I'm in year 11 but my English teacher has been a HSC marker and what not and we had this creative writing task and my boyfriend submitted in a story, which was really well written, descriptive, lots of metaphors/similies and good sentence structure etc but because it had murder and "violence" she gave him an 8/15 and deemed it too violent, same with many other "violent" and "murderous" stories. BTW your story sounds a little like the movie "SHROOMS" lol.