Teen Times: A boy is sitting at the back of the class, his chair dangerously perched on two legs. His eyes are darting around the room, looking for distraction.

He fires screwed-up balls of paper at the girl in front of him. She looks around and glares, but that doesn't deter him. He throws some distasteful comment at the boy sitting up the front with the glasses. Everyone laughs, and he smiles to himself.

His report last Christmas said that he is disruptive. That he lacks purpose and doesn't apply himself. His parents are disappointed and don't understand why he doesn't want to succeed.

He is made to study every night, so he sits in his room for hours scratching the surface of his desk with a compass. His grades do not improve, nor does his behaviour. He gets into a fight one Saturday night with a boy who he thought was insulting him. On Monday morning he has a black eye.

The boy is sitting an exam, an English exam. He reads the poem like a nursery rhyme. Everything in it is obvious to him: the poet's intentions, the reasons for the metaphors used.

The question asked is a simple one: what is the poet expressing about love, and how does he portray this? The boy sets his pen down on the desk and leaves it there.

They try to send him to a counsellor. He goes once or twice, but she makes him draw pictures.

Soon he finds a way out of it, and now he spends every Wednesday from five to six behind a shop near his house. Sometimes there are other boys there; sometimes he buys a six-pack or a joint from them. Sometimes he doesn't bother.

When he comes home, his mother lets him in. He doesn't speak to her, though she is watching him. She sees his glazed eyes and grazed knees but says nothing.

This boy is in every class in every school. He is the one who has lost his friends because their mothers ban them from seeing him. The principal refuses to acknowledge him and the teachers are dismissive towards him.

He leaves his six years of secondary school with nothing but a bad reputation and an untapped mind.

He is haunted every night by the countless thoughts and ideas that race through his head. He ignores them because he thinks they're stupid, a waste of time. They say that no man is an island, but this boy is.

• Deirdre Ní Annracháin (16) is in fifth year at the King's Hospital in Palmerstown, Dublin

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