‘Your hair really is black, isn’t it?’ My hand went to my crown. Years of unwanted patting had created a reflex. ‘I’d read that black hair was a thing here, but…’ He paused. ‘It’s almost, sort of navy in the light, isn’t it? No, not navy, but…’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘That girl in Year Twelve has it too.’

‘Britta Sayers. One of the Eldest Girls.’

‘Yes. She and her –’

I cut him short. I didn’t care that he had brought up the Eldest Girls in conversation, not then. I cared that we were straying from what was supposed to happen next.

‘It’s lucky,’ I told him. ‘My hair.’

‘Is it?’ He smiled, waiting for the punchline.

I nodded, let my hand fall away from my head, and in my newly found voice, the voice of Leah, I asked him: ‘Would you like to touch it?’

Ordinary Time: Autumn 2017

ORDINARY TIME: AUTUMN 2017

They walked differently.

They didn’t trip and scurry anymore, powered by laughter and chatter; didn’t curl over and into one another, tugging down sections of hair to cover their faces. They unfolded their arms away from the former embarrassment of their blooming chests.

Overnight, they became tall.

Promenading side-by-side, their strides long and certain, linked elbows were their only concession to past girlishness. From main building to canteen, from chapel to school, they took their time as they went, letting you look, wishing to be acknowledged. This desire to be noticed was nothing new – they were sixteen-year-old girls – but no more did they seek attention by pretending they didn’t want it.

‘They glide now,’ said a boy from the First Year seniors, ‘they float.’

‘Like ghosts?’ said his mate with a snigger, to which the first boy replied, dead straight, ‘No, like… Queens.’

They took on a different scent.

A Second Year senior girl spotted three pairs of feet beneath the door of one cubicle in the toilets at lunchtime, mid-September, two weeks after the singing incident in chapel – Anna’s buckled T-bars, Jade-Marie’s brown brogues, Britta’s laced-up black boots with the heavy soles. They were sobbing in there, said the Second Year, or at least one of them was, while the others issued calming whispers and spluttered curses. This wouldn’t have been thought of as unusual – teenage girls were supposed to hide away in bathroom stalls if they needed to cry – but the aroma of them made it strange.

The signature scent of September was a sweet fizziness. The school toilets and changing rooms were a haze of cheap body spray, supplies still plentiful from the summer shipments. But the girls’ bathroom that day smelled earthy, meaty, feral. Laced across it was the churchiness of incense.

It was a smell that was disconcerting in its familiarity.