She feels like an outsider in her own country. Technically she’s only a quarter English so maybe that’s part of it. She looks English, with her thin blonde hair and big blue eyes, but at the same time she doesn’t, with her tanned skin and a host of worldly experiences on her shoulders. She is thirteen years old, and she has lived overseas for as long as she can remember.

 

Fresh off a plane from Bangkok, she starts a new school. It’s February, the middle of a term. It’s cold and grey and hasn’t stopped raining since she arrived. This is the first time she’s been away from her mum for a long period of time. She’s scared but knows this is better than the alternative of staying in Thailand. At school in the headmaster’s office she is told that there are three other new students starting that day with her. One is from Nigeria, he says, and there are several other international students here already. The Nigerian boy is actually from East London and has never been to Africa despite his distant heritage. The other international students include a Polish girl who’s lived in the small rural town her whole life and speaks fluent English, and an Irish girl. The lack of diversity is shocking. Up until now she has been proud of her background, happy to have lived in so many different places and to have experienced their cultures. She soon realises that here, in this narrow-minded, white, middle-class area, change is not good, and anything different that they don’t understand, they make fun of.

 

When she says she moved here from Thailand but is actually from Abu Dhabi, they laugh at her, mocking her “posh”, non-regional, international accent. They don’t even know where Abu Dhabi is, but the name sounds funny to them and that’s enough to set them off. They tease her about her appearance, something she’s never really paid attention to before. Her chin sticks out, apparently, and she’s not a size 6 like most of the girls in her year. She’s at least half a foot taller than them, but no one seems to take that into consideration. Her taste in music is wrong; she likes Green Day and Avril Lavigne and lots of stuff in between, but not the UK Top 40 because she’s never heard of that before. No one plays games at lunch time; everyone sits around outside in groups talking about nonsense. They bore her; she hates it here. She cries every day for a month.

 

People in her year talk about drinking, how they go to each other’s houses and get drunk on cheap beer and bottles of vodka that someone’s older brother has bought for them. Their parents seem not to care, or are absent, or are oblivious to the lies their precious angels tell so effortlessly. They talk about sex, something she’s only ever read about in magazines and giggled about with her best friend, but these are real life graphic accounts of 13 and 14- year-old girls having sex with older guys in the middle of fields. Probably over half of the girls in her year have lost their virginity, even though some of them haven’t even started their periods yet.

 

No one cares about what she has to say, and every time she does speak they tease her about her perfect grammar or lack of slang use. They can’t even begin to comprehend the things she talks about so easily, things that she thinks are completely normal – like spending her days at the hotel beach club, shopping in the malls, and getting mani pedis every weekend. Growing up in the desert she has picked up some quirks, but that’s what makes her unique, not a clone like the rest of them. She clings to this knowledge and hopes it will be true one day, as she grows quieter, preferring to create imaginary worlds in her head instead of being part of their real one. She feels embarrassed to be English; she knows she is nothing like them and will never belong here.

 

She only started her period a month before and she only started shaving her legs right before she left Thailand. She suddenly feels an enormous pressure to look like the other girls here. She doesn’t wear make-up to school as she’s never been allowed, but the girls here are caked in it. When she does wear make-up, and dutifully brings it to school so that she can join the girls in the bathroom at each break to reapply it, they mock her again for not having the same products as them. She doesn’t have the energy to explain that hers are much better than theirs – her Dior mascara and Chanel lip gloss are her essentials – and doesn’t have the heart to mock them back for pronouncing the names wrong. She leaves her hair to dry naturally as she’s used to the heat doing the work for her, but here it hangs limply around her shoulders, damp for hours in the miserable weather. Everyone else’s hair is dead from all the products and dye they subject it to, and she thinks it looks awful, but apparently hers looks worse. She’s never really noticed whether she’s pretty or not, nor has she ever really cared, but now she feels like a mouse amongst a pack of lions, and she fears they will eat her alive.