Oh dear Christ alive. We were allowed to call him Jacques because he was only a few years older than us and was employed by the school in an exchange programme to help French teachers with their English accent and Irish teachers with their French accent. Lizzie fancied the pants off Jacques because he was a bit exotic, all long hair and bright clothes, the anti-Irish boy. He must have had twenty pairs of coloured socks; we’d never seen anything like it in our lives when he sat on the desk with his legs crossed. Yellow socks on a man, trop chic!

He could wear glasses and not look like a geek. He was so French he could gaze directly at a teenage girl for minutes without blinking which had us all in a state of total panic. You couldn’t look away and you couldn’t think of the words you needed for the two whole classes of French pronunciation and conversation on a Wednesday afternoon because he held your eyes with his big brown sleepy ones and as a result your brain turned to mush.

We heard him explain to Sister Pious that the PE teacher, Miss McElroy, was sick and he had been roped in to help supervise us for the week. Sister Pious did not look best pleased; she had needed big beefy Miss McElroy to help her herd thirty-five hormone-riddled eejits and now she had someone who would stoke those hormones to catastrophic levels.

Lizzie was speculating on the chances of her being taught French kissing from the horse’s mouth. She always made such a mess of herself when he was around, it was excruciating. She couldn’t understand that she looked like a fool, a fool with verbal diarrhoea. Like her, I really did fancy him but I denied it every time she questioned me. I crossed my heart and hoped to die that he did nothing for me. I had to put a lot of effort into not drooling over him; she would have thumped me or anyone else who got in her way.

Lizzie had opened the suitcase of dreams to bring forth a bagful of egg and onion sandwiches with cheap margarine on nasty sliced white bread, a packet of chocolate digestives and a pile of sweets: Crunchies for me and at least five or six Curly Wurlys for her. I had homemade bread with jam: dull.

–  Oh, Mary! I think I actually love Jacques! I can’t stop thinking about him. Have I the skinniest, weeniest, teeniest of chances of pulling him before he disappears back to France?

–  Stranger things have happened.

I had to have the egg and onion in case Jacques suddenly saw sense or saw her with the light behind her and fell head over heels squealing her name and begging her to snog him! She couldn’t risk having breath like a farmer when he finally came to his senses and leaned in.