The dream I was having ended abruptly with the sensation of falling and then waking up after smashing my head on the floor.

Falling out of bed is never the best start to anyone's morning but having a hard, wooden floor with no carpet certainly doesn't help. And having an unnaturally high bed.

"Ow..." I held both hands to my forehead, wincing in pain as the sharp pain began to dissipate leaving the dull, throbbing sensation that filled my head like the worst migraine in history. Or a hangover, both were just as bad. "Ow..." I moaned again, steadily pushing myself up to my feet, so I could stagger over to the mirror to examine the mark, and hoping that I wasn't about to see blood because it was too early in the morning for that drama.

I peered at the sleep deprived boy with a mess of brown hair and bright green eyes in the mirror with a crack running through his face from where a textbook had been thrown across the room in frustration while the thrower was thinking about why he'd thought GCSE history was a good idea. I stuck my tongue out at the mirror boy and he stuck his tongue out at me as I stared at the bruise on my head that was already beginning to turn purple. Great. The last day of high school ruined by a bruise shaped like a plank of wood slap bang in the middle of my forehead.

I glared at myself before stalking out of my room and into the shower, stopping momentarily to listen for any signs that my little brother and sister were awake yet. All quiet. I flicked on the light and had a brief battle with the shower before it began to spit out its pathetic bursts of water onto the wall. No rust today though, I thought as I stripped and stepped in. I jumped back, it's still bloody freezing though. After my circulation had been kicked into high gear I silently crept back into my room and managed to find a uniform that didn't smell too bad, and then opened the curtains allowing the early morning light to flow in, casting long shadows over everything it touched.

It was a nice sight, in its own unique way. The last remnants of the early morning mist curling away into the dew filled air, the concrete tower blocks standing tall and proud despite their ugliness and the faint roar of London's rush hour echoing through the window. Unique beauty that didn't distract me from the day. I sighed, pulling myself away from the window and walking out of my room and into the kitchen.

"Morning Mum," I said as I walked in.

Mum turned to me and gave me a warm smile. "Morning sweetheart," she walked over to give me a kiss on the forehead when she suddenly noticed the bruise. "Nick, what have you done to your head?"

"Oh this," I rubbed the bruise. "Oh, this is just a memoir from the three-headed demon I was fighting last night." She gave me the look that only a mother can manage. I grinned, "I fell out of bed and hit my head on the floor."

She shook her head and rolled her eyes, "you could have just said that."

"And not even try to protect my dignity?"

"What dignity?" she grinned. We had a similar sense of humour, which did come in handy when I got into trouble for doing something stupid at school, like calling my drama teacher a cankerous old crackpot.

"Ha, ha, very funny," I plonked myself down at the table and began pouring cornflakes into a bowl.

Mum was busying herself in the kitchen, making my little brother and sisters breakfast while also packing their schoolbags. "Must have been some nightmare you were having," she said without turning around.

Yet another piece of evidence to suggest that my mother is a telepath. "Are you sure that you're not psychic? Because I swear that you can read my mind."

"I'm your mother, I can always read your mind. What was it about anyway? It must have been bad if you fell out of bed."

I thought for a while, desperately trying to claw back the fragments of the dream, but nothing would come. I shook my head, "I'm afraid I've got nothing, total blank spot."

She sighed, her sea blue eyes shining, "never mind, but finish up quickly. We need to get the kids up."

I nodded, taking another spoonful of cornflakes and then taking a glance at the paper. I'm pretty much the only sixteen-year-old in the world to read the newspaper over social media but as a self-diagnosed technophobe it works for me just fine. As I scanned the front page something caught my eye. Hidden amongst the heavy black print of the latest football scores, offers on organic Frappuccino's and the most recent celebrity breakup story was a small story that made me stop dead. I quickly flipped over the page and read the headline. I almost fell out of my chair.

"Anything good?" Mum asked, her back was turned to me, so she couldn't see my wide eyes and rapidly paling complexion.

I gulped. "Not exactly."

She turned now and saw that something was really bothering me, "what's wrong?" She followed my gaze, "oh my god."

Written in bold black writing, taking up a good quarter of the page the headline screamed, PANIC RISES AS THE SEARCH FOR MISSING SCHOOLGIRL CONTINUES. I took a deep breath and began to read aloud. "Fear continues to mount as the hunt for missing schoolgirl continues. Fifteen-year-old Rose Coultard disappeared yesterday afternoon and a missing persons report was filed by her parents after the girl did not return from her school. She seemingly vanished into thin air after being sent to the school nurse after she became ill during one of her classes. When one of her friends went to check on her after the lesson had finished, Rose was nowhere to be found and the school nurse reported that she had not actually arrived. When the girl's parents also confirmed that she had not arrived home the metropolitan police were scrambled, and the search began that would last long into the night.

However, the disappearance of Rose Coultard has a fair element of the bizarre added to it, inside the school building along the third floor a good deal of the walls had been damaged including one which had been completely knocked down but no one in the entire school claimed to have heard any sign if a struggle. Secondly Rose was never seen leaving the school grounds, no camera caught her leave, but they did capture a group of five people walking into the school grounds but once again they were never seen leaving either. And finally, the body of the school's head of security was found lying dead outside one of the entrances in a camera blind spot. Henry Parker, a husband and father of two with no previous reports of ill health or hereditary health problems had his brain crushed from a force equivalent of being hit head on by a car travelling at 120mph. Police are now treating both incidents as a possible murder although the search for Rose will continue until she is found, one way or another. The girl was last seen wearing a burgundy blazer with the Lady Cartwright logo on the right side, a grey skirt, black tights and bee shaped neckless. If you have any information, please call this number." I put the paper down and leaned back in my chair, "Christ almighty..." I muttered and for once Mum didn't tell me off, she was too busy rereading the page herself. "That makes her, what, the sixtieth kid to vanish this year?"

Mum nodded. "Fifty ninth."

Over the last seven months nearly sixty kids between the ages of eight and nineteen had disappeared without a trace all over the UK and so far, none of them had turned up. At first no one had been that bothered, it's a sad fact of life that people go missing all the time, but when the number began to climb to double digits people started to get worried. Every new disappearance became headline news, with children vanishing from primary schools, parks and on the streets while teenager's friends would suddenly turn around to suddenly see nothing but air standing next to them. But this one was different, no one had died, but now there was a guy lying on the concrete floor that had suddenly had his head ruptured. None of it made any sense.

"What's happening to the world," I said quietly. Mum didn't say anything and now that I got a better look I could see that her knuckles were turning white from clenching her fists together. "Mum? Are you alright? What's wrong?" I was really worried about her. Maybe the news had upset her, especially considering today was the two-year anniversary, but I'd never seen her act like this. "Mum?" I gently placed a hand on her arm which seemed to bring her back to reality.

"I need to show you something," she said walking for the door.

Puzzled, I followed her out onto the walkway and down to the corner of the floor where she pointed at an alleyway just visible from up here. It was surrounded by yellow police tape and the CSI in their white suits were picking their way through the rubbish bins and broken glass that littered the floor.

"I saw it this morning when I was coming back from work," she said calmly. "I asked one of the officers what was going on." She paused and looked at me, something about her expression was unsettling. "They found that girl's bag in the alleyway, they also found a lot of blood and a knife." She let that sink in as I stared at the scene below us with horror and grim fascination.

"Where was she going?" I muttered. I leaned over the balcony looking left and right. "She was from Lady Cartwright, that's in Kensington, what the hell was she doing over here?"

"Nick..."

"Where was she going? There's nothing around here except for the woods, where was she going?"

"Nick, listen to me."

"Why would she be here?"

"Nick!" I quickly turned to face Mum, her arms were folded, and she was giving me a very hard stare. I'd never seen her look this serious in my life. "From now on you're not walking to school on your own."

I was appalled, she hadn't walked me to school since I was ten. "What! But Mum, I can manage."

"I don't care," she snapped, "I don't want you going anywhere on your own anymore, I want you back in the flat at four o'clock sharpish and you are certainly not going out after dark."

I was taken aback by her tone and sudden fierceness. "Don't you think this is a bit of an overreaction? It could happen to anyone."

"Anyone includes you," she gently placed her hands on my shoulder, "I'm not losing you as well, not today."

I didn't know what to say after that last part, I just stood there, but tears pricked the back of my eyes. She gave me a final smile as Maxie and Lilah stuck their heads out of the open door and came charging down the walkway in their pyjamas and slippers waving two rulers above their heads claiming that they were swords. We both laughed as Mum scooped up the little pirates and sent them running back into the flat.

"In the meantime, let's get the terrible twosome sorted," she gave me a final smile as she left me standing there for a little while longer, looking down at the place where Rose Coultard had been. Sparing one final glance at the woods on the hill I turned and headed back inside.

As per usual with small children, Maxie and Lilah were blissfully unaware about the world, today's events or what today signified for them, but they were only little when it had happened so how were they to know? The walk to school wasn't a long journey but it certainly felt different, maybe it was because Mum was there, and she had to keep stopping to push the twins away from shop windows with shiny displays of sweets and toys every few seconds, or perhaps it was that the streets seemed a lot more crowded as almost every kid I saw was accompanied by a grownup, but I couldn't shake the feeling that something felt odd.

"Who's that lady?" said Lilah suddenly. It stopped me dead in my tracks, we were only a few feet from the primary school, but wave of panic suddenly washed over me.

I knelt next to Lilah, "What lady?" I asked.

She turned and pointed at a girl, no more than my age standing next to a lamppost, her phone pressed against her ear. I sighed with relief, just Lilah's imagination playing up. "It's just a person in the street, no one to worry about."

Lilah looked puzzled, "You mean you don't know her?"

Now it was my turn to be confused. "No...Why do you ask?"

"Because she said your name."

How was I supposed to respond to that? Part of me was reasoning that there are lots of guys called Nick, it could have been anyone she was talking about, but then there was that other part of me, the part with a very sick feeling brewing in his stomach. "Nick's a common name Lil, it might have been anyone she was talking to."

"No!" she said sternly, "I heard her she said 'So all I have to go on is that he goes to Skinners Park, he's sixteen years old and his first name's Nick. Is that all you have now?' That's what she said, word for word."

I was now very nervous, the rational side of me had been beaten down with a very big stick and my paranoia was thriving. I looked up ahead at Mum and Maxie who were both looking at us, one curiously and the other was clearly getting bored.

"Hurry up slowcoaches!" yelled Maxie, running down grabbing me and Lil by the hands and dragging us both along to the school gates where the twins ran inside without even saying goodbye, Lilah had clearly forgotten about our little conversation and was now more concerned about playing with her friends. Me and Mum waved them both inside and then headed down the road towards Skinners Park high school.

"What was going on there?" Mum asked as soon as we were away from the gates. "And why do you keep looking over your shoulder like that?"

I hadn't even realised that I was looking over my shoulder. "Lilah told me that someone said my name."

"Well Nick is hardly uncommon," she began.

I continued, "She also said my age and my school. There's no one else in my year called Nick, or Nicholas or Nicki or anything like that. It's just me."

"Who said it?" She was now very concerned.

I peered over my shoulder and pointed down the road to the brown-haired girl that Lilah had shown me. "That girl, the one with the denim jacket."

Mum then surprised me, I was expecting her to look worried but instead she looked relieved. "Oh, don't worry about her."

"Wait, do you know her?" I said, surprised.

Mum nodded. "Yes, she's a friend from work. She does the graveyard shift on Sunday nights." For the past year Mum's worked down at the local twenty-four-hour Tesco and she regularly does the late shifts, leaving me to keep an eye on the twins until she came back in the early hours of the morning.

"You've never mentioned her," I said.

Mum shot me a sideways look, "I fail to see why this is important."

Something felt off about my mum's description. "Alright, what's her name?"

She didn't say anything for a while.

"You don't know her."

"I know that you can always trust her." What an odd thing to say I thought but I couldn't push the subject any further as we had reached the school gates and Mum had begun to fuss over me. I managed to push her off and after she made me promise to be back home by four she turned and headed down the road while I headed into my own personal hell.

I hate school, but trust me when I say that wasn't always my opinion on the matter. Throughout primary I had loved those six hours of mucking around with my friends, playing games out on the playground and charging around the field playing football with the two goal posts made from jumpers. It had been a happy time, I had heaps of friends and I was constantly going round to their houses for tea, or sleepovers or birthday parties on a weekly basis.

High school started like that as well but then it took a turn for the sour in year nine. Suddenly my friends had become obsessed with things that would make our childhood selves start giggling like mad. All, they could talk about was drinking and drugs and the girls they'd like to spend some time with, alone. They'd suddenly become, rude and obnoxious, swearing in every sentence, and they'd constantly sneak out to behind the sheds to have a quick smoke while no one could see them. I stuck around them for a little while, just to say that I could keep my friends, but when one of my so-called friends brought in a bag of weed and tried to get me to partake was when I drew the line and reported them to the head.

That didn't end well for me though as they all turned on me like a pack of dogs, hurling abuse, insulting my parents and even turning physical, I had rocks and bottles thrown at my head on a few occasions, but they'd never actually hit me, I was too fast and they were so stoned they couldn't aim properly. Then one day, they stopped, it all ended as quickly as they'd started, but in a way, that was worse, I'd stopped being Nick the pathetic little tell-tale and I'd become poor little Nicky-no-dad.

The whole school found out within a day what had happened to my dad, the few people I had told had gossiped and when I finally came back to school it was like I died and stopped existing, not Dad. Whole classrooms fell into silence when I stepped into the room, like they'd all just been talking about me, people wouldn't go near me in P.E, they veered away from me whenever I went near them like you can catch having a dead parent. Sometimes I swear that I was like Moses standing above the Red Sea waving his stick around. But then the rumours started, a few weren't so bad, like saying that the power plant where he worked had caught fire from a fault in the wiring or something stupid like that. Some others said that he'd killed himself. Those weren't fun to listen to. Sometimes I wished that someone would throw a rock or a punch at me, because they couldn't possibly hurt more than the razor-sharp whispers that tore at my back when no one thought I could hear. But today I knew they were going to be worse than ever, two years to the day my dad died.

My point was proven the second I stepped into the school grounds. You could have heard a pin drop as I felt a thousand eyes look right at me. I pretended not to notice but the entire day was just the same. Teachers sighing as they said my name on the register in the pitiful way that only they know, students whispering on the desk behind me, people sitting as far away from me as possible and when the head called out my name for the awards ceremony you could have heard a tumbleweed go by before she encouraged everyone to clap. A few years ago, I would have been desperate for any reward, especially for the athletics club, but now I was just happy to be recognized.

The day slogged by until Chemistry rolled around for last period. Chemistry last thing on a Friday is the complete opposite of what anyone wants but the one thing that made P5 chemistry more unbearable was the chemistry teacher, who happened to be an evil old git called Mr Slattery, emphasis on the word git.

He was a man of indeterminable age from his rapidly receding hairline and worry lines, worry trenches would be more accurate, etched across his forehead. He was always wearing a three-piece suit even on non-uniform days and he was one of those people that spent more time gelling his moustache than paying attention to the world around him. He had a voice like a foghorn, a temperament similar to that of a bull and was the most hated teacher in all the school. For the five years that I had been to this school he had always been my chemistry teacher and for some reason he hated me, but then again Mr Slattery was one of those people who seemed to hate everyone under sixteen so what he was doing as a teacher was beyond human understanding. But all things considered Mr Slattery hated me the most. I had never been particularly cruel to him and I had always stayed away from making teachers cross but something about me made him despise me, so the feeling was mutual.

By this point in the day everyone was bored and since it was the last lesson before the summer you'd expect something relaxing like watching a movie or doing quizzes on the internet, not with Mr Slattery. With the strong belief that all fun is forbidden on pain of death, he'd forced us all into groups and was forcing us to go through a meaningless experiment involving something I didn't understand but all I knew was that it involved Bunsen Burners, those old rusty chimney contraptions that spouted a flame from the top. I was sat at the back, absentmindedly flicking my fingers through the flame, with three other students who were leaning as far away from me as possible without falling over like I had the plague or something like that, all three of them were quickly getting on with the experiment without shooting a look in my direction, but I could hear them whispering my name. Fine by me, I didn't want to interact with them either.

"Hayden!" Barked the booming voice of Mr Slattery, "what are you doing?" He never refers to the students by their first names its always their surnames like in the military. Come to think of it, that would explain a lot.

"Nothing at the moment, sir." I grumbled, attempting to keep the smirk off my face as I mentally dragged him through a barbed wire tunnel.

"Well do something sharpish or you'll be getting detention." I wouldn't put it past him to go through with that threat, so I reluctantly walked over to the rest of the group who suddenly stopped talking.

"So, what are we doing?" I asked. No one said anything. "I'm trying to help. What can I do?" one of them actually took a step back. I felt a pang of anger somewhere inside me, but I just let it go for a moment. "Are you all deaf or something?" I said a bit more sharply.

One of them, a brute of a lad that went by the name of Beck Hammer, stepped forward. "What do you think you dumb bastard?"

I clenched my fists together and glared at Beck, that pang of anger was beginning to boil now. I turned to sit back down when someone bumped into me, the tray of test tubes she was carrying shattering instantly. The girl looked like she'd just shot someone.

"Oh god, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm -" she was frantically picking up shards of broken glass, shredding her hands in the process.

"Hey, stop that!" I pushed her hands away from the pile, I barely touched her, but she shot back like I'd took a running swing at her. The surrounding crowd was staring at me.

"What's happened?" yelled Mr Slattery.

"Nick pushed Daniella and she cut her hands on some broken glass," someone said.

What? What! I didn't even have a chance to defend myself before everyone in the class was repeating the same thing. Somehow it was my fault.

"Hayden!" roared Slattery. I turned to look at him, his face was twisted into a hideous snarl, but his eyes were shining. The psychopath was actually going to enjoy this. "What do you have to say for yourself?"

I was utterly gobsmacked, "I didn't touch her, she bumped into me and I was just pushing her hands away from the broken glass."

"Is this true Ambrose?" Daniella didn't say anything, she just hung her head and started at the floor. No one was going to defend me. Something was getting very close to snapping inside me.

"Sir, I didn't touch her," I protested.

"Well I'm getting two very different stories, and yours seems to be the least favoured."

"I swear I didn't do it, I just bumped into her."

"I'm not surprised you tried this today, you know you can get away with it." He was lucky there was a desk in between us because I would have taken a swing at him. The room felt like it was getting hotter as I got angrier and angrier as the accusations came.

"Sir, that test tube's boiling over!" Yelled someone, but they went unheard.

"I. Didn't. Do. It." I said slowly.

"You're a liar," he spat.

More people were shouting now. "It's not on the burner. Its boiling!"

Slattery wasn't even looking at me now, he was walking back towards his desk at the front of the room, chuckling. "Liars will always get punished."

"I'm not a liar!" I screamed. The end of my tether had been reached, my patience had gone out of the window and I felt like a lit fuse ready to go off.

Slattery tutted. "What would your father think?"

Bang. "DON'T YOU DARE TALK ABOUT MY FATHER!" I slammed both my hands down on the desk. And vibrant orange flames erupted from the wood. Screams rang out as the flames raced along the desk, tearing through everything it touched. People were running for the exits, climbing up on tables to escape the sudden blaze. I was sat on the floor, knocked down in surprise, my mouth hanging open in shock as those flames curled round the wood. Slattery ran forward, fire extinguisher in hand and within a few seconds the flames were gone and all that was left of the carnage was a scorched desk and the ashes of a few papers.

"HAYDEN!" he screamed, "GET UP HERE NOW!"

"You can't believe that I did that, can you?" I said in disbelief.

"Of course, I can," he snapped. His eyes were blazing, his moustache leaping up and down with every syllable. "You knocked over a Bunsen Burner and set fire to the desk."

I picked myself up and stared down the room. "How?" I asked. "For starters, the nearest burner is over there." I pointed a few feet down the desk to where the burner was still standing upright. "So how could I have touched it from all the way over here? And secondly no piddly little Bunsen burner is going to set fire to anything that quickly, and these things," I tapped the charred desk, "are supposed to be fireproof." Now with any normal person I would have proven my innocence with the first point, but Slattery wasn't normal, he was insane.

"Detention," he said quietly.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me."

"Detention! Now!" he yelled.

"But I have to be home by four."

"Give me a good reason why," his tone was dangerous.

There's no point arguing with a madman. I couldn't say anything withoutit being a blatant lie. I could have said that I was going to my dad's grave,but I had already gone to see him this morning and Slattery had a habit ofseeing though any excuse. Reluctantly I scooped up my bag and stormed out ofthat stupid classroom, slamming the door behind me.