2015, Texas

‘OK, students, we’ll be arriving at the institute very shortly, so I want you all to be on your very best behaviour,’ said Mr Whitmore, absentmindedly scratching at the scruffy salt-and-pepper stubble around his mouth. He considered it a full beard even if no one else did. ‘As I’m sure you will be,’ he added.

Edward Chan sighed and looked out of the coach’s broad window at the scrub beside the highway. Outside the air-conditioned comfort of the coach it was another blistering Texas day. Hot and bright. Two things he hated. He much preferred his dark bedroom back in Houston, drapes drawn, an ultraviolet lamp making the manga posters on his black bedroom walls glow like the halogen signs outside some cool nightclub.

Dark and cool and peaceful. A place far away from the incessant noise of other kids, the shrill laughter of clusters of girls. High-school girls always seemed to come in clusters — mean, spiteful clusters that sniggered and whispered and pointed. And the boys… If it was possible, they were even worse. The jocks — the alpha-male types — loud, brash, great at sports, oozing easy confidence, gangsta rap hissing out of their iPod earbuds, high-fiving each other for any reason. Golden-tanned, sandy-haired, blue-eyed boys who, you could tell, would ease through school, ease through college, ease through life… and never once wonder if someone was whispering behind their back, laughing at them, pointing at them.

That was the tribal system at school: the girls — giggly gaggles of Hannah Montana clones, the jocks in their swaggering gangsta gangs

… and finally the third category, the ones like Edward Chan — the freaks. Loners, emos, geeks, nerds: the cookies that didn’t quite fit the cookie-cutter machine that was high school.