The air is warm against Zara’s legs as she strides across the football pitch. It is strange to be at school in August, like she is at the beach in the off season or in a closed shop after hours.
She is thinking about the new school term as she walks from the pitch to the surrounding fields, dry clumps of yellow-green grass littered like balled-up socks on the lawn. Specifically, Zara is thinking about stationery. She bought new pens today, a pack of three wrapped in cellophane. Blue, black, red. She’ll never use the red one – isn’t it rude to write in red? – but she likes the collection, the three together.
It’s already dusky, at eight o’clock, but the evening stretches out in front of her. She can go to bed late, get up whenever she wants tomorrow. And so tonight is going to be spent in a delicious frenzy of unpacking new stationery. Four stiff cardboard folders. Slippery A4 plastic wallets. Sticky tabs. She’ll return to school, to year ten, a new woman, she has decided. She doesn’t quite yet know who she will be. But it won’t be who she was before.
When she first hears the noise, she thinks it’s nothing. An unexplained shout on a hot summer’s evening. Her pace is slow and relaxed across the empty field, the sky a high lavender dome above her, little dried tufts of grass stuck to her trainers.
It’s only when she hears the second shout, then the third, that she stops, a fine layer of sweat on her lower back slowly evaporating as she turns, scanning the horizon for the noises like an animal looking for its predator.
Her eyes land on the bandstand. It’s been having its roof repaired over the summer. Each week, on the way home from her piano lessons, slightly more progress has been made. She squints now in the half-light. That’s where the noise is coming from. Two men. One on the stage, another halfway up the steps.
She paces forward then stops, maybe twenty feet away. Something’s happening.
Goosebumps appear on her arms as she moves back across the field to one of the greenhouses nearby, lets herself in and breathes in its familiar, hot-musk-tomato smell. She had spent so many hours in here over the spring, growing organic and non-organic lettuces for a biology experiment. She would re-pot them in her break times, moving from small pots on the windowsill to fat grow bags outside. She would lie awake, sometimes, worrying about her frilly-leaved lettuces out in the cold, which her mum had laughed at. ‘Classic you,’ she had said, a strange expression on her face.
Concealed by forgotten, spindly, grey-green plants, she looks carefully through the leaves and into the bandstand. She can see the figures clearly. Two boys, a couple of years older than her, maybe sixteen. Not men, as she had first thought.
She shifts her weight on her feet, poised to intervene. But no. She can’t bring herself to. To leave the safety of the greenhouse. She puts a hand on the windowpane, just looking.
She watches it unfold, staring so hard her eyes go dry and painful. Something horrendous is happening, but something important, too, and so Zara forces herself to keep looking, not glancing away for even a second. She counts, instead. One second. Two. Three.
It’s over in ten.