4.

Behind me sits Pauline Johnson whose favourite entertainment nowadays seems to be licking her fingers and swallowing nail fragments. This is only because she has learnt to like the green thick stuff her mother gets at Mr O'Connell's Chemist to spread on her nails and make her stop biting them. This is a new habit. At the beginning of the year she seemed to prefer sticking little pieces of rubber up her nose and into her ears until they were so full her mother had to take her to the doctor to have them removed surgically.

So Miss Enamel, our teacher, walks down to the end of our row and tells her off for devouring her nails like that. And then tells Richard Prince off for not finishing his three hundred lines reading ‘I shall not laugh at my classmates’. As if I cared … Yes, a little extra handwriting will surely do him good, and I tell him so as I grin widely, making sure my grin remains there even after I turn my back to him.

Miss Enamel is talking about ancient sculptures today. We open

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our books on page twenty-seven, except Richard who is still doing his lines, and a woman named Venus de Milo from somewhere in Greece is standing there, and I wonder if, like Pauline, she also bit her nails before losing her whole arms.