There was this teacher, for example, who tried to seduce her when she was fifteen, but she didn’t realise this is what he’d been doing until she was seventeen. She’d thought at the time he was another adult wanting to prove he was a good person by giving special attention to the girl whose dad was in prison. She didn’t know that there were a half-dozen of them at the school with parents locked up, because none of them, including her, would ever talk about it, and so his targeting of her with daily compliments and questions about her weekend and offers to help on assignments that weren’t even for the subject that he taught (PE, for god’s sake) was not, or not only, because of that misfortune. She didn’t know either that adult men weren’t supposed to talk about the smoothness of teenage girls’ legs or notice their painted nails or stroke their hair and tell them how silky it was. Which isn’t to say she enjoyed it—it made her skin crawl, made her spin on her heel and duck into empty classrooms when she saw him coming—but she didn’t see it as meaning anything. It was just what some adults were like.

At some point the teacher stopped. It hadn’t been bad enough that you’d notice it stopping right away. Just after a while she saw him standing too close to Elissa James, who was backed up against the closed door of a classroom and his face had that I’m really listening to you intensity that creeped her out so much and she thought, Ugh, poor Elissa, her dad must have been arrested or her mum OD’d or something, and when Elissa left school soon after Nic assumed that she’d been right, something awful had happened at home. Then she didn’t think about the teacher or Elissa or any of it again until a year or so later when it was all over the news that Elissa was expecting the teacher’s kid. Her parents and his wife wanted him prosecuted but Elissa was eighteen and wouldn’t cooperate in any inquiry about what had happened before that, so there was nothing anyone could do.

‘That coulda been me,’ Nic told Michelle while they were watching the story on 60 Minutes.

‘You wish.’

‘He wished. He tried it on me before her.’

‘Yeah, right. Look how pretty she is.’

‘She’s no prettier than Nicky,’ Mum, who had crept in behind them, said. ‘Quite plain, really. That’s what creeps like him look for, though. Girls who’ll be grateful for the attention.’

Michelle smirked at that, but Nic felt good. She’d not felt a bit of gratitude to the old perve. Not a teensy-tiny bit.