By the second term of Year Seven, Courtney Woods was already known to most, if not all, of the teaching staff as an infuriatingly intelligent troublemaker, who was in Wednesday detention so often she'd claimed one of the desks as her own and put the hour she spent there every week on her timetable.

Now that Courtney was entering Year Nine, she had firmly cemented her place as 'that child' or, in her own words, 'the demon spawn of Coal Hill'. Every teacher, regardless of whether they had ever taught her or not, knew her name and her face. In fact, most of them could recognise her from the back at the other end of the main corridor, and that was before she opened her mouth. Courtney even had it on good report that her picture was on the wall in the staffroom under a label, 'report any incidents to Steve'. Steve, or Mr Cunningham as Courtney was supposed to call him, was the head teacher at Coal Hill School. To most of the students, especially the little Year Sevens, Mr C was terrifying. Being the highest power in the school practically made him Cthulhu – the beard didn't exactly help the image–, with all the teachers being his weird little cult. However, to Courtney he was just a guy who just wanted Courtney to pass her exams and stop making the Year Sevens cry. And that didn't exactly hold any kind of gravitas with her.

Coal Hill tried almost everything they could think of: report cards, exclusions, reduced privileges. At one point they'd kept a running total of how many cautions she got each week, in the hope that seeing the apparently 'horrendous' totals would make Courtney re-evaluate her life choices. Instead, Courtney just tried to see how high a score she could get each week. And then how high she could get without swearing at any teachers. And then how high she could get without speaking unless directly addressed. And then how high she could get without saying anything at all. Mr Cunningam gave up on the idea pretty quickly.

The latest idea was to put Courtney in counselling sessions, just to make sure she didn't have any 'behavioural problems'. Courtney found this more than a bit insulting. If they'd just bothered to ask her, she could have told them that no, she didn't have trouble concentrating or managing her behaviour or understanding her feelings, she just hated school. It was that simple.

Well, it had been.

In the second week of Year 9, Courtney's English teacher, Dr Black, just up and left, leaving behind a huge stack of unmarked English controlled assessments and a truly astonishing number of tea stains on the wooden floor of his classroom for a man who'd been using the room for less than ten days. Unsurprisingly, Courtney found herself at the centre of attention, if anyone at Coal Hill could convince a teacher to leave in two weeks, it was Courtney.

But, for once, Courtney hadn't actually done anything. Her mum had threatened her with a Scottish boarding school run by scary nuns and so, for the first few weeks of Year 9 at least, Courtney was on best behaviour. So with Courtney out of the running, a whole bunch of other theories popped up. Alien abduction, affair, convict, secret assassin, debilitating crush on Mr Matthews (who could blame him?), the rumours steadily got worse and worse until some Year Eleven hit the jackpot. He'd been murdered. In the library. With a lead piping.

Courtney was pretty pissed off she hadn't thought of it. Not only was it annoyingly intelligent, it was also sensational enough that all the Year Sevens who didn't get the joke were talking about it anyway. The only problem with it was that it got so out of hand that they had to have a whole school assembly in which Mr Cunningham explained that Dr Black was in fact alive and well in Barbados and that insinuating he was dead and making light of it by likening to a game of Cluedo was 'strictly against the ethos and tenets of Coal Hill school'.

Whatever that meant.

After half a term of the world's worst substitute teachers, Courtney had all but given up on English lessons. They were quickly just becoming regular napping sessions for her and the rest of Set B. And then one Tuesday afternoon in November, having spent a week truanting and finding out that being in school and being able to piss off teachers was actually way more fun than hiding from the entire adult population of London, she strolled into her English classroom to find some sixth former she didn't recognise writing a whole list of books in cutesy cursive on the glass board thing they were using as a temporary replacement for the dented whiteboard in the corner. Apparently, one of the Year 12s had thrown his laptop at it in frustration.

"Uh, excuse me, I'm supposed to have an English lesson in here right now." Courtney said, standing in the doorway.

"I was wondering when you would all start turning up." The sixth former turned around and smiled at Courtney. She was about the same height as Courtney and looked like she'd just fallen out of a Topshop advert. Courtney never did understand what was so exciting about A-Levels that rendered school uniform apparently unnecessary. "Do you know what time the lesson is supposed to start? I'm sorry, I haven't got my head around the timetable yet." The sixth former smiled to herself.

"Afternoon lessons start at two thirty ish." Courtney said, still confused as to why a sixth former didn't know her own timetable yet after doing the same thing week in, week out for almost two months.

"You're a bit early then." The sixth former said, glancing at the clock. Courtney looked up. 2:24 PM.

"What can I say? I'm super keen." Courtney said, giving the sixth former her best 'I'm a Year Seven and I'm excited to learn about the Tudors for the fifteenth time' look.

"Fancy sitting at the front then?" The sixth former smiled at her and nodded at the front centre desk.

"Fuck that." Courtney muttered as she dragged her feet to the seat furthest from the glass/whiteboard.

The sixth former sat down in her chair. "I'm not deaf, you know." She said. Her sing-song voice was beginning to get on Courtney's nerves and she'd only known her two minutes.

Courtney shrugged. "Sorry." She really wasn't in the mood for prefects who thought they were better than everyone else.

"Don't apologise. Just try not to limit yourself to such uninteresting language." She said, typing on the keyboard of the truly ancient computer in the corner.

Courtney had nothing to say in reply to such a pretentious statement, so she slumped down into her chair and pulled out her phone. Twitter was dead and everyone on Tumblr was reblogging the same three photos of Benedict Cumberbatch's face. Typical. She shoved her phone back in her pocket just as the bell rang.

Within a minute or so, the classroom was full of very tired, very unenthused Year 9s who wanted nothing more than to go home so they could sit around and complain there instead.

"Oi oi." TJ slammed her bag down on the desk next to Courtney's.

"Afternoon." Courtney said, shoving TJ's bag onto the floor before TJ could even consider filling Courtney's desk with all of her stuff.

"I thought you'd given up on school." TJ said, sitting down and pulling out a battered exercise book and a single pen that had been chewed to the point that calling it a pen anymore was tenuous at best.

Courtney shrugged. "Got bored."

"You got bored of not being in school? Courtney, you're such a fucking weirdo." TJ said, laughing and shoving Courtney in the arm.

The sixth former coughed purposefully and stood up. "Afternoon everyone, I'm Miss Oswald and I'm here to replace your previous English teacher and his, er, successors. Now, I thought we'd start with a bit of an ice breaker…"

Okay, so maybe she wasn't a sixth former.