“Huh?” Lexi asked distractedly.

“Lunch,” Kate repeated.

Lexi’s gaze snapped from the corridor to Kate’s office. “Oh. Sure. Oui, oui, Madame Kat-er-in.”

Chapter Four

“Are we having a barbecue?”

Squinting in the afternoon sun spilling through the windows of the second-floor music room, Kate looked at Lexi over the baby grand. “Uh-huh. For Hannah’s birthday.”

Lexi sniffed the air, as though the scent of frying onions wafting through the opened window from the school quadrangle for the last fifteen minutes had only just assaulted her senses. “I can’t eat a barbecue.”

Kate returned her gaze to the sheet music. “Excuse me?” she murmured. “You’ve eaten a barbecue every first night of term since I’ve been here.”

“I’m vegan now.”

Kate looked up. “Since when?”

“Since the holidays. My cousin hit a ’roo,” she explained, and Kate’s mind spun as she attempted to make sense of that logic. “So what’s the meat substitute?” Lexi pressed.

Kate sighed. “I don’t know, Lexi. If you didn’t give Sister Ellie a heads-up before she took the island shuttle across the causeway to shop this morning, the substitute is whatever you can find in the fridge. Otherwise, I’m sure there are bread rolls.”

Lexi cringed. “Bread is so fattening.”

Exhausted by the first day back, Kate couldn’t even summon the effort to roll her eyes. Thank God the cohort of three hundred had already escaped on afterschool buses across the causeway to Portarlington, or the Mornington ferry. Thank God only the twenty-five boarders remained.

“You think I can play once more for you before dinner?” Lexi asked hopefully. “Then we can finish.”

Kate clicked her pen and set it down on her notes. “Sure.”

For her end-of-year practical exam, Lexi had selected Carole King’s Beautiful. Kate had been surprised by the choice, and then deeply impressed. She hadn’t shared her hope with Lexi yet, but Kate could see her perfecting the performance to take into final year for the external markers. While Lexi’s vocals were exceptional, she wasn’t quite there yet as a pianist, always fumbling over the final few notes. But Lexi had time and Kate had faith.

The final bell rang just as Lexi reached the riff, but she played through it, her expression adopting a fierce determination that had Kate chewing at her lip in an effort not to grin. Lexi finished, groaning. “You don’t have to clap literally every time, Kate. That was crap.”

“I do have to clap each time. It may not have been as good as earlier today,” Kate agreed, “but it was still very good.”

As they gathered their work, the noise from the barbecue grew louder. “One day down, fifty-seven to go,” Lexi sighed. “Oh, by the way, I had Tilly for History this morning.”

“Yeah?”

“She said that you both boarded in our room.”

“We did.”

“She’s really nice. I like her a lot. Glad I have Sister Ellie for French, though. You should have heard Tilly trying to pronounce the school motto earlier—well, attempting to.”