I can’t concentrate at school the next day. It’s hot; the fat muggy air makes us all like amphibious creatures and it coats us with a slick sheen of sweat. Despite this, I can’t stop shivering. I think of the phone booth, and it couldn’t have been real. The stress from everything must have pushed me completely over the edge, although if I’m having a midlife crisis at fourteen then it doesn’t bode well for my life expectancy.

‘This seat’s taken.’

Cassie’s dumped her bag on the desk that I usually sit at in English, the one next to Tara. The punishment for walking away from a Circle is nothing if not predictable. There’s usually an empty seat in the row in front of where we sit so I walk over and put my bag there. Lou shoves it off with her own bag so mine crashes onto the floor.

‘So’s this one.’

I keep my eyes down. Everyone in class is just staring at me now, so I pick up my things and go to the front, where there’s a few desks not being occupied by The Challenged Group.

‘Oh my God, like I’d sit up the front, for real!’

‘Nerd.’

And this is high school.

I like my English teacher. She’s got spiky black hair and always wears colourful scarves and wacky glasses. From the way she looks you might get the impression that she’s a flake, the kind of hippy baby boomer that the tide pulls in to this town in droves, with their camper vans in tow and their heads full of ideas about chakra-cleansing therapy and using meditation to fix unruly behaviour. We’re not too far from Byron Bay to have more than our fair quota of mung-bean-eating staff members, but they’re usually confined to the art and drama departments. Mrs Thomas is definitely not one of them.

‘Right!’ she demands as she enters the class. The heckles stop. Everyone sits that little bit straighter. Such is the power of Mrs Thomas. We’re studying Lord of the Flies and I copy down the notes from the blackboard. As the teacher writes, her hefty breasts rub against the board, smudging some of what she’s already written, but nobody laughs. Not to her face, anyway. She turns towards the class, chalk smudged across her bosom.

‘So I’m assuming that everyone’s read the text?’

Silence.

‘And the relief teacher said you were such a talkative bunch!’

We had a relief teacher last week and for the first half of the class we managed to convince him that this was actually the Advanced Spanish lesson and he was hopelessly lost. Cassie even spoke to him in a jumble of made-up words, gesticulating wildly in her best impression of a Spanish señorita.

‘Okay. So since everyone here’s read it, can you please enlighten me as to what it’s actually about? Damien?’

Damien, a popular surfer with a perpetually peeling nose looks up from graffitiing his desk.

‘You’re the teacher, miss, shouldn’t you already know?’

The class erupts into laughter, but not for very long. Not with Mrs Thomas in charge.

‘Very good. You can practise your comedy routine picking up rubbish after class. Cassie. Your thoughts, please?’

Cassie scrunches her pretty face up.

‘So like, there’s a bunch of kids and they’re on this island. And there’s a pig. Or something. And then they get off. Edge-of-your-seat stuff, miss.’

Cassie returns to admiring her nails.

‘Well, not everything can be as scintillating as Cosmo magazine, can it? What I’m after is not what happens. I want you to go deeper, what’s the story about?’

A girl from The Challenged Group who’s sitting beside me in the front row is about to burst a blood vessel she’s straining her hand so high, desperate to get picked. Mrs Thomas scans the room. I have my head down, my hair a curtain around my face, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.

‘Kirra. Your thoughts, please.’

Shit.

‘I don’t have any, miss.’

She looks hard at me, like I’m disappointing her.

‘Well, you’d better formulate an opinion quickly or you can join Damien picking up rubbish this afternoon. Capiche?’

I peek out through my hair, willing her not to make me do this.

‘Ummm . . .’

I hear a snicker from the back of the room and I pause.

‘Go on, Kirra.’

‘I think what the book is trying to say is that everybody is vicious and brutal really, once you scratch the surface. It’s only society that makes us pretend that we’re not.’

Mrs Thomas gives me a small smile. It only lasts for a microsecond but it’s the kind of smile that says, ‘this is why I am a teacher’. Lou coughs loudly into her hands.

Cough.

‘Nerd!’

Cough.

I look around and the rest of the class is laughing, except Noah Willis, Damien’s best friend and fellow surfer demigod. Noah’s lived down the road from me ever since we were little and we used to play together until he got to the age where he realised that unpopularity was just a little bit too contagious to risk sitting very close to it. His face sits beneath a mop of sandy-coloured hair and under a mass of freckles, and somehow the freckles make him even better looking. He’s staring at me like I’m an alien, as though I’m too much of a freak show to even laugh. I do look a bit like an alien, with my small face and my large yellow eyes. That’s what Damien says, anyway. He whistles The X-Files theme song whenever I’m near.

I’d rather their laughter, I think. I’d rather laughter than disgust.

When the school bell finally rings, the sound makes me think of the phone box all over again.

As I’m leaving, Mrs Thomas stops me. ‘I’d like to have a word with you, Kirra, if you don’t mind.’

It’s not like I have anywhere to go during lunchtime anyway. When you’re shunned from a group like mine, none of the other groups will take you on, not even The Challenged Group. It’s like they can smell the blood on you and they’re afraid that if they let you sit with them you’re going to attract the sharks. The only alternative is sucking it up and worming your way back into the good books, or changing schools. St Andrew’s would go bankrupt without our broken, picked-on kids. The only problem is, my parents can barely afford food on the table, let alone a posh private school.

Mrs Thomas pulls out my last assignment from a pile of papers.

‘I was really disappointed in your essay, Kirra.’

I can barely remember what the essay was on. I handed it in about the same time as Mum found out about Desiree’s pregnancy. The problem with Lark not even having the decency to skip town when he left us is that this town is too small. Mum and I ran into him when we were doing the groceries and when she saw him standing in the fruit aisle she snatched the eggs from our basket and started throwing them at him, one by one, across the citrus section. I was grabbing her hands and trying to stop her and our fingers were slimy with yolks and she kept slipp­ing from my grip. When he scampered out of the store quick smart she just crumpled, and she looked so small with her head down it was like someone had just tossed an old dress onto the ground, she hardly filled it. She sat there, heaving, in a pile of broken eggshells and slime, with half the town watching on. A manager came over with a mop and a pail and crouched down close to her.

‘You’re going to have to pay for those, ma’am.’

So I wasn’t really concentrating on the essay when I wrote it.

‘I want you to redo it – have it in to me by Monday.’

Mrs Thomas pushes the offending paper into my hands and goes back to busying herself at her desk. I look down at it – I received a thirteen out of twenty. Hardly a punishable offence.

‘But miss, I passed . . .’

‘You passed because you’re clever and you would probably do a passable job on an essay you wrote on toilet paper in your bathroom break. But thirteen out of twenty isn’t good enough for you.’

This is outrageously unfair.

‘Cassie hardly ever gets more than fifty per cent, and she’s never had to spend her weekend rewriting an assignment.’

Mrs Thomas leans against the desk and looks me square in the eye. Behind her bright-red square-framed glasses her eyes look surprisingly tired. Surrounding them are small lines like little willie wagtails have hopped around and left tracks on her skin.

‘To be born with few brains, well, that’s unfortunate. To be born with brains to spare and to waste them? That’s a sin.’

She gathers her things and strides towards the doorway. Just before she exits she turns to me briefly. ‘I see so much potential in you, Kirra.’

There’s that word again. Potential. I wish I didn’t have it, whatever it is, because it’s brought me nothing but trouble this far.

Lunch is spent by myself, studying for the science exam next period. As we’re lining up outside the classroom it’s obvious Cassie had forgotten about it until now because she looks as stricken as she did that time the hairdressers took five centi­metres too much from her hair. If her grades don’t improve her parents have threatened her with St Andrew’s, which means that she’ll be stuck in unflattering knee-length tartan and a classroom full of kids she’s bullied into switching schools.

She rushes over to me and drapes her arm around my shoulder. ‘This is an exam on evolution, right?’

I nod.

‘Do you think I can claim religious exemption because I believe the Lord Jesus Christ Our Saviour created us in seven days?’

‘Probably not, only because you were the one who heckled a pastor at assembly that time, and told him it was all make-believe anyway. And that religion causes terrorism.’

Cassie rolls her eyes. ‘But he was so boring! Honestly he was so old I couldn’t believe he wasn’t dead yet!’

We all start filing in.

‘You’re sitting next to me, right?’

I nod again and she flashes me a smile that stretches across half her face. My punishment is over, or at least on hiatus.

During the exam she kicks my leg and when I look across at her she’s mouthing, ‘Eight?’

Looking around to check the teacher isn’t watching, I lift my paper up for her to see and she scribbles the answer down furiously. The teacher’s a bearded man who experimented too much making homemade acid when he was a chemistry student in the sixties, so he doesn’t notice and at the moment he’s preoccupied with tapping on the glass tank where the lab rats live.

‘Thirteen?’

I scratch my nose, write the answer on a scrap of paper and scrunch it up in my hand. Feigning a yawn I stretch out my arms and drop it on Cassie’s lap. I give her enough answers to stave off St Andrew’s for another semester at least.

The bell rings.

‘So, umm, does this mean I can sit with you again?’ I ask her, biting my lip.

She checks her hair for split ends and rolls her eyes. ‘Fine. But remember not to walk like a retard at the social tonight, okay?’

I nod.

The social.

Shit.

I had completely forgotten.