Kate chuckled. “She always struggled with the accent.” She turned in the doorway. “Are you coming down for dinner?”

“Yeah,” Lexi said. “I just want to get one more practice in.”

“Okay. Don’t work too hard. Come outside soon for your bread roll, yeah?”

Lexi scowled playfully.

Kate stopped by her office inside the boarding house to drop off her notebooks. Even from across the road and indoors, the music was loud—the girls must have taken their portable speakers across to the quad. Was Tilly out there yet? Throughout the day, Kate had passed her in the hall a few times, wandered by her Year Eight History class after lunch, but they’d barely exchanged three words.

At the movement of one of her Year Nine boarders in the doorway, Kate chanced a quick glance up from checking her email on her computer. “What’s up?”

The student slid her diary across the desk. “I have to get this signed by you.”

Kate’s gaze flickered briefly to the opened diary, to Tilly’s perfect script in the bottom left corner of the day’s date. “Tilly says my uniform is two centimetres too short.”

Kate looked over the desk. The navy tartan skirt was a bit short above her knees, but hardly an issue. “It looks all right to me.”

“Well, apparently it’s not.” The girl leaned across Kate’s desk and lowered her voice to a whisper, as though they were sharing a secret: “She made us kneel on the floor and she checked with a ruler.”

Kate raised an eyebrow. “She did?”

“It was so weird.”

So weird was how the memory of being alone with Tilly in the belltower suddenly struck her. Kate, slipping her hands over the smoothness of Tilly’s thighs, Tilly letting Kate’s touch venture beneath the hem of her school skirt. Kate pressed it to the back of her mind. Reluctant to undermine Tilly, she signed the diary. “Get the hem taken down over the weekend, yes?”

“Fine…”

Outside, back across the dirt road and inside the school quad, Kate found Grace and Molly helping Sister Mary Monica and Sister Ruth at the barbecue, the two girls insisting they didn’t need the aprons Sister Ruth attempted to slip over their heads to protect their uniforms.

At one of the picnic benches inside the quad, Sister Ellie was busy buttering bread rolls. “Don’t butter Lexi’s,” Kate told her as she slipped up beside her and reached for a disposable cup. “She’s vegan now.”

Sister Ellie shook her head as she watched Kate pour apple juice from the picnic vat. “I give it a week.”

Kate scoffed as she cast her gaze fondly over the girls’ volleyball game across the quad. “I give it three days.” Leaning back against the table, she looked across the quad in search of the woman who had been on her mind all day.

There she was, at the furthest table, fixing the blanket over Sister Tessie’s knees. The downing sun cast Tilly’s immaculately coiffed bun copper as she sat back on the garden bench, her shoulder pressed against Sister Tessie’s, fingers clasped between the elderly sister’s hands as Sister Tessie talked her ear off. The afternoon wind fluttered the hem of Tilly’s skirt, the thin material licking at the base of her calves. Tilly bent for a moment to tuck it between her legs. As she sat back again, she said something. Grinning, Sister Tessie smoothed a hand up Tilly’s forearm, rubbed back and forth like a proud, affectionate grandmother.