School consumed so little of my time as a teenager, partly due to the low level of attendance that I had, and the amount of my days spent "playing truant" at home.

It wasn't always intentional. Sometimes, I would wake up in the morning, wait until my parents had left for their full-time jobs, and then decide on a final twenty minutes or so in bed until I had to walk into lessons. I would wake up at lunch time and decide that it would be worse to be so ridiculously late than to miss the entire day.

Eventually, it became intentional. After so many successful dodges, I knew exactly how to miss my lessons without being reprimanded. And I had my friends - a couple of years older than me and either unemployed or laid-back college students, and of course my new drug addiction, which almost definitely contributed to my need to be lazy and uneducated. School just kept me occupied and away from the moments in life that I felt most essential to my happiness.

But eventually, letters were sent home, and it was only for so long that I could put a spin on the situation, or trick my parents into thinking that it was days that they had allowed me to miss. Soon, my mum was driving me to school each morning - a last ditch attempt to get me into my lessons on time.

Sometimes, I would go to school, smoke heroin in the toilets before my lessons, and then sit bleary-eyed and semi-conscious whilst teachers tried to teach me. Other times, I would wait until mum was out of sight, slump over to the bus stop, and then pay a fare to take me straight back home, where I would spend the day nourishing myself with poison and intoxicants until my parents go home to find me in deep slumber, strung out from the day behind.

Yet, nobody caught on that I was a junkie.

I believe, on my parent's part, that it was sheer selfishness that made them ignorant to my habits. My father was a drug user himself, smoking bags of cannabis each evenings, clouding the lounge in a haze of sweetly scented smoke. My mother was an alcoholic, though not overly so, but she would easily down a bottle of wine or two each evening. They despised eachother, and this ritual was the only way that they could cope with their own marriage. But this escapism that they found only allowed my own problems to go unnoticed and masked behind the piles of wine bottles and overfilled marijuana ashtrays.

On the school's part, it was ignorance. They didn't want the school's ratings to fall, it was a highly reputable school that were close to becoming a recognized business college. They didn't want to have to deal with the extra funding that they would need to investigate the situation, to see how far my corruption had spread.

It hadn't spread at all. Not once while I was at school did I attempt to make friendships with any of the others in my year. On numerous occasions, girls would try to speak to me, mostly to ask about Dom and the others that met me at the gates. Curiosity, they said. I saw darker motives. If they knew about my relationship with Dom, understanding it to it's full extent, they would try and seek out the pitfalls or problems and exploit them to their best advantage.

They didn't think the shy and unsociable girl that nobody liked deserved a boyfriend as attractive as Dom. They thought Dom was an older boy, probably had a car or was at least having driving lessons, and maybe even had a job to buy them presents. He looked quite old, so if they were with him they could probably get into night clubs. And he was a trophy boyfriend, that they could wear as a handbag until he got boring or the relationship demanded they actually made an effort.

I hated them. I hated the boys that followed them around like puppy dogs, desperately hoping for their attention. I hated the teachers. And I hated everything about school.

So I was not happy to find Anicka at Kit's house, four years on from my school days, randomly dancing into my life.

She was in my biology class, she had an unusual need to know all of my secrets. We had argued on a few occasions where she had tried to make me respond to her during lessons. She had never learned anything about my life, but she had informed me on numerous occasions that she had been telling "the others" that I was quite nice after all, and that we were "quite good friends". I had hated her like I hated the others, only I hated her a bit more, because she rused my from my drugged sleep during lessons.

Anicka was the kind of girl that gave blow jobs in the boy's toilets and then bragged about it afterwards. I wonder if any boy ever touched her back, perhaps to make the deal a bit more fair. Anicka was quite proud of the fact that she had given over ten blow jobs at the age of fifteen. When she lost her virginity on her sixteenth birthday, she told me that blood filled the bedsheets and her mother knew instantly that she had been deflowered, as she was walking uncomfortably with her legs open for the next three days. She gave me the rather graphic details of the bruising between her legs. I was traumatized and horrified at the imagery.

When I saw her there, four years later, she had just returned from a date with Kit. She was his calibre of girl, and I knew that they were a match made in heaven, but I was still surprised to find her there.

The first thing I did was thank her, as if it hadn't been for her and her gorey "first time", I probably would have started having sex a lot sooner.