Monday 18 July

Bec and I walk to Wellness one step behind Tash and Lola. I’m looking forward to another slack class. I picture myself walking through the front door at home after school today and finding the guts to ask it out loud: Can someone tell me what’s actually happening around here and what happens next?

Malik made us bring something that’s important or special for week two of this fruitless pop psychology exercise that is Wellness class. Fruitless pop psychology is Clare’s take on it; she’s harsh, but often right.

Lola goes first. She cradles her dog Pepé’s ashes and starts to cry before she gets a single word out. (Dear little Pep! I’m welling up, too.) Bec jumps up and gives her a hug. Malik asks Bec to sit down, which is a bit anti-Wellness if you ask me. (Because Lola wants to be an actor, she does seize any opportunity to cry on cue, and Bec’s mainly hugging to enhance the class disruption, but Malik doesn’t know that.) Lola takes some deep breaths, and Malik gives her a nod of encouragement. ‘This urn holds the ashes of our darling little Pepé. We had to have her put down last year . . .’ She dissolves into another flood of tears. She does genuinely feel sad about Pep, but she is also honing her crying skills like mad.

‘Thank you, Lola. We’re honoured that you shared such a heartfelt memory with us today through this precious object.’

Tash goes next, showing her first haircut curls, preserved by her mother, proving that she was once a natural blonde.

‘Things from our childhood are often particularly potent emblems of who we are,’ Malik says. ‘Our sense of self springs from these years. Interesting aside: Victorian mourning jewellery uses woven hair as a decorative element in commemoration of someone who’s died.’ That elicits a few heartfelt ee-ews.

I settle deeper into the beanbag’s hug and watch away-with-the-pixies Kate untangle a necklace that’s special to her for reasons I don’t tune in to. I finish dreaming up her Primavera costume as she sits in a pool of sun streaming through the stained-glass windows, flooded with new colours.

My show-and-tell is so super special that my mother would have a thousand kittens if she knew I’d taken it out of the house. It’s a silver bonbon spoon with a vine pattern. It belonged to my great-grandmother, my gram’s mother.

‘Well, I’ve brought along a spoon today.’ It takes me quite a while to struggle out of the beanbag into a standing position. I walk to the front of the group and hold up the spoon, feeling suddenly stupid for bringing something like this to class, and then not wanting to pass it around.

‘Something about me is that I love eating, and we eat with spoons, so spoons are significant and important to me.’ A couple of people are amused. With a perfectly straight tone of voice, I’m sending up the activity without even trying. Malik’s serious, respectful look makes me want to scramble towards a conclusion, so I can sit down. ‘This was my great-grandmother’s. She lived in Vienna. And she loved pretty things. Like I do.’

My great-grandmother lived a beautiful life in a beautiful house in Vienna, until being Jewish meant being persecuted. She and her family lost their beautiful life and lost each other. Only she survived, and all she ended up with was a handful of things that could be stitched into the hemline of a jacket. So I’m only sharing about two percent of the story. And if my mother really does face losing, say, her house, there’s probably trauma memory in her DNA that makes it more horrible than it might otherwise be.

‘I’d also like to share that I’m a fan of Tiffany.’ I put a finger to the silver bean on a silver chain that I wear every day. ‘And, coinkydinky, this spoon is by Tiffany, too. So even though my great-grandmother and I never met, I’m pretty sure we would’ve got on. At home, we use this spoon for jam. The end.’

When Malik tells us that sharing significant things will help us to get to know each other, he leaves out the part about it making us more vulnerable, and the part about people, e.g., me, not usually exposing themselves that way.

I realise that I’ve never told Rupert any family stuff, past or present, which makes my brain buzz back around the should-I-end-things-with-Rupert-or-will-things-get-better question. It doesn’t seem fair to stay in what is feeling like a one-way relationship. But I obviously don’t want to break up before the formal. Why can’t I get properly into Rupert? It’s annoying when the perfect boy turns out to be all wrong. Why is life so unsimple? Maybe if we had more in common . . . He’s super sporty, which I find super dull. I’m sure someone out there wants to hear all about the records he breaks when he runs, and the goals he kicks when he footballs, but not me.

While I wonder about the kindest way to dump Rupert when the time comes, mind-directing various heart-wrenching scenarios – he’s a mess, I’m dry-eyed but gentle; I’m crying, and he’s comforting me etc. – girl after girl after girl coughs up an acceptable fur ball. Swim-girl Clem shows off a medal. Iris Banks, another boarder, holds up a photo of herself with a girl, both aged about eight, dressed as Thing One and Thing Two. Turns out the other girl is Clem. I keep forgetting those two are twins. They could not look more different from each other if they tried. I’ve never seen them speak or even acknowledge each other’s existence until now. Clem is giving Iris the evil eye; I guess Iris didn’t clear her show-and-tell object with her twinnie.

*

As we leave Wellness class, Ms Zahir, who is our head of IT, comes to confer with Kate Turner about an IT thing. I realise I’ve seen the apparently vague musician being consulted by teachers about stuff like this before. She obviously has computer superpowers, as well as her music thing. I’m curious and interested, as instructed by Malik.

Kate looks at Zahir’s laptop screen and starts tapping the keys with quiet concentration, appearing to simultaneously diagnose and remedy whatever the problem is, earning a relieved thank you from Zahir and some puppy-love fangirling from Iris Banks.

Oh, Malik, I am, from now on, going to be totally all over this understanding people at a deeper level shit.

Text to Tash: I will respect your confidences about what you think you might want to wear to the formal if you feel like sharing after school today?

Text from Tash to me: I will trust you with that confidence and respect your confidences re formal dress thoughts too. We. Need. To. Shop.

Text to Tash: We can probs be our best selves with hot chocolates at Figgy’s

Text from Tash to me: Deal for real