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‘He killed her?’
I crush a nodule of dirt between my fingers. ‘I don’t know. My mum went in to look and she wasn’t moving.’
‘Jesus. Fuck. Christ.’ Lydia stalks off towards the gate.
‘Get back here,’ says Mina.
‘What? Why?’
‘Because this is going to look bad. Because Tristan needs his friends right now.’
‘Isn’t this a bit beyond that?’
I need them both. I can’t back up my brother’s stories. I need someone else to verify that Miss Smith has been flirting with him, making advances. Someone needs to have seen something.
I start to cry. The thought of my brother going to prison is like being asked to lie still in a grave. ‘You don’t believe me?’
‘He literally just… I don’t even know what that was earlier, with Georgia.’
‘He went too far but he was never actually going to do anything – you know that. And he probably went too far with Miss Smith too but he wasn’t going to have sex with her either – he’s seventeen and she’s, what, forty? Fifty? He’s seventeen. She wasn’t saying no. She was saying yes and he… What would you do? What if you came on to, I don’t know, Richard Gere, but in real life, and in real life he put his hand on your thigh and asked you back to his? I mean, really?’
It was a scenario we’d discussed after watching Pretty Woman.
Lydia walks back towards us.
‘Except you’re alone in a room and you don’t need to go anywhere else for it to happen and he pushes you up against a wall – then what?’
Lydia sits down next to me and Mina follows.
‘She tried to rape him?’ says Lydia.
I nod.
‘Fucking bitch,’ says Mina.
I nod again.
Mina puts her hands on her hips. ‘We’ll tell them. If the police ask us. We’ll tell them everything everyone’s been saying.’
I squeeze Mina’s arm, but I see Lydia putting her head on one side, watching Mina. All of us have told stories about Miss Smith. Mina said she saw her cup Tristan’s bum as she went past. Lydia said she saw her reach onto his tray in the canteen and take a bite of his apple. I said I saw her blow him a kiss as he was leaving her classroom.
But none of us have ever discussed whether each other’s stories are true.
And there are the things everyone has seen. Miss Smith’s short skirts. The way she sometimes climbs up onto a chair to adjust a poster with everyone watching when she’s wearing one of them. Her winks and jokes and habit of toying with the pendant between her breasts when she speaks.
And she really did go into the storeroom after sending Tristan in once.
And there are all the stories from other people. The time she apparently groped our head boy on a field trip. What she supposedly said to Alex Dory when she caught him smoking in the woods. The boys she’s rumoured to have slept with in years gone by.
I can see Lydia thinking. She made her story up, but what about everyone else?
‘Tristan thought…’ I start, wanting to mention Tristan’s story about them seeing Miss Smith holding him back after class, trying to kiss him, but I feel like it’s too soon. Lydia still isn’t certain. ‘Tristan just wanted a bit of fun. He likes to push things – that’s why you like him, right? He’s fun. But we’re all just kids, really, still, aren’t we? He’s never even had sex before. Not really.’
Lydia frowns at me. ‘What?’
I shake my head. ‘He hasn’t.’ This is true, actually. It was his biggest secret, until now. All of his previous girlfriends have protected it.
‘Bloody hell,’ she breathes.
