‘HERE!’ she shouts in reply to Miss Olive, before lowering her voice again. ‘I don’t know why Yanny won’t talk about it.’

‘Maybe it’s not weird to him. If he lives there.’

‘I s’pose.’ She sighs. ‘But there are definitely secrets in that forest, and up that weird staircase.’ Her face grows serious, and she plays with the cuff of her jumper. ‘I do not like secrets, Stella.’

‘Here,’ I say, raising my hand as Miss Olive gets to my name. I look back at Zara. ‘But doesn’t everybody have secrets?’

‘You talk far too much sense for this time on a Friday morning,’ she says. ‘Everybody might have them, but that doesn’t mean they should!’

Just then, Yanny rushes into the form room. Miss Olive glowers at him, and he gives her a smile that I swear radiates straight to her. She checks his name off her list with a gentle shake of her head, and then the bell rings, and we all pick up our stuff and head out again, catching him in the tide and swirling back out into the corridor.

‘G’morning,’ he says, untangling himself from the knot of kids heading in one direction, to come with us towards science. ‘Missed you at the gate, Zara.’

‘No you didn’t.’

‘I don’t know how it happens,’ he says, charging up the steps two at a time. ‘I leave at the right time – Ma hassles me enough . . . It just seems to take too long to get here.’

‘Maybe you dawdle,’ she says. And then, with a wink at me: ‘Maybe it’s the spirits in the forest, slowing you down.’

He falters on the landing for a split second as she charges up past him, and she doesn’t notice how he blanches, as if she hit him in the stomach. It’s there and gone in a blink, and then he rushes on after her, bag swinging, bright as ever, but the feeling remains in my belly all through the morning, and I can’t look him in the eye, even when we have art again without Zara. It’s just me and him sitting at the end of a big table, and the teacher is late, so everyone’s chatting, except I don’t know what to say to him.

‘How’s it going?’ he asks.

His freckles glow under the artificial lights; it’s dark, and the clouds are stormy outside, and the whole place suddenly feels claustrophobic. Every lesson is a different textbook, a different teacher, a different classroom down a different corridor. I’ve got lost every time I’ve looked for a loo, and I don’t know anything. I take a deep breath in, filling my chest, and breathe it out slowly, lowering my gaze to the old wood table with its scored lines and crossed-out words.

‘Stella?’

‘It’s different,’ I say. ‘I wanted it so much. I still do. But it isn’t what I thought it would be.’

He doesn’t say anything, and it takes me a long time to look up from the desk. When I do, he’s staring at me.