Bea Paige [Paige - Delinquent (Academy of Misfits Book 1)

Copyright : Kelly Stock writing as Bea Paige

First Published: 25th August 2019

Publisher: Kelly Stock

Cover by: Everly Yours Cover Designs

Kelly Stock writing as Bea Paige to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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My dear young lady, crime, like death, is not confined to the old and withered alone. The youngest and fairest are too often its chosen victims

~ Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens

Prologue

A licia Loi Chen which loosely means Great Noble Thunder or some such crap like that.

Thats me. Thats my name. Pretty fucking great, yeah? At least my mum thought so given the amount of times she tried to convince me it was.

In her more lucid moments over the years, when she wasnt messed up on some drug or other, shed loved to weave magical tales about far away countries filled with dragons and other mythical creatures. For a long time, she had me convinced that shed been a concubine to the Emperor of China, and I was their lovechild spirited off to England for safekeeping, my name chosen because I was born to some great Chinese dynasty.

Of course, I realised pretty soon that she was full of shit.

My empty stomach, threadbare clothes and dirty, flea-ridden flat we called home had proven that. Our true story, the one she tried to hide from, has only ever been a tale of woe and its about to get a whole lot worse.

Born on December 26, 1998 during one of the worst hurricanes to hit the UK for years, my fucked-up, drugged-up, heroin addict mother actually named me after the storm that raged beyond the single glazed windows of our shitty rundown council flat in Hackney. Her wails of pain from pushing me out of her ravaged, undernourished body matched those of the hurricane that wound its way through the feeble mould-ridden walls of our home. Tracy Carter, mums best friend and my surrogate mum growing up, had cradled my head as I slipped into the world wailing, my lungs bursting with rage at being born, my tiny little body already addicted to heroin. An angry baby junky, courtesy of my messed-up junky mum. Born with thunder inside me, thunder rolling outside, my name was fitting back then, I suppose. Except now Ive shredded that name like a dirty threadbare jumper. I dont live a fairy tale life and Im not some emperors daughter, real or imagined.

Im just Asia. A name I chose for myself, not because of my heritage. And certainly not because of my mothers addiction for the opium produced in the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia that finally killed her on my fourteenth birthday.