08.01: School Days

JAMIE BRADDOCK
Jamie got up at 5.30 a.m., despite his whole body begging him to stay under the duvet. He liked his duvet, he had had to go onto Westchester to get it and the covers they still preferred blankets over here. He put on his running kit and headed to the athletics track as the sun rose over campus.
It took him an hour to run twenty-five laps: a distance of ten kilometres. He showered, then traded some homework with Shakeel over breakfast. Lessons went from 8.30 until 2.00, with half an hour for lunch. After lessons, there was Karate practice topped off with forty-five minutes' circuit training.
Boiling hot, Jamie downed half a litre of orange juice and collected one of the ride-on mowers from the estate manager Sam Guthrie. It wasn't hard driving the mower, but the sun was on him the whole time and the grass pollen made his eyes itch.
It was 6.15 p.m. by the time Jamie got his first chance to relax. Dinner was a social event, with everyone mucking about and catching up on gossip. Most
had done their homework before dinner and had the evening to themselves, but the mowing meant Jamie hadn't even got started. Homework was supposed to be two hours a day. Some teachers were decent. Others piled on so much work it took heaps longer.
When Jamie got back to his room it was gone 7.00. He sat at his desk, spread out his textbooks and opened his homework diary. He had acquired a backlog of
homework that sucked up every second of his free time.
It was a warm evening, so Jamie left his window open. A breeze clattered into the plastic slats of his blind. Jamie's eyes were gluey and the words in his textbook drifted out of shape. His head slumped on the desk and he dozed off before he'd written a word.