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heard a rumour about bullying at his previous college. He wasn’t surprised. Rusty was a strange and introverted boy who seemed to have very few social skills and held the majority of his conversations with himself.
    Tallfor his age but thin and stooping, his eyes were either gazing off into space or fixed on the ground as though he’d lost something. Rusty rarely looked people in the eye and this social failing was reinforced by a more tangible barrier – the ever-present digital camcorder which was always strapped to his hand, and invariably raised in front of his face on the rare occasions he lifted his head.
    Strangely, he seemed to possess the intellectual skills of a more mature person when producing written work, and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of films which he unveiled at the most inappropriate times. On a recent careers evening, he’d informed Rifkind that his ambition was to work in the cinema, and the lecturer had been unable to stifle the unworthy thought that Rusty would indeed make an ideal usher. Naturally Rifkind hadn’t voiced this opinion. At least not in front of Rusty’s gorgeous young single mum – a MILF indeed.
    In front of Rusty now sat the strikingly pretty Becky Blake conversing with Fern Stretton, her best friend. The pair chatted as though alone in the universe, about everything from boys to their annual
X Factor
applications. Becky was fixated on fame and fortune and she certainly had the looks, though her in-your-face attractions had never been a draw for Rifkind. Until recently her superficial charms had been twinned with that air of unabashed expectation that clung to so many of her peers – a serenity derived from unbroken dreams.
    But Rifkind had the sense that something had shifted within her. He often noticed it with students around this age. For a couple of years in their teens the most promising carried that galling conviction that they owned the world, believing their lives would proceed exactly as they wished. Then, one day, an unforeseen setback would rouse them from theirslumber and they were forced to face a future of hard graft and disappointment.
    Well, Rifkind was convinced that reality had sunk its teeth into Becky recently because she carried with her now that slight bruise of knowledge that her life would not be quite as predicted, as though something in her carefully gilded future had been stepped on.
    Rifkind looked at his watch again and fired up his laptop to register those present. Jake McKenzie hadn’t yet put in an appearance. McKenzie was a blue-eyed, dark-haired Adonis, as talented academically and athletically as he was handsome, and Rifkind had heard that every girl in the college had thrown herself at him at one time or another. And yet he seemed to be a thinker, rising above the petty obsessions of teenage life, absorbing himself in his studies and his sport, at which he excelled.
    Rifkind didn’t mark him absent yet. Jake was in such demand that he was often late from some practice or other.
    Kyle Kennedy, the other boy from his Literature Group, couldn’t have been more different from Jake. He was slim with delicate expressive hands, lightly built with feminine, stubblefree features, large doe eyes and long lashes. Despite being very shy he was a popular confidant of some of the girls and this, above all, made him the butt of most of the gay banter flying around. But academically, Kyle had a fierce and probing intelligence and was well on the way to an A* in Literature. Predictably, this only added to the resentment from the less talented.
    Rifkind took a breath as Adele Watson walked through the double doors. He hadn’t expected to see her and she hurried to a chair, steadfastly ignoring his gaze. She was a talented, ifnaive writer and very beautiful. Next year she’d be studying English Literature at Cambridge – thanks in part to his own inspirational teachings.
    He examined what he could see of her face. She’d been crying, he could tell,