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to play with at home, but were to be ignored at school in front of mates. The Prep department was in a different building to the Upper School and he and his crew ran off to play football in their yard before the bell went. I headed round the side of the building to the girls’ locker rooms. The noise hit me as soon as I went in, all the post-weekend chatter about who’d done what, with who and when. I hung my coat up and collected some textbooks I needed for the morning. This area was only for Year 10 so everyone here knew me; it was safe.
    Walking out into the corridor was different. A bunch of younger girls stopped at the sight of me, their mouths screwing up before they turned away. And then the whispers . . .
    When would it stop? We’d only been back a couple of weeks and I was still a novelty – Shrek Goes to High School. But would they ever get used to me?
    A couple of Year 8 boys pushed into me, not looking where they were going, and I shoved them out of the way before they knocked me over. ‘Eww, that’s disgusting,’ the geeky spotty one muttered to his friend. ‘She should put a bag over her head or something.’ Even a minger like him found me repulsive.
    The second boy sniggered and I couldn’t stand the idea of them following me down the corridor so I veered into the girls’ toilets and locked myself in a cubicle.
    I leaned on the door for support as I waited for my pulse to slow and the usual choke of anger and humiliation to die away. Walking down that corridor was the hardest part of the day and every time I did it, I had to fight back the memory of the first day back at school after the accident.
    The locker room had been bad enough as girls from my year rushed over to say, ‘Hi! We missed you . . .’ before their voices tailed off. Their eyes widened in shock, even though they all knew what had happened to me. But knowing it isn’t the same as seeing it. I saw the thoughts flash through their heads: if that happened to me . . . oh God, I’d die . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . They tried to pretend they weren’t horrified, but they couldn’t hide it. I didn’t know what to say to them. I wanted to run out of the building and phone Mum, then sit in the field and cry until she came to get me.
    But she’d talked me through this so many times and I didn’t think she’d come for me anyway. She’d call the school and they’d send a teacher to find me. They’d already offered to get my form tutor to meet me from the bus, but I didn’t want that. To be escorted down the corridors would only make people stare even more – Exhibit One, Fugly Scarface with Mrs Barker as bodyguard. Instead Beth had met me at the lockers and linked her arm through mine to march me to the form room.
    When a new girl gasped at the sight of me, Beth’s face set as stiff as the plastic mask I’d discarded only the week before. My heart raced so fast I felt faint and I needed her arm to stop me falling. The corridor went quiet – a Mexican wave of silence spread along it as people saw us coming.
    Stop looking at me! Leave me alone! I screamed it so loudly in my head that I was scared for a second I’d yelled it for real.
    Everyone around me took on that blurry quality as if I was sleepwalking through a nightmare. Fuzzy blobs of faces, staring bulbous eyes. Beth half-dragged me down that corridor; I couldn’t have done it by myself.
    I took a deep breath and opened the toilet door, remembering just in time to look away from the mirrors. Another deep breath, and I stepped out into the corridor again.
    Beth was sitting on the desk in the form room changing the cartridge in her fountain pen. She looked up as I walked in and I sensed she had news. Big news.
    ‘Jen, hi!’
    ‘Hi, good weekend?’ I sat down on the desk next to her.
    ‘Yeah, the battle re-enactment was brilliant! The best I’ve ever been to.’ Beth’s parents were members of a historical society who dressed up and did role plays of famous events in