Generation Next Read Online Free

transfer? Did you do something terrible in your last school? Were you forced to leave?”
    “Er, I . . .”
    “My cousin Dermot laced the fruit punch at his school prom with vodka,” she said, “and after five glasses of it, he tried to snog his chemistry teacher outside the gym, but she tripped over some bunting and fell backward down the stairs and broke her tibia. Was it that sort of thing, the reason you were forced out?”
    “I . . . I wasn’t forced out.” I laughed nervously.
    “Well it must have been something,” she said, “or why change schools in Year Twelve? That seems quite unintelligent to me.”
    “It was something,” I said firmly, “but not that.”
    “Yeah, sorry, this is our Ava,” Austin interjected. “She’s pretty much a genius but sometimes a little outspoken, you get me?”
    Ava made a sudden move closer to me and looked me dead in the eye.
    “You can tell me anything you want, Jack Penman,” she said. “My sister’s got a minor eating disorder, so nothing fazes me.”
    “Right,” I said, backing away a tad.
    “And just in case it matters to you,” she went on, “we are not the cool group around here.”
    I looked at her, Austin and Sai, one by one.
    “You think?” I said.
    After I’d said hi to a couple of the less alternative members of Austin’s tribe of misfits, he filled me in on a few of the key players in the school hierarchy—the big hitters—as well as some of the eternal losers, plus who was cool and who was best avoided.
    “You know Hunter?” Austin said.
    “Who?”
    “The guy who shouted out to you in the class earlier.”
    I nodded.
    “Well he’s definitely one to be wary of. Total knob-head. Lots of kids look up to him ’cause he’s stinking rich, but he’s massively arrogant and never misses a chance to tell everyone how amazing he is. Prone to violence on occasion, too, so watch yourself around him.”
    “Noted,” I said. “Thanks, mate.”
    As we were leaving the common room, Austin invited me to one of the group’s computer game nights, which they took turns in hosting. Deep joy. The next one was at his place, and, he assured me, it would be the coolestone because his parents had made their cellar into a den for him and his younger brother and they had a massive fifty-inch flat-screen TV with surround sound down there. The whole thing sounded unfeasibly lame to me, but I had promised myself I’d make an effort, so I nodded and smiled agreeably.
    “Sure, why not?”
    I could have actually come up with about thirty reasons why not off the top of my head, but sometimes you just have to take the plunge in a new situation, you know? That was one of the reasons I agreed to go along, the other being the fact that nobody else in any of the other cliques had spoken to me, so I thought I might as well give this lot the benefit of the doubt, right? If I’m totally honest, they seemed like they might be an OK bunch. Little did I know then how momentous that decision was going to turn out to be.

THE PAST
    “So how was it, then? How were the other students? Did you meet anyone nice, make any friends?”
    So many questions and I’d only been in the house for three minutes. While I poured myself an orange juice, Mum hovered around me in the kitchen, halfway through making what she called her world-famous lasagna. The fact that nobody outside our family had ever tried it cast some shadow of doubt over the “world-famous” handle, but we all thought it was pretty good anyway.
    “Yeah, it was fine, Mum. Really cool.”
    “That’s good, Jack,” she said. “Because this time your dad and I really want . . . I mean, we don’t want—”
    She stopped, suddenly, as if she might be about to say the wrong thing. I sat down at the breakfast bar and looked across at her standing over the sink with her back to me, her best chopping knife suspended in mid-air as she thought carefully about what to say next.
    “You and Dad don’t want what?” I