I phoned Dad before bedtime. I told him I’d arrived safely and that everyone was very nice. I could tell he was trying to keep the conversation light to stop me feeling homesick. Neither of us were used to being apart like this. All my life, apart from one school camp, I’d never been away without Dad. “Good luck for tomorrow, Maisie,” he said as he hung up. And those words kept me awake way after midnight as I lay in my bed and looked out of the windows at the Paris roofline under the inky night sky and felt sick to my stomach about my first day at school.

***

I should never have brought my own canvas. I realised this as I walked across the cobbled courtyard. No one else was carrying one. At the office of the school administrator, Madame Richard, I sat on the chair and waited with my stupid big canvas and my bag, feeling like a little kid in Year Zero at primary school. Madame Richard opened her door. “Maisie? Here you go!”

I thought she would show me inside and talk to me about the school. I expected at the very least she’d show me where the classroom was! Instead, she just gave me a pink slip of paper and waved me towards classroom 1C!

In the end I found it by myself. Classroom 1C was on the lower level of the building, and the number was written in black on the door.

I could hear the buzz of conversation as the door swung open, but the moment they clapped eyes on me the words froze in the air. Sixteen art students, all of them so old they looked, like, almost twenty or something, stood silently behind their easels and stared straight at me. I have never wanted the ground to open up and swallow me so bad.

“You must be Maisie Thompson?” A bearded man in a dust-brown short-sleeved shirt and black-paint splattered jeans came over and shook my hand. “My name is Augustin. Congratulations on your scholarship.”

He said the words in perfectly accented English and then he muttered, “It would be nice if they would consult me in these matters of course …”

He said this in English too so I’m sure he meant me to understand him, and the meaning of his words, that he hadn’t been the one to select me for the scholarship and perhaps was not entirely happy about it. Certainly it didn’t seem like he was congratulating me at all and he definitely seemed disgruntled about having me in his class.

“You may take the easel at the front of the room,” Augustin directed.