Life's Lottery by Kim Newman

practical purposes a nun.
    Though three school populations are amalgamated, there’s little mixing. You’re in lessons with Hemphill kids and hang around with them at breaks. Some kids (Michael Dixon, Mary Yatman) you were at infants’ school, even kindergarten, with are around. You don’t talk to them unless you have to.
    You had expected armed combat with the Marling’s boys, but it rarely comes to that. Hemphill lads think grammar schoolies are posh and soft and brainy. Some of them, like Michael, are. As Shane solicits homework help from you, you worry that deep down you’re posh and soft and brainy too. More and more, you think about your Eleven Plus. How might things have been if you hadn’t failed it? Is the worst thing in the world to be posh and soft and thick? You actually make an effort in some of your classes (English, French) but it’s a struggle. It’s not the work you have to overcome, it’s the sluggishness of your classmates and even the teachers.
    You get fed up with Shane, Dickie, Barry, Paul and Vanda. They’re so impatient to get out of school and ‘on with it’ that they keep getting into trouble. You get dragged in with them too often. Dickie has a maniac streak (he threw the first stone at that bloody dog, you remember) and commits an escalating series of acts of vandalism. The prefab classrooms are flimsy and Dickie discovers that he can head-butt cracks in the pasteboard walls, even punch right through them.
    It makes sense to distance yourself from your long-time friends, and you spend more time with Vince Tunney and, oddly, Marie-Laure. The three of you are all-round out-of-its, too clever for CSEs, not clever enough for O Levels. You admit to Vince that you find the prospect of life after school terrifying. You don’t want to go down the Synth, you’ve decided. But you don’t want to work in a bank or an estate agent’s either. You don’t want to drag things out by going to college or university. You think of joining the merchant marine and joke about running away to become a pirate.
    Vince would like to be a comic-book artist but isn’t very good. In the art room, he sees superhero panels drawn by Mickey Yeo, one of the O Level stream, and is forced to recognise how inadequate his own work is. He can never get hands right. Marie-Laure is torn between staying at home – her rich parents are screwed up enough to support her without a second thought – and travelling to India. She’s the first person you know who tries marijuana. You and Vince sometimes go to her house in Achelzoy, a village outside town, and loll around her bookless room, getting stoned. Her mum and dad are never home at the same time.
    You want time to stop, now. Then you wouldn’t have to think about the future, the imminent after-school. Without noticing it, you’ve become a grown-up. You’re sixteen. The fun is over. Vanda and Shane announce their engagement. Paul, Barry and Dickie bunk off school most of the time. Marie-Laure’s hands won’t stop shaking. Vince endlessly catalogues and rearranges his comics. Ahead of you, a shadowy void gapes. You are sure there are cobwebs stretched invisibly across the path, waiting for you.
    * * *
    At the end of your first year at Ash Grove, your fourth year in secondary school, you have interviews with your class teacher and a careers officer. You worry that the only ambitions you’ve ever had, to be a pirate or an astronaut, won’t impress them.
    Mr Bird, your class teacher – you don’t have him for any lessons, just for a ten-minute get-together in the morning – looks over your report and asks if you want to shift from maths and French CSE to O Level courses. He thinks you’ve got a chance of passing.
    ‘You should seriously think about it,’ he says.
    You don’t know. Can you keep up with the more demanding work? And will two O Levels to go with six CSEs mean anything in a year’s time, when you pass out into the void?
    If you transfer to the O