Suddenly, she’s not Rebecca Martin and I’m not Miss Cooper, she’s Lena and Nicole, she’s every one of Bella’s bitchy friends who’d laugh at me, make her embarrassed by me; all those girls who made my sister a stranger. I’m sixteen again, too fat in my school uniform, and there is Bella, dripping blood on her desk. I’m not going to let them do this to me again. I will not sit by quietly this time.

“Why don’t you shut the fuck up?” I say to Rebecca/Lena/Nicole.

There’s a gasp from someone.

“Excuse me?” Rebecca says half laughing, half shocked. I can only partly hear her through the buzzing in my head.

“Shut the fuck up, I said.” I get up, my chair scraping across the floor. My head spins and I can feel Bella urging me on. Go on, Tess, show them. Tell them. “You have no idea what’s going on in my life and you don’t even care, do you? All I want is for you to give me a break and do your bloody work. And maybe, for once—just shut your damned mouth.”

There’s total silence now. I look down at the poetry book in my shaking hand but then Rebecca fucking Martin laughs again and my control snaps.

I march over to her desk and she gets up, as tall as me, taller than I was at sixteen. But her bravado is all fake as I grab hold of her stupid short tie and pull her forward until our foreheads are nearly touching.

“Seriously? You’re still laughing? Will you still be laughing if I throw you through the fucking window?” I shove her backward and she falls, her chair clattering to the floor.

The silence is broken by someone shouting, “Miss has gone rabid!” It’s a boy’s voice, jubilant and scared all at once and it brings me back and Rebecca Martin isn’t Lena or Nicole anymore, she’s a scared-looking kid with tears in her eyes sprawled on the floor. Bella is gone from the desk next to her. Of course she is. She was never bloody there.

The door flies open and Sophie runs in, white-faced as she takes in the scene.

She puts her hand on my shoulder. “Tess?”

I reach out a hand to help Rebecca up, but she scrabbles away from me, fury and fear on her face, her cheeks burning red.

Sophie grips my shoulder harder and pulls me away. “What have you done, Tess?”

Oh God.

What have I done?

I go straight to Karen, my head of department, trying for damage limitation before the whole of the eleventh grade gets here with their own exaggerated versions, but I’m made to wait outside while Rebecca and Sophie are brought in before me.