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 anyone else. 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 and a 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.
I did have 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 silent Well, that seems nice.
I was just well-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 for a 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 a lot of 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.”
“I don’t suppose you’d consider…not? I mean, it’d save us both a lot of meetings.”
Jaz looked at me like I was the world’s least skibidi person.
Esther just laughed in a way I found reassuringly professional. “That is pretty much the size of it. But”—she gave me a look that I found uncomfortably understanding—“has ‘Just don’t’ ever worked for you?”
“No,” I admitted. “Then again, I’ll go a very long way to get out of a meeting.”
Jaz was still ignoring us, so we just had time to lapse back into another awkward silence before the receptionist put down her phone and told us that Miss Collins was ready for us.
Esther, who had clearly worked with this school before, led me and Jasmine the short distance up the corridor to the deputy headmistress’s office, which, it seemed, was also the office of the school’s designated teacher for looked-after and previously-looked-after children.
Presumably because they were in fact the same person.
I’d expected Miss Collins to look the way I remembered teachers looking when I was Jaz’s age, which was to say ancient, withered, and extremely unradical.
When she turned out to be slightly younger than me, and probably less withered as well, I felt kind of personally attacked.
Sitting beside her was a man of similar insultingly-my-agedness, who was not only wearing a grey cardigan but also seemed to be made entirely out of them.
“Mr. O’Donnell?” Miss Collins didn’t give me a hand to shake, but she indicated a chair for me to sit in. One of three currently unoccupied. “Jasmine? Do take a seat. Mr. O’Donnell, I don’t think you’ve met Mr. Lorimer. He’s Jasmine’s liaison with the virtual school.”
“Hi, Jaz,” said Mr. Lorimer in a voice like an overworked vicar.
Jaz grunted something that might have been hi in return.
With all the introductions, I hadn’t quite got around to taking a seat yet, but Esther had taken hers comfortably enough and I followed suit. Jasmine stayed resolutely standing.
“You can sit down,” Miss Collins told her. “You’re part of this meeting too.”
Jaz looked at the chair like it was booby-trapped. “Where’ll Mum sit?”
Mr. Lorimer looked at Jaz with forlorn, slightly wet eyes, which might just have been the only eyes he had. “We’re not expecting her, I’m afraid.”
“She’ll be here,” Jaz insisted.
“None of us have heard from her,” explained Esther, gently. “We’ll find her a seat if she shows up, but it’s unlikely—”
“She’ll be here,” Jaz insisted again. “She knows about this. She’s been told.”
The briefing Oliver and I had been given about Jaz’s homelife had been highly detailed in some ways, infuriatingly vague in others.
We knew that her mother was a single parent, that she had some kind of highly nonspecific mental health condition, and that Jaz had been put in the system for severe neglect rather than abuse.
But a combination of confidentiality rules and the telephone game of institutions talking to institutions had left us otherwise in the dark.
We’d been told rather more about the kinds of behaviours we could expect, although we’d also been warned that the thing we should expect the most was the unexpected.
“We could give her five minutes?” I suggested. The meeting was already due to start, but I was used to operating on CRAPP time and delays were well baked into my regular working practice.
Miss Collins looked disapproving. “I don’t think that would be appropriate. We have a lot to get through. Normally we’d want to start by looking at what’s been going well and what our challenges have been so far, but since Jasmine—”
“Jaz,” Jaz and I said simultaneously, and Jaz gave me a look of what I could only describe as grudging solidarity.
“Since Jaz is new to the school and I believe”—Miss Collins looked to me for confirmation—“new to your family as well, we should look instead at how things went at your previous school.”
This second your was directed at Jaz, which I appreciated because it would have felt ick as fuck if this whole thing had been us talking about her as if she wasn’t in the room.
Jaz, though, seemed to appreciate it a lot less.
She slouched against the chair she was reserving for her mother and said nothing.
Esther leaned over to her and said, very quietly, “This is your space. You can say anything you need to say.”
Jaz, as ever, wasn’t in much of a mood to say anything.
“Perhaps,” prompted Mr. Lorimer, “you could tell us something about your goals relating to attendance?”
We’d also been informed that Jaz’s attendance at her previous school had been dog shit. Obviously it hadn’t been put in those exact words. Nor did Jaz herself seem inclined to put it into those words. Or indeed any words.
“In your last term at Bellefield,” Miss Collins added, “you seem to have been going to far below eighty percent of your classes.”
“Eighty percent doesn’t sound too bad,” I said.
Except it was clearly the wrong thing to say because Miss Collins gave me a stern whose-side-are-you-on look that made me feel like I’d been caught passing notes in class. “It’s a day off a week,” she pointed out. “And I said far below.”
“I was ill,” Jaz muttered.
Mr. Lorimer leaned forwards earnestly. “Remember that this is a fresh start. Previous challenges only matter insofar as we can learn from them.”