Castlefield Academy, Thetford. 11:02 am
He came out of the maths block into the noise of break.
The yard was at full volume. Three hundred Year 9s and 10s had been released from second period and were doing the thing they did with their twenty-three minutes, which was talk over each other at the volume of a small festival. Footballs. Phones. A queue at the snack pod. The smell of the air was the smell of school yard at midmorning — concrete warm in the sun, hot pastry from the pod, the chemical green of the sports hall mats coming in faint through an open fire door somewhere.
Ethan walked through it the way a person walked through cold water.
His chest was almost back. His hands had stopped being cold. His face, where Mrs Daley had crouched next to him saying breathe with me, still felt like a face that had been crouched next to. He had wiped his nose twice on the way down the stairs. He had not looked at his sleeve. He did not need to.
The bench was under the sycamore at the bottom corner of the yard, where the lower path ran down past the netball court and the railings dropped away toward the field. It had been the bench since Year 8. He had not chosen it and they had not chosen it. The bench had simply, by attrition, become the bench.
Three of them were already there.
Jamie was on the bench itself, one leg up, the other on the path, eating a flapjack out of a paper bag. He was the tallest of them. He had been the tallest of them since Year 7, and his arms had never quite caught up with the rest of him. Black hair cut short, a small chip in his front tooth from a year ago that he had stopped being self-conscious about, the cuffs of his blazer pushed up to his elbows because the blazer was a size too short and pretending it was on purpose was easier than asking for a new one.
Theo was on the wall beside the bench, swinging his feet, mid-monologue. Red hair. Freckles that had got worse since the weather had turned. Talking with both hands. He was the loud one. He was always the loud one.
Dan was on the back of the bench, leaning against it, scrolling something on his phone, not contributing. He did not contribute much. When he did, it landed.
Ethan got to the wall. He sat on it without saying anything. The wall was warm.
Jamie looked at him for half a second. Looked at the rest of him for another half-second. Did not say anything. He broke the flapjack in his hand into two pieces, looked at them, decided which was bigger, and held the bigger half out to Ethan without turning his head.
Ethan took it.
Theo, mid-flow, did not stop.
“— my mum says she was seventeen. Seventeen. And she was watching the news and they were saying the whole thing had been breached and everyone’s photos were — she says she didn’t sleep for like a week. She kept checking the windows. She says her dad sat in the hallway with a — ”
Dan, without looking up from his phone: “With a cricket bat. You’ve told us.”
“It’s a good detail.”
“It’s a good detail but you’ve told us.”
Jamie swallowed a mouthful of flapjack. “My dad was at uni. Birmingham. He came home for the weekend and my nan wouldn’t let him go back. Made him stay in Norwich for three weeks. He says she looked at him like he was already — ”
“On the list,” Dan said. “You’ve told us that one too.”
“It’s also a good detail.”
“It is.” Dan put his phone down. “Doesn’t mean we haven’t heard it.”
Ethan looked between them. “What are you talking about?”
Theo’s feet stopped swinging. “The Great Breach. Twenty-Eight.”
“The — what?”
“The Great Breach of 2028,” Dan said. “The government built a database. Everyone’s photos. Everyone’s ID. Everyone’s address. Said it was for age verification. Said it was for safety. Then it got hacked and criminals took the whole thing and used it to — ”
“To find kids,” Jamie said.
“To find kids. And take them. And worse.”
Ethan was holding the rest of the flapjack. He did not eat it.
Theo kicked his heels against the wall. “You know how many photos they needed? Twenty. Twenty photos of one kid and the AI could make them say anything. Do anything. And the government had given them like fifty million. Just — there. In one place.”
“And they said it was unhackable,” Jamie said.
“They always say it’s unhackable. They said the NHS one was unhackable. The school census. Every single one. All of them got breached.”
“The phones thing,” Jamie said. “That’s the bit that — ”
“Yeah,” Theo said.
“Because the government banned phones in schools that year. Said they were too disruptive. So everyone had to leave them at home. And then — ”
“And then the database got breached,” Dan said. “So the traffickers had everyone’s route. Everyone’s timetable. And the kids are walking home with no phone. No way to call anyone.”
“It’s the combination,” Theo said. “My mum says it’s the combination that made it so bad. Taking away the one thing a kid could use to call for help. And then handing their exact location to criminals. At the same time. In the same year.”
Theo’s feet had stopped swinging. “My mum knew a girl. She had a cousin. Manchester. She was nine. Walking home from school. No phone. And the traffickers knew her route because the government had made her mum upload it. Knew what time she left. Knew what time she’d be at the corner by the shop. Knew her mum worked late on Thursdays.”
He stopped.
“She was never found. My mum says there are still families who don’t know. Twenty-two years. They just never came home.”
“Some of them did get found,” Dan said, quietly.
“I know.”
“And it was worse.”
“I know.”
Everyone knew what Dan meant. The ones who were found alive had been — Theo’s mum had used the word traumatised, but Theo had heard her on the phone to his aunt once, late at night, using words that were not that word. Some of the children had been kept. For weeks. For months. The ones who came back were not the same children who had been taken. Some of them never spoke again. Some of them did not recognise their own parents.
“And some of them were murdered,” Jamie said. His voice had gone flat. “It wasn’t just traffickers. There were people who just wanted to hurt kids. The database didn’t check who was looking. It gave everyone to everyone.”
“It gave everyone to everyone,” Dan repeated.
“And some people used it to find kids to kill. And they did.”
A football bounced off the side of the snack pod. Someone laughed on the other side of the yard.
Jamie was looking at his hands. “My dad’s cousin was on the list. She wasn’t taken. But her photo — her Year 6 photo — someone took it and ran it through the AI. Made it into — ”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to.
“My great-aunt saw it. She doesn’t go online anymore. She won’t even have a phone. My dad says she just — she never really came back from seeing that.”
Theo said, quieter, “It wasn’t just kids. That’s what people forget. My uncle had his whole identity nicked. Someone took his passport scan and opened about twelve credit cards. Took four years to sort it. He still gets letters. And whistleblowers — people who’d spoken out against the government, political dissidents from other countries — anyone whose ID was in there, if someone wanted to find them, they could. And some of them were found. Like the kids.”
“The database didn’t care,” Dan said. “It just had everyone. In one place. And then the place got broken open.”
A football rolled past the end of the bench. Someone shouted from the netball court. Jamie nudged it away with his foot.
“My dad was at the London march,” he said.
“Norwich,” Theo said. “Thirteen thousand people. My mum was there. She says she’d never seen anything like it. Everywhere. Not just here. Australia. Canada. Germany. Every country that built the same thing. All of them breached. All of them had kids taken. All of them had kids killed.”
“And governments fell,” Dan said.
“Actual governments. The Dutch one. The Australian one. Here, the Home Secretary went, and the Digital Minister. Half the cabinet. Millions of people in the streets saying you don’t get to do this to our children.”
Theo unfolded his legs. “My dad says it was the closest thing to a — ”
“Revolution,” Dan said. “Your dad says revolution.”
“He does say revolution. But he’s not wrong.”
Jamie rubbed the back of his neck. “The compensation was the worst bit.”
“Four and a half grand,” Dan said.
“Per person. But that was just — that was the standard payout. My dad says the government ended up having to give out hundreds of millions more. Because people sued. Families who’d lost kids. Families who’d had kids taken and then found, but — ”
“But they weren’t the same,” Theo said.
“They weren’t the same. And you can’t put a price on that. You can’t say here’s four grand, sorry your daughter doesn’t speak anymore. Sorry your son doesn’t recognise you. Sorry your child was murdered by someone who found them because we handed over their address.”
“Some families took the money,” Dan said. “Because they needed it. For the funeral. For the — the counselling. For the years the kid couldn’t go to school.”
“Some families didn’t take it,” Jamie said. “Called it blood money. Said taking it meant saying it was okay. And it wasn’t okay. It was never going to be okay. So they didn’t cash the cheque. Framed it instead. Put it on the wall as evidence. My dad says there’s still people in Norwich who’ve got the cheque in a frame in the hallway.”
“Some families used the money to start charities,” Theo said. “Support groups. Campaigns. My mum’s friend’s family took their payout and put the whole thing into a foundation that helps families of missing kids. Still running. She says it’s the only good thing that came out of it. The only thing.”
Dan snapped a twig in half. “The apology was worse than the money. The Prime Minister on telly. We are sorry. We have learned. This will never happen again.”
“My nan threw a shoe,” Jamie said.
“Did she hit it?”
“Missed. Hit the wedding photo.”
The bench absorbed that.
Jamie said, “My — ”
He stopped.
Theo looked over. “What.”
Jamie shook his head. He was looking at the ground. His voice, when it came, was smaller than it had been.
“My dad was one of the ones who got taken.”
The bench went still.
“He was eight. He was walking home from school and the traffickers knew his route because — ” He stopped. “He got away. Eventually. After three days. The police found him in a house in Peterborough. But he — he never really — ”
He was crying. He was not making a sound but his face was wet.
“He killed himself,” Jamie said. “When I was seven. He tried for years, my mum says. To be okay. He tried really hard. And then one day he couldn’t anymore and he — ”
He wiped his face with the back of his hand. The flapjack was still in his other hand. He had forgotten he was holding it.
“I hate the government,” he said. “I know it’s — I know it was a long time ago and everyone says we have to move on and it’s different now and the systems are better. But they’re not better. They’re the same thing with a different name. And my dad is dead because of it. And they just said sorry and called it a goodwill payment and built the next one.”
Theo put his hand on Jamie’s shoulder. He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
Dan had put his phone face-down on the bench.
Ethan sat very still. The flapjack was finished. He did not remember finishing it.
The sun moved behind a cloud and the yard went grey for a moment and then the cloud passed and the sun came back.
Dan’s voice was different when he spoke. Quieter. “My brother’s doing his Lifeprint next month. He’s been putting it off since January. He says encryption is a word governments use when they’re about to ask you to trust them with something they’ve already promised not to lose.”
Jamie wiped his face again. “He’s not wrong.”
“No. He’s not wrong. That’s the worst bit.”
“And then Lifeprint,” Theo said. “And the broadcast. Who You Really Are. And everyone’s like — Cleopatra. Caesar. And nobody’s asking what happens to the actual person.”
“You seen the thing about the policeman,” Jamie said. His voice was still rough.
“The Warsaw guy.”
“Zhukov,” Dan said.
Theo said, “They said his name and now his family’s in hiding and he can’t go to work and he didn’t ask for any of it. He was just a policeman. Going to work. And the machine decided he used to be someone terrible and now that’s who he is forever.”
“Same shape,” Dan said.
“Same shape every time. Every generation. You trade your privacy for safety. Then the thing that was meant to keep you safe gets used to hurt you. Then they apologise and call it a goodwill payment and build the next one. My brother says he’s nineteen and he’s already seen it happen twice.”
The sun had come out again.
Ethan had been listening. He had been listening in the way he listened to most things, which was to say with the part of him that did not need to participate. But something in the conversation had settled in his chest and would not move.
His mum had been seventeen when it happened. Maybe eighteen. Old enough to have been at the marches. He tried to picture his mum at a march and couldn’t. The version of his mum who held a sign and stood in a crowd was not the version of his mum who sat at the kitchen table with a mug she held in both hands without drinking.
But she had never posted a photo of him online. Not once. Even before his dad died. She had never put his face anywhere. She had looked at the school census permission slip for three days before signing it.
He had thought, at the time, that it was just her being her. Slow. Careful. Reluctant to commit to paper.
He understood, suddenly, that it was not that. It was the breach. She had been seventeen when the children started disappearing—when the government took their phones and built the database and handed it to criminals, all of it in the same year, all of it called child safety. She had watched the news and seen the faces of children who had been taken and then found, and the faces of children who had never been found at all. She had carried that fear into motherhood and never set it down. Every form she hesitated over. Every photo she refused to upload. Every permission slip she held onto for days. The fear had outlasted the event. It was still in the house—in her mug on the kitchen table, in the way she held it without drinking.
“—still says revolution,” Dan was saying.
“He does still say revolution.”
“He’s not wrong.”
“No,” Theo said. “He’s not wrong.”
Ethan surfaced.
And now Lifeprint wanted his field signature. And the broadcast wanted to scan everyone. Every living consciousness on earth, simultaneously, in the same scan—that was what the woman on Question Time had said. And a policeman in Warsaw couldn’t go home because the machine had decided who he used to be. And Jamie’s dad was dead because of what happened in 2028. And nobody was asking what happened last time. Nobody except the people who’d been there.
He hoped—in the part of him that didn’t form thoughts into words—that someone shut it down. All of it. Lifeprint. The broadcast. The thing that was coming. He hoped someone remembered.
The sun was on the side of his face. Jamie had given him another half a flapjack. Theo had talked himself out. Dan had snapped his twig into three pieces..
He saw her before the others did, because he was facing the right direction.
Lucy Marshall came round the corner of the maths block. She had the textbook still against her chest. She was walking the way people walked when they had decided to walk over and were trying not to think about whether they should be walking over.
He felt her arriving in the back of his shoulders.
Theo saw her next. Theo’s mouth opened.
Jamie kicked Theo’s ankle. Not hard. Just enough.
Theo kept his mouth open anyway.
She got to within two metres of the bench and stopped.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” Ethan said.
“Can I borrow you for a minute?”
Theo’s face did, in real time, the face Theo’s face was always going to do. The eyebrows went up. The mouth, already open, took a breath like a man preparing to make an announcement.
Jamie kicked him again. Harder.
Theo, undeterred: “Don’t mind us, Eth.”
Dan, without looking up: “We weren’t expecting much from you anyway, mate.”
Ethan stood up. He felt the thirteen-year-old heat in his ears that arrived whenever his friends did exactly the thing his friends were always going to do.
He looked at the three of them.
“Yeah,” he said. “Hilarious. Thanks.”
Theo, hand on heart: “We’re proud of you.”
Jamie: “Theo. Stop.”
Ethan, to Lucy: “Where.”
She gestured. Toward the bike racks at the side of the maths block.
He followed her.
Behind him, Theo said something Ethan did not catch. Jamie told Theo to shut up. Dan said nothing. Dan was the most dangerous of the three when he was being quiet, because Dan stored things up.
The bike racks were on the strip of concrete between the maths block and the perimeter fence. Quieter than the yard. Two crows on the fence further down. A drift of cigarette ends in the corner from yesterday. The concrete was warm in the sun.
She put the textbook down on the rack.
He stood with his back to the fence. She stood three feet away. The geometry of the conversation was the geometry of two people who had once stood much closer than this and had agreed, without ever saying so, not to.
“How are you,” she said.
“Yeah. Fine. Good.”
A beat.
“Right.”
Another beat.
“I saw what happened. In the corridor.”
He looked at the cigarette ends.
She came half a step forward. She put her hand on his arm. The hand was light. The hand was the hand he remembered. The weight of it was the weight of it. She had not touched him in nearly a year.
He shifted his weight back.
He did not push her away. He moved his arm out from under her hand. She let her hand fall. She let it fall in a way that was not hurt — she had been expecting it — but was not nothing either.
“I appreciate it,” he said. He could hear the brightness in his own voice. The brightness was its own small failure. “I’m fine. Honest.”
“Ethan.”
“I am.”
“Eth.”
The diminutive landed. She had only ever used it when they were alone. He had not heard it for nearly a year. She had not, he thought, said it on purpose. It had come out of her the way the touch had — the muscle memory of a time when she had been allowed.
He looked at her then.
She had her hair in the low ponytail he had seen in the corridor. Small silver hoops. A constellation of three freckles on the bridge of her nose that he had once, on a bench at the back of the school field, tried and failed to count out loud and got the giggles about. She was looking at him the way she had looked at him on that bench. Patient. Steady. Not asking.
She said, more quietly: “I know we — I know that was a while back. I’m not trying to make anything weird. I just — I care about you. Other people care about you. I want you to know that.”
He had nothing to say to that.
He had several things to say to that and could say none of them.
What he did say, when he could say something, came out smaller than he had meant it to.
“I know. Thank you. It’s just — it’s not easy.”
“No,” she said. “It never is.”
A beat.
“I should — I should get back,” he said.
She nodded.
He turned. He had taken one step when she said —
“Are you going to visit him?”
He stopped.
He did not turn round straight away.
There was no other him. There had not been another him for five years and there was not going to be another him.
He turned back.
“I visit him every day,” he said.
He said it plainly. Not for effect. As a fact.
“Even when I’m ill.”
He turned and walked back the way he had come. He did not see her face when he said it. He registered, in some part of him, that she had not moved, and that she was probably going to take the long way round the building, because following him through the yard would have been more than either of them could absorb.
He walked back to the bench.
Theo had been waiting for him.
“So.”
“So nothing.”
“That looked like something.”
Jamie: “Theo.”
Theo: “I’m just saying.”
Dan, without looking up: “It looked like a conversation, mate. Conversations are a thing people have. Some of them even occur between humans of opposite genders. I appreciate this is news.”
Theo: “I’m aware of how conversations work, thanks Dan.”
Jamie, eating the last of his flapjack: “Are you, though.”
Theo: “I’m aware.”
Ethan sat back on the wall. He did not say anything. The not-saying was the loudest he could be without participating.
Theo gave up after about ten seconds, which was, for Theo, a long time.
The conversation picked up something else. Something to do with PE. Something to do with whether it was going to rain on Saturday. Something to do with whether Mr Liang was going to make them run the cross-country if the field was wet. Ethan did not contribute. Ethan listened.
He waited until there was a gap.
Then he said, to Jamie: “Tonight. When I’m at yours.”
Jamie looked over.
“Yeah?”
“Can we do the Bourne films?”
There was a pause.
It was not a long pause. It was the pause of Jamie’s face arranging itself.
“Mate,” Jamie said. “Eth. I love you. Genuinely. Those films are about fifty years old.”
The thing that happened to Ethan’s face was small. It was the smallest possible falling-of-face, the kind that happened in the muscle around the mouth before the rest of him caught up. He could not stop it. He did not know it was visible. It was visible.
Jamie saw it.
Jamie’s face changed instantly.
“I’m joking,” Jamie said. “I’m joking, mate. I’m joking. We’re absolutely watching them. All of them. I’ve got the box set somewhere. We can do all four. We can do them in a row if you want.”
Ethan looked at him.
The smile arrived before he meant it to.
Jamie tapped his shoulder once. Lightly. The tap was, Ethan understood without exactly understanding it, the closest Jamie came to saying I love you, mate.
“Cool,” Ethan said.
Theo, who had been eavesdropping: “Wait. What’s tonight?”
Jamie: “Sleepover.”
“Without me?”
“Always without you.”
“Why am I in this group.”
Dan: “You ask yourself that every day, mate. None of us have answers.”
Theo subsided.
The bench was good. The bench was, for thirty seconds, the best place in Thetford. The sun was on the side of his face. Jamie had given him half a flapjack and lied about a film. Theo was being Theo. Dan was being Dan. The robin-feeling, the high, light, sad thing, had been pushed into the corner of his chest where it could be carried without spilling.
Then the shape of the yard changed.
He felt it before he saw it.
It was the way thirteen-year-olds always knew. The way a crowd held its breath without telling anyone.
He turned his head.
Conor was coming round the corner of the maths block from the same direction Lucy had come from. Liam and Ben were behind him. They were not walking the casual walk. They were walking the other walk. The one with intent in it.
Jamie had seen it too.
“Eth.”
Ethan turned.
Conor stopped three metres from the bench.
His face was wrong.
The wrongness was something the reader of his face — and Ethan was a careful reader of faces, even when he could not interpret them — registered immediately. The anger in Conor’s face was not anger that had started this morning at breaktime. It was older than that. It had been somewhere else first. The anger had been with Conor when he came into school today. The maths lesson had not started it. The maths lesson had given it a shape. Now break had given it a target.
His blazer was missing. His shirt was untucked at the back. There was a small graze on the knuckle of his right hand that had not been treated and had a rim of dried blood around it that was already brown.
“Outside,” Conor said.
Ethan blinked. “Sorry?”
“Outside. The two of us.”
Ethan thought about this. He could not parse it. They were outside. They were already outside. He looked behind him reflexively, as if to check, in case there was a part of outside he had missed.
“I — we’re outside,” he said. “We’re already —”
“Don’t be funny.”
“I’m not being funny, I just don’t —”
“Get up.”
Jamie had stood up.
Jamie had stood up in the small, absorbed way Jamie did things. He was not posturing. He had registered the next sixty seconds and had registered that he was the first thing Conor would have to go through, and had stood up because that was what Jamie did when something was about to happen.
Theo had stopped talking. Theo was a foot behind Jamie now without having moved, because the wall had become further from the bench in some way that was about geometry.
Dan had put his phone down.
Ethan stood up. He stood up not because Conor had told him to. He stood up because the geometry of the conversation seemed to call for it and he was still trying to work out what was being asked of him.
“Conor,” he said. “I don’t — I don’t know what you want.”
“I want you to fight me.”
“Why.”
The question came out of him before he had decided to ask it. It was, also, a real question. Why was the first useful piece of information. Why was where he started with most things he did not understand.
Conor stared at him.
A small thing happened to his face. Ethan did not have a word for it. The thing was the realisation, on Conor’s part, that why was not in the script he had brought with him.
“Because I said so.”
“That isn’t a reason.”
Behind Conor, Liam half-laughed. It was a small laugh. It was not at Ethan. It was at Conor. The laugh was small enough that Conor did not have to turn round but big enough that Conor heard it.
Conor’s shoulders did a thing.
“Get your hands up, Clarke.”
Ethan did not get his hands up.
He stood with his hands at his sides. He was not making a statement. He was not posing. He was doing the thing he had done since he was eight, which was do nothing and wait for more information. He was beginning to understand that the strategy that had worked in maths a quarter of an hour ago was not the strategy that this situation required. He did not know what the strategy this situation required was. He did not have time to invent one. He stood with his hands at his sides because that was the position he had been in when the situation had begun.
A small crowd had begun to form. The way crowds formed. One kid tapping another. A girl, twenty feet out, lifting her phone slightly.
Ethan saw, without looking properly, that there were two teachers visible at the far edge of the yard. One was on her phone. The other was talking to a sixth-former. Neither was moving.
“Come on,” Conor said. “Get them up. Hit me.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Get them up.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You autistic fuck — hit me.”
He stepped in. He pushed Ethan’s shoulder. It was a hard push. Ethan stumbled back half a step.
He did not raise his hands.
A noise from the crowd. The dishonest small oh that crowds made when something was about to happen and they had collectively decided to enjoy it.
Conor pushed him again. Harder. Ethan went down on one knee on the concrete. His palm hit the ground. He felt the small bright pain of the skin tearing under the heel of his hand.
He got up. He did not get up smoothly. He got up because getting up was the next thing.
“Get them up.”
“No.”
Conor stared.
He was, Ethan realised with the part of him that registered things, getting more frightened than Ethan was. Conor had come over here with a thing he wanted to do. The thing was not happening, because the boy was not playing. Conor’s hands were up. Ethan’s hands were down. The geometry was wrong, and the geometry being wrong was breaking something in Conor in real time. The breaking was making Conor angrier.
Conor swung.
The first punch landed on Ethan’s cheekbone. His head snapped. He did not go down. He stayed where he was.
He did not raise his hands.
Inside Ethan, the thing that was thinking was not thinking heroically. It was thinking — I do not want this. I do not want this. I do not want to find out what the next thing is. I want him to stop. I want him to stop and I do not know how to make him stop without making him worse.
The second punch landed on his mouth.
There was blood. He tasted it. The metal in it. The warmth.
A voice in the crowd: “Hit him back, Eth!”
Another, further: “Hit him!”
He did not.
The third punch was to his ribs. The pain was a different pain — duller, lower, and worse. He went down again. Both hands on the concrete. He coughed once. There was blood on the ground in front of him in a small specific place.
He was thinking, in the part of him that was still thinking, that he should get up because not getting up looked worse. He shifted his weight to start getting up.
Conor drew his foot back to kick him.
She was there before Ethan saw her arrive.
Hannah did not arrive theatrically. She did not run. She walked, fast, with the absolutely particular gait of a girl who had been told from the other side of the yard that her brother was being beaten up and who had been crossing the yard for the last forty seconds on the strength of it. The crowd parted for her. The crowd parted because of what her face was doing.
She got between Conor and Ethan.
She did not hit Conor. She put both hands flat against Conor’s chest and pushed him back two steps.
The push was harder than Conor had been expecting.
“Back off.”
“Get out of —”
“Back. Off.”
She said it once more, quieter, in the register that came out of her when she had decided what was about to happen. He had heard the register before, at home, on the phone, when he had been five and she had been seven and a man on the phone had been refusing to send someone for the boiler. He had not known the word for it then. He still didn’t.
“If you ever,” she said, “touch my brother again, I will fucking end you. Do you understand me.”
Conor’s face did the thing thirteen-year-old boys’ faces did when a Year 11 girl who had been lifting for a year pushed them in the chest in front of an audience. It registered. The registration was visible.
The anger was still there. The anger had not been embarrassed out of him. It had been amplified.
He looked past her. He looked at Ethan, on the concrete, bleeding.
He laughed.
It was a small ugly laugh.
“Needs his sister to fight for him,” he said. “That’s where we’re at, is it.”
Hannah’s face changed.
The change was not visible to anyone else in the yard. It was visible to Ethan, on the concrete, looking up at the back of her head.
She did the small forward weight-shift that she did when she had decided to commit to a thing.
“Conor.”
A man’s voice, behind them, sharp.
It was Mr Andrews. Mr Andrews had been the teacher who had been talking to the sixth-former. He had, finally, registered the shape of what was happening. He was crossing the yard now at speed.
He arrived. He saw Ethan on the ground. He saw the blood. He saw Conor’s knuckles. The arithmetic took less than a second.
“Conor. With me. Now.”
“Sir, I —”
“Now. Move.”
Conor moved. He looked back once as Mr Andrews steered him by the shoulder. He was twenty feet away when he said it, low enough that Mr Andrews did not hear and Ethan did:
“This isn’t over.”
Then he was gone.
The crowd, with Mr Andrews gone, dissolved. They dissolved with the speed of a school crowd that had registered there was nothing more to look at and was conserving energy for the next thing.
Hannah crouched.
She was not gentle. She did not coo. She put her hand under his elbow and brought him up to his feet. He came up shaky. There was blood on his shirt. He wiped at his face with the back of his hand and only spread it.
“Stop,” she said. “Don’t use your hand. Use your sleeve.”
He used his sleeve.
“Other sleeve. That one’s clean.”
He used the other sleeve.
“Right,” she said. “Nurse.”
“I’m fine.”
“Mhm.”
She walked him toward the door of the south wing.
The corridor was mostly empty. Break was running down. The ones who had not been at the fight were already drifting back inside for third period. Their shoes squeaked on the polished vinyl. The fluorescent panel halfway down the corridor was buzzing.
Hannah walked beside him with one hand at his elbow. Her grip was halfway between supporting and steering. It was the same grip Sarah had used on him at the school gate when he was six, on the day he had cried about going in.
After about ten steps, Hannah said —
“Why didn’t you hit him.”
Ethan thought about that.
He thought about it for the length of three steps. The honest answer was the answer the inside of him had been giving him during the hits, and he did not have the words for it in the version that would be useful to her. He knew, also, that any version of the truth he gave her would not be the version she would accept, and that the version he gave her would have to be a version they could both pretend was the answer.
“I don’t believe in violence,” he said. “Unless I have to.”
Hannah, flat: “You being beaten up wasn’t have to?”
He thought again.
“He’s probably got problems at home.”
She looked at him.
“I think I’m just easy to hit,” he said.
He was doing the thing he did. He was finding the version of the answer that was closest to the truth without being the bit of the truth that would hurt her most. He was looking, at thirteen, for the diplomatic version of I did not want to find out what would happen if I made him angrier.
“I don’t hate him,” he said. “I feel sorry for him. I hope he gets help.”
Hannah did not answer immediately.
She walked three more steps before she spoke. He could feel her not saying the things she wanted to say. He could feel the sentence lined up behind her teeth.
What she said, when she said something, was:
“You’re an idiot.”
“I know.”
She said it without venom. He said it without resistance. It was the closest thing they had to I love you in the architecture of how they spoke to each other.
They reached the nurse’s office.
The door was open.
The nurse was not in. There was a small handwritten note on the desk that said BACK IN 5.
Ethan stopped in the doorway.
“I’ll wait.”
“I’ll wait with you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.”
She stood next to him. The corridor was quiet. The fluorescent panel buzzed.
“You should go back to,” he said. “Whatever you were doing.”
“I was reading a book.”
“Then go back to your book.”
“Mhm.”
She did not go.
He looked at her.
He looked at her properly for the first time. His face was a mess. Hers was not. Hers was the face he had been looking for in every doorway for four years.
He said: “There’s a parent-teacher meeting today.”
“I know.”
“Mum’s coming.”
“I know.”
A silence.
He said, smaller — small enough that the silence almost ate it:
“When are you going to come back?”
The question was a small question on the surface and the largest question he had under it. He had wanted to ask her this every day for four years. He had not asked her, because asking her was asking her to choose, and asking her to choose was a thing he had understood, very early, that he was not allowed to do.
She looked at him.
Her face changed.
The change was small. She did not cry. Hannah did not cry where people could see her. But her eyes went wet and she did not blink them dry, because blinking them dry was a tell.
“I can’t, Eth.”
“Why.”
“Eth.”
“Why can’t you.”
She breathed in.
He could see her choosing. He could see her, in real time, going through the versions of the answer and discarding the ones that would leave her with the answer she could give him.
She gave it.
“Because she’s drinking through your benefits,” she said.
He did not say anything.
“The DLA,” she said. “The money the council pays her for you. She’s spending it at the off-licence. I’ve seen her do it. I’ve seen the receipts. I’ve watched her for a year. I’m not going to live in that house and watch as she kills herself. I tried. For four years. I tried.”
He did not say anything.
She was not looking at him. She was looking at the noticeboard on the opposite wall. She was looking at it because not looking at him made the next sentence available.
“And you should not be in that house either.”
He felt it land.
“Hannah.”
“You shouldn’t be.”
“Where else am I going to go?”
She did not answer that.
He said, after a moment, very small:
“She would be alone.”
Hannah’s face did the thing it did when somebody had named a precise thing she had been carrying. She had been carrying it for four years. She had been carrying it because she had decided not to set it down, and someone setting it down for her, even her brother, was almost more than she could take.
She said: “I know.”
“I think she can come back,” he said. “From this. I think — ”
He started to cry.
He cried the way he cried, which was with his hands at his sides, blood and tears running together on his face. He was not articulate. He was thirteen. His father was dead. His mother was not who his mother used to be. The only person who was left was in this corridor, in school uniform, with her hair in the gym ponytail, telling him the thing nobody had told him.
“She’s the only — she’s the only — ”
Hannah crossed the half-step between them.
She took him into her arms. She did not speak. She held him. He cried into her shoulder. She was not crying. Her hand was on the back of his head. Her hand was on the back of his head the way his mom’s used to be, before, and his body remembered the shape of that hand even though it had been a long time, and his body cried about that as well.
She did not let go for a long time.
Footsteps at the end of the corridor.
Mrs Iyer came round the corner with a coffee in one hand and a small sheaf of paperwork in the other. She saw them in the doorway. She slowed. She gave them three more seconds. Then she cleared her throat, professionally, gently, in the way of a nurse who had been doing this for a long time.
“Sweetheart,” she said. “Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
Hannah let go.
She stepped back. She wiped Ethan’s cheek with her thumb in the way an older sister did — not tenderly, efficiently — getting the worst of the blood off so the nurse would not have to start with that.
“I’m always there for you, Eth,” she said. “If you need me.”
“I know.”
“Always.”
“I know.”
“I’ll see you at the meeting.”
“Yeah.”
She turned. She walked back down the corridor. She did not look back. Looking back was a tell. She walked the way she walked into rooms, which was the way she walked out of them — head slightly down, purposeful, getting somewhere by getting away from somewhere else.
Ethan watched her until the corner.
Then he went into the nurse’s office.
Mrs Iyer sat him down on the bed. She put her coffee on the desk. She got a wad of cotton wool from the cupboard and a bottle of saline solution from the top drawer.
“Right,” she said. “Talk me through it.”
“Concrete.”
“Concrete, with a side of fist?”
“Yes, miss.”
“Mr Andrews is going to want a statement.”
“I know.”
She cleaned him up.
She was good at it. She had been doing it for a long time. She did not ask him questions he could not have answered. She did the lip first. She did the nose. She did the cheekbone, which had begun to come up in a way that was going to be visible for a fortnight. She did the heel of his hand. She did the other heel of his hand.
The corridor outside was quiet. The bell for the end of break had not rung. The school was, briefly, in the small still pause before the next changeover.
From two corridors away, a sound.
It was high. It was, at first, almost like a scream. It was loud enough to carry through walls. Mrs Iyer paused with the cotton wool against his lip and looked toward the door.
The sound was not a scream of distress.
The sound was a scream of joy.
It was the unmistakable, slightly unhinged, completely undignified noise of a teacher who had come back to her empty classroom from the staff room with a fresh coffee, and had glanced up at the board, and had seen, on the board, a thing that had not been there twenty minutes ago.
Mrs Iyer, mildly: “What on earth.”
Ethan did not say anything.
His face did a thing.
The thing was a smile. It was the smallest possible smile. It happened in the corner of his mouth that was not split. Mrs Iyer did not see it because she had gone back to his lip.
He could hear, faintly, Mrs Daley’s voice in the corridor. She had come out of her room. She was carrying her coffee. She was, by the sound of it, walking very fast in the direction of the staff room. Her voice was saying — over and over, at a volume rising into hilarity —
Who did this? Who did this? Who did this? Excuse me — who did this?
Mrs Iyer shook her head. She went back to her work.
“Right,” she said. “You’ll live. I’m writing you a note. You’re going home for the rest of the morning.”
“I have a meeting at four.”
“Then you’ll go home, you’ll have a sandwich, and you’ll come back at four.”
“Yes, miss.”
She wrote the note.
The end-of-break bell went.
He stood up. His face was patched. His shirt was bloody. His ribs hurt in a low, particular way that he was going to feel every time he breathed for the next week. He took the note. He thanked her.
He went out into the corridor.
The corridor was filling. Three hundred thirteen-year-olds were coming back inside for third period. Ethan walked against the current. He walked the way he walked, which was the way he had been walking that morning on Magdalen Street, on his way to school, before any of this — neither in time with the world around him nor entirely out of it, carrying a thing in his chest he did not put down because he did not know where to put it down to.
Somewhere, two corridors away, Mrs Daley was still saying who did this.
Ethan did not say.
He went out through the south wing door into the air.
ns216.73.217.39da2
and then Add to home screen.