I felt a strange sense of satisfaction. I’d caused inconvenience. Conversations had been had. Schedules had been altered. In every classroom, there would have been students talking about it. Teachers had admonished pupils, knowing the perpetrator was most likely a Five Oaks student. Mr Clark had laughed it off, but he was pissed off too – you could tell – because someone had targeted his classroom, if for no other reason. For once, this place wasn’t controlling me. I’d had control, if only for half an hour or so. I’d had the power.

Lessons that morning didn’t fill me with the usual dread. While Mrs Slade talked about the French resistance fighters in third-period history, I doodled Sophia’s name and sketched us as caricatured wartime Parisians – all berets and cigarettes. I decided that next time I saw her I’d smoke as well – it seemed almost essential. I rolled a scrap of paper under my desk and practised holding it, pinching it between my thumb and third finger over a cupped palm. But mostly I spent the morning coming up with ideas for our next offensive. It was out of habit rather than necessity that I spent lunchtime in the Hole. And that’s when it all started to go wrong again.

The Hole is not actually a hole. It’s just how I’d come to think of it, in the many weeks that I’d been hiding out there during break times. In fact, it’s a cubicle in the old toilet block near the gym – the one with Victorian cisterns at head height and glossy painted brickwork – the second to last one on the left. It was always vacant. I’d have my lunch in there, if I could be bothered to eat, maybe watch a dirty vid on silent on my phone, anything to avoid the playground. For a school of over a thousand pupils, you’d be surprised how little use those cubicles saw. Most days, this one kid came in just before the bell, and spent a minute and a half in the end stall, breathing fast and rattling his belt buckle. But otherwise it was usually pretty peaceful in there.

It was halfway through lunch break when I heard someone come in. It was no more than a squeak of shoes, but straight away I knew this was different. It was like a shadow had fallen over the room, darkening the paintwork, pinching the cubicle walls closer to me.

My body recognized it before my brain did, tension winding up in every muscle, my mouthful of crisps suddenly refusing to be swallowed.

I could hear whispers at the far end of the corridor that ran between the stalls. Silently, I drew my feet up on to the edge of the seat. My one sanctuary on school grounds was being penetrated. I could feel it. I wasn’t safe here any more.