‘Please,’ I beg, loud enough for only him to hear. ‘Just let me go.’ My gaze darts over his shoulder, hoping Mr Clark might be returning. He’s nowhere to be seen.

‘Open the fucking bag!’ Nate shouts into my left ear, flecks of spit making it halfway to my eardrum. His hand clenches the rucksack.

‘Don’t be shy, Morcombe,’ Dimi says. The three of them are laughing. Everyone else looks on, desperate to see what I’m concealing.

‘Amit!’ I shout. ‘Lei! Please help me.’ I’m rooted to the spot, using every ounce of strength to keep the bag stationary in spite of the increasing number of hands grabbing at it.

‘Just leave him alone,’ Amit says. He doesn’t even shout. He says nothing else, makes no attempt to help.

The force pulling at my bag drags me along with it. My hip strikes a desk. I stagger across the room, the desk juddering along with me. Somebody is prising open my fingers. Someone else is cracking the edge of a ruler on my knuckles. At the periphery of my vision, I see Dimi standing on a table. He folds one arm in front of him and grips his own fist. He jumps. I can’t move out of the way. His full body weight drives his elbow into my spine. I’m propelled forward. My legs tangle in a chair. One hand reflexes out to steady myself. And my bag is gone.

Joey dangles it at arm’s length. ‘Want it back?’

I lurch forward. With my hand centimetres away, Joey passes it to Dimi. Dimi jogs to the back of the classroom. He begins swinging the bag by the drawstring. A number of hands around me reach into the air, ready to catch it. Dimi studies each of them in turn, making a show of considering who should receive it next. It’s swinging like a pendulum, higher with each pass. ‘Ready to catch it, Morcombe?’ he asks.

‘Don’t throw it!’ I shout. ‘Please. Just put it down.’

Laughter fills the room. My bag is almost completing full rotations round Dimi’s wrist. He feigns releasing it, his gleeful eyes fixed on mine.

‘Fuck you!’ I scream. I scream it over and over. ‘Fuck every one of you.’

My shoulder smashes against Mr Clark’s as I explode out through the door and down the steps. He swings backwards into the guardrail and looks at me in shock.

I bolt past the classroom windows. I veer into the gap between the next two Portakabins.

And it comes.

3.11 p.m.

My eyeballs feel it first – a pinch of pressure at each side. My vision distorts, everything elongating and flashing salmon pink. There’s an inward rush, as though a giant has inhaled and sucked all the air from the atmosphere. There’s a millisecond of perfect calm. Everything is still, preserved in the silence of a vacuum.