Under Haralda’s rule, the class achieved their learning objectives without incident, gaining the ability to solve linear equations and convert verbs into nouns. When the bell rattled in its tinny metal case and the students filed out for break, Lizzie approached her with nothing short of reverence.

“I’ve never seen them concentrate so hard before,” she said, wiping a tear away with a polka-dot handkerchief. “How did you do that? It’s amazing!”

Haralda smiled, took out the pocket guide and pressed it into her colleague’s hands. She declared, “There’s no big secret. The trick is to make sure you get the little details right, and then everything else will fall into place.”

“What is this?” asked Lizzie, flicking through hundreds of pages on everything from classroom bin placement to optimal teacher hair length.

“A guide to all the little details,” said Haralda, before patting her on the shoulder and strutting back down the hallway, keen to check on Kari. The child hadn’t come back, which hopefully meant she’d found the special educational needs classroom more welcoming – Haralda felt a crushing responsibility to give her a chance at a normal childhood. A deputy head wasn’t supposed to get maternal instincts, but Haralda got them just the same, and the only reason she hadn’t adopted before was because the authorities didn’t have any faith in single parents. Well, Kari was her chance to prove them wrong.

In the hallway, Olivier, Olly and Olive greeted her. The special class.

“Where’s Kari?” she asked.

“Who?” said Olivier, face uncomprehending. The boy looked like a warm-hearted skeleton, and despite the amount of time he’d spent in the hospital, was making good strides in the catch-up classes. Soon he’d be ready to rejoin Year 6.

“The girl I took to your class,” said Haralda. “Tall, with long dark hair.”

The three children looked at each other, and she saw that they were panicking because they weren’t able to answer a direct question from Madame Gunmetal.

Olive’s lip wobbled as she said, “You didn’t bring a girl to the class, Madame Gunmetal.”

The other two looked at her like she’d just done a Nazi salute at a war memorial. But Haralda didn’t stay to thank them; she sprinted to the special needs classroom, barrelled into the door, tumbled through, and found Kari slumped over in a chair, dead.

“No,” said Haralda, brushing the child’s hair out of her eyes. Kari’s face did not look serene. It looked twisted, pained, and angry, a cocktail of emotions that were altogether too mature for such a young person.

There was nothing in the guidebook about this. Students did not just die in Haralda’s school. She stood there, vacant, looking at the girl she’d have liked to call her daughter, the girl she wanted to teach a language other than violence.

The sight became too much, and she felt vomit surging up her throat, so she ran out the class, slamming the door behind her, and made a break for the staff toilet. She heaved. Kari was dead. A thousand tiny doors had closed. She scratched into her clipboard:

GRIEVE –

Just like that, the emotions dissipated. They were trapped on the page and could be dealt with later, when she had the time to be weak. For now, she followed the arrow on the remote to the main hallway, where she’d promised to turn back any students braving their way into the building during breaktime.

The first students unlucky enough to attempt this were the Brick Gang. They were smiling as they walked in, but they stopped dead as soon as they saw her.

“Where do you think you’re going?” shouted Haralda. “The corridors are off limits during break!”

It was against the guidebook to shout, but Haralda wasn’t feeling herself. Her voice compelled the Brick Gang back, and their eyes narrowed from mutual respect to fear.

“And tell everyone,” she shouted. “The corridors are off limits! I’m to see no-one in here during break, under penalty of expulsion! There are simply no excuses for not following the code of conduct!”

They scarpered, and Haralda found that she was heaving out her breaths. Why was she so angry? Why couldn’t kids just follow instructions? Why did they take Kari and not her?

CALM DOWN –

It didn’t help. She wanted to smash something. Punch a wall. So it was that contrary to the original day, when a steady trickle of children came in to have a nice chat and turn around once she’d explained to them the basics of fire safety, no children passed by the corridor at all. In fact, the mood on the playground was dampened so much by the Brick Gang, who thought she’d expel them if they didn’t inform every single student, that the children stopped running around entirely. They sat on the asphalt, murmuring to each other, unable to laugh.

Florence, the headteacher, approached Haralda with a hot cup of tea and led her into the office. The remote kept trying to nudge her back out into the corridor, and it was right to, because Florence had never once made a cup of tea for anyone.

“Haralda, my dear,” said Florence, daintily. “Is everything okay?”

Her calmness was crushed in the battle for the room’s atmosphere by Haralda’s rage. A bonsai on the desk shivered, and all of its leaves dropped off.

“How would you feel if a student had died in the school?” asked Haralda. “What would your reaction be?”

Florence’s eyebrows narrowed. She leaned over to the bookshelf and reached out for the Barden City Teacher’s Guide.

“No,” barked Haralda. “Not my opinion. Your opinion. What would Florence, the headteacher, do?”

“What’s come over you?” asked Florence. “Are you feeling under the weather? Why are you shouting at children and coming in here asking me about such frightful things?”

Haralda slammed her fist on the desk, sending awards flying.

“Answer the question.”

Florence’s eyes flitted down at Haralda’s fist, then back up to her face. She calmly collected the awards and propped them back up, in order – BEST SCHOOL 2001, BEST SCHOOl 2002, BEST SCHOOL 2003, BEST SCHOOL 2004…

“I’d resign,” said Florence. “Of course I would. I’d never work with children again, in fact. You can ask any teacher in this school that question and that’s the response you’ll get. Okay?”

Haralda nodded. 

“Drink your tea,” said Florence. “You’ve done so much for us over the years – don’t feel like you can’t ask us for help. I’ve sorted the food situation on my own. They’re sending over pizza. Nothing needs to be done apart from some emails. Do you want to just sit in the office until lunch? Take it easy for a while?”

The remote jabbed Haralda through her skirt, insistently. She finished the cup and rose, flipping past CALM DOWN and GRIEVE on her clipboard to find a list of miscellaneous tasks.

“I’d love to,” she said, “But a Deputy Head can’t go shirking work. For instance – CONDUCT INVENTORY OF ART SUPPLIES. They may have changed drastically since last week, and I’m not about to have a shortage.”

Florence blocked off her exit. “A deputy head also needs to listen to her headteacher. And I’m ordering you to REGULATE YOUR WELLBEING. If you go out like you are now, you’ll scare the children.”

Haralda glared at her, but Florence didn’t wither, even under The Look. So she sighed, sat down at the desk, and drank cup of tea after cup of tea, ignoring the remote as it crackled against her thigh. By the time it was lunch, she was able to tick off CALM DOWN.

In the corridor, she joined the flow of children towards the lunch hall, quietly relieved they didn’t run away – the prospect of pizza made them more boisterous as ever, and her outburst was forgotten. The remote pricked her again. She took it out of her pocket and saw it pointing to the intersection she’d been guarding earlier. It made sense, as children who’d eaten their lunch needed to go outside, not back through the building. She took off her clipboard shield and leaned on it as she waited – after what she’d done at break, she wasn’t expecting anyone to try their luck.

“Thanks, Haralda,” said Mary, walking by, transfixed by the shield but too stunned to actually comment on it. “It seems you made quite the impression on the children. Aren’t you going to come and eat?”

Haralda checked the remote. “I shouldn’t. Fires don’t wait for lunch breaks, and therefore neither should I. Go on, have your lunch. I’ll eat later.”

Mary shrugged and walked on. More of her co-workers trailed past, thanking her for volunteering, asking whether she was going to come anyway, then moving on. It struck Haralda how none of them offered to take her place. Florence was half-right – they appreciated her, sure, but they still wouldn’t lift a finger to help out if it killed them.

A sudden noise broke her out of a daydream. She looked up, and there was Olivier, skin sickly, sweating like a fire hose as he crept towards her.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

He stiffened, back immediately straight. He was shuddering – he swallowed, the lump catching in his throat, and then he took another step.

“Young man,” said Haralda. “You’re not allowed in the corridors during breaktime.”

Her words made him stumble, and he just managed to catch himself. He lifted his head, wobbling, trying to keep eye contact.

“M-m-my b-b-bag,” he stammered. The outburst seemed to drain all the fight he had left in him, and his head hung limp below his shoulders.

“You need to start taking what you need from your bag before lunch,” she instructed.

She checked her clipboard to see whether she could let him off just this once, but the guidance was clear – a rule must be enforced consistently or it’s not a rule. “Go back to the hall,” she said. “You can get what you need when you come inside after break.”

Olivier’s eyes drooped. He turned, unevenly shuffling back to the lunch hall. She watched him go, bemused. Now that she thought about it, that was her last memory of him – he’d been reassigned to a specialist hospital afterwards, and she’d never had the chance to say goodbye. She took a step after him, but the remote speared her finger, pointing unrelentingly for her to remain where she was.

She waited, and a couple of other children came to get things from their bags. She sent them back, to be consistent. 

Then Florence buzzed over, biting at her knuckles. 

“Ah, Haralda,” she said. “I’ve just remembered we need to do a stock-take on the P.E. cupboard, would you mind going to do that?”

Haralda moved to pencil it in on her clipboard, but Florence pushed her back in the corridor, saying, “No, now. I need you to do it now because… if you don’t do it now, I won’t be able to order new stock in time for the next term. Go on, please and thank you.”

Haralda checked the remote. Sure enough, it wanted her to go in the direction of the underground P.E. cupboard, which was really a dusty old war bunker put to better use. The walls and ceiling spanned multiple meters, and Haralda hated going in there because it was so quiet that she always caught tinnitus.

She walked away, doubt in her mind. If she’d never said goodbye to Olivier, and today was the last time she’d seen him, well, she wasn’t an idiot…

Anton waved at her frantically from outside reception. Uncannily, he wasn’t putting on his usual airs, and was exuding an oddly professional aura.

Anton said, “Your French man wouldn’t happen to be the father of one Olivier Chiron, would he?”

The remote jammed her again, and Haralda was so fed up with the thing that she flung it in the fishtank.

“He’s dead, isn’t he,” she said.

“Already?” He paced around the reception, picking up objects and fiddling with them. “I thought he’d just gone into shock.”

“Shock? What do you mean?”

“Something to do with peanut oil on the pizza. I don’t know why he didn’t have an epipen on him,” said Anton. “Florence just asked me to call the parents and arrange – hey, where are you going? Haralda?”

She charged down the corridor, but slowed down when she caught sight of the teachers huddling in the staff room, shouting at one another. They’d laid Olivier in a chair, covering him with coats. The boy was catatonic.

Haralda pressed open the door just a crack. They were too busy nearly coming to blows to notice her.

“Shouldn’t we tell Haralda?” asked Lizzie. “She’d know what to do.”

“No,” snapped Florence. “Under no circumstances can she find out about this.”

“Right,” nodded Mary. “She’s way too important to lose. The ambulance is coming. The parents have been called. They’ll sort this out.”

“Are you serious?” cried Lizzie. “What are you going to tell her, exactly? He’s gone to another school?”

“I suppose you want to have children like the Brick Gang running wild in your class,” said Florence. “I suppose you want us to break our nine-year streak of winning best in country.”

“I don’t, but…”

“There, there.” Florence brought her into a tight hug. “We’re not lying. Just… keeping her out of the way until all of this has died down.”

“For the good of the school,” said Mary. “For fuck’s sake, would somebody get him some water, if he dies anywhere it needs to be in the hospital for the records.”

“Exactly,” said Florence, holding a bottle to Olivier’s greying lips. “For the good of the school.”