The bass casts sparks from the band of drummers a metre or so away through the rubber soles of my feet, sending their shooting stars of vibration right up to my stomach. It’s cold and it’s semi-wet, yesterday’s rain and this morning’s foggy minus-degree mist shimmering in not-quite puddles on the paving slabs of a [...]

…and gone again.
Another month to wait.
I need a temporary memory erase, as in Eternal Sunshine.

We said to each other, ‘see you tomorrow,’ as we’d say to friends, but it was too strange, and after a moment’s silence, we both laughed.
See you tomorrow!
…tomorrow!
(Before which I have much hoovering to do, as the dust bunnies have begun forming something resembling fluffy yet malicious ranks.)
I know it is not cool to be [...]

He has perfected the almost feline leap across the rows of wooden desks. He can start at one end of the room, now, and make it to other side without any part of his body making contact. He practised and practised in the depth of the night, every night for months, after the gates had [...]

My parents are having one of their infamous dinner parties, where starters are not even considered until well past nine pm, where the carpet on the stairs is hoovered for the first time in months, where us kids are ‘dealt with’ hastily half an hour before eight o’clock - a pizza shoved into the oven, [...]

Dear girl who sat alone in the café,
After having just spent an hour and a half with you and your probing ideas, roaming eyes from the back of the class resting way too often on the space around my head, seeing you sitting there by yourself came as a shock, and for a second my [...]

I have been delegated by my mother to a lower position in the list of Household Things To Deal With When Leaving the House. This morning her parting shot to me was a tweet, the pursing of lips and rapid sucking in of air she used to greet the budgie with before he morphed in her eyes into something [...]

What I wouldn’t give to be a real distraction, I breathed, my mouth hovering in the space between touching and not touching his ear, lips brushing fine hairs. A sharp intake of breath, and suddenly his eyes weren’t straying towards the battle of Endor, biggest and bestest battle in sci-fi.
It’s no match against you, anyway. [...]

Yesterday I mopped up the tears of a girl I barely know. I catch her flicking glances over at me in every class we have together. She wears black fitted tops and black and white striped tights and long floaty skirts, which she tells me she buys for two pounds at a little store called [...]

The chaplain has surpassed himself. He calls to his little lair behind the sixth-form centre my friend, and tells her she is affectacious, ha! she should look that up in her dictionary.
He tells her, I can’t help you unless you tell me absolutely everything. He wants to know with whom she last slept, who she [...]