The Last Summer
It isn’t until he walks out of his last exam into the sunlight filtering through the trees that shade the exam hall that Ryan realises quite the significance of this moment.
It’s over.
School is over, done and dusted, and that’s it. He will never come back here again—he will never put on a school uniform, or sit in a lesson, or even listen to the headmaster droning on and on about respecting the community and why the kids drinking outside The Plough are disgracing the school in the eyes of the local community.
This is it.
Ryan is now an adult—out of school and ready to enter the university world. He’s still a student, but he’s also an adult, and it feels like, somehow, things have to change.
But he doesn’t know what.
“Oi!” Tom says, clapping him on the shoulder as he
