Troll Chapter 2

Two months earlier.

The lights were bright in the office complex at King Edward School, just off the Mile End and Bow intersection––a gritty East End comprehensive that struggled to receive any appreciation from the people who lived in it.

The pupils were a mix of the white and black working class with a growing immigrant community. These were the children that politicians used as pawns in their machinations at the ballot box.

Nothing had changed in the sixty-five years since the school had been open. The only notable pupils of the school were career criminals, drug dealers, and gangbangers. There weren’t really any exceptions to the rule.

Children attended the school until the law said they didn’t have to. When they could, they left and took jobs in the city: service jobs, like in bars and restaurants.

Those were the good kids.

The others took to the streets, selling wraps, K, meth, and anything else that took the mind far away. The lucky ones got blooded into gangs, and the unlucky ended up snorting, sniffing, jacking up, and turning to petty crime.

It was an endless cycle of self-abuse, intermingled with street violence. The weapons of choice: mopeds and knives.

The Mile End had had three stabbings that week as Keith Shytles sat reading the newspaper.

He hated the place.

He was sitting in the office easychair, which was pulling on his back causing a sharp pain.

He felt like a child, his knees near his ears, his corduroys too tight to mention, now biting into his growing waistline.

He had been suspended from working as the IT teacher at the school.

Miranda Felton had been throwing around wild accusations that he had forced himself on her, trying to force his penis in her mouth.

Miranda had sucked his cock. The sixteen-year-old promiscuous student, who, to the school leavers, would hitch her skirt at the drop of a hat, had wanted better grades and offered the blow job to her teacher in exchange for them.

Sticking her gum on his desk, she unzipped him, then fellated him.