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and this is when everything changed. Suddenly, with the move from Phoenix, Arizona to this small town in Devon, I had transformed from the girl that everyone was friends with, to the loner at the back of the class.
Even the teacher disliked me. Once I asked to go to the bathroom:

“It’s not bathroom here.” She said that as if somehow the British were above the rest of the world when it came to doing the business. It annoyed me at the time. “Here, we say toilet.”
This made no sense to me. There was more than one toilet in the ‘toilet’. When I said ‘bathroom’ I meant that I wanted to go to a room where I could go to the toilet and then proceed to wash my hands in a sink. There were no sinks in a toilet cubicle.

I remember being held down to the table – whilst the teacher was in the room – because I wouldn’t say that I was gay. When I kicked my legs, it was my fault for being so aggressive.

I can’t say I was sad to leave that school. I got a bigger house to start with. But nothing changed at first.