Jordan Watson pulled up his hood. The family home was suffocating. There were too many people visiting with their sympathy faces. Dad was holed up in a chair, receiving grieving relatives and friends. It was depressing and utterly pointless. The only thing that would help was getting out and doing something. He couldn’t bear Millie’s tears any more either. It wasn’t that she annoyed him, just that he knew he couldn’t do anything about it. He couldn’t do the one thing that would make all the pain go away: bring Mum back.

When he thought of Mum, his head went fuzzy and his chest tightened. The anger in his heart burned fiercely and was growing bigger by the hour. It was all-consuming and threatened to explode into a physical manifestation against somebody he loved if it wasn’t dealt with. To exorcise it he had to move. Sitting in the house helped no one. Reminiscing, like Millie, giving up like his father, or constant swooning, like Grandma, didn’t meet his own individual need: the desire for revenge.

He’d asked around and found out where most of his friends got their recreational drugs. Parties were stuffed with illegal substances at their age, and if their parents knew the extent of the use and availability, they’d no doubt keel over, shocked and horrified. They thought kids did what kids had always done: fool around, make jokes, act like idiots and cause a little trouble. None of the parents he or his friends knew would believe the amount of drugs and alcohol consumed by his generation. The press said that his age group was turning its back on mind-altering substances. But that wasn’t what he saw. Every party was super charged with an ‘olders’ network, oiled to perfection with practice and experience, ready and stocked for exchanges between various dealers in drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. Sixth-formers dealt the alcohol, most teenagers could get the cigarettes, and anyone could get drugs: from ket tablets to simple zoots of weed. He knew plenty of Year 7 students – barely eleven years old – hooked on it all. Teachers knew nothing. Parents knew nothing.

But that wasn’t why he was here. He was here to score, though only ostensibly; what he really wanted was to become involved. He cared nothing for how long it took him. He’d use his wit and his charm to find his way in, and when he did, he’d get his revenge.