Generation Next (4 page)

“You can tell me anything you want, Jack Penman,” she said. “My sister's got a minor eating disorder, so nothing fazes me.”

“Right,” I said, backing away a tad.

“And just in case it matters to you,” she went on, “we are
not
the cool group around here.”

I looked at her, Austin and Sai, one by one.

“You think?” I said.

After I'd said hi to a couple of the less alternative members of Austin's tribe of misfits, he filled me in on a few of the key players in the school hierarchy—the big hitters—as well as some of the eternal losers, plus who was cool and who was best avoided.

“You know Hunter?” Austin said.

“Who?”

“The guy who shouted out to you in the class earlier.”

I nodded.

“Well he's definitely one to be wary of. Total knob-head. Lots of kids look up to him 'cause he's stinking rich, but he's massively arrogant and never misses a chance to tell everyone how amazing he is. Prone to violence on occasion, too, so watch yourself around him.”

“Noted,” I said. “Thanks, mate.”

As we were leaving the common room, Austin invited me to one of the group's computer game nights, which they took turns in hosting. Deep joy. The next one was at his place, and, he assured me, it would be the coolest
one because his parents had made their cellar into a den for him and his younger brother and they had a massive fifty-inch flat-screen TV with surround sound down there. The whole thing sounded unfeasibly lame to me, but I had promised myself I'd make an effort, so I nodded and smiled agreeably.

“Sure, why not?”

I could have actually come up with about thirty reasons why not off the top of my head, but sometimes you just have to take the plunge in a new situation, you know? That was one of the reasons I agreed to go along, the other being the fact that nobody else in any of the other cliques had spoken to me, so I thought I might as well give this lot the benefit of the doubt, right? If I'm totally honest, they seemed like they might be an OK bunch. Little did I know then how momentous that decision was going to turn out to be.

“So how was it, then? How were the other students? Did you meet anyone nice, make any friends?”

So many questions and I'd only been in the house for three minutes. While I poured myself an orange juice, Mum hovered around me in the kitchen, halfway through making what she called her world-famous lasagna. The fact that nobody outside our family had ever tried it cast some shadow of doubt over the “world-famous” handle, but we all thought it was pretty good anyway.

“Yeah, it was fine, Mum. Really cool.”

“That's good, Jack,” she said. “Because this time your dad and I really want . . . I mean, we don't want—”

She stopped, suddenly, as if she might be about to say the wrong thing. I sat down at the breakfast bar and looked across at her standing over the sink with her back to me, her best chopping knife suspended in mid-air as she thought carefully about what to say next.

“You and Dad don't want what?” I asked her.

I knew what she was thinking; what all her conversations with Dad must have been about for the last two weeks. Is Jack going to fit in at this school? Is he going to make friends? Will there be any more . . . bullying. Yes, that was the word she couldn't bring herself to say. That was the elephant in the room. Her only son had been bullied at his last school and then had to leave. Boom! Of course they'd been amazingly supportive at the time, but sometimes I wondered if they might be a little bit ashamed of me for not sticking up for myself more. Probably nowhere near as ashamed as I had been of myself when it all went down. Still, I'd left that in the past where it belonged. It wasn't going to happen again; things were different this time.
I
was different, wasn't I? Anyway, I decided to put her mind at rest.

“Actually I met quite a decent guy today, Austin. He's invited me round to his place with a few of his mates, gaming night or something. They're all a bit geeky, but they seem nice, y'know?”

Just as I finished the sentence, my dad walked in from work, throwing his briefcase down on the stool next to me.

“Well that sounds positive,” he said, joining in the conversation. “Fresh start.”

“Doesn't it, Paul?” Mum agreed, a beaming smile on her face as she hacked into an iceberg lettuce.

I recognized that tone in both their voices—a mixture of concern and hope—and I was seconds away from yelling at them, telling them to back off and stop making such a fuss, but then I stopped myself. After all, why wouldn't they be concerned? Seeing their son bloodied and bruised the way I was on that very, very bad day back in January, of course they were going to worry.

“They're into the stuff I'm into, this crowd,” I said instead. “Making videos, tech stuff. They all seem pretty intelligent, even though a couple of them are a bit weird. There's this one girl, Ava—”

“A girl already, eh?” Dad chimed in. “You don't waste much time, do you, son?”

“Well he's a nice-looking boy, Paul, of course he's going to have girls flocking round him,” Mum said.

She's always been my biggest fan.

“No, I was about to say that this girl, Ava . . . she was a bit wacky, but yeah, very pretty. Then there was this other girl . . .”

I stopped mid-sentence, as I was about to veer into TMI territory. They didn't need to know that I'd already developed a crush on my very first day at St. Joe's, did they? That would just give them more to talk about, and sometimes with my mum and dad, much as I loved them, less was most definitely more, you know?

Up in my room, I began to think about my time at Charlton Academy. That place had been a total nightmare. In fact I couldn't fathom how I'd survived it for five whole years. An all-boys comprehensive, it was well known all over Hertfordshire as being a tough school, but for the first few years I kept my head down and held my own pretty well. Most of the students in my form seemed happiest when they were coming up with new ways to disrupt a class, and the only time half of them concentrated was when they were on the football field or during rugby practice. Look, it's not like I'm trying to big myself up—I wasn't bloody Einstein or anything, but I wanted to learn, and in that environment it was next to impossible. Feeling like I was ahead of the pack in English, math and history was one thing, but in the technical classes—computer science and graphics, which were important to me—I felt like I was in a different postcode to everyone else, including a couple of the teachers. You see, ever since my seventh birthday, the day I got my first proper computer from my mum and dad, technology and how it works had been my utter passion. It started off with games—and yes, like most kids, I loved playing them—but as time went on it went deeper than that. I wanted to know what made those babies tick: how they worked and how it was possible to make all those amazing things happen at the mere touch of a button or the flick of a lever.

Originally I'd gone to Charlton because of their so-called excellent technical departments, but that turned
out to be a joke. By the time I was fourteen, I was writing code, making programs and inserting virtual weapons, tools and all manner of other stuff into games: things that didn't even exist in the game until I put them there. Eventually I became known as “GODLYM0DZ” in gaming circles online—M0DZ being slang for modifications. It was like being a bit of a celebrity, with people writing about me on forums, desperately trying to find out my real identity like some crazy internet version of Batman. You know what, it felt good . . . for a time. Meanwhile, in my computer science class we were still covering the basics.

I guess that was when the trouble started. The other boys could see I was bored; they watched me rolling my eyes and slumping forward on my desk while the poor bloke teaching the class tried to explain the rudiments of something I'd known how to do since I was ten. Yeah, I know what you're thinking: I was probably too big-headed, a know-it-all who deserved to be taken down a peg or two. Maybe that was true. I mean, it's all very well being GODLYM0DZ when you're sitting in the safety of your bedroom, fighting your enemies with a fast flick of your wrist, but out on the streets, things weren't quite as neatly tied up as that. In real life I was seen as an outsider by the other boys in my class, and maybe they were right—I certainly felt like a bit of a freak, being one of the few kids who seemed eager to learn something and to get somewhere in life. OK, so
I'm not exactly what you'd call a straight-A student, but I sometimes felt like I was the only one in the class knuckling down to study for exams.

Some of the boys in my form even took the piss out of me because I had a paper round in the week, and before my revision schedule started to get really heavy, I worked in a local clothes shop on a Saturday and Sunday. To be honest, I didn't really care what they thought; I wanted to earn my own money so I could have a bit of independence and buy my own things. It wasn't like my mum and dad were super rich, so anything new I wanted I worked for and bought myself.

During break times and lunchtimes I sat in the computer room trying out new stuff, discovering something great and then trying to work out how to do it myself. I withdrew more and more from the other kids until it seemed like nobody ever saw me outside during school hours because I was always shut in a classroom in front of a screen. I ignored the name-calling when it was just some idiot shouting “Freak!” at me in the playground, but when it came into the classroom, that was a different matter. There's nothing worse than being insulted and belittled in front of a roomful of your peers, especially when you're trapped and there's nowhere to run.

There were two kids, Dillon and David, or Dim and Dimmer, as I like to remember them, who did this kind of thing on a regular basis. After months of making my life a misery, I eventually got my revenge by hacking into
their Facebook accounts and locking them out so they couldn't post anything, use Messenger, or even look at their own pages. It drove them nuts, and for a while they didn't have a clue it was me. After a few weeks, however, there was more and more online speculation about who this GODLYM0DZ character might be. I was pretty horrified to see my name come up on a few of the forums, and even more horrified when Dim and Dimmer turned up at school one day begging me to stop attacking their accounts. So was my secret out at last? I wasn't certain, but I wasn't taking any chances, so I told them both to . . . Well, you can guess what I told them both to do.

It's funny, all the rest of that day I felt like I had a little bit of power, and I thought maybe some of the other kids might even have some respect for me after they found out what I was capable of. Maybe things would turn around and get better at Charlton. That feeling didn't last long. On the bus home from school that night, Dim and Dimmer plus a load of their mates cornered me. I was sitting upstairs on the back seat, nose in a magazine, and before I knew it they'd all bombed up the stairs and gathered around me. I was pretty much trapped. I tried to look past them to see if there might be anyone else on the top deck who could help me, but there were just a couple of other kids and an old lady who disappeared as soon as she realized there was going to be trouble.

“Think you're funny, messing with my Facebook page?” Dillon said through gritted teeth. “You're lucky I haven't got a blade on me.”

Before he'd even finished the sentence, I felt a punch to the side of my head, then my face hitting the window, and then pain shooting up my legs as they put the boot in. After the fourth or fifth punch I sort of went numb. I could still feel it, but it didn't really hurt anymore, you know? In the end it just became a blur of fists and kicks, cussing and name-calling, and then finally there was a ringing in my ears and I think I must have blacked out. The driver stopped the bus in the end and came up the stairs, but they'd all legged it. He found me sort of half crushed between the back seat and the seat in front of it.

“You got a lot of blood on you, man,” was all he said.

I remember Mum's face when she arrived at the hospital where they were patching me up; she was utterly horrified.

“It's not too serious, Mrs. Penman,” the nurse assured her. “Just surface mess and a few bruises. Nothing's broken; he'll be fine.”

Mum looked relieved there was no permanent damage, but she still cried a bit. I did too.

“I'm not going back there,” I told her, barely able to open my mouth. “I'm not a coward but I'm not going back. There's nothing for me there.”

She just nodded and hugged me, causing me to wince with the pain. Then I felt her tears fall on my shoulder, so
I told her not to worry, and promised her I'd be OK and that things would be different from now on.

“Jack, your lasagna's ready!”

It was her voice that shook me out of the unhappy memories of that day two months earlier, and as I jumped up off my bed, my heart thumping in my chest, I told myself that I would never,
ever
let anything like that happen again.