Chapter One

I was not the average student. That was as much as I'd been told anyway and I suppose that I was not in the average student's mood as I sat in the headmistress's office for the third time that day. Apparently most students did not whistle 'Somewhere over the Rainbow'. I found most students extremely boring.

Eventually, the woman seated on the more powerful side of the desk interrupted the tune. "You have a few problems in school, don't you, Skye?"

I blew a strand of chestnut brown hair away from my eyes and looked up, blinking after having suddenly been snapped out of my daydream. I shrugged. "In school, with school, about school," I said, sighing in a non-committed manner.

Mrs Charlotte nodded, acting as though she actually understood what was going on. "I imagine you have some out of school as well." I made no attempt to show I'd even heard what had been said, and she leaned forward to give the illusion that we would be getting more privacy in her otherwise empty office. "With your friends… and at home?" she suggested.

I smiled patronisingly, knowing that the woman opposite me didn't even have a clue. I very much enjoyed patronising my elders, especially those of which I was constantly being told to respect. "I don't really think you should be making judgements about my home when I'm the one that lives there, and, personally, I quite like it." I didn't care whether or not I was telling her the truth anymore, and I refused to address the point about my friends. It wasn't remotely relevant.

"Well… I know you've been having a difficult time lately."

Batting my eyelashes innocently, I replied, "Nope." I had no intention of admitting if I had been having a difficult time. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing that I could be having a difficult time dealing with… absolutely nothing.

Mrs Charlotte pressed her lips together tightly, and I wondered whether it was from annoyance or she just wanted a cheap way of reddening her lips. Clearly she had thought that I would burst into tears and pour my feelings out to her like the book had said would happen. I was sure it was from a book. She read hundreds after thousands of them, telling her how she should deal with her pupils, what she should do in whatever situation she came to be in. She only read the books so she could figure out how to get herself out of situations that she enjoyed getting herself into… like this one. "I've had to pull you in here several times today," she reminded me. "There has to be something wrong."

Slouching even further into the hard wooden chair, I shrugged. "I didn't ask to be here."

The conversation had long since been tired of on my end, but for some reason my headmistress felt that she should explain to me all the things that I was doing wrong, as if she didn't think I was troubled enough. In what universe was it really going to help? "You haven't handed in homework for any of your teachers in three weeks, you spoke back to your English teacher, and you've spent the last four lessons asleep in the nurse's office."

Too bored to answer, I exercised the shrug once again. When had it become a crime to fall asleep anyway? At least I hadn't done it in the middle of the class… oh, right, I had only a few minutes before leaving and making an excuse about cramps that I didn't have.

"Look, we understand that you and the school counsellor don't get on particularly well –" The sentence wasn't yet finished but I felt the need to interrupt.

"Why should I trust someone that was too stupid to get a PhD?" I asked.

Although Mrs Charlotte did not make any attempts to agree with this statement, she made none to deny it either. Instead, she decided to completely ignore it. "You don't get on very well," she repeated. "So we've been looking into a psychologist for you."

A disgusted noise escaped my lips. "A psychologist?" I asked, accompanying the question with an eye roll.

"Yes," Mrs Charlotte confirmed. "I've spoken to some of the mothers in the school and I was recommended a lovely man on Orwald Street." I wasn't sure if she was even allowed to do that. Did the other mothers know about the reason behind the headmistress's questioning? "And I've spoken to your mother and she said that she had thought about the possibility of you seeing someone too." Lovely, my own mother thought I was psycho. "She's booked an appointment for you on Thursday." Well wasn't that just… peachy?

"I've been in here twice already today, why are you only mentioning it now?"

"Well," she said, sniffing as a way to gather extra time to come up with a reason. "I had planned on telling you in our meeting tomorrow, but as you are here now I decided I shouldn't put it off any longer." I had no recollection of an arranged meeting with her, but did not dwell on that for long. Mainly because the 'any longer' she'd added to the end intrigued me more. How long had people known and not told me for? It couldn't be much longer than I'd been putting my life on hold, as before I was just the perfectly normal of the students that weren't average.

I couldn't be bothered to come up with a reply, or even speak again so I merely picked up my bag and walked out of the office, stalking through the empty hallways and to my art class for the last ten minutes of school. I purposely landed in front of a canvas as far away from the rest of the people in the class as possible, not because I cared if they saw my sketches but because I had no interest in making contact with any of them.

When Thursday finally managed to appear, the two days before it barely seemed to exist. By the time I woke up on the morning of the day, I wasn't sure if I hadn't just slept through them. And until my mother reminded me that I still hadn't handed in any of my homework, I was completely convinced this was true.

My eyelids tried to slip back over my blue orbs several times before I was forced to rub them into staying in their place. And, while I ate my cereal and prepared myself for missing the first four hours of school, a conversation that would've been very helpful to me had I known about it was going on in a place I wasn't supposed to arrive at for another hour.

Oliver Robertson walked into the tall house in which his older brother worked as a psychologist. He had nothing to do, being twenty-one and jobless, and so had decided to make a surprise visit to his brother's place of business to make fun of it.

Professor Peter Robertson had very stupidly told Oliver the day before that he didn't have any appointments until ten, but that he would be stuck at work filling out papers anyway.

"Hey, uh, could you get Pete for me?" Oliver asked, leaning over the desk of the receptionist.

The petite blonde woman looked up at him and forced a smile onto her face. She'd been faced with him before, and found that most times she wanted to slap him. "He's extremely busy at the moment."

"I really need to speak to him," he lied. The only thing he really needed to do was send an insult at him.

The receptionist rolled her eyes. "Pop upstairs and into his office then," she told him, quickly going back to her typing and grinning as his shadow disappeared from over her.

Peter did not have the same grin on his face when his brother walked in without so much as a knock. Instead, he began shuffling the 'private and confidential' papers into his briefcase. "What are you doing here, Ollie?" he asked.

Ollie landed himself on the sofa in the large room. "Aren't I allowed to come and say hi to my bro?"

Peter rubbed his eyes, depressed and anxious teenagers he could deal with, but his brother… he didn't have a clue what to do with him. "I told you I'd be working."

"Mmm-hmm, yeah, I understand," Ollie replied.

"Then what are you doing here?"

Ollie made a face at him. "Oh, that wasn't me agreeing. That was me impersonating you while you work." This comment received the warning look that it deserved, and as usual the look was completely ignored. "I swear, you could just leave a tape playing in the room that occasionally asked questions and no one would know the difference."

"My job is a lot more than that," the professor objected. "I have to understand their lives and why they are the way that they are and –"

"Tell them what's wrong with it and how to fix it," Ollie suggested, picking at the sofa lint.

Peter rolled his eyes. "That is not what I do, and you should stop talking about things that you know nothing about."

Ollie snorted. "Sorry," he said through laughs. "Did you mean to just prove me right, or did it happen by accident?"

The psychologist in the overly plush chair opposite him was extremely fortunate to have his mobile phone start beeping to signal a text message coming in, as he had no idea what to answer. "It's Candice. I've got to go," he said after a few moments of staring stupidly at the screen.

"What?" Ollie asked, confused. He didn't even know whom this Candice was, how could she possibly be more important to his brother than he was?

"It's her school. Something's wrong and I have to get down there," he told his brother, helping him in understanding that it was a patient. "You should leave. I'll see you on Saturday." He rushed down the stairs, ready to give the receptionist a message to apologise to his patient (me) that he couldn't be there and ask to make another appointment next week. Only problem was the blonde typing expert wasn't there, and according to the note she'd left behind she wouldn't be for another hour and a half. Peter pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to remember why he'd hired her in the first place. When he finally did look up he saw the smirking face of his younger brother.

"I need your help." The sentence was released reluctantly from his mouth.

"Oh really?" Ollie asked, continuing to smirk.

Peter sighed. "Yes. I need you to tell the girl that comes here in twenty minutes that I've had an emergency, and ask her to organise another appointment. Will you do that for me?"

He shrugged lazily. "Sure."

"Okay, that's great. Thanks!" were the last words that escaped my new psychologist's mouth before the door slammed behind him.

Oliver chuckled to him. "Yeah, sure I'll ask her to organise another appointment," he said to himself, "one with me, that is. Prove your stupid job's nothing more than I thought it was."

A/N: This is a story that I actually started writing about three years ago, and intended to do with one of my friends… but we sort of got distracted and lost interest, and thus the story sat on our joint FP account with nothing happening to it. Anyway, I was going through my old documents the other day and came across this one, and I really liked the characters and the plot and I just didn't want to waste that, so I got interested in the idea of writing it again. All that has resulted in me reposting this story on this account, with the intention of continuing writing it (hopefully I'll be more successful this time). Anyway, thanks for reading, and please leave a review about what you think of the first chapter or the plot in general or anything.