I am the master of my own destiny.
Well, that’s what Ms. Bracket, my English teacher last year, always says.
“Shiraz Bailey Wood,” she says. “The sky is the limit for a bright spark like you! You could be anything you want. Like an astronaut! Or a lion tamer! Or the Prime Minister! The only thing stopping you is yourself!”
She used to jar my head sometimes she did. She was proper obsessed about us passing our GCSEs. Ms. Bracket isn’t bothered about all that “Superchav Academy” stuff. That’s what a lot of snobby newspaper reporters used to call my old school Mayflower Academy, you see. And I’ll say it again for the billionth time…
WE WEREN’T ALL CHAVS, RIGHT!?
(Jury’s out on Uma Brunton-Fletcher, though.)
Ms. Bracket isn’t prejudiced and stigmatizing toward young people like most grown-ups are. Saying that, she doesn’t take any of our crap either. Like when I told her me and Carrie didn’t need no English GCSEs ’cos we were starting a world-famous singing duo called Half Rice/Half Chips.
“Fair enough, Shiraz,” Ms. Bracket says. “But in the event that you don’t become the next Beyoncé Knowles you’ll need to get a job to feed and clothe yourself! SO DO YOUR HOMEWORK!”
In the end even I had to admit that passing my GCSEs was a better plan if I didn’t want to end up flogging the homeless paper Street News outside Food Lion. If you’ve ever seen that YouTube clip of me and Carrie on ITV2’s Million Dollar Talent Show you’ll know why. Oh my days, that was well shameful.
Ten pounds flaming ninety-two pence we spent on those matching red leg warmers and devil horns, then we only get one verse into “Maneater” by Nelly Furtado and this snotty-looking judge in trousers so tight you could see the outline of his trousersnake tells me I’m singing like someone strangling a donkey.
Yeah, BARE JOKES, bruv. Jog on.
Not like I cared though. I just laughed in his face. He was like thirty-three years old or something. A proper antique. It’s not my fault if he couldn’t appreciate me being an individual.
Oh well, that’s break over. Better get back to work.
2:15PM—I don’t regret nothing in my life. Nothing. I’m always moving forward, me. I’m keeping it real. It’s just sometimes, when I’m standing here behind this pan, frying an egg, and I’m proper sweaty and some bloke with a hairy bum cleavage is at the counter moaning on going, “Ugggh, you’ve made my yolk hard. I wanted it runny. I like my eggs runny!”… Well, it’s times like that when I remember Mayflower Academy. I think about what a laugh Year Eleven was with Carrie and Luther and Chantalle and Uma and Kezia.
Y’know there was a bit last year when I even started planning to go to Sixth Form. And I ain’t exactly a Sixth Formery type of girl if you know what I mean.
But I never thought I’d wind up here at Mr. Yolk on Goodmayes High Street making Set Breakfast C two hundred times a day for geezers with bigger baps than me.
This was NOT in Shiraz Bailey Wood’s life plan.
“EAT LIKE A PRINCE FOR £2!!” That’s the “mission statement” at Mr. Yolk. It’s written in BIG CAPITAL LETTERS across the front of my T-shirt. I know I look totally butterz in it, but my boyfriend, Wesley Barrington Bains II, says I look hot.
“Wifey,” Wesley says. “You could put on anything and you’d look buff, innit.”
Wesley reckons I’ve got it proper cushy working at Mr. Yolk ’cos:
1) It’s just down the road from my mother’s house, and
2) I get free dinner every day and they do steak and kidney pot pies, and
3) He can pop in and see me on the way to his plumbing NVQ and get his egg roll.
Wesley don’t like his egg runny. Wesley likes his egg yolk quite hard and he likes the ketchup just on the egg white NOT the yolk, with a sprinkle of black pepper on the yolk. The first dozen times I made Wesley’s egg I got it wrong, but now I make Wesley’s egg just perfect he reckons. That’s my biggest achievement all August.
I’m dreading picking up my GCSE results next week. I tried my best and everything. I knew that Jane Eyre book backward by May! I used to go to sleep at night and dream about Mr. Rochester on his horse, clip-clopping through Romford and scooping me up outside Time and Envy nightclub and taking me away from Essex.
I tried my total best in that exam, honest.
It wouldn’t be the first time my best wasn’t good enough.