Sadie

‘All right, ladies and gentlemen,’ Miss Venables called briskly above the hubbub when everyone was sitting down. ‘Reading books open at page twenty, please.’

Without thinking, Sadie pulled her book out of her satchel and placed it on the desk in front of her. The spine fell open on account of the crumpled pages, which for some reason looked a lot worse now than they had done the night before. Miss Venables noticed the state of Sadie’s book immediately.

‘Er, Sadie Burrows,’ she said, her voice not quite so loud now but certainly audible to the rest of the class. ‘What have you been doing to your book?’

Sadie looked guiltily down at the damage Allen had done. ‘Nothing, miss,’ she mumbled.

Miss Venables picked the book up from her table and held it up between her thumb and forefinger. ‘This doesn’t look like nothing to me, Sadie.’ It was a reprimand, but it was kindly spoken in the way that only Miss Venables could manage.

There were a few giggles from the class behind her, and Sadie felt her skin redden again. ‘What d’you do to it, Sadie?’ a voice called out. ‘Use it to wipe your—’

‘That’s enough!’ Miss Venables said sharply, and the class quietened down again. She laid the book back down on Sadie’s table and said, under her breath, ‘Don’t let it happen again, Sadie.’

The rest of the lesson passed without incident. When it finished, Sadie left quickly, so as to avoid having any further conversation with Miss Venables about the book, and went straight out to the playground for breaktime. Anna and Carly had made it impossible for her to approach them, she decided, by the way they had been ignoring her. It was up to them to make up with her. But from the way they had positioned themselves at the far side of the playground, it didn’t look as if that was part of their plan. So Sadie found a place away from everyone else, laid her satchel on the ground and sat down, clutching her knees with her arms. At first she started watching what was going on in the playground, but after only a few moments everything became an unseen blur as her mind concentrated on all the things that were preoccupying her.

She didn’t want to go home. She couldn’t bear to. The thought of being in the same house as Allen – let alone the same room – was horrible to her. It made her muscles clench and her stomach churn; it made her thoughts become confused and jumbled. Now Mum was never there, and even when she was she took his side all the time. If she told her the things he had said to her, she’d never believe her anyway. The image of the bruise on the side of Mum’s face flashed into her mind. It was perfectly obvious to Sadie where it came from, and she knew that she couldn’t leave Mum to that sort of treatment. She was too weak; she’d never survive it.

But what could she do? She was only thirteen.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a small voice. Shaking herself from her reverie, she looked round to see Jamie Brown, standing alone and awkward, a couple of metres away. The smell of his dirty clothes hit her, but she was used to that by now. He looked nervous – more nervous than normal – and Sadie suddenly remembered the way he had walked away from her yesterday. With everything else that was going on, Jamie’s troubles had barely entered her head. She forced her lips into a thin smile.

‘All right, Jamie?’

Jamie nodded, his wide, bloodshot eyes fixed firmly on Sadie. ‘Um, sorry,’ he said.

‘Forget about it,’ Sadie told him.

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. ‘It’s me birthday,’ he blurted out, blushing as he spoke.

Sadie felt a pang of renewed sympathy for the little boy. Jackie had taken her to McDonald’s on her last birthday; she had no doubt that Jamie would not have been treated in any way by his mum. She smiled at him. ‘Sit down, birthday boy,’ she said, indicating the ground next to her.

They appeared to come from nowhere. Before Jamie could sit down, he was suddenly rushed at from one side by a tall, lanky ginger-haired boy who pushed him roughly so that he fell to the ground. Jamie shouted in sudden pain as his hand scraped against the rough tarmac, but his cry was soon drowned by the jeering shrieks of his sudden assailants.

‘Gross!’ one of them shouted out. ‘You fucking touched him!’

Two other voices howled with laughter as the ginger-haired boy grinned at them. Sadie looked up at the gang. There were three of them, a little older than she was and quite a bit older than Jamie, and they started taunting him with chants, which he must have been used to by now.

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