Free Out of My Depth by Emily Barr

off you sad, power-crazed bitch. Izzy didn’t say it. She took herself out into the corridor, tears pricking her eyes. There were still ten minutes of the lesson left. She stood outside the door for a while, then sat down and took some homework out of her bag. She couldn’t focus on it. She had never been sent out of a lesson before and Mrs Spencer’s fury seemed so random and yet so personal that she was stunned. Izzy avoided trouble. She had never been someone who could laugh off verbal assaults. She hated the woman, hated her. She comforted herself with the rumours. Mrs Spencer was said never to have been married, but to have changed her Miss into a Mrs to quell suspicion. She was said to be living in a flat in the Cathedral Road with a sixth former from a couple of years ago; a girl Izzy vividly remembered as the only ‘out’ lesbian the school had contained within anyone’s memory. They had all been fascinated by Heather, with her short hair and her manly clothes. She would turn up in a man’s suit, right down to the waistcoat and tie. It was, Izzy admitted, highly unlikely that she was actually living in domestic bliss with Mrs Spencer, but it was an excellent rumour. ‘It’s true!’ Janie had said the other day. ‘My sister’s friend saw them buying a bed in Habitat!’
    And, Izzy told herself, biting back her pain, and she is a sad woman who counts for nothing in the real world. She just gets a kick out of humiliating people, and probably most of all out of humiliating people like me who aren’t used to trouble.
    As she heard the chairs scraping back, she jumped to her feet and prepared her apology It stuck in her throat, but Mrs Spencer hardly seemed to care. She gave her a detention, almost as an afterthought. When Izzy complained to Mrs Twiss in the music school, the head of music said nothing. She just rolled her eyes and gave Izzy a conspiratorial glance, accompanied by an expressive shrug. Tamsin, Suzii and Amanda all agreed that Mrs S must fancy Izzy. The thought made her gag.
    Now Izzy sat as far away from the woman as she could, and she avoided looking at her. The vivid recognition that that’s not fair was still burning in her, two years after the humiliation. She had kept quiet in biology classes for the rest of the GCSE course, had flinched if the woman so much as looked at her, and had put her head down and done the work as averagely as she could, so she wouldn’t stand out. One of her chief joys on the completion of GCSEs had been the knowledge that she would never again have to sit in the same classroom as that bitch. And now, here she was, on her very first day in the sixth form, fiddling with her pens and notebooks and, once again, trying to be invisible.
    Mrs Spencer sat on a table, her feet on two different chairs, and none of her charges dared to giggle. She looked around with her funny pointed smile, and said, ‘Hi there! Welcome to the sixth form, ladies.’
    ‘Hi!’ said a couple of the more conformist members of the form.
    ‘Right, well, first of all, things are going to be very different now from the way they were for you all last year. Bobs, nice try, but no chance.’ She inclined her head and Bobs meekly headed out of the room to wash off her make-up. ‘Oh, and welcome to the new girls.’ She bestowed a malevolent grimace on two girls who were sitting at the front. They both looked nonplussed.
    ‘Hello,’ they said, in unison, uncertainly.
    ‘Which of you is . . .’ she consulted a list. ‘Which of you is Joy Wong?’
    ‘I am,’ said one girl.
    Tamsin giggled. ‘No shit,’ she whispered.
    ‘So you,’ said Mrs Spencer, ‘must be Rose.’
    ‘Yes,’ said the other new girl. ‘I’m normally called Rosie, though.’
    ‘Rosie it is! Everyone got that? Joy and Rosie, our new girls. I’m sure your time with us will be a joy and the future will be extremely rosy.’ There was a wave of dutiful laughter.
    Izzy found the whole thing excruciating. Worse still was