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her hair tied with multicoloured braid.
    Cali comes to the school office with me and somehow manages to persuade the lady there to let me be in the same class as her. She promises be my “class buddy” and show me around. The corridors here are long and grey anddark and smell of old cabbage and disinfectant. There are no flowers decorating the place, like in my old school and no gold carpets on the floors. Instead, everywhere is decorated with black and red bumblebee children zooming along the corridors and screeching up and down the stairs.
    “Slow down, ladies and gentlemen,” shouts a teacher, “and keep your voices down.”
    But no one listens. Everyone just carries on running and screaming. No one holds doors open for other people or offers to carry the teachers’ heavy bags. I feel small in this big place and am worried that I won’t fit in. I wish I hadn’t tied my hair back so neatly, I look stupid. I pull off my hair tie and shake my hair loose.
    “Cool hair,” says Cali, looking at my bright red curls.
    “Yours too,” I smile.
    At my old school I knew every single child and teacher by name and everyone there knew me. Here I know nobody, except Cali and I’m glad to have her next to me, she somehow makes me feel brave, like I could even face my dad with her around.
    My first lesson is drama. Our teacher is at least 190 years old and she makes us read scenes from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I quite like Shakespeare, but all the rest of the kids are groaning with boredom. Shakespeare’s only fun if you know how to read it properly, otherwise it’s just a string of difficult words that are hard to understand. My old drama teacher taught us to read it in time with a heartbeat, that way the whole thing suddenly comes alive.
    A boy with spiky hair, who is called Dylan, is interrupting our reading by having a fight with our teacher, Mrs MacDougall. He’s going on about the fact that she’s infringing his human rights by asking him to turn his mobile phone off during lesson time and Mrs MacDougall is trying to give him a calm and reasoned argument to dispute this. I know she’s not really feeling calm inside because a little stream of sweat is running down her face and on to her blouse collar, making a stain. I am shocked. I have never seen a pupil argue with a teacher before.
    A girl with white-blonde hair holds up a red card and runs out of the room.
    “She’s allowed to do it,” says Cali, seeing my surprise. “She has an anger problem, which means she sometimes just bursts into one big rage that disrupts the whole classand frightens the teachers. So it’s better for everyone if she gets herself to the ‘green room’ as quickly as possible to calm herself down.”
    Clusters of girls are whispering and giggling and not paying attention to any of what’s going on. Some boys at the back of the class are shooting bits of squished up paper through their biros to see who can be first to hit the bull’seye, which happens to be Mrs MacDougall’s head. There’s so much going on in our classroom that my eyes don’t know where to look next and I’m finding it hard to keep my attention on Shakespeare. Cali is sighing and gently bashing her head on the table in despair.
    “See what I mean?” she says. “It’s terrible here, we never get anything done. It’s so boring. Why can’t they just get on with it and they might even discover that they actually like Shakespeare! I bet nothing like this ever happened at your old school. You wait, we’ll just about be getting into it and we might even learn something and then the bell will go and we’ll have to pack all our stuff up and go on to our next lesson.”
    Cali is right because before we know it the bell’s ringing and we’re off to a P.E. lesson. We all get changed into black and red-striped P.E. kits and buzz around the sports halltrying to play basketball. But basically the whole lesson turns into one big fight and the teacher