Stay pissed off. Stay pissed off.’ I repeat it out loud. Chanting the words overrules the questions that whizz round inside my skull. I know that every great thing that has ever been achieved is the result of someone staying pissed off enough.