As the daughter of two teachers, many assumed school was easy for Margaret Grimes. She attended with her twin brother, Malcolm, had an older sister in the senior year, her mother taught English and her father took the history classes. To any outsiders looking in, they were the dynasty of St Nicholas High School.
To quiet, sensitive, and eager-to-please Margaret though, nothing could be further from the truth. She felt like the square peg in a round hole. She was academically gifted, but disinterested in the latest fashions, not up to date on the cool bands, TV shows and trends. She had little in common with her classmates. Her brother, Malcolm, was a loner and a troublemaker, who struggled in classes, and she was expected to be responsible for him, while her father ruled both his household and the classroom by using fear. No one was foolish enough to disrupt one of Mr Grimes’s lessons because he would punish students for the slightest thing. And that rule extended to his children too. If anything, he liked to use Margaret, Malcolm and their older sister, Alice, as an example for the other students, almost looking for ways to find fault with them.
At home, things were no better, and behind closed doors the punishments were more physical. Forgetting to pray at the dinner table, not removing shoes at the front door, and failure to do chores properly resulted in regular beatings with the belt that Gerald Grimes kept in his study desk drawer. And there was no running to their mother. Marie Grimes stood behind her husband and, although she never dished out the punishments herself, she wasn’t interested in giving any sympathy.
As the eldest, Alice suffered the most, rebelling against her father every step of the way, Malcolm was disinterested, seldom even reacting to punishment, while Margaret tried her best to stay on her father’s good side. Still she walked on eggshells around him, terrified of doing something that might upset him.
Alice had always been the constant in Margaret’s life, the one person she could turn to, but the more Alice resisted, the further Gerald sought to punish her, and as a result the sisters became further estranged. Alice started staying out late and Margaret knew she was seeing boys – something their father strictly forbade. The results of the late-night make out sessions were evident in the love bites around Alice’s neck.
School life was no picnic either, with some of the more popular students learning that Margaret was an easy target. As kids often are, they were discreet with their bullying, careful to do it when there were no witnesses. And when they found they had no resistance, their confidence grew, often setting Margaret up to take the fall with her father. A shove of a text book off her desk, making her look like she had dropped it or kicking the back of her chair, causing her to cry out. Gerald Grimes was always quick to blame his daughter for disrupting the lesson.
Margaret tried her best to keep her head down, avoiding eye contact with the other students, eating her lunch quietly in the corner of the canteen, and praying like hell that Malcolm behaved himself and didn’t do anything to draw attention to them. Things seldom happened that way.
All Margaret wanted was to make it through school unscathed then she could take her A levels, go to university and start afresh.
Things moved along miserably, but uneventfully, until October when the opportunity arose for a school trip to Norfolk. It was billed as a Pre-Christmas Extravaganza, with Black Dog Farm opening its doors to welcome students to celebrate ahead of the Christmas period.
Margaret had no interest in going, hadn’t expected her father would even want her to, so she was surprised when he announced at dinner one evening that places had been booked for her and her brother.
She tried to reason with him, but of course he took her dislike of the idea as resistance, punishing her accordingly. Malcolm was nonplussed as usual, not really reacting to the idea one way or another, but Margaret was dreading a whole week stuck in Norfolk with her classmates.
As the date grew closer, Margaret’s misery increased. School was already a miserable enough affair. A whole week with her fellow classmates would be unbearable.
A few days before the trip, she was given a mild reprieve. Suzannah Chegwin, one of her main tormentors, had come down with flu and would be unable to go. On the day of the trip, Gerald drove Margaret and Malcolm to the school, playing the genial father as he watched their luggage being packed, then waved them goodbye as the coach pulled away.
Margaret had glanced around at the other students. Two of Suzannah’s friends, Kelly Dearborn and Rachel Williams were on board the coach, but neither girl was too bad if Suzannah wasn’t around. Maybe the weekend would be more bearable than expected. The absence of Suzannah lulled her into a false sense of security. Little did she know that she was just a couple of hours away from meeting the girl who would destroy her life.
