28. After

The blobfish risks a smile as we wait in a tiny room. I smile back and she makes a very rude gesture, circling her thumb and fingers, jerking her hand back and forth in unison with her tongue as it bulges in her cheek. I can't help but shift my eyebrows up and down suggestively. It would appear we have a shared interest. One we can hopefully recommence in our new mixed-sex abode.

We're called through and they ask us questions to which it would be frankly concerning if they didn't already know the answers. Full name. Birth date. Preferred pronoun. Star sign.

But where was I?

Oh yes, the beginning of the end.

My God but Port Emblyn was beautiful in the sunshine: cobbled streets glistening, holly and red bows and gold bells strung between streetlamps, shop windows full of Christmas things handmade, bespoke, organic. The higgledy-piggledy stone buildings clustering about the port all wearing bright coats of white paint. Reflected light dancing on boats' hulls. Seagulls wheeling in pure blue above the harbour wall.

But after noting the time Frances, with her dyed-blonde curls and tan handbag, dipped back into Riot after her rather lengthy lunchbreak, I ignored the postcard scene and got back to the Port Emblyn School app.

As it was accessible to parents, most of the unofficial acronyms I've always found so useful were missing. No LP (Little Prince/Princess), TAPS (Thick as Pig Shit) or DI (Devil Incarnate).

I did my best to read between the lines. If you add ‘Ava is a confident young woman with strong leadership skills' to ‘She sometimes faces challenges in her interactions with less confident children', you get: Ava is an arrogant little boss bitch bully.

Her brother seemed much the same, while Lydia's daughter Rose was a rare gem – academically brilliant, mature, kind, athletic – and Jenna, well…

Her profile described her as hard-working, quiet and considerate, but threaded through were lines that tugged at my heart.

Jenna's devotion to music might be likened to obsession.

Jenna's artwork sings with a visceral melancholy.

Jenna is a thinker.

Jenna does not often contribute in group situations.

Jenna finds conflict challenging.

Jenna's outburst was quite shocking to her class members.

Jenna could engage more with her peers.

I was delighted she was doing drama, and planned her first class with her record open in front of me, and I barely slept until the day I met her.

Outside, the trees were bare and the grey sky pressed against the windows. The classroom was overheated. As the children entered, laughing, jostling, it started to rain. I sat behind my desk, just watching. They snatched glances at me, taking in the new teacher, as if they didn't quite believe in me yet.

I sensed her before she stepped through the door, and I held my breath. Her hair was so long, like she was clinging to childhood by her split ends. Around her neck hung her headphones. She had coloured in her fingernails with black pen. Her eyes studied the floor as she shuffled to a desk at the front, next to Rose.

Rose, with her violet eyes and long braids and brown skin, was the class's defiant beauty, an outright raving scream of delicious difference in this white, white school.

Jenna's good looks were more subtle. You wouldn't notice her, behind all that hair, but sometimes, the right lighting, a new angle, and all the awkward facets of her being would collaborate to shock you with their exquisite, pale perfection.

She was beautiful and broken. Immediately I wanted to take her in my arms and tell her everything would be okay.

Though I would've been lying.

I waited for the class to fall silent and then pressed play. The gritty, mournful, grating drone of Radiohead's ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack' filled the room.

Not all of them would get it. I knew that. Some shuffled. One girl started picking off nail varnish. But Jenna looked up at the blank board, and her eyes began to glisten.

I watched her and I thought about my father, hazy-brained but still nimble-fingered on a piano or guitar. He had given me this: my love of music. And it was so intense that it was hard to untangle the sounds from the feelings.

I think it's why I felt so close to him when I was little, even though he was hardly there. And why it felt, when I first came back, listening to the Stones with him as he lay in his hospital bed, as though we'd barely been apart. If I could hear music, my dad was there.

Except we had been apart. For years. And now he got muddled putting on his pyjamas.

That first meeting with Jenna, as the song came to an end, I felt tearful myself. But I was worried Jenna might break down completely.

The class was about music and emotion. Even if they thought Radiohead was past it, each student came up with songs to get them in the right mood for a scene. And Jenna's list for Hamlet was sublime.

So sublime, she started singing it under her breath as she was leaving, and was somewhat distracted as I lifted her phone from the back pocket of her bag. The poor sweet thing used her birthday as her password.

At lunch I read her messages: practical exchanges with Frances and Dan, long discussions of music and books with Rose, and a sordid, heartbreaking, year-long campaign by the rest of her year group to destroy every aspect of Jenna's being.

The WhatsApp group was called PES6. The profile picture was an oil painting of a man in a high white collar with thick grey mutton chops. It was as though someone had specifically instructed him to try not to look creepy, and God bless him he was trying.

I knew the painting well. It lived in the sixth-form common room.

There were a few sections of chat on school events, but otherwise the group was devoted to the destruction of Jenna. Last year, it had been quite light.

Did anyone see JBB's epic face plant today?

Does anyone else think JBB's headphones might actually be hearing aids?

But then it grew an edge.

OMG, Jenna, are you okay? I saw you crying in the toilets.

Complete with a picture of Jenna crying in the toilets.

There was a screenshot of a Google calendar reminder for the event ‘JBB's Period Starts Today' that recurred every month, followed by almost every single member posting a picture of a bloody tampon.

Then, in the last few months:

What if her hair is that long EVERYWHERE?

And:

Has anyone noticed that Jenna and Rose never bring packed lunches?

I guess they both like to eat out.

And:

I thought the dinosaurs went extinct?

Beneath it was a picture of Jenna and Rose labelled ‘LICKALOTAPUSS'.

There was a GIF of Snow White going down on Pocahontas.

And on and on and on.

Despite myself I felt my lips wobble. Because I knew what this was like; how it felt to have your friends turn on you, make your life hell day after day, take things that were private and untrue and make you into a spectacle.

Was it more or less sad that Jenna was in the WhatsApp group herself? Why hadn't she left? Surely someone at PES knew about this?

But I shook myself off. I hadn't come here to feel sorry for a Beaufort-Bradley.

She came in after lunch, asking if I'd found her phone, but I said no. I needed to be able to give her the phone as she was leaving school and find out how she got home. I caught her in the foyer after her piano lesson and handed it over.

‘Really excellent work in class today, Jenna. I was really impressed.' I pushed all the warmth I could into my smile, which was a lot, because I practised.

She looked down at her Doc Martens.

‘Your connection with music will really help you. You have a gift.'

She seemed to shrink.

‘It's rare to find someone who knows so much about – really understands – music. And at your age! That class today, that's my thing. Let me know if you want to talk more about it.'

She looked up, longing to say yes.

Poor Jenna. Poor, poor privileged little princess spawn of the devil.