What Came Before He Shot Her by Elizabeth George

no idea what she was up to aside from playing truant, and she didn’t reveal any details to him.
    He would have preferred her company, though, not only in fulfi lling their assigned duty to Toby each morning and afternoon but also in having to navigate the experience of being the new kid at Holland Park School. For the school seemed to Joel to be a place fraught with dangers. There were the academic dangers of being seen as stupid rather than shy. There were the social dangers of having no friends. There were the physical dangers of his appearance, which, along with having no friends, could easily mark him as a target for bullying. Ness’s presence would have made the going easier for him, Joel decided. She would have fitted in better than he. He could have ridden along on her coattails.
    No matter that Ness—as she was now and not as she had been in her childhood—would not have allowed this. The way Joel still saw his sister, if only periodically, made him feel her absence at school acutely.
    So he sought to be a fly on the wall, attracting the attention of neither pupils nor teachers. To his PSHE teacher’s hearty question of “How’re you getting on then, mate?” he always made the same reply. “S’okay.”
    “Any troubles? Problems? Homework going all right?”
    “S’okay, yeah.”
    “Made any friends, yet?”
    “’M doing all right.”
    “Not being bullied by anyone, are you?”
    A shake of the head, eyes directed to his feet.
    “Because if you are, you report it to me at once. We don’t tolerate that nonsense here at Holland Park.” A long pause in which Joel finally looked up to see the teacher—he was called Mr. Eastbourne—intently assessing him. “Wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Joel?” Mr. Eastbourne said. “My job’s to make your job easier, you know. D’you know what your job is at Holland Park?”
    Joel shook his head.
    “Getting on,” Eastbourne said. “Getting ed-u-cated. You want that, don’t you? Because you have to want it in order to succeed.”
    “Okay.” Joel wished only to be dismissed, free from scrutiny once more. If studying eighteen hours a day would have allowed him to become invisible to Mr. Eastbourne and to everyone else, he would have done that. He would have done anything.
    Lunchtime was the worst. As in every school that has ever existed, boys and girls congregated in groups, and the groups themselves had special designations known only to the members. Those teens deemed popular—a label they gave to themselves, which everyone else apparently accepted without question—hung about at a distance from those considered clever. Those who were clever—and they always had the marks to prove it—kept away from those whose futures were obviously limited to working behind a till. Those with advanced social agendas stayed clear of those who were backward. Those who followed trends remained aloof from those who scorned such things. There were pockets of individuals, naturally, who didn’t fit anywhere within these designations, but they were the social outcasts who didn’t know how to welcome anyone into their midst anyway. So Joel spent his lunchtimes alone.
    He’d done this for several weeks when he heard someone speak to him from nearby his regular eating spot, which was leaning out of sight against the far corner of the security guard’s hut at the edge of the schoolyard near the gate. It was a girl’s voice. She said, “Why d’you eat over here, mon?” and when Joel looked up, realising that the question was directed at him, he saw an Asian girl in a navy headscarf standing on the route into the schoolyard, as if she’d just been admitted by the security guard. She wore a school uniform that was several sizes too large for her. It successfully obscured whatever feminine curves she might have had.
    Since he’d managed to avoid being spoken to by anyone save his teachers, Joel didn’t quite know what to do.
    The girl said, “Hey. Can’t you talk or