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There was a GIF of Snow White going down on Pocahontas.
And on and on and on.
Despite myself I felt my lips wobble. Because I knew what this was like; how it felt to have your friends turn on you, make your life hell day after day, take things that were private and untrue and make you into a spectacle.
Was it more or less sad that Jenna was in the WhatsApp group herself? Why hadn’t she left? Surely someone at PES knew about this?
But I shook myself off. I hadn’t come here to feel sorry for a Beaufort-Bradley.
She came in after lunch, asking if I’d found her phone, but I said no. I needed to be able to give her the phone as she was leaving school and find out how she got home. I caught her in the foyer after her piano lesson and handed it over.
‘Really excellent work in class today, Jenna. I was really impressed.’ I pushed all the warmth I could into my smile, which was a lot, because I practised.
She looked down at her Doc Martens.
‘Your connection with music will really help you. You have a gift.’
She seemed to shrink.
‘It’s rare to find someone who knows so much about – really understands – music. And at your age! That class today, that’s my thing. Let me know if you want to talk more about it.’
She looked up, longing to say yes.
Poor Jenna. Poor, poor privileged little princess spawn of the devil.
29
BEFORE
All day, every day, I think of that evening in the orchard, over and over, trying to remember something I said, some slight, anything Princess could’ve taken in the wrong way.
I can’t think of anything.
Again and again I see her face screwing up with hurt and hate and feel her pushing me, feel the crack of my skull against the tree trunk.
It’s a bit of a stereotype that popular girls are usually bullies. I used to be popular, but I was never a bully. None of my friends were. It was like we were just carried around on a soft cloud of our own superiority. We didn’t touch anyone and no one could touch us.
But now everything has changed. I’m fair game and it’s like a fever. I walk down a hall and I see it in everyone’s flushed cheeks. Everyone, everyone, has something to say, and if they don’t, they just wait for an opportunity to joust me with a shoulder, knock my bag, drop something in my lunch.
So, I start eating lunch in the toilets.
Then one day, I think it might just be subsiding. I think, after a morning without shoves or snide comments, with a few actual smiles, that there’s an end in sight.
And then I walk into the common room at lunch and it’s empty, which it never is, and pasted up on the walls are pictures torn from magazines. I can’t figure them out from where I stand in the doorway, so I walk closer.
Women with splayed legs and men pressing into them. Mouths stretched around shiny penises. A lesbian orgy.
All of the women’s faces have been pasted over with pictures of sheep’s heads.
Speech bubble stickers are scrawled with ‘BAAA!!!’.
I hate myself for crying as I tear down as many pictures as I can.
I run out onto the top field and sit picking at the grass, clutching my bag of porn. I should just run away. Climb over the fence in the trees at the edge of the school grounds, where no one can see me.
Except someone has already.
‘Can you tell me what happened?’ asks Miss Smith.
