Page 7 of Spearcrest Knight

When my parents finally convinced me to go to Spearcrest (well, not so much convinced me as forced me) they promised me nobody would ever find out they work for the school.

“Won’t the kids there wonder why a normal person is going to their school?” I’d asked as a naive Year 8.

“They are normal kids,” my parents said, “their parents are just wealthier than other people’s. That’s all.”

Of course, they were lying.

Spearcrest kids are so far from normal I don’t even count them as kids at all. Most of them don’t even look like teenagers. They look polished and synthetic, like robots created to look like teenager but with every setting turned to a hundred. They are tall and lithe and athletic, eerily beautiful. Blinding white teeth, glassy skin, doll-like eyes.

Not just the girls, but the boys, too. Even in Year 9, they are already showing the outlines of muscles, and they walk with a cocky strut that indicates their place in the world, somewhere above everybody else.

When I look at the Spearcrest kids, I don’t see teenagers, or peers.

I don’t even see people.

So, most of the time, I don’t look.

I sit with my elbow on my desk and my chin propped in my palm. I gaze outside, dreaming about what my life will be like when I get to leave this place. I’ve only been here for three weeks, and I already can’t wait to be gone.

All I have to do, I keep reminding myself, is to be patient and bide my time.

Of course, that’s easier said than done.

“If your parents aren’t cleaners,” the girl next to me continues. “Then what do they do exactly?”

I weigh my options. Answer, or keep ignoring her?

If I ignore her, she might eventually leave me alone. Or she might keep pestering me, which is what she’s doing right now.

If I answer her, she’ll have to leave me alone.

I turn to give her a look. “They are administrators.”

She gives me an innocent look, wide doll eyes and mouth open in a pink O.

“So… like secretaries?”

I sigh. “Sure.”

She leaves me alone after that, but by the end of the week, everybody at school thinks my parents are cleaners.

Of course by that point, I have bigger things to worry about.

Like my mattress being soaking wet every night when I go to bed, handfuls of mud and leaves smearing the blankets.

Or my school books getting ritualistically defaced, my pencils snapped and my notes torn to shreds.

Or having my breakfast dashed into the bin and my drinks knocked over every time I refuse to butter the bread of the upper school girls.

Telling my parents isn’t an option: they already know. They even warned me about this. “They will expect you to prove yourself to them, Sophie. You mustn't crack. You must show them how strong you are.”

So I do my best not to crack, but something’s got to give.

For me, stress comes in the form of a horrific acne breakout, my inner distress destroying me from the inside out. Add to that the fact I’m the tallest girl in our year group, and there’s literally no hiding.

One day, a Year 11 girl spots me when I’m standing outside a classroom waiting for my lesson. She’s tall, as beautiful as a model, her face picture perfect. She stops, her features twisted with disgust, and says to me, “You have got to be by far the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Spearcrest must really be letting just anybody in nowadays.”

I don’t cry at that, but I do cry that weekend, when my parents tell me I’ll be spending every weekend until half term break in school to “make friends and build connections.”

---