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you, I wasn’t.’
    I look back at him and I’m thinking all the others? but what I’m saying is, ‘Thanks, man.’
    Seán beams like I’ve just given him the greatest compliment he’s ever gotten.
    We spot Jenny sitting with two friends on one of the low windowsills lining the corridor that links the old and new parts of the school. She is wrapped all about by the fall of sun through the glass and her hair has ignited into gold filigree. Herself and her friends don’t even look up as we stop in front of them. They are looking at Jenny’s iPhone and the scratchy, parched audio from the video they’re watching skitters all along the corridor.
    I don’t know what to do and I’m looking at Seán. Seán shrugs and nods dumbly toward Jenny like he’s fucking Lassie or something .
    Not knowing what to do I clench and unclench my fists and not knowing what to do I make this stupid polite cough.
    One of Jenny’s friends, a fat girl with hair like unravelled Brillo Pads, lifts her big head and looks at me like I’m something she’s scraped off her shoe. She sneers at us and goes, ‘What do you two losers want?’
    I blink at this and I say, ‘Can I have a word with Jenny please?’
    I’m saying this and at the same time I’m thinking, why the fuck am I asking permission?
    Jenny’s not looking at me. And Jenny not looking at me goes, ‘Tell him I don’t want to talk to him.’
    The fat girl says, ‘She doesn’t want to talk to you.’
    Again I look at Seán. He’s grinning encouragingly and he’s nodding eagerly at me. Now I’m looking from Jenny to her slab-of-lard friend and now I’m going, ‘Look, I don’t need an interpreter. Jenny, do you have a minute?’
    Jenny looks up at me and she smiles and she goes, ‘Why? Do you want to show me how you can fall on your arse again?’
    That thing that was hooked in my guts, the one that snagged there when I admitted that Jenny and I weren’t an ‘us’, that thing now rips free and unspools my innards. Jenny is smiling so sweetly that she’s threatening to give the entire school diabetes and my whole belly is opening up with a long agonising yawn. Both of Jenny’s friends are laughing at me and I’m thinking that this is what Daniel O’Hara must have felt like with his Mam boxing the back off him and the whole school sniggering at him.
    I’m standing there like something built out of wet clay and I don’t know what to do. The expressions scuttling across the girls’ faces are awful things, cruel and in flux and all of a sudden everyatom of me feels like it’s being dissolved by their scorn. In the middle of the corridor I’m standing there and I feel like my entire being has become a big blank naught.
    And then Seán says something.
    He stands beside me and he goes, ‘You’re not very nice people.’
    Jenny bridles and her chin tucks into her neck. Her fat friend lifts her hand, index finger quivering upright in a daytime TV oh no you di’ant gesture of indignation, and she says, ‘What business is it of yours, you fucking ape?’
    But Seán is on a roll now and his voice just rumbles straight over fatso’s talk-show performance. He’s going, ‘You’re not very nice people. My friend is the nicest person in this school and you people are horrible. I don’t like you. You just talk about people all the time. You’re always mean. All the time you’re mean. You make all the other girls cry.’
    Then he lifts his big hand and he points at Jenny. His voice just keeps coming out of his mouth gathering momentum and speed like a tsunami.
    Now, still pointing at Jenny, he’s saying, ‘You like to keep these two around you because they’re not as good-looking as you. You always want everyone to look just at you. If people aren’t looking at you, you disappear. I see the way you keep looking at your own self in the windows. You have a mirror in the lid of your maths set too. You’re friends with ugly people because you want to stand out. You