That hurts, mostly because I know she’s right. Anything bad is gonna come right back to me even if it’s not my fault.

I drop the tote on the kitchen floor and march out the door. Then I come back in, clear away my breakfast stuff and march out again. Annie looks like she’s trying to hide a smile but doesn’t say nothing.

*

Bash and Skye are waiting for me by the school gate. Skye says that her older sister used to get stopped by that security guard all the time, even when she wasn’t nicking stuff. Skye hopes that Annie’s gonna get him sacked. Me, I don’t tell my friends how much they upset me. I didn’t like it when all them people were staring at me and I had to style it out and pretend I didn’t care. I don’t tell them about the woman in the hot-pink tracksuit who came to help me. How she was all on my side at first until I refused to say sorry. Then her face went as hard as the rest of them.

Bash holds out a box with some cake. It’s got bright yellow icing on top and a lump of sugary ginger. Bash knows I love ginger.

“Sorry, hun,” Bash says. “But you know what my mum’s like.”

I don’t. I’ve never been to her house. I’ve never met her mum. But I take the cake anyway.

Skye puts her arm around me. “At least I stayed,” she says.

I raise my eyebrows.

“You saw me, Chaz!” Skye says. “Checking through the window.”

“Through the window?” Bash snorts. “You almost knocked me over trying to get out so fast!”

“But it’s your fault I dropped that posh make-up!” I remind Bash.

She laughs loud. “No one can prove nothing!”

I eat my cake. The icing is too thick and too sweet, but I finish it all. Bash and Skye aren’t perfect, but I suppose I’m lucky they decided to be my friends at all.

*

The first lesson today is History. Most subjects are streamed at this school so that all the kids the teachers think are clever are put in the same class. Before I started, Annie showed me the school website. They go on and on about their results. Families move into this area just so their kids can go here. That makes Annie laugh. She says that everyone used to think these ends were a dump, and the kids from the estates still end up squashed into the bottom sets for every subject. And me, I’m squashed down there with them.