Sweet as Honey (The Seven Sisters) - By Caitlyn Robertson Page 0,17

the teacher listening intently to one side of the classroom. “I got into trouble when I was sixteen.”

They all stared at him.

“What kind of trouble?” asked the boy in front of him.

“Theft.” Dex cleared his throat. Then he sighed. What did it matter? It was all in the past. “I come from Wellington. My parents separated when I was eight and my mum moved back to England, where she was born. My two brothers and I lived with my dad. All he wanted was for us to be quiet around the house and help out with his painting business at the weekend. He didn’t really care how we did at school—he never came to parents’ evenings or read our reports or anything.”

A couple of the boys nodded, clearly associating with that image.

“I didn’t do well at school,” he continued. “I was fairly bright, but I couldn’t see the point in bothering. I was never going to go to university—we didn’t have the money and, well, there was no encouragement. I knew I’d never be a lawyer or a doctor. I knew I’d probably end up working for my dad, maybe one day run the business with him.”

“Yeah,” said one of the boys, “teachers are always going on about university but my folks aren’t never gonna have that kind of money, so why bother?”

“That’s what I thought,” Dex said, hoping the teacher wasn’t sending him daggers. “So I never did homework, and I hung around with other kids who didn’t work either. Mostly friends of my brothers—older boys. Did graffiti. Got into fights. Drank. Smoked a lot of weed.” He could almost feel the teacher’s eyes on his back, but he ignored her. For the first time, all the kids in the room were engaged.

“It started with shoplifting,” he carried on. “The older guys would dare me to take stuff, and I did it because I wanted to impress them, plus I never had pocket money, and it was a way to get sweets and stuff for free.” A couple of guilty looks flashed around the classroom. Yeah, he’d suspected as much.

“I left school at sixteen, before taking any qualifications. Did a couple of odd jobs. Continued to hang around with the boys because there was nothing else to do at night. Couldn’t afford to take a girl out, unless I stole money, which I did occasionally, from my dad as well as from shops.” He didn’t tell them about how he’d slept around, got into worse fights—how he’d sunk farther and farther into a dark pit of despair where in the end he barely thought himself worthy of any happiness—barely cared whether he lived or died.

“Then, one night I got pressured into joining in with a theft on a house. A rich guy, an accountant or something. One of the guys knew he was away on business, and apparently he had all this technology in his home, widescreen TVs, Playstations, X-Boxes, phones, you name it. So we broke in.”

He paused. The students stared at him, wide-eyed. His lips twisted as he remembered the anticipation that had turned to panic and then fear. “We didn’t know that not only was the house alarmed, it was linked to a security firm, and they called the police. I’d always wanted a Playstation, and the guy had two—two! One in the bedroom and one in the living room, as well as an X-Box. It seemed unfair—why should he have all these things when I didn’t have anything? So I took one. Climbed out of the window and ran off—straight into a policeman.”

“Shit,” said one of the boys, earning himself a scolding from the teacher.

But Dex just laughed. “Yeah.”

“What happened to you? Did you go to prison?”

He shook his head. “I was sixteen. And stupid. And incredibly lucky. Because the policeman I ran into was part of a programme that helped boys like me, and he recognised that I hated what I’d sunk to. That I knew I could be better if only I could climb out of the pit, you know?”

The Maori boy met his eyes for a moment before he dropped his gaze. Yes, he knew.

“So what happened?” asked the girl.

“The policeman talked me into joining the programme. He was the same age as my dad, but he seemed to care, where my dad didn’t. He listened when I talked. And when I said I wanted to change, he believed me.” As Dex thought about Charlie Randall, his throat tightened. Charlie had been