Not just one problem but a whole truckload was waiting for me at Spit Hill the next day.

I’m not talking about the big kids who ran through the corridors shouting and banging each other into the walls. Although they were bad enough. Or seeing some boy being shoved into a big trash bin in the cafeteria butt-first. (He got stuck in there with his head and his feet sticking out. Which suddenly became my worst nightmare ever because bins are full of stinking diseases and germs.) And I’m not talking about all the girls who stopped me in the corridor and took photos with me to post on Facebook and Instagram because they couldn’t believe how tiny I was and they just had to show their friends.

I had three major problems by the time my first week was over.

It’s embarrassing to admit it but the first problem was a boy. Boys just made me want to throw something at them before but this boy was almost okay. He was kind of small like me, not as short, obviously, but not exactly a basketball player either. He had messy dark hair that kind of flopped from his head, big brown eyes, and a spray of freckles on his face like they had been flicked off a paintbrush. He didn’t seem loud and stupido like most of the others. I had to stand next to him a couple of times because he was getting stuff out of a locker right above mine.

Just standing there waiting for him to finish made me feel really awkward. It was the first time a boy had ever made me feel like that. And that was a problem because I was going to have to stand near him a few times a day, every day.

The second problem was a class.

Someone from Parker Harris must have arranged it because there it was on my schedule: period four, every week on Tuesday. It was called “Inward Reach” and the teacher’s name was Miss Figgis. So in period four, I went to the building, found the room, and sat down.

As far as I could make out, it was for kids whose parents were divorced or one of their parents was dead or the kids were, like, emotionally scarred by some major trauma or something. Miss Figgis had this mass of hair that looked like brown cotton candy and a really long face. She wore purple from head to foot and these dangly necklaces. I was sure she was going to catch one on a door handle and strangle herself. By the end of the class, I was kind of hoping she would.

In that first class she made us sit in a circle and take turns talking to the group about our feelings. It was right up there in the top ten most awkward situations of my entire life. I obviously didn’t want to talk about my dad. Not in front of everyone, and especially not to her. She was the kind of person who would go on and on about it forever until you wished you’d never opened your big mouth.

Miss Figgis started by asking an eighth-grade girl called Hannah what she’d written lately in her diary about her father dying from cancer. Hannah was really nervous and shy and she started to whisper, “I wrote…I wrote that—” but then she started crying and couldn’t carry on. The last thing she needed, if you ask me, was to have to explain herself to a bunch of strangers who were staring out of the window yawning.

“You just take a moment to collect yourself, Hannah,” Miss Figgis said, and she moved to the next person in the circle. “Joanne,” she said to this meaty girl with dyed blond hair and fierce eyes, “why don’t you tell us how you feel about your parents’ divorce?”

Joanne rocked on her chair really hard and snarled, “Yesterday I smashed up everything in my bedroom with a tennis racket.”

That’s a pretty big clue, if you ask me.

So Miss Figgis spent a few minutes giving Joanne simple but effective tools she could use on a daily basis to deal with her anger.

“Joanne, sweetie, after me, take a deep breath to the count of five in through your nose: one…two…three…four…five…and release through your mouth slowly, like this: foooooooooo. Then breathe in through your nose again slowly to the count of five: one…two…”

Joanne’s face slowly turned purple, and she kept rocking backward and forward on her chair. It looked like she was about to go right over. Miss Figgis just carried on breathing and counting, moving her hands up and down really slowly, and I was starting to feel sorry for Joanne because I would actually have died of embarrassment if that was me. But then she snapped and let out a sudden screech that was so loud I jumped six feet in the air. She grabbed things on the table—bags, pencil cases, water bottles—and started flinging them at the wall. A pencil case whizzed past Miss Figgis’s ear. The rest of us sat there, frozen.

“Well, that’s another way to release it, Joanne,” Miss Figgis said, “but that’s quite enough of that. Calm yourself down with some breathing, and I’ll come back to you in a minute.”

Joanne grabbed her bag and stormed to the door, yelling, “I’m getting out of this hellhole!” but Miss Figgis got up and called her back, reminding her that she couldn’t leave because she was on report again, so she should just calm down and come back in.

Once Joanne was sitting down again, snorting with fury, Miss Figgis turned to me.

“Amber,” she said super sweetly, “on behalf of the student welfare team, I’d like to welcome you to our ‘Inward Reach’ class. I hope you now have a sense of the wonderful atmosphere we’ve created here so you can talk with absolute safety and freedom about your innermost concerns.”

I looked at Joanne scowling at me and Hannah sobbing into her hands in despair, and smiled weakly.

“Amber, would you like to tell us about yourself?”

I said politely, “No, thank you.”

But Miss Figgis wasn’t having it.

She obviously knew about my dad because she asked me a million questions about my family and how it was at home with my mum and my sister. I didn’t say much, so she asked me if being “abandoned,” by him made me feel worthless, which it didn’t actually—not until she mentioned it anyway. And I hadn’t ever really thought of being “abandoned,” which sounds miserable. Like a ghost town or a rusted-up car by the side of the road or something.

To get her away from that subject, I thought the best thing to do was just talk about something else. Maybe even make something up.

So I said, “You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning and you have this feeling like you’re going to change the world?”

The others were squinting at me like, no, we never feel like that. What are you going on about, freak? But Miss Figgis was nodding so much, I thought her head was going to fall off and roll across the classroom.

“But then you have days when you wake up and you know you’re never going to do anything great at all and there’s all this darkness swirling in your head where murky thoughts grow?”

The other kids were making proper weirded-out faces now and Joanne was glaring at me like I’d just eaten an earthworm fresh from the mud, but Miss Figgis was still nodding excitedly.

“So when my head gets dark and murky, this huge, scary beast crawls out from under my bed. He’s massive and scaly and has these big horns and he stands over me, growling until I feel small and pathetic and want to stay in bed forever until I die.”

I’m not great at making things up. Not when I’m being stared at by strangers and especially one who’s potentially violent. It all got a bit too real actually. I only said all that stuff because I figured, as a psychologist, Miss Figgis would love it and stop talking about my dad. But it just made her worse. I really wished I hadn’t mentioned it.

“Amber,” she shrieked, “what a wonderful image! You are so in touch with your psyche—it’s fabulously mature for someone your age!”

Joanne was kicking a chair leg over and over again, mouthing “stupid nerdy weirdo” at me. I decided there and then to stay well out of her way for the rest of school. Which was about the next seven years and counting.

“The beast is called doubt, Amber,” Miss Figgis said. “Everyone questions their abilities. It’s basically fear and you have to battle with it and overcome it because you can be anything you want to be. Search out those monsters, Amber! Shall we search out our monsters? Come on, everybody up off your chairs and on to your hands and knees!”

She made us get on all fours and pretend we had flashlights in our hands, and we crawled around the room in a circle as she shouted, “Let’s look under our beds for our monsters, shall we? Come on, everybody! Search under your beds for those monsters! Out! Out from under our beds, you horrible monsters!”

Everyone was giving me death stares for that little beauty. Even though Joanne refused to join in, I still wanted the ground to open up and swallow me.

Once we sat down again, to add to my misery, Miss Figgis said, “For those of you who are new, the wonderful news is that Spit Hill has an art competition every year. The deadline for this year’s art competition is next Wednesday, and it’s a big deal here at Spit Hill. The older students have known about it since Easter and many have been working on their submissions over the summer. The theme this year is ‘What Matters to Me.’ I know it’s short notice, but I want each of you to bring in a picture next week of something that’s important to you. I’m going to enter each and every one of you into the competition.”

I shrank in my chair.

Oh. My.

There was no way on earth I was showing anyone my secret art or having it judged in some school competition.

And then, when I thought the class had got as bad as it could possibly be, we all had to hold hands and sing “I am beautiful in every single way…”

I was so glad when it ended. But it was a temporary type of gladness because it was on my schedule and I was going to have to go in there next week and the week after that. There was no avoiding it. And to top it all, Miss Figgis wanted a picture from each of us for the art competition.

How the Phineas and Ferb was I going to get out of that?