Unboundaried

I’ve just come back from hospital and they’re still completely clueless about what’s wrong with me. Dr Jameson reckons I need more medication and Dr Wasri won’t make a diagnosis until more tests are done. Professor Wigg is worried about the impact the drugs are having on me and I saw him talking to my mum but she won’t tell me what he said. The newspapers are calling me racist and even if they can’t name me for legal reasons everyone at school knows it’s me. No one’s allowed to put it on social media but the whole town knows it’s me.

What happened was I was on a school trip in Italy last summer and we were on a bus. It was raining hard and everyone was shouting with the rain clattering on the roof.

In the town we’d just visited me and Paul had bought two big bottles of lager from a supermarket and drunk them in an alleyway and then we walked about making fun of the Italians, ‘and their customs’, as Dr Jameson puts it.

When we got back on the bus it was full so we had to sit right at the front. We were both still quite tipsy so I decided to play a joke on the driver.

I asked him where he was from and he didn’t say. I heard Paul snigger so I asked him if he was from Africa but he still said nothing. Paul laughed again so I asked the driver if he was a slave. I knew I was acting like Dad because that’s what he says on Saturdays when he takes me to the match. Paul laughed hard this time, like a hyena, so I carried on and told the driver there’s plenty of room in Africa so why don’t you go back there? But he still didn’t answer.

The doctors reckon that something snapped in me at this time, causing me to become ‘unboundaried’.

Anyway, what happened was Paul was laughing his face off and then the bus stopped at the train station and as we were getting off the driver turned and looked at me and without moving his lips said ‘hear me now, you will pay for what you say’.

Ten minutes later I heard the same voice in my head on the train. He told me ‘I am with you now and I will stay with you until you have learnt how to became a man’.

The doctors reckon it’s not about when I turn eighteen but how I conduct myself from now on but I hear the driver’s voice fifty to sixty times a day and that’s been consistent for the last four months so I don’t think I’m doing very well.

I’m writing this as part of the 500 words competition to see what you think I should do. I’m fifteen years old and I made a mistake and now I’m in hell.

Oh hang on. That’s him now. I better go.