Chapter 2 – Extract 3 from The Paradise Induction! 

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Considering I’m six-foot, he was around six-foot three, a skinny build, and about my age.

“Okay!” he said with a tone that sounded like an attempt to be a Drill Instructor. “You have been selected for random screening! What I’m going to do, is search you with this!” He gestured towards his metal detector device. “I want you to sit down and lift your feet up! One at a time! Is that understood?”

I nodded and sustained my expressionless face, eyes fixed dead on his.

”Do-you-understand?” he said with increased aggression as if he was talking to an insolent child.

“Yeah,” I muttered, continuing to nod. I watched my bag get raided by the others. Their hands dug deep, turning things over, mixing things around, opening items up, sniffing them like a bunch of monkeys with new toys.

Just got to let it happen, I thought. Let it happen.

I was six years old when I found out that being born with black skin was wrong.

In my school classroom, I sat surrounded by three of the prettiest white girls, amid twenty other pupils diligently getting on with their maths sums.

On my table that day, I heard words that would carve into my conscience for life.

“You’re black. You must be dirty,” said the blond, blue-eyed Canadian girl as she prodded my forearm. “Didn’t God clean you?”

With the finger she’d used to poke me, she pressed it into the table and wiped to get the filth off her.

Sitting in the centre of them, I looked at my skin, wondering how I could clean the dirt off my body.

Why would God make me so dirty? I thought.

“The palms of your hands are white,” the brunette girl called Jane said. “That’s a start. It’s just the rest of you. We can’t touch you as we might get some on us.”

“Yeah,” the other blond girl Lexi said and chuckled. Her head flicked to Jane. “Kiss him. I dare you.”.

“No, you kiss him,” Jane replied.

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