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 hair, 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.

I'm not even gay. I've been attracted to people who aren't men. Not that Tristan would care.

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.

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 football 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 everything I need.

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 judgment. 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 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.

Notes

Zuhr: Noon prayer

Bent/bender: Derogatory language for someone being gay/a gay person

Food bank: A place where food, typically basic provisions and non-perishable items, can be collected free of charge by people in need

Nowt: Nothing