"I was coming up to 18 years old when I finally got the break I needed. It had taken me seven years, but at last the day had come. I was out of the hellhole that most folks would call ‘High School’, but there remained just one last thing to do, and one more painful memory I had to make before it could really, officially be called ‘over’.
The school term had already ended, but on this day in the summer holidays it was exam results day, and I had to make the final trip though those doors and out again for me to truly consider myself free. I’d walked in, quietly gliding through the groups of students standing around and jumping up and down as they tore open their envelopes. I made my way past them all with the impact and notice of a poorly realised ghost.
I collected my envelope from a woman who’d fished it out of a long box of them, and I retreated to the least populated part of the room to open and read what I’d managed. Two Ds and a C. It wasn’t ground breaking. It wasn’t even something I was proud of, but it was enough to do what I needed. University was safe.
I looked up again to see teachers congratulating their students, and people I may have then called friends too absorbed in their actual friends’ results to really notice what I had. I made a slower than usual exit, almost in the vain hope that somebody would notice and stop me to say ‘good luck’, but it never came. By the time I’d reached the main door, I’d timed out the few perishing scraps of patience I had for the place. There was no point in persisting. It would just be best focus on what was to come next, and to simply leave that place viewed by peers and faculty the same way as when I went in – A stranger. A freak of nature that simply cried too easily.
I stepped outside to the front of the school and the fire door sealed away the now sibilating sound of the chatter behind me as I walked slowly down the path, away from the school reception. In the moment of nothing but subdued birdsong from the school’s countryside location, I stopped to turn myself to look back on the dilapidated, unloved eyesore of an establishment in pause. The fresh start I wanted all those years ago had failed, but now it was time to try again. Now it was time to make it count."
