Generation Next Read Online Free Page A

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