It All Started In A McDonald's...

Two hot chocolates later, and I was ripping up paper. And I'd snapped my pencil, which clearly wasn't exactly helpful. Shit. When had school ever been this stressful? I was never stressed in lessons, ever – my devil-may-care attitude always took care of that for me. But something about the last hour made me totally snap... or at least snap pencils.

MJ had originally joked about me having too much chocolate, but when she realised I was genuinely stressed, she let me get some fresh air for five minutes and her mate Sergei let me out the back to cool off.

I followed, my head feeling empty. It made no sense... I didn't ever feel like this. Ever. Surely I hadn't already lost all social ability? Was it because I'd basically isolated myself from going out for too long? I wasn't great without company at the best of times, and I knew that, but I hadn't realised that so much time out of my regular routine would affect me so much.

Surely some fresh air would clear my head a little.

The door closed behind me and I was left alone in the tiny, courtyard out back. It was surrounded by an old wooden fence and contained nothing more than some garbage bins and a few weeds. The ground was just an expanse of frozen earth. I looked up at the sky above the fence. Being so far from my apartment, the view of the city would be much different, and I was looking forward to seeing it. But from here, all I could see was the tops of the skyscrapers, and I wasn't going to settle for that.

So how to rectify that problem? Well, I like to be high up and, apparently, in danger of killing myself if I fall, the majority of the time anyway, so I decided to climb to the roof. Lucky for me, this was easy to do, because there was conveniently a drainage pipe on the outside wall, which seemed sturdy enough, next to the fence, and the building was only one storey high, so it wasn't too much to climb.

I put one hand on the pipe, one on the fence, and used my legs to edge higher up the pipe, eventually using the fence as a foothold and grabbed onto the pipe and used my arm strength to pull myself onto the roof. My skinny frame often misled people about my physical strength, or maybe it was just because I was so light and athletic. Whatever the case, this kind of thing was easy for me, even though I was no Spider-Man.

I sat on the roof edge and sighed, swinging my sneakers over the ground below. The wind reached me better up here, and rather than freezing, I found it refreshing and it cooled my overheating head. Looking up, the view wasn't as nice as from my apartment, with it being a tiny building near a bunch of skyscrapers, but the moon was out and it was almost pitch black outside, so the tiny flickering lights of the windows and stars stood out and calmed me down.

Why had I suddenly become stressed out like that? It wasn't like the work was particularly hard, or MJ was particularly stressful (if anything, it should've been her getting stressed out because I'm so stressful to be around, or so I've been told). Was it even stress I was feeling? I'd never experienced the feeling before, so I couldn't even be sure. Maybe I really was just going stir crazy.

Great. Now Dad could put up with me being crazy as well as all my other shit problems.

I sighed into the wind and turned my head. We were so near the Avengers Tower now I could finally see how huge it was up close. It could probably fit ten of my entire apartment in the lobby. Up at the top, the Avengers logo was flashing the same colour as my hair, then to bright green, and back to purple. The lucky colours. Well, unless I saw an Avenger whilst walking home from McDonald's, didn't look like the trend would continue.

I shook my head and my own thoughts came back to my head and I regained my usual attitude. Why was I being superstitious? Was I seriously counting on the Avengers logo flashing purple and green on the probability of something happening? If I really thought anyone would come swooping in to change my life, I was being an idiot. My life wasn't going to change any time soon, and the best thing I could do was grit my teeth, knuckle down and get on with it. Pull it together, Jamie.