When 3.15 finally arrived, Chase felt as though he had been at school for a week already, rather than just one particularly long and rubbish day. After his run-in with the head, things hadn’t improved at all. Lunch had proven to be a traumatic affair where he had choked down an amorphous, grey blob of something that he presumed was supposed to be mash, accompanied by an unidentifiable slop that most closely resembled a puddle of cat vomit. Even the puddings had been inedible – he’d rejected the so-called ‘jelly’ on sight. He knew full well what jelly looked like, and the murky, greasy slime presented to him had looked far more like something a plumber might find in a U-bend than food. Instead, he’d settled on a ‘rock cake’ that, as far as he could tell, had been an actual rock-cake and he
