Paula pivots sharply. She walks straight into the middle of the knot of bodies. Titch’s heart is pounding. Kids yell ‘Jackson!’ and scatter. The two fighting take no notice. They grapple and pull at each other till Titch sees the boy in the grey hoody, red-faced, tumble back towards the door. She sees his elbow strike the reinforced pane and the glass shatters and he falls.

Paula stands in front of the other boy. She’s a foot smaller than him. She points and barks something and he goes, instantly, following the line of her finger like it has some occult force. Her lean face is clouded with fury. Her voice is sharp as a whip crack.

The boy in the grey hoody is sobbing on the ground, holding his arm. It looks wrong, the arm. Paula kneels, and he’s speaking to her, saying something between choked breaths about having to go to his lesson, he must go to his lesson.

Paula stands, and she shakes her head. Someone takes the sobbing boy in the grey hoody to first aid.

‘I am so sorry about that,’ says Paula to Titch, as she rejoins her guest, voice tight. They carry on towards the sixth form centre.

Titch’s pulse is racing, and the sounds of the school fall spikily around her, sharp and unsettling. The clack of her heels on the floor, the echo of voices. The presence of so many, so close, behind doors, and walls, and windows. She follows Paula as she moves slickly through the corridor, head high and alert, and feels the tightness in her chest of threat, and sudden possibility.

There are fifteen students in the Media Studies class, spread evenly across five rows of chipped desks. The walls are covered with film posters and student work. Paula smiles at Titch from the corridor and is gone.

The teacher comes to greet her. He is large, athletic in a fleshy and pink-cheeked kind of way.

‘Will Bradman,’ he says. ‘Brilliant you could come.’

Titch hopes she is smiling.

The teacher squeezes himself into a chair at the side.

She tries to meet the students’ eyes. She remembers what Paula said last night. They are nice kids, these. These ones are not the ones who fight and smash windows. She sees a skinny boy with a well-shaped quiff, another in a hoody with a couple of pimply chins. A girl with heavy makeup, a dark streak of contouring down each cheek and a white line down the bridge of her nose. Another girl with blotchy hands, stained from fake tan.

Her gaze falls on a tall girl at the back. Her hair falls evenly on either side of her face. Her skin is a little greasy.

The girl meets her eyes. Steady.

Titch blinks first. She widens her eyes, smiles. She takes a breath, tries to slow herself down.

‘Good morning,’ she says.