Boy Bewildered

This year, it's hard. I'm in sixth form. I take Maths, Further Maths, German, Physics and Chemistry. I miss English, French, and sometimes philosophy.
What's with the exam system?

To sum up, for those who don't live here: once you're 16 going on 17, you're meant to drop down to 4 subjects (normally...). Then the next year you're expected to drop one more.
Fuck it. People deserve to be educated in more than one thing. The system discriminates against people who don't know where they're going, or want to go. It fights the people who have skill to succeed in everything. It says: don't be greedy. You can't be good at more than one thing.

I learn a lot, sure, but the pressure? It builds on me, until it feels like 2am is the normal time for homework, and that my eyes are meant to be 2/3rds closed the whole day.

I want to get out.

Otherwise, I'm good. I read Marmalade boy (8 volumes of manga comics). I finished the last two in a fug of tears, my chest heaving like it had remembered how. I couldn't cry for years. I let that one go two summers ago.
My friend was talking to me, about another friend who had some problems learning and wasn't where he deserved to be. (He's wowow bright). I said something, something about it being terrible if he really did have his friends who were smarter than he and thought down at him. My friend looked at me, with a look of disbelief starker than a Bill Brandt photo. A look that needed examination. 'Fran. I think you're on a different level to all of us anyway', he said.

I didn't cry at the time. I cried when I realised what the look really meant. It meant I was alone. It meant he looked at me, and didn't accept. Couldn't accept me as equal to him, because it would make him a failure.

And... I don't want to make people feel that way.