THERE'S A FREEDOM IN THE HEART THAT CAN ONLY BE DISCOVERED UNDER ITS DICTATORSHIP. BUT YOU WOULDN'T KNOW

            Baba still watches me take my medicine. He attempts to hide in the periphery of the kitchen, camouflage into strenuously stuffing the washing machine, and thinks I'm none the wiser to his surveillance but his doubt I'll take them without prodding makes the pills even harder to swallow.

I wish I could chew them but have to settle for leaning forward as advised by the chemist and chewing the water I wash them down with. After two years, I still chew water.

'Another week ahead.' Baba says this every Monday, just as every Friday, he'll announce another week over. When the only response it elicits is a disinterested hum, he prods. 'How do you feel about it?'

I shrug and turn to Iya's painting of Jesus on the wall. It's the only thing given to her by her parents that she brought from Benin. I've met them once, so she tells me, though have no memory of it. Whenever we can afford travel, we go to Fez, which I expected to bother her, maybe even evoke jealousy, but if anything, she beams brighter than Baba at the sight of Henna dressed in her pastel hijab and abaya when she meets us at the airport.

Iya hardly speaks of her parents but over the years I've pieced together the issues root in her choice of husband. And consequently, me, because if inter-ethnic marriages are doomed then what abomination are the kids? The rest of our ancestors don't seem to mind. At least, they allow her to worship them daily.

When Jesus provides me with no strike of brilliance, I return to my abandoned bowl of soggy Asda Wheat Bisks. 'I dunno. It's just another week.'

'It doesn't have to be.' Baba's optimism is oppressive. 'You know, inshallah, it's not too late for you to make some friends. At your age, I made some of my best ones the day before graduation.'

I drag my fingers along my palm under the table, then stretch them out. With my lips clamped to stop myself from sucking my teeth, I glance at the glaring green of his Asda uniform vest. 'I'd prefer it to be just another week.'

This is a lecture I suffer at least once a month: I don't socialise enough, this is the age for me to have innocent fun with friends, not to spend all my time with my head six feet under or hidden behind books Dal buys me.

But after lengthy contemplation, I've come to the conclusion that other people are a terror best agonised from a distance. This is how it would go: I'd make a friend, then they'd find out I'm insane and leave. Or I'd manage to lie to them until disinterest grew between us. Either way, it's destined for doom. All things end eventually, I know, but that doesn't mean I want to willingly suffer more than I must.

And what if I uncovered something about them? What if I got bored? Where am I supposed to find the time to upkeep the relationship? I'll have to sacrifice something. Am I ready to sacrifice my time alone, my time thinking? Can I be myself if I don't spend hours wound in internal spirals? How am I supposed to know other people when I hardly know myself, much less understand? And what if they understood me better than I do? How do I cope with someone understanding me better than I do?

I'd rather insert myself into scenes I've seen in movies. That way, a future doesn't exist, nor does a past: carpe diem is easy when I'm not me. In reality, I can't love anyone into loving me.

In reality, I'm still half-ghost and other people exist on a plane I can't quite reach anymore, nothing but vague silhouettes in whatever limbo I've cursed myself into, and I can't grip onto any of them, much less look them in the eye.

Not to mention that in my isolation, I've teemed so full of love I wouldn't know how to ease it out at a drip easily swallowed. A burst waterballoon, it would all surge out and scare them off or drown them, and if it wouldn't drown them, the cement blocks chained to my feet certainly would.

If I was a machine, I'd have no desire for connection other than the plug that hooks me to the socket, and if I was an animal, it'd be much easier to make them, simple necessity and happenstance of being born to the same ecosystem. Would I rather...?

'It wouldn't hurt if you tried a little.' Baba is a virtuoso in making his chides sound like well-natured suggestions.

I want to argue that I already have friends, like Naz, who lives a street away... though I've not spoken to her in over a year, or Dal, but he's twenty-five and much more a grudging brother than a friend.

It wouldn't hurt if I tried... How much trying is required for an innate kinship? Where do I draw the line between laziness and bullheaded refusal to let things go when they're not meant to be? I don't want to waste my time with shallow acquaintances, I want the kind of connection people have in movies, but how will I know if it arrives? How much trying is required to make someone my soulmate?

'Couldn't you be friends with Miles? He's right next door and he's in your class, it's practically effortless.'

I dart my attention from my final spoon of fake-Weetabix wheat mush to glare at him. 'Thanks, but I'd rather break all twenty-seven bones in each hand one at a time.'

Sighing, Baba lifts his hands in surrender. Apparently, my complaining about Miles isn't interesting dinner conversation so I've reduced it to only when prompted, but it bores him nonetheless.

As he digs out his jumble of keys, he casts me an apprehensive glance and unlocks the padlock to the cabinet above the washing machine he installed after June 2006 to retrieve laundry detergent. I blackmail myself into finishing my breakfast and drop the spoon into the empty bowl with a clangour before I stand, rinsing it in the sink and dumping my pill box onto its shelf.

Baba returns the laundry detergent to the cupboard and clicks the padlock shut. 'Are you sure you don't want me to drive you?'

'It's calm.'

Unable to stop himself, he adjusts the knot of my violet tie until I swat his hands away with another Baba, it's calm and he pulls away with a laugh.

'Well...' He grabs a clip-lock food container from the fridge. 'Here's your lunch.'

My parents have always ensured I know what love is, that it's woven into mundane details of daily life. When they've both had a long day at work, they'll lie on the sofa together to watch the evening news and Baba will massage Iya's swollen feet or she'll rub his balding head until they're on the brink of sleep and neither holds a grudge when the other retreats for their respective prayers. He'll do the cooking and the laundry in return for the glass of bissap juice she makes him on Wednesdays. At dinner, on the occasion when I speak Darija to intentionally exclude Iya's stricter opinions, he'll give a knowing smile and respond in French or English.

Iya picks off the white albedo from the tangerines she peels for me and Baba always minces yellow onion into powder because he knows I can't stand it in chunks. In my childhood, even though they both worked almost as much as they do now, Baba would find time to help me read the Qur'an every morning and Iya the Bible before bed.

Most of all, love is practised in the near-accidental touches of habit. How Iya fixes my hair in passing, how Baba thumbs her knuckles each time he sits beside her and how she kisses his arm to reciprocate, how he squeezes my shoulder after he has effortlessly rolled up his prayer rug whilst I take at least three attempts to get it neat.

It's not that I don't believe in love, it's that I believe in love too much. What if I never find what they have? Have I doomed myself for eternity by having too high expectations? Are people right when they say I watch Before Sunset too often?

Besides, time won't let me live the life I want.

Throat cinched with regret over my morning cynicism, I'm sure to fill my goodbye thalla with pep.

The moment I'm outside, my eyes, summoned by movement, find Miles's silhouette behind his kitchen window. I snap them away to unlock my bike from the chain link fence that severs my house from his. The back of my neck burns. Please don't be watching me.

Sufsdale is shrouded in clouds, and though it's not raining, water clings to the air so that by the time I reach the school's paved forecourt, my clothes and hair are vaguely damp. It'll cling to me until Zuhr like a shiver that never comes.

I shove my bike into the shelter littered with crude vandalism and one reprieve of a Totally Spies sticker. As I unravel the chain from the handlebars to padlock it around the skeleton, I scowl at the letters bolted to the front wall: North Chapel Independent Secondary School and Sixth Form College. More like a circle of Hell they forgot to include in scripture.

I keep my eyes on the taupe linoleum floor even as everyone else's glue onto me. My stomach knots. Maybe the lavender braids weren't such an intelligent choice for half-hearted teenage rebellion. To pretend I'm too busy and cool to notice people staring, I dig out my cell to text Iya.

'Nice braids, Leech.' Tristan rips the Nokia from my fingers when I'm three words in and tosses it to the opposite side of the corridor. The battery pops out and propels several meters away. 'Everyone knows you're bent. No need to advertise it anymore.'

Unbothered to look higher, I watch the shined heels of his and Lysander's shoes as they pass me, then pick up my cell, the back cover, and the battery, stuffing the fragments into my pocket as I mumble to myself. 'I'm actually not...'

I'm not gay: I've been attracted to people who aren't men.

Perhaps it's more honest to say I've never been attracted to anyone I've known in real life, and how could I possibly be gay if boys too are so terrifying I don't dare to play with the thought of acquaintance? Revisal: I've been attracted to people who are men and who aren't men when they exist in books or the telly. I can demand to understand characters to their core because they don't have the sentience to hurl my perception off its tracks and rip back the curtain that'll prove me a fraud, they can't resist the version I've nourished in my head. No extraneous variables. It's easy, comfortable.

As far as I'm aware there's only one other queer person in our year, David Sheffiled, who came out before GCSEs. There's not even a performative sense of solidarity between us. He's the kind of white gay who still thinks Madonna invented voguing despite being told otherwise for eighteen years.

People don't call him slurs, or if they do, they extend him the courtesy of doing so in private so the words aren't tattooed to the back of his neck. Unlike David, I never got the privilege of coming out. It was done for me as soon as my peers were old enough to recycle terms they heard from their parents or the radio, pelleting them at me until they battered through my skin and rooted colonial settlements in my body which spread propaganda with toxic fumes that eventually rose to my brain.

Though I've healed most of my mind, a spot still remains in the periphery, like a bloodstain on white cotton that won't come out because I made the mistake of scrubbing it under hot water instead of cold. I think it'll be there for the rest of my life, benign, but out of reach for surgical tools.

The classmates I share form time with are split into two clusters as they wait outside the room, neither of which I join, though my gaze finds Lysander and Tristan on instinct. Miles isn't here yet; the bus from East Trough only arrives with a few minutes to spare.

I've barely had the thought when the clicking of zipper pull-tabs against the sliders prefaces his arrival and he turns the corner, fingers already coiled in the knot of his green tie to loosen it.

Miles's college in Leeds didn't require a uniform and regressing into it has transfigured every seam into sandpaper and the buttons to beggar's lice hitchhiking in the knit of a jumper. His fingers are incessantly tugging at it. At home, he's always dressed in athletic wear, as if he might, at any moment, get the impulse to go on a run and doesn't want to be thwarted by the need to change clothes. Even here, he doesn't bother with a book bag but tosses textbooks and a handful of dethatched pens among his kit in an Astros gym duffle: school is extracurricular to football.

Not that I'm one to complain when my own is a Slowpoke backpack I found in a charity shop and hardly fits the supplies I need for my five A-levels.

Miles passes me and, as though wanting to prove me wrong, doesn't divert his gaze to his shoes or the posters tacked onto the wall opposite. Our eyes meet for a split second and the corners of his lips twitch, the tiniest movement but it unravels something within me and before I catch the string, my heart is undone to woeful filaments. The fissure proceeds to unshackle my ribcage.

But then he's past me. He joins Tristan and Lysander with the rest of their friends and I pay for my lapse in judgement. Spears easily fit through the gaps I've left in my bones, and as I hurry to reconstruct my heart from the frayed threads, I poke my insides with the needles until the tang of iron rises to my tongue.

That's not it; the blood comes from my lip, which I've chewed another lesion into.

Even as it brews tempests in my chest, I can't stop staring at them as Venetia drudges through a story about how she spent hours pulling kernels off cobs of corn only for her little sister to knock it onto the floor. Miles is a slow speaker and tests out each word in his head first, even now as he asks why she didn't just buy tinned sweet corn.

Venetia has an aura of perpetual boredom, a symptom of being Tristan's girlfriend no doubt, and she barely bothers to answer. 'They don't have any nutrients.'

With my focus preoccupied with knitting my ribcage back together, my tongue slips past my surveillance and the damage is done before I can even raise the alarm. 'That's not true. Most foods are actually richer in vitamins and antioxidants when you buy them tinned.'

Lysander remains relaxed against the wall as his eyes drift to me as if I've caused him a great inconvenience. 'Or is that just what they say to make you feel better at the food bank?'

'No...' Already, my eyes burn and I blink several times. 'My mum's a doctor.'

His lips stretch to a smirk that allows a gust of laughter to slice through his canines. 'Your mum's a nurse.'

By now, the second cluster of our form group has halted their own Monday catch-up to listen, and even Sonia, who is equally isolated as I am, looks up from her manga, which does nothing to help the flush in my face or the defensive bite in my voice. 'My mum's a nurse here.'

'Yeah, it's a shame we have medical standards above animal sacrifice.'

'I'll sacrifice you–'

The door opens and Howell invites us inside, either ignorant of the scene he interrupted or choosing to ignore it... probably the latter. I wait for my peers to file in before trailing after them, though Howell's sigh stops me at the threshold.

He shuts his eyes as if to gather his strength, then opens them to take in the lavender braids tied to the top of my head. 'What is this, Ziri?'

'You can't give me detention,' I say. 'The dress code says, and I quote, "no pupil may dye their hair unnatural colours and have it visible during school hours" but this isn't my hair, I haven't dyed my hair. This is synthetic hair that I've braided into my head. So, the all-white administration has led to an oversight and until it's fixed, you can't give me detention.' My confidence wanes and panic strums a note through my nerves. 'I'm not gonna lose my scholarship, am I?'

'You graduate in less than three months. Wouldn't save much money revoking your scholarship at this point.' Howell scans my braids as principles fight boredom in his head. Eventually, he raises his hands. 'All I'm saying is it might be a laugh now but you'll need to think more about how you come across for Oxford.'

'I'm not going to Oxford.'

The fog in his eyes sharpens away for possibly the first time I've ever seen. 'But you got an offer.'

'That doesn't mean I'm goin. I applied cause you forced me, innit. As far as dying goes, being murdered by a group of pretentious white boys doesn't rank very high for me.'

As the adults in my life increasingly tend to be, Howell is unamused. 'Why would you get m–? Ziri, this is the best school in the country.'

'Careful, sir, you'll offend the Cambridge kids.'

I can't afford Oxford, and even if I did somehow manage a full scholarship, Iya won't let me move out until she's confident I'm "better", which is unlikely to ever happen. Despite what I keep being told by well-intentioned but somewhat dismissive cheerleaders, it's nothing like cancer: I'll never be declared in remission.

'You only care cause it'll look good on your statistics.'

Howell's eyes dull back to their normal state. 'Yup, you know everything.' With a sigh, he gestures me inside and shuts the door behind us. I drop my backpack onto the floor under a vacant seat in the middle as he starts the register.

By a long shot, Howell is the best form tutor available at North Chapel; though it's hard to imagine him as ever having had a passion for this job, he's not at all strict, which is more important at eight on a Monday morning.

Already, David is furiously scribbling the answers to the chemistry homework due for our next class. In the back, Sonia puts down her manga only to retrieve a 250ml tub of shea butter. She lathers a coat onto her inner wrist, a patch where her eczema has roughened dark umber skin with the craters of the moon, then leaves the tub on her desk to resume her book. Most teachers let her get away with reading or drawing during classes, afraid, behind their infantilising, that she'll throw a "tantrum" if scolded.

When I pop the battery back into my cell and idiotically turn it on so that the Nokia start-up tune sings loudly through the room and I have to cram it between my thighs in an attempt to mute it, Howell doesn't respond with more than a lazy wave of the hand. 'Phones on silent, please.'

At the desk diagonally behind me, Tristan and Lysander continue their chat, unbothered to whisper. Miles slouches beside them, fingers crooked into his cuffs. He thumbs the button as if resisting the urge to undo it, the same sentiment as scratching around a mosquito bite to trick the brain into forgetting the itch.

Howell speaks half-heartedly over the noise. 'Just a reminder that local elections are coming up. Those of you who are eighteen should have registered to vote by now, but if not, you've got two weeks left before the deadline. Otherwise, I'll give you detention.' He chuckles to himself, entirely aware that nobody is listening. 'No, I won't. That would have me out of a job.'

I prod a deep scrape on my desk. This is East Sussex we're talking about: Tories will win.

He drops into the blue office chair which croons loud enough for most of us to remember we're in school. Repetitively clicking a pen, he leans back to survey us. 'Anybody do something interesting this weekend they care to share?'

Lysander's tongue, ever the sharpest blade in a Swiss Army knife, is so quick to cut I see the blood before the sting arrives. 'Yeah, Leech, did you go visit your friends in juvie? Or wait... were you a total loser there too?'

Howell sits upright with a clack of the chair spine, tossing the pen to his desk. 'And that's enough sharing.'

My hands fist under the desk and I lock my spine into place as eyes poke the back of my neck. Don't look. Don't look. Don't—

But I do. I always do. Ever since Edenfield programmed me to expect constant surveillance, I identify eyes the way normally-anxious people check for emergency exits at gatherings or aeroplanes. There's always fire. My smoke alarm triggers from a match.

I turn to find Miles watching me. You know, don't you? How I'm wrestling back tears and how my heart still aches from the smile that my ribs naively let through.

Neither of us turns away until Lysander nudges him with arched eyebrows. Miles shakes his head: nowt, I weren't looking at nowt, and he doesn't spare me another glance.

Miles skims me like a book he's read dozens of times, so familiar with each word that he barely bothers to pay attention, then discards me, mid-chapter, with a lazy toss to the corner of the sofa for someone else to clean up.