Wednesday Afternoon, Week 4

None of Abigail, Spencer or Anissa appear for lunch. Instead, you sit with Krystal in the staff dining room and eat Spanish Chicken, potatoes, peas and sweetcorn. The potatoes are diced and lightly fried with herbs. The peas and sweetcorn are overcooked. Not the best meal you’ve had at the school.

“Caught another student trying to hack the school network to get porn,” Krystal tells you.

“There’s porn on the school network?”

Krystal looks at you as if you’re an idiot. “No, of course not. The school network blocks such sites, but this is the third student who’s tried to hack it so they can get onto porn sites. They’ve heard they need a VPN to get explicit content, and they think the school’s VPN counts.”

“Doesn’t mean much to me,” you have to admit. “Three in four weeks sounds bad.”

“It depends how you look at it. Compared to last year, and all previous years, it’s a catastrophe. I’ve been here five years, and the first attempt was last year, about May. Nothing before then. Now, that might sound good to you, but it sounds odd to me.”

“Why?”

“I admit when I was at school it was a different time. But every girl I knew in school tried at some stage to look at porn on the school computers. Not here. Not this school. Not until this year. I was concerned I was missing something for four years. Now, I feel better, because I’m finding it. Either the girls have grown less tech savvy this year, or we were raising saints.”

“Maybe this is a school for saints.”

Krystal’s look tells you she doesn’t believe that. You return to your disappointing meal, followed by a less disappointing sticky toffee pudding swamped in custard.

There’s no sign of Abigail in her classroom and office after lunch, so you decide, as you have no classes, to go home early and carry on your work at home.