There was occasionally something so cheerfully immoral about the city that it caught her off guard, made her feel like her former self. Go and have an absurd love affair, it told her. Go on. You’ve done it before. Do it again. Walk around naked underneath your coat. She considered the possibility that everyone was naked underneath their coats. It wouldn’t surprise her. The city was silent during the day and loud in the evenings, and the sudden transition alarmed her. It could be bossy in that way – be scared, don’t be scared, now be terrified. Once the Metro came to a stop, the lights died, total silence, not even a cough. Then it moved as normal. There was the sense of an unspoken resilience. Every Monday or Friday, regardless of where she was, how unpredictable she was feeling, she received a phone call from the school. This was what she talked about when she rang home. In a city of novelties, responsibility was the only real novelty.

It was Halloween when she next stepped into the boy’s school, passing by unremarked except for a few fake skeletons dangling from the ceiling, an unsophisticated holiday. When she stood in the hallway, feeling like a student herself, the place spoke to her of sweat and failure. Already, at under twelve, there were violin, piano, language lessons abandoned, a sluggishness set in. A sea of uniforms swept over her; a tide of blue. The boys all had bad posture and awkward gaits as if ashamed of their childhoods. Why are you so sluggish, she wanted to ask. Perk up. Many of you are going to be rich.

‘What’s the collective name for a group of boys?’ she asked the teacher.

‘In French or in English?’

‘English.’

‘I don’t know in either language.’

‘A school of boys, maybe,’ the woman said, ‘a drooping of boys.’

The teacher always so elegant, yet merciless, in her admissions, told her that morning the boy had hit a classmate – slapped him hard across the face for beating him at a race.

The woman was quiet for a moment. ‘He doesn’t get this from me.’

‘No,’ she said, delicately.

‘I’m the stand-in.’

The teacher gave a curt nod in response.

She leaned forward awkwardly in her chair. ‘You think I’m not trying.’

‘I don’t think that.’

‘I love that boy.’

‘I know you do.’

A silence passed.

‘We don’t want to have to expel him.’

‘I will speak to him,’ she said, ‘I will speak to him.’

‘He’s very good at running,’ the teacher said, a genuine smile on her face. ‘Fast.’

‘He does get that from me,’ she said and closed the door.

In the hallway she waited for him, watched the overhead skeletons, seemingly relaxed without a skin. She spun one in her hand, made it dance. It seemed to resent the movement. A private school, she thought, its skeleton private.