Don't Stop The Music

-one-

CHAPTER I

- overture –

[Liam]

Liam had expected his first day at sixth form to have a little more bang to it, a bit more pizzazz, fanfares and confetti falling from the sky, that sort of thing. So far there had been long talks from the headmistress, awkward ice-breakers and paperwork. The school was huge: part of it old brickwork and towers with ivy trailing up the walls, but with two or three more modern white plastered buildings, newly refurbished with gaping wide windows and flat roofs.

He'd met his form teacher and all of his classmates and then quickly forgotten them. The pretty year 13 girl leading them around, a short brunette – Pearl was the name on the sticky label – spoke too quickly, a faint blush colouring her cheeks, gesturing at the buildings and the tennis courts and the blocky buildings, leading their ragtag group to their next location, probably for another team building exercise or something.

"Anyway," Pearl said, looking at her timetable again. "I think we have...you'll meet your, um, new family members now. It's just this thing we do to get you all settled in. Basically, all the new year twelves get to meet a couple of people in the year above, so you have someone with experience, say if you need someone to go to for advice or something, especially about applying for universities and stuff, you know?"

She ushered their group into the cafeteria, where, sure enough, they were greeted by a fairly apathetic-looking group of year 13's milling around the coffee machines. Some of them looked up and nudged each other as they shuffled in, smirking. One of the girls outright squealed 'they're so cute!' despite the fact they were only a year younger than them, and Liam sighed inwardly. His parents were probably going to be assholes. The best kind of people.

Pearl went along with a list of names, grouping people together and sending them off with a list of questions to ask each other. Finally, she stopped in front of him.

"Okay..." she said, looking up at him and smiling briefly before glancing down at the list. She was prettier up close, with a soft dusting of freckles across her nose, wide hazel eyes and brown hair tied into a loose plait hanging over one shoulder. "You are...number 7." She pointed at the plastic picnic tables that made up most of the cafeteria, the front row of which had papers with large numbers taped to them. "Anthea and Neil. They're nice people, so don't worry about it, yeah?" She smiled again, and Liam secretly wished she was his mother, or sister, or however he and Niel and Anthea were supposed to be related.

He'd been at table 7 for a couple of minutes when someone sat down opposite him: tall and slender, with straight brown hair and green eyes framed by a pair of glasses. "Liam, yeah?" she asked, and when she nodded, continued: "I kinda hoped my son would be a bit taller."

Ouch.

"Watch out," he told her, "the short people are going to stage an uprising one day."

"That'll be cute."

"Of course, the ones who patronise us are the ones we'll lynch first."

"Better start thinking. How are you going to reach the top shelves if you lynch all the tall people?"

"High shelves will be abolished in the new world order, obviously."

"Well, let me know how your little coup progresses," Anthea said.

"Alright." Liam looked around, noticing that most of the groups had already got together by now. "So is it just you? Wasn't I supposed to have a dad?" he asked.

"Who, Neil? He couldn't make it," Anthea said lazily. "Don't worry, he's in a better place now."

"You killed my father?"