Walden’s teaching persona, her mask, was a necessary shield. It created a wall of distance between herself and the young people she taught and listened to and genuinely cared for. It let her glide untouched past jokes and sneers, and stand serene above the outbursts and the awkward moments. But eventually the mortar in the wall began to crumble. You could not maintain the same kind of distance with sixth form that you held on to with the middle school. They came back after their GCSEs out of the red uniform jumpers, wearing the smart clothes which they had chosen themselves, and you reframed them in your mind: adults, almost. Normal people. Think of yourself at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen—were you really so different now?

But oh, it was awkward. When you lost the mask, you lost the scripts that belonged to it. Walking down the corridor beside Nikki—Nikki still looking crumpled and tearstained—Walden was terribly aware, and terribly sorry, that she could think of absolutely nothing worthwhile to say.

School corridors during lesson time never lost their uncomfortably liminal quality. Passing the closed doors of busy classrooms, Walden glimpsed colleagues at work, children with their hands up or with their heads down over exercise books; but out here, just their two sets of footsteps in the hush, and the wall displays in need of touching up, and the persistent smell of floor cleaner.

The infirmary was on the ground floor of New House, opposite the sixth form common room. The front half of the room was a cross between a doctor’s waiting room and an admin office. Curtains blocked off the beds in the back half. The school nurse was behind the desk packing a medical kit with spare inhalers—Walden couldn’t remember which trip exactly was going out this week. She looked up when Walden and Nikki came in, gave Walden the polite greeting that her status in the school hierarchy demanded, and immediately took over looking after Nikki—sitting her down, getting her a glass of water, asking friendly, inane questions just to get her talking. She was an expert, of course, on how to deal kindly and helpfully with a child who was having a bad day. Walden felt a little sting of professional envy for the skill that she did not have. “I’m just going to pop in and see Matron—I’ll let her know Nikki’s here.”

“Dr Walden,” said Nikki, suddenly and a little too loudly. Walden paused in the doorway.

Nikki took a deep breath—gathering courage. She lifted her chin. “Dr Walden,” she said, “I think I should drop.”

Walden stared at her.