“That…doesn’t seem like a good reason to handcuff you.”
She shrugged.
Apparently, the conversation had come to a natural stopping point. I permitted myself a cautious whisper of optimism that she at least hadn’t spat on me yet.
Chapter 20
We arrived pretty quickly at St. Jude’s Church of England Academy, and I parked us, very inexpertly, in a dull grey car park down a dull grey road behind some actually fairly nice but still pretty dull redbrick houses. It wasn’t my first visit. I’d been with Oliver as part of the endless round of pre-Jaz meetings when we were scouting schools, but I still got a kind of itch in my stomach just looking at the place. There was just something about school buildings that made me feel fifteen and in trouble, even though I definitely wasn’t one of those things and was only sometimes the other.
The sign between the car park and the entrance to the school proper very firmly instructed all visitors to report to reception, so to reception we reported. Or at least I reported. Jaz trailed behind me looking like she’d rather be anywhere else, or perhaps with anyoneelse. With the possible exception of Oliver.
The receptionist was a friendly-looking woman in perhaps her mid-forties with her hair in a bob and her glasses halfway down her nose.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Luc O’Donnell and Jasmine Johnson. We have a meeting about her…” Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. “Her personal plan thing?”
The receptionist looked at her computer screen helpfully. “Personal Education Plan? You’ll be meeting with Miss Collins anda representative from the virtual school at nine fifteen.”
“And my mum,” said Jaz.
The receptionist looked at her quizzically. “Pardon?”
“He’ll be meeting with Mum. She’ll be coming too.”
The receptionist looked back at the screen. “Oh yes. I was just talking about staff. There’ll be a social worker there as well.”
At the mention of a social worker, Jasmine scowled, but the receptionist ignored it and so did I.
“If you’d like to take a seat.”
There were low, not especially comfortable chairs by one wall, the kind that one hundred percent of waiting rooms and reception areas seemed to have, as if they were all handed out centrally from some giant not-especially-comfortable-chair warehouse. Nearby, a neat white table had a few copies of the school newsletter laid out for people who wanted something to read but didn’t have phones.
Ididhave a phone. But the irrational voice at the back of my brain said that the newsletters were there as a test. A Good Parent Test to see if I was Taking an Interest or not. They weren’t, obviously. They were probably just the cheapest reading matter the school had to hand and could be sure was appropriate for children. I picked up a copy anyway and leafed through examples of year seven artwork, poems written by year eights, details of the year nine geography trip to the Lower Lea Valley, and a bunch of other things that I should have been paying attention to and having opinions about but could only really respond to with a silentWell, that seems nice.
I was justwell-that-seems-nice-ing my way through the diary dates and the notice congratulating something called “Sparx Maths Champions” when I heard a cheerful “Hi, Luc, hi, Jaz” and looked up to see Esther making her way past me to sign in at reception.
I said hi to Esther in return and, beside me, Jaz murmured something under her breath that could just about have been mistaken fora greeting from a long distance in a bad light.
“Getting to be a bit of an old hand at this, aren’t you?” said Esther to Jaz with what I read as genuine sympathy but which I strongly suspected Jaz read differently.
“S’pose,” Jaz muttered. She was still staring at her phone—a cheap pay-as-you-go job that it was presumably my and Oliver’s responsibility to keep topped up and, for that matter, monitor her use of.
Esther gave me a typically bright look. “Miss Collins should be ready for us soon. Don’t worry, Luc, I’ve met her before and she doesn’t bite.”
I gave what I hoped was a good-humoured smile. “Oh good.”
“And you’ll soon get used to how everything works,” she added.
Unusually, this actually prompted Jaz to make an audible response. “There’ll be alotof meetings.”
“How many?” I asked, trying not to sound like I hated the idea more than I did in fact hate the idea.
“Every time I change schools.” She was counting on her fingers now. “Then a couple of months after changing schools, then a few months after that, then special extra ones every time I”—she moved her fingers from counting duty to air-quotes duty—“‘display challenging behaviour.’”
I probably shouldn’t have been asking but I did. “How often do you display ‘challenging behaviour’?”
“Quite a lot.”
