But when the Year 12s began their damage, I couldn’t watch. Feeling nausea rise, I had to look away.

Much later, I watched the end of the clip. It showed Willow bursting through the playground doors like a cork from a fizzy bottle, launching herself at the biggest boy, whose trainered foot was about to take a kick at Zach’s head. She was much smaller than him, but she had velocity on her side, and he went straight down.

‘Hey!’ his mate shouted. ‘Fuck off!’

She fell too, knocking into another smaller boy, busy filming the whole thing. Another Year 12 went to haul Zach up by the shirt, already speckled with his own blood, pushing him back, preparing to hit him again.

And then the teachers were there, pulling them apart, shouting at the assailants to ‘fall back’, demanding those filming the fight turn their phones off ‘right now!’ The energy hummed in the air; the crowd grew.

I can only guess that Willow was shocked at Zach’s face – at the blood on his school shirt.

That she felt dismal.

That the images Melissa had sent me from the CCTV footage played out in her mind.

The fact she’d inflicted enough damage already, perhaps.

I thought of what I’d seen Marcus doing this morning as I skulked opposite the café, when he came back out of the side door.

Which lass I’d seen him in the arms of; how very daft I had been not to realise before.

How very daft I’d been to think he’d ever been interested in me.

Melissa

FRIDAY 6 OCTOBER

That sanctimonious cow Jan Vermaak cornered me at the cashpoint the morning after the attack on Zach at Northgate High.

The story I cobbled together from the torrent of information she unleashed, along with the fragments from Cecilia that I managed to pick up, was this:

Lola and Willow had been together yesterday, in their year assembly, sat with their skinny friend Biba – ‘Boring granddaughter of a Sixties model who’d hung out with that Jimi Hendrix,’ Jan grimaced, jealous even in the retelling of a story, as if that celebrity endorsement was relevant to anything – when the girls had apparently spotted Zach, skulking outside the school hall.

With an eye-roll, Jan told me Lola had always said Willow ‘liked’ Zach. That’s why she’d done it: she was pissed off trying to get his attention at school, Lola said.

What a mess, I thought. Turns out it doesn’t always pay to be the prettiest one.

Because Zach, it seemed, had been at school trying to get Cecilia’s attention.

Had anyone else noticed Cecilia in that assembly, I wondered, sitting alone on the other side of the hall? Or that swotty Mary from the vicarage had invited Ceci to sit with her, but Cecilia had chosen to stay where she was, alone.

I could well imagine poor Ceci, nervously picking at her face and fingernails the whole way through assembly, until the immaculate Willow must have felt a shudder of distaste.