It wasn’t until after lunch, when Fox was doing extra sport with Jeff, that the children discovered the wet paint. Brendan asked the class to get their writing workbooks from their desk drawers and Chloe burst into tears. Fox had emptied the paint inside the children’s desks. Their rulers and erasers were multi-coloured, their writing and maths books splattered, black paint sticking the pages together.

‘Chloe, it’s okay, I’ll come and sort it out.’ Brendan comforted the crying girl. ‘The rest of the class can copy down the sentences on the board.’

He dabbed at the paint with paper towel and managed to take off the large blobs. But parts of the workbooks were ruined. Chloe’s three-page story, of which she’d been so proud, was soaked in black paint.

Fox. That little shit. Deliberately wrecking other kids’ work—it made him furious.

In the weekly staff meeting, Brendan had brought up Fox’s behaviour yet again.

‘I need more help for the girl.’

He looked around the room, his eyes settling on Patricia Campbell, the principal.

‘You have a few parent volunteers reading with her in the mornings, don’t you?’ Patricia had asked, already knowing the answer.

‘Yes, but they—’

‘Fox already takes up most of the school counsellor’s allocated hours.’ Patricia shook her head. ‘We’re doing the best we can within our resources. Ask for more parent help.’

We all know it takes a village to raise a child but parent volunteers can’t cope with her behaviour, Brendan had wanted to shout at the principal. They’ve nearly all stopped coming because they don’t know how to handle Fox. There were only two mums left who were prepared to put up with her crap.

‘We need to get her parents to agree to having her assessed,’ Brendan said. He must have repeated that line ten times by now.

‘I have contacted the department again,’ the principal replied.

Brendan sighed. The parents would never agree to an assessment. He’d met the mother just once. Wearing a long, flowing dress and armfuls of jangling bracelets, she’d reeked of dope and alcohol. She only spoke in a whisper. ‘Fox is a special girl,’ she’d murmured. Brendan wanted to shake some sense and sobriety into her. He suspected Fox had foetal alcohol spectrum disorder.

His girlfriend, Claire, worried that some terrible incident with Fox would jeopardise Brendan’s career. But the department hardly ever kicked out teachers—there was enough incompetence in the classrooms for him to see that.

For the past three days, though, he’d been living the dream.

No Fox.

Of course, her parents hadn’t rung in to report her sick. They never did. And while Brendan had marked Fox absent on the roll, he hadn’t yet told the principal. Maybe tomorrow he should mention it.