After breakfast I go get my bus. We don’t have to be in till ten thirty today as they are showing around the new students for August’s intake. Perhaps they don’t want us students about to scare them too much. I was so scared when I first went to the grammar school, but I needn’t have been; the pupils are much less dangerous than the kids in the Homes.
On the bus, we all discuss what we know about what’s happened. I usually sit near Amanda but not near enough to talk. As there are only four of us, we get a double seat each.
Daniel and Ronnie tend to sit at the back and Amanda tends to sit in the middle, although sometimes with them. I did sit at the front on my own but have recently started moving backwards nearer to them. This time all four of us sit near each other in the middle; after Jane’s death and the news about Sally it has meant a break in the established social rules.
It’s strange that normally we don’t usually travel together as a group. We all go from the same place to the same place, at the same time, on the same buses and trains, yet I wouldn’t say we travelled together. Today we do.
Ronnie, who is tall and skinny and has a lot of spots on his face, says that he’s heard it was a minister who took Sally because she was impure, as a warning to all other girls. Daniel says he thinks it might have been a werewolf. He is just trying to scare us; he’s too smart to believe in werewolves. Amanda says that she has spoken to Sally before – she knows a girl in her cottage a bit. She’s been over to Cottage 29 since Sally disappeared and the atmosphere in there is Baltic – all the girls were all crying and are convinced she’s dead. They think she had a boyfriend as she had been sneaking out in the weeks before, but no one knew who it was.
None of us really know Sally. We all think she must have been killed, too, like Jane was.
At the grammar school we are the centre of attention; now Sally’s gone missing, the newspapers have gone crazy again and all the children want to know what’s going on at the Homes. Sometimes they tease us about having no parents and living in the Homes, and are snooty about us, but today we are the most important people at the school. Had I seen anyone suspicious hanging around? Who do I think did it? Are there many policemen about searching for Sally?
Even a teacher asks me what’s happening. I tell her what I know, but not that Jonesy saw Jane’s body when she had been killed, nor that we went to look in the woods where she was found. As for Sally, I just say that people run away sometimes, but obviously they think she’s been murdered too. I feel bad guessing about what’s happened but that is all everyone’s doing, we know so little – especially why it’s happened.
By the end of the school day I am so tired of talking and saying the same things. On the train and bus none of us says anything, we all just stare out of the windows at the fields as they go past.