English book, check. Pens, check. Homework diary, check. Maths homework, sort of check... ish. Courtney shoved her half-finished page of simultaneous equations into her bag, and grabbed a Galaxy bar from the back of her locker. She slammed her locker shut, pushing the door into the piece of blue tack that she kept stuck to the inside of the frame that kept her locker closed. She didn't have the attention span to keep track of a locker key for a whole year, anyway.

Courtney got the sense someone was watching her, like a prickly feeling in her shoulder. She glanced over her shoulder.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

"The fuck do you want, Jason?" She asked, picking up her bag.

"Wanted to know if you were going to English after this." He asked, an infuriating smirk playing across his lips.

Courtney waited for an explanation. "Why?" She asked, having finally realised that she wasn't getting one.

"Just answer the question." He said, flicking a pen between his fingers in a way he must have thought made him look cool. It didn't.

"You didn't ask me a question, fuckhead." Courtney said, already sick of talking to him.

"Yeah, I did." Jason said, squinting in confusion. Courtney gave him a look and he backed down. "Well, are you going to English now?"

"Yeah. I want to see who they've got in as a last minute replacement for Oswald. Me and TJ have bets." Courtney was kind of hoping it would be one of the terrible subs or, even better, a reincarnated/zombie Dr Black. "Why?"

"Thought I could walk with you." Jason said, with a small smile.

Courtney knew better than to trust that smile, she'd seen Jason throw it at teachers, friends, girls he was creeping on and it never ended well for anyone, well, except Jason of course. Courtney felt sick just looking at it.

"What?" Courtney laughed. "Oh, you've got to be fucking with me. Is this is your fucked-up way of apologising for yesterday? Because if so, frankly, you can fuck the fuck off." Somewhere, her Head of Year was losing her mind. She just had a way of sensing that Courtney was swearing on school site, even when she couldn't possibly be in earshot.

"I wasn't going to apologise–" Oh, of course he wasn't. He was Jason. Courtney laughed again. Jason stopped. "What?"

"What?" Courtney copied Jason's confused frown.

"You laughed." He explained.

"You just said you weren't going to apologise like it was a good thing." Courtney said, not understanding how Jason couldn't see the irony. "And I know you think you're the greatest thing ever to set foot on this meagre earth, but even literal actual deities have to apologise for being a dick, you pillock."

Jason stood there in silence for a moment, like he was in shock. "I don't think I'm–"

Courtney didn't let him finish. "Oh, so you're just a dick for no reason then? That's cool. No judging, I mean, I am too." Courtney waited for Jason to relax slightly before carrying on. He was a dick, he deserved the mood whiplash. "Just leave me the fuck alone or I'll rip your precious hair off your head."

Jason instinctively went to stroke his hair that Courtney was pretty sure was at least 85% product. "See you in class." He muttered, shuffling away.

"Fuck off, Jason." Courtney spat at him, a glob of saliva landing on the back of his blazer.

Courtney considered going to class. It was only English; it wasn't exactly hard and in the space of ten minutes the day before she'd already built the reputation of the girl the teachers just avoided. Eh, Miss Oswald's replacement wouldn't miss her that much.

Courtney meandered aimlessly through the corridors of Coal Hill, occasionally looking in on all the lessons going on. Apparently, someone had tipped off the office to the fact she (or someone else) wasn't in class, because Mrs Adams was patrolling the corridors with a furious look on her face, meaning Courtney had to hide behind some lockers a couple times. She was pretty sure that the second time, when she ducked behind the block of lockers used by 8S and 9M, she stuck her hand in a blob of fresh chewing gum. Fucking fantastic.

After about ten minutes of just walking around and not really having anything to do, Courtney eventually found herself sitting on the floor in the science department. From her position, she could hear Year Sevens or Eights shrieking in excitement about something. Probably some mundane experiment they'd end up doing a thousand times.

"You and I both know you're supposed to be in English."

Shit.

Courtney looked up to see Mrs Arkwright, her Head of Year, glaring down at her.

Courtney shrugged. "Maybe. I forgot my timetable."

"Well, isn't it good I found you?" Mrs Arkwright said, with mock enthusiasm. "I'll take you back to class, I'm sure Miss Oswald is missing you terribly."

"Didn't she quit?" Courtney asked, hauling herself to her feet.

Mrs Arkwright let out a short laugh. "You're not as intimidating as you think, Courtney."

Courtney rolled her eyes.

Mrs Arkwright walked Courtney to her English classroom and practically pushed Courtney through the door. "Courtney Woods for you, Miss Oswald."

Miss Oswald looked over at Courtney and smiled, apparently genuinely.

"I'm glad to see you found the time to grace us with your presence." She said, barely missing a beat.

What? Where was Miss scaredy-cat 'I've clearly never done this before' Oswald? Maybe it had been a ploy of some kind. Ugh. Fuck this. Now, Courtney was going to actually do some work. "I was just explaining to everyone who bothered to turn up on time what the schedule for this term is going to look like."

Oh, jeez.

Miss Oswald continued, "Now, since you've basically missed half a term's teaching it's going to be pretty full on to get you guys in a state where you're GCSE ready by July. I'm hoping I can count on you to do some reading outside of class as part of your homework, so that we can spend lessons discussing the texts rather than just reading them out."

Courtney dropped into the nearest seat and stuck her hand in the air. "Yes?" Miss Oswald looked at her expectantly.

"What books are we doing?" She asked, pulling out her English book and pen.

"Well, I thought we could start off the year with a bit of Macbeth." Miss Oswald smiled brightly, like what she had had anything close to a positive effect on the class.

"Isn't that a play?" Courtney asked.

"Yes."

"So it's not a book."

"No."

"So, why are we studying it?"

Miss Oswald pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. Courtney thought that now would have been a good time to remind her that she had chosen to be here; Courtney hadn't. "Because literature encompasses all forms of written work."

"What, even like Facebook statuses?" TJ asked.

Miss Oswald thought for a moment. "Yes."

"What about tweets?" Someone called out. Eloise perhaps?

She nodded. "Definitely."

"What about subtweets?"

Miss Oswald frowned slightly, scrunching up her nose. "What about what?"

"Subtweets." TJ said. She thought for a moment. "It's, like, when you tweet about someone but you don't say who it's about but everyone knows but no one says anything, 'cause no one wants to say that that shiii–" TJ trailed off, trying to think of something to say that wouldn't get her a warning, "bad thing that person wrote was about them 'cause then you're, like, throwing shade at yourself?"

Miss Oswald shrugged. "I don't see why a subtweet can't be literature."

"But how's a tweet literature? It's so short." Jason said, still fiddling with his pen. Courtney was ready to shove it down his throat.

"Well, the length of the–" Miss Oswald noticed Eloise apparently plotting Jason's murder from the far corner. "Yeah, go ahead, Eloise."

Eloise smiled that stupid smug smile of hers and took a deep breath. Courtney rolled her eyes. Holy crap, here we go.

"Okay, so like in a tweet, you're constricted by a certain number of characters? And there's loads of types of poetry that do the same kind of thing, just with like lines or syllables or whatever. And it means people can write really inspiring stuff but they are so restricted that the art is in like conveying a message actually worth reading in less than 140 characters. So, yeah it's definitely literature." Eloise smiled at her own apparent intelligence.

"Uh, surely literature has to say something meaningful?" Jason said, making sure to remind everyone that he thought he was the cleverest person in the room, including Miss Oswald. "And like most people just tweet their food or pictures of their cat or whatever. So it's not literature because it's just mindless and boring and literature is about preserving and understanding culture."

Eloise laughed. "But if literature is just preserving culture, then Twitter is, like, the epitome of literature. Because it's literally like a live thought stream of hundreds of millions of people, who literally are their own culture. Because that's what culture is."

Miss Oswald smiled that stupidly serene smile of hers. "Well, this certainly wasn't the direction I expected this lesson to take. If you two could just hold those thoughts whilst I give a quick rundown of what we're doing this term, I'm sure we'll return to this at some point."

Eloise huffed to herself and folded her arms. Jason, apparently, still had yet to process the complex noises coming out of Miss Oswald's face hole and carried on blathering. "Are you seriously telling me Twitter is more literary than–"

"Jason." Miss Oswald's smile didn't drop. Jason finally got the message and leaned back in his seat. "Right, so this term, we're going to be studying Macbeth, which will probably be the first Shakespeare you've studied, am I right?" The whole class nodded and murmured some generally positive-sounding grunts. "Good, okay. Right, so I'm just going to hand round some copies of the text. Now, these are yours to keep, so draw on them and highlight and annotate as much as you want, alright? Just keep your doodles to the margins." Miss Oswald picked up half the giant stack of books off the floor next to her desk. The whole tower was almost taller than she was. Not that that was saying much.

She walked around handing out books and generally being sickeningly nice to everyone, making Courtney want to puke.

"Miss Oswald?" TJ called out.

"Yes, TJ?" She answered, offering Eloise a book. She took it off her far too enthusiastically to be reasonable.

TJ held up the book, open on one random page, looking at it like it had killed a person. "How are we supposed to understand any of this? It's not even English."

Miss Oswald laughed slightly. "I know it might not look like it, but I promise you it is actually English. And don't worry, we'll be going through it together anyway. Shakespeare always looks like it's going to be much harder than it is."

Miss Oswald offered Courtney a copy. She looked at it and looked up at Miss Oswald and then back at the book and then back at Miss Oswald. Eventually, Miss Oswald gave in and just placed it on her desk. She turned to address the entire classs. "Okay, so once you've got a copy, write your name in the front so we can return them if you lose them. Has anyone ever seen Macbeth before?" Nobody spoke. TJ looked knowingly at Courtney. She glared back. Courtney wasn't about to say yes, even if it was true. "Okay, interesting. Do any of you know anything about Macbeth?"

One of the drama kids, Jay, put his hand up. Miss Oswald smiled at him encouragingly. "You can't say its name in a theatre." He said, confidently.

"Yeah." If Miss Oswald smiled anymore, her cheeks would probably crack.

"There are witches." Somebody else suggested.

"Isn't he, like, King of Scotland?"

"Loads of people die."

"He was married to Lady Macbeth?"

Miss Oswald nodded. "Anything else?"

"The trees walk up a hill?" A small ginger boy with giant glasses said, his voice barely louder than a whisper.

The whole class took a moment and then began to snigger.

Miss Oswald did her best to glare everyone into submission but owing to the fact that the first word that came to mind when you looked at her was 'adorable' or 'tiny', it had almost no effect. "Sorry, could you repeat that, uh, Max?" She asked, quickly checking Max's name on the list on her desk.

"Yeah, there's, like, a bit where the forest moves, I think." He muttered, suddenly absolutely shit-scared that anyone was paying attention to him. Despite his flaming red hair, people did their best to forget his entire existence. Courtney didn't feel sorry for him, it wasn't like everyone else told him to be a nerd.

"Did you say the trees walk up a hill?" Jason asked, twisting in his chair to look at Max.

"Yeah…" Max laughed nervously. "I mean, maybe not."

"Dude, this isn't one of your weird anime things. Shakespeare's stuff is about the real world. " He said, smugly. What. A. Fucktard.

"Well, I don't want to spoil anything for any of you, but I really wouldn't be so certain, Jason." Miss Oswald said, with something that might have been a smirk, were it not for the fact that she was a teacher, and had had to sacrifice her human emotions when she got her teaching qualification.

"Wha?" Jason mumbled.

"Macbeth's got witches in it, dipshit." Eloise said, rolling her eyes. It must have been a terrible affliction, being so intelligent.

"We can have a discussion without being rude, Eloise." Miss Oswald said, tutting slightly.

"Sorry." Eloise muttered, glaring at Jason. Jason and Eloise had been snapping at each other since Year Seven and Courtney was in no way prepared to deal with it for a whole year.

Miss Oswald grabbed a beaten up copy of Macbeth, full of post-its and folded up wads of paper, and opened it to the first page. "If you all want to open your books to the first scene, I thought we could have a little read-through of the first scene? Any volunteers for the witches?"

The back row of girls, who were perpetually upset that cheerleading wasn't something that people outside of the US actually pursued full time, even in school, put their hands up straight away.

Courtney couldn't help but smile at the image of the three witches from Macbeth as three bitchy cheerleaders, who were more concerned about their manicures than predicting the future. It was kind of perfect in a weird sort of way.

Now that Courtney had made an intellectual insight this lesson, albeit only in her head, she decided she was done for the lesson. The last twenty minutes before was the perfect time for a nap. Courtney yawned and put her head down on the desk, trying to get some shut-eye whilst the Mean Girls attempted to butcher Shakespeare.

Ugh. Teenagers.


A/N: I exist! Sorry for the stupidly long wait. I've been dealing with stuff, but now I'm back! Hopefully!