Kaylene sat on the edge of her bed and sighed, nervously twirling her long, naturally blonde hair around her fingers. It was her first day at her new college in this new strange town, and the reputation of the place worried her.
It was one of the few colleges in the UK where strict uniform and behavioural codes were implemented. Often, because post-16 education is non-compulsory, colleges are lax on behaviour and rarely have strict uniform codes. However at Elderflower College, Rotherham, this was not the case. Mostly because Elderflower provided educational services for students who skipped, outright failed, or were expelled from key courses such as English and Maths. It was truly scraping the bottom of the educational barrel.
Amongst the negative reviews and news articles she found when researching the place, many of them were regarding students performing lewd acts in the toilets or even in classrooms, often with other students or, in rarer cases, with teachers. Online fight videos, party antics, and Facebook drama constantly streamed from Elderflower, and many of them made her virginal body shudder at their content.
Everything had changed suddenly for Kaylene. Her father, a well-respected and affluent lawyer, had finally had enough of her mother's dramatic tendencies. He decided he was sick of her constant negativity and took off, promising Kaylene he would contact her when he had a steady place to live sorted in a few weeks.
Kaylene's mother took it horribly. She decided she would act in the most spiteful and difficult way possible against her father; she moved them away to one of the only places she could afford in a hurry, a shitty flat in Rotherham arguably worse than a council flat. Kaylene took the move poorly, but as her disposition was akin to that of a mouse, her mother talked over her to the point where she could only squeak out a miserable "Yes, Mother." as she followed her terrible decisions.
Now Kaylene was dressed in her white collared shirt and black tie, black blazer embroidered with the namesake flower, and black skirt down to the knee. Underneath were black tights and a modest pair of white undies, matching her basic white bra that covered her pert young tits, just shy of C-cups. She was a natural, virginal beauty. The sight of her soft, fair skin would have any man frothing at the mouth for her; but she was raised quite reserved and didn't buy into the modern-age feminist propaganda that casual sex is cool. She wished to be patient, to wait for a traditional marriage with the right man.
She checked herself in the mirror, which rested against a wall adorned with ragged wallpaper that it seemed the previous tenant decided they did want after all halfway through removing it. From a four-bed detached house with a garage to a cold flat in Rotherham, she thought, and shook her head.
"Kaylene! You'll be late!" Her mother shouted. Kaylene shut her bright green eyes tightly for a second, hoping that when she opened them it would all have been a terrible dream. To her disappointment, when she opened them, it of course was not.
Exiting her room which opened directly into the living room, she turned right into the cramped kitchen area. Her mother sitting at a small glass table chugging coffee, furiously browsing job sites on her phone.
"Do I look okay, mum?" Kaylene asked hopefully. Her mother lifted her gaze from her phone for two seconds and looked her up and down, then went back to scrolling.
"Sure. You're a little pale. Maybe try a darker foundation." She responded dismissively.
Kaylene sighed and grabbed her black rucksack from the table. She wasn't wearing any foundation, just a touch of mascara and eyeliner and some pink lip balm she liked the colour of; it also kept them nice and soft. She was pale for a blonde, she would admit, but had never been fond of inauthentic tanning methods such as the sunbed or liquid fake-tan. She certainly enjoyed tanning in the sun when she could; not that the dreary English winter would allow her to anytime soon. For a moment she daydreamed of a time three years ago, when her father took the three of them on an all-inclusive week to a five-star hotel in Ibiza. If she closed her eyes she was there again, poolside, lazily sipping non-alcoholic Piña Colada...
"Kaylene!" Her mother barked again. "Bus! Five minutes!"
Kaylene's shoulders slumped. It wasn't such a rush to get to the bus that stopped directly outside the flat complex, but she still had to travel down three flights of stairs to get there.
She walked out into the bare concrete hallway, walls sprayed with various unintelligible graffiti. She loathed urban 'street art' in all its forms although she couldn't say with any honesty that the confused attempts at sprayed gang-signs were in any way masquerading as art.
Hearing the reverberations bouncing off the walls from the alcoholic couple arguing three doors down, she quickly turned left to the end of the hallway, past rows of red doors, each one leading to an equally squalid flat. Why can't they give it a rest? She thought. It's half past seven in the morning!
They had only been in the flat a week but Kaylene had already learned to take the stairs as quickly as she could. Twice there had been a gang of dishevelled Pakistani youths lingering on them, reeking clouds of marijuana hanging in the air. The first time she walked past they whistled and clucked at her, laughing as her pale cheeks blushed and she hid her face. The second time she pulled the hood of her navy blue raincoat up over her head and basically ran up them before the stoned youths knew she was there. At this time in the morning, however, the stairs were expectedly clear, and she took her time descending them.
Stepping over a shin-high pile of junk mail and wet old newspapers, she buzzed herself out of the steel security door in the lobby area, also painted horribly with various overlapping gang-signs. The bus stop was directly on her doorstep. Despite the high population of the five-storey flat complex, the bus stop wasn't even erected as a shelter, just a dingy blue sign on a pole. To her left she saw the corner shop that was a handy distance away, to her right on the very end of the street was an ancient pub known as The Mariner's. Across the road was a drab row of council bungalows.
At the bus-stop she found herself next to a nice little old lady who had a floral umbrella opened up to deflect the drizzling rain. The grey-haired lady must have been made three times her original width from the layers of purple and blue fleeces and coats she wore, and with a warm smile she raised the umbrella and shuffled to one side, making room for Kaylene.
"Oh, you don't have to." Kaylene smiled back and gestured to her waterproof hood, which did a meagre job of guarding her from the grey drizzle.
"Nonsense! You're too pretty to drown in this cold rain, dear." The warm smile again. "Besides, you can give my aching arm a rest while we wait." Kaylene laughed at the cheekiness of the little old woman. She reminded her of her own passed-away maternal grandmother.
"Thank you." Said Kaylene, and accepted umbrella responsibilities from the woman. "It should only be a few minutes for the bus, I think." The old woman looked at her strangely for a second, before bursting out laughing.
"Ha! I needed that on a Monday morning." She chuckled. Kaylene was puzzled.
"It comes at twenty-to-eight, right?" She asked.
"My dear, it's supposed to come at twenty-to-eight. That means we'll be lucky to see it by ten-to."
Call it cronic wisdom, or traditional British pessimism, but the old lady was right. The bus arrived twelve minutes late at seven fifty-two, and by that time Kaylene was grateful for the umbrella. The two exchanged pleasantries while they waited. The bus was a little packed, so Kaylene ceded a front seat to the nice old lady and travelled to the back. Instantly the atmosphere changed as she felt eyes on her from the back row.
From left to right across the three back seats scowling at her was a feisty looking brunette with thickly drawn eyebrows, a blonde bimbo type with bright pink lipgloss and long, painted pink nails, and a fat, sweaty girl with greasy black hair forced up in a bun. All three wore the Elderflower uniform, but where Kaylene wore it in her preppy and modest way, the blonde and brunette unbuttoned shirts and loosened ties to show cleavage, and their skirts ended around mid-thigh with no tights and high boots, strictly against the dress code Kaylene had studied. The fat girl looked like she simply didn't know which button went where and had created a mismatch; her tie was a rough knot. She wore baggy trousers with big square shoes at the end.
Kaylene felt apprehensive as she sat on the only empty row two seats away from them. There was the odd Elderflower uniform in sight, but the majority seemed to be normal people heading to work. She clocked an older man near the front of the bus with a brown scratchy beard and square glasses. He was at least mid-thirties, in a smart brown blazer, clutching a laptop bag in his hands and gazing out the window. She figured him for a teacher type.
Something bounced lightly off the back of her blonde ponytail and fell to the floor. She knew from the feel it was balled-up paper and turned to see the three girls sniggering. She turned back and sighed, knowing the fifteen-minute journey was sure to be a fun one. Her phone buzzed in her bag. A text from Dad.
Hey love. Thinking of you. Hope the flat isn't too bad. Just found a place two miles away that's nice. Visit this weekend? Dad. X
Her spirits lifted automatically and a big smile plastered across her face, almost chuckling to herself at the characteristic way he signed his name at the end of the text despite it popping up every time anyway. She wrote back.
Hey Dad! Of course!! Can't wait to catch up. X
She had two more paper balls bounced off her head, but not even lead ones could have dulled her mood as she grinned her sparkling white happy smile the whole way to college, thinking of seeing her father for the first time in over a month.
___________________________________
Her eye had treated her well as she saw the teacher get off at the bus shelter outside Elderflower College. The three chav girls toned their rowdy behaviour down around him. He had a strange mixed aura of being a stringent academic along with something else... Confidence?
Kaylene decided to follow him down the brown paved pathway. Elderflower had large green metal gates and a bright welcome sign across from the bus shelter, but the college itself was offset from the pavement, a two-minute walk up the paved pathway to the main doors. Dallying patches of youths dragged their feet up the path and the brown-stubbled teacher shepherded them in.
