Today, the small group of teenage pupils are in the valley on the other side of the island writing poems about nature. Their teacher, Mrs. McGrath, is clearly a poetry freak as that’s all they seem to do. Saffy can’t help but wind her up. “Poetry makes me want to gouge my eyes out,” she says repeatedly, and finally Mrs. McGrath snaps.
“Sapphire, I’m going tae have tae ask you tae keep your opinions tae yoursel,” she says, pushing her glasses farther up her nose with a wiry finger. “There’ll be plenty of time tae dae other subjects, but this morning, we’re doing poetry.” She throws a hard stare across the class, who are sat on tree stumps. “Anyone else got a problem with that?”
They all shake their heads, resignedly. Saffy pouts, annoyed that nobody else has taken the cue to rib their teacher. Cowards.
An older boy leans into her. Brodie. “Impressive,” he says. “I’ve been waiting for ages for someone to stand up to that mean old bitch.”
Her chest fills with a warm glow, the kind that follows approval. She smiles broadly at him, and he winks. He’s handsome. She noticed him the first day she started school, but up close his beauty is striking. He’s Rowan’s boyfriend, and so she hasn’t paid him any mind. But Rowan’s sitting with another girl on the other side of the group. Maybe they’ve broken up.
She doesn’t hear what Mrs. McGrath says next, and she doesn’t quite see the page so clearly, either—suddenly Brodie’s proximity to her has made the world swampy, underwater somehow.
“I’m writing about butterflies,” she hears Rowan announce. “About how the caterpillar changing into a butterfly is a metaphor for me becoming who I want to be.”
“Very good, Rowan,” Mrs. McGrath says. “Though please do write in silence? You use up your creative energy by explaining your project.”
My project, Saffy thinks. Creative energy. She scribbles on the page, keeping Brodie firmly in her field of vision. He looks up at her every now and then. He’s seventeen, she remembers. He has stubble on his jaw and curly brown hair.
“I’m going to divide you all into small groups,” Mrs. McGrath says. “I’ll assign you a part of the forest to explore so you don’t waste time chatting.” Saffy finds herself in a group with Brodie and the weird twins, Fia and Fen, who don’t talk to anyone but each other. They’re assigned to a vague part of the forest that looks spray-painted with neon-green moss. She remembers that sphagnum moss is an antiseptic, that the Celts used it to pack their wounds after battle. Soldiers in World War One did the same. She likes to cling on to bits of information like that, the type that links the ancient past to the near-present. It makes the strangeness of the present less strange.
Mrs. McGrath tells them to do pencil rubbings of five different kinds of leaves and name the tree from which they came, then write a poem from the perspective of each tree that identifies how it grows, its fruit or leaves, and what happens to it during each season. To the others, this appears an easy task, but Saffy has no clue. Birds, she knows about, but trees? She can just about name five—oak, birch, fir, cherry, pine—but identify them? Not a chance.
“You OK?”
She looks up to find Brodie standing over her. The twins have slunk off, leaving her and Brodie alone in a clutch of towering conifers. Immediately, blood rushes to her face, her heart catapulting in her chest. For a moment, Jack’s face sweeps across her mind, and she feels a pang of guilt.
“Yeah,” she murmurs weakly. “Just . . . trying to remember the name of this one.”
“That’s a maple,” he says.
She rises to her full height. Saffy’s tall, five foot eight, but Brodie looks down at her, making her feel tiny.
“You lived in the city, didn’t you?” Brodie says.
She nods.