Prologue

School uniform shopping is bad at the best of times. School uniform shopping the day before you start secondary school is like an all-day long dentist session.

I'm standing in a queue, fidgeting and shifting from foot to foot. Gah, can't the people in front of us just hurry up? It's not like I have all day - it's 3pm and we still have loads more clothes to buy. I blame Mum, of course. It was her idea to buy all our uniform at the last possible moment. It was her idea to visit the busiest shoe shop in the whole of South London. It was her to make me try half a dozen different pairs of football boots, and it was her idea to stop constantly to look at clothes and shoes for herself. She can buy shoes whenever she wants - she doesn't work - and it's not like we have the money for Mum to buy herself three new pairs of trainers.

"Mum, are you sure we couldn't have done this earlier?" I turned to her and asked that same question for maybe the fortieth time.

"Darling," she replied in that stupid patronising tone of hers, "I wanted us to make the most of our summer holidays together. Is that such a bad thing?"

"Yes," I snapped back, "it's 3 already and we still have to buy ties, blazers, coats, pencil cases, stuff to put in those pencil cases. After that, we have to go home, unpack all our shopping, we all need to pack our bags for tomorrow, and we're like half an hour away from getting out of this bloody shoe shop!"

"Language!"

"I don't care! You're wasting everyone's time! We could have done this earlier, you know. We could have been ahead of the curve, but no. Lots and lots of families have had the same idea as you, and it's pretty clear from where I'm standing that idea was a bad one."

"Darling, you don't unders-"

"There's nothing to understand, Mum. You made a dumb choi-"

"How dare you call me dumb!"

"We all know I'm smarter than you, Mum."

"I have wisdom from my experiences in life."

"And an IQ about as good as your average German Shepherd. The two don't cancel one another out."

"What's the IQ of a German Shepherd, then, smarty pants?"

"Like humans, different German Shepherds have different IQs. There are smart ones and dumb ones. But the average is 60. A human of IQ 50-69 is clinically moronic."

"69, haha." My retard of a brother, Paul, still hasn't realised the random crap that 14-year-old hormonal teenage boys is best not said out loud.

"That's rude." Mum chastises.

"It's the medical term for it." I retort.

"I wasn't talking to-"

"Shut it, you three!" That would be Dad, finally stepping in and stopping us killing each other.

"Why do you lot keep fighting?" You gotta love just how innocent my little sis Jenny is. She's always completely out of it, and when she does remember there's a real world with people and places and bullshit like that, she's always really confused by it.

Edna, my sixteen-year-old sister, shakes her head disapprovingly, then goes back to whatever music she was listening to on her iPhone. Damn, I wish had an iPhone, or at least a smartphone. I have a hand-me-down Nokia brick phone that, and I am not joking, is older than I am. The bastards just don't break for some reason.

TBH, that kind of sums up our family. Mum and I screaming at each other, Paul saying something dumb that turns Mum and my row into a three-way yelling contest, Dad steps in to diffuse the situation, and Edna just stands there ignoring us. If Jenny evens registers what's happening, she'll ask us why we're fighting and then go back to dreamy-land. That is, if she registers what's happening. One big, happy family.