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she finds out you’re playing silly buggers then she’ll twig it was copied and that’ll knacker it for the rest of us. Cross it out again; put a one instead. One’s safe – or zero. Zero’s always good; they like zero.’
    Stottie smiled gratefully at her friend and scribbled another ‘O’ into the inky mess: noughts and crosses played by a dangerous lunatic.
    Baker spotted Bunty at the far end of the room but pretended she hadn’t seen her. Strolling across to the classroom blackboard, she was about to pull a tissue from her pocket in order to update the chalk count in the corner (eighteen days to go till the end of term) when she spotted that their form mistress, Mrs Lorimer, a practical-minded woman, had brought in an off-cut of knitted dishcloth to wipe the board with since the real thing had disappeared. That was her little game, was it? Baker picked up the dusty white rag and dropped it down the back of the bookcase en route to her locker. The original felt brick thingy was still hibernating beneath a pile of dead leaves directly under the classroom window. Astonishing the amount of nuisance you could create with the simplest act of sabotage: the hunt under desks, the search for tissues, the selection of a volunteer to go next door (‘Sorry, Mrs Rathbone, but Mrs Lorimer says can we borrow your board rubber?’). Hours of fun.
    Amanda McQueen had, entirely against her will, been designated classroom noticeboard monitor and was standing on a desk posing menacingly with a staple gun like a lost Bond girl. The class next door had a trendy-looking collage of sunsets culled from back numbers of the National Geographic . Queenie’s current display was composed of pages torn from the London A–D telephone directory with ‘Call me’ scrawled across the lot with one of her mother’s old red lipsticks. Downright embarrassing, or so Mrs Lorimer felt as she made her way to the front desk and frowned for the hundredth time at the solitary blue carpet tile set in the otherwise grey floor. The room directly above had blue but none of their floor tiles was missing when she went to look (none you could see, anyway: Bunty had taken enormous care to pinch one from underneath the corner lockers). The form mistress looked up and noticed yet another drawing pin in the ceiling: a good twelve feet away. How did they do that?
    ‘Amanda!’
    Mrs Lorimer let out a wincing ‘tut’ as she remembered too late that all four heads would turn. Odd the way girls’ Christian names washed in and out of fashion. Three of her grandmother’s five brothers had married Dorothies: Dot; Dot; Dot.
    ‘Amanda Baker. I daresay your father has spoken to you about yesterday evening?’
    And Baker placed a bet with herself that she’d say ‘new leaf’ and she did. Good as gold.
    Bryony and Vicky and Patricia were all admiring a centrefold inside Bryony’s locker – same singer, different picture (different denim shirt, anyway).
    ‘Excuse me, lads,’ said Baker, squirming past the metal locker door. ‘Oozat then, Brian?’
    Brian. Tee hee. But it was their own fault really. Samantha started it – her and ‘call-me-Jo’ Josephine. As if you could just choose your own nickname. Well two could play at that game. And now the whole lot of them had a boy’s name: Paddy, George, Brian, Vic. All except Natasha. Natasha could easily have been ‘Nat’ but she wasn’t. Natasha had only arrived a year ago, just after the Christmas holidays. She had been at some swanky ‘international school’ in Brussels or Bruges or Belgium or somewhere and had breezed in on her first day very, very full of herself, face and hands dry-roasted by a radioactive ski tan.
    ‘I’m Natasha – Natasha Baldwin,’ she gushed, ‘but you can call me Stash.’
    Except no one did of course. Bunty christened her ‘Tash’ and it stuck (what with the dark hair and everything).
    The assembly hall was already nearly full as Baker and Bunty took the seats that Queenie and