Here Are Some New Personalities to Try on the First Day Back at School

First day back at school today, which means one thing: it’s time to reinvent yourself as someone cool. This has been the first-day-back tradition since time immemorial – kids who spent the summer growing their hair, learning guitar, getting fingered, smoking their first ever joint, drawing large A3 drawings of intricately designed robots – they all come back to the school year remade and reborn. Here are a few of the cool personalities you might want to try in order to disguise your own, terrible and dull actual personality:

MEGA-GOTH

Sara has been in your form for four entire years but you’ve never really noticed her before because she’s so meek and quiet and only ever puts her hand up in art class, but now she’s somehow got Extremely Into Goth Shit and wears fishnets over her hands and spends all of her free periods trying to completely colour in one page of her textbook in black biro ink and keeps threatening to make a voodoo doll in your likeness and break its neck on your birthday. Eventually gets detention for trying to do PE in New Rocks.

KID WHO JUST DISCOVERED GRIME

He’s read Skepta’s Wikipedia page twice through, crushed all of People Just Do Nothing into one summer, and now he’s constantly zipped into a North Face puffa, calls his sleepy provincial hometown “ends” and keeps trying to make that gunfire brrrrrap sound in Maths class but can’t quite roll his r enough so it just sounds like he’s chilly. Loses all of his small accrued amount of street cred when the school’s one cool RE teacher asks him what the national anthem is and he says God Save The Queen, like no joke, like right in front of everybody.

‘ILLICITLY INTO VAPING’ KID

Schools are always Quite On It when it comes to outlawing literally any harmless form of entertainment, which is why you all had to sit through that assembly about fidget spinners, and the Mannequin Challenge, and why Year 7s aren’t allowed to dab anymore. But for some reason they never banned vaping, because why would they: what, truly, what August-born 15-year-old wants to embarrass himself in front of his peers by chewing clouds so much that vaping gets a campus-wide ban? Well, Sebastian from Year 11, that’s who; the boy who only says “rig” now and still after weeks of practice can’t do smoke rings so just posted blurry Instagram videos (@seb_tha_vape_g0d) of him blowing a formless puff of vape into a ceiling fan then coughing for like, 15 straight seconds, fade to black.

GIRL WHO IS JUST SLIGHTLY TOO INTO HARRY POTTER

Non-prescription lenses to hide her 20/20 vision? Check. Every assignment in English class is just poorly written fanfic? Check. Glued her locker key to the end of a big stick so she can unlock things while pretending it’s a wand? Check, check, check. Spends lunch break going round the third-floor corridors trying to find hidden rooms? Err, it’s getting a bit weird now, mate. Really eerily insisting her name is ‘Lavender’ now? Err. Umm. Should we tell the teachers she’s gone mad, or just… leave it?

GIRL WITH SLIGHTLY OLDER BOYFRIEND WHO SMOKES

The hierarchy of girls is always restructured come the first day of Year 10 when one of the mid-level girls suddenly ascends to the top of the pecking order by virtue of, over the summer, acquiring a slightly older boyfriend who smokes. Ideally he also goes to another school, nearby. And has a car. The details do not matter: what matters is she has smoked cigarettes, now. She has spent a Sunday afternoon driving for no reason to Coventry. She wears his leather jacket sometimes, the one he bought with money he made from his actual job, at ASDA. Year 10 boys just cannot compete. Watch the Queen Bee as she floats down the corridors she rules now, emitting an unassailable air of mystery, of smokiness, of worldly knowledge. She and she alone knows what it’s like to do hand stuff in the passenger seat of a Focus RS before chewing a load of Softmints and being dropped off two streets from home.

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GIRL WHO WENT TO GLASTONBURY THIS YEAR AND NOW IT’S HER ONLY DISCERNIBLE PERSONALITY TRAIT

Guys have you been to Glasto????? WoOoOoW you HAVE to go. My dad – my dad is one of those cool dads who spent his half of the divorce money on a load of expensive guitars and lets us call him ‘Gavin’ instead of ‘dad’, and let’s us have beer and his new girlfriend is 24 – my dad took me this year and wow guys, wow. Firstly, the vibe: the vibe is, like, incredible. And it’s so spiritual, you know? But mainly, the absolute best thing about Glastonbury, just has to be the credible musicians. Before Glasto I was like ‘yah, yah, girlbands’, but now my favourite band is— well, you might not have, but have you ever listened to Muse?

TIGHT BUDGET HYPEBEAST

Your boy worked all summer at his dad’s carwash to raise the funds to ship this hallowed Supreme headband he found over on Grailed, and now he refuses to take it off, even when he sleeps. Weekend trip to Nando’s with the squad? Supreme headband. Sister’s graduation ceremony? Supreme headband. His dad wouldn’t let him come to his uncle’s funeral with it on, but he still managed to squat in front of the coffin for a 12-like fit pic for the ‘gram. This is who he is, now. He is… the gulliest guy in Year 10.

GUY WHO JUST GREW HIS HAIR A BIT

Ah, nice one: The Weird Kid From Year 10 is now The Weird Long-Haired Kid From Year 11 after a summer spent growing his hair out past the standard-issue mum-approved £6 haircut every lad gets from ‘Ali Barber’s’ in town, thru the difficult mullet stage, and now fluttering somewhere shapeless down near his shoulders. You will be thrilled to hear he really likes metal music now, still hates his stepdad, and after a staggering growth spurt the lunch hours he spends punching walls alone to “toughen his knuckles up” have gone from being “laughably odd” to “really quite terrifying”. Will come into his own in sixth form after getting moved up to top set Maths and learning to love learning again, don’t worry.

KID WHOSE PARENTS WENT AWAY FOR THE SUMMER FOR SOME REASON AND HE TRIED TO HAVE A PARTY AND INVITED EVERYONE IN HIS YEAR BUT IN THE END ONLY LIKE FOUR PEOPLE TURNED UP SO HE SPENT THE WHOLE EVENING GETTING REALLY STUCK IN TO HIS DAD’S LIQUOR CABINET AND NOW REALLY HAS A TASTE FOR IT, REALLY HAS A TASTE FOR IT, HOLY FUCKING SHIT

You always thought the “most disgusting way to start the school day” crown would be claimed by that bus stop full of lads who all drink 49p Spar-brand energy drinks and occasionally wash it down with a couple of Freddo’s, and are twitchy and erratic until lunchtime, smelling violently of a sort of fizzy medicine, but actually no this kid from the year below who drinks vodka cokes now has taken the bad breakfast throne, and long may he reign. Every morning on the bus he’s got a little road bottle of Diet Coke with some Rachmaninoff mixed in, and on mornings he has PE he does a big tin of Guinness “for the iron”, and he’s already started going a bit red in the face and you’re pretty sure he shat himself or at least half shat himself in IT once, and part of you thinks: hey, if you just went to the party he had, maybe this never would have happened. But another, much larger part of you, thinks: yeah but going to some parties in Year 10 essentially constitute social death, and this was definitely one of them, you knew that even before the bleak photos of him dancing alone made it on to Facebook. So, really, who is it better to die first: Lee from Year 10, or your fragile and formative sense of credibility? Exactly.

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