Harry really couldn't win.

Having started to make headway with the parents, she should have been finally starting to settle in. Unfortunately the students had other plans. Whatever had happened during Lindley's memorial had truly broken the feeling of enigma the students had previously had towards her. She was learning that she had most definitely been in her honeymoon period with the students for those first eighteen days she'd been in town, and she was learning it much too quickly for her liking.

She just couldn't catch a break. After everything that had happened within the community in her first couple of weeks, she thought that she would be entering a period of smooth sailing. She now wondered if the students had purposefully lulled her into a false sense of security, just to smash her even harder.

Funnily enough, one of the best behaved students in the weeks following the service was Troy French. Harry had lingered after Lindley's memorial, noticing Dupret, Troy and his mother all talking in hushed tones.

"You know the plans have changed! You and Casey could have ruined everything," Dupret had been saying as Troy looked at his feet. His mother had stood with her massive eyes brimming with tears. Harry hadn't been able to tell whether the woman was wanting to defend her son or was ashamed that he had managed to disappoint the man she seemed to be enamoured with.

Since then, Troy had came to school and sat on his phone every lunch, hardly acknowledging the senior girls who flipped their hair and pushed their chests out in front of him. Even in class he just sat doodling. He didn't make his normal underhanded comments. He didn't attempt to one up anyone. He just sat. A vacant husk. It seriously concerned Harry. The kid may have been a jerk, but she was starting to worry that the boy was significantly broken. There must have been more happening at home that she was unaware of, but neither Annelisse nor Maddi seemed affected in the slightest.

Conversely, the high school boys seemed to have been trying to pick up Troy's slack, yet with much less finesse. Two days post swarm, Jake Jefferies had been caught making grinding gestures behind Sandra Lichen while she was on playground duty.

Harry had called Jake over to discuss the incident to which Jake had called to his mate Adam, "Yeah, that's right, you know she wants a bit!"

The next day, Adam had decided to tell an extremely disturbing joke in class and had refused to remain silent or leave the classroom until he had gotten the rotten punchline out. Jake had laughed uproariously, as had the Grade 9s, and both Jake and Adam had stared at Troy waiting for some congratulatory gesture. Troy had continued doodling in his book without even looking up.

On the third day, Harry had needed to complete her first lot of suspension paperwork, when Drew in Year 8 and his mate, whom Harry had learnt was named Tom, had decided to dump a tin of paint on the head of one of the Year 9 girls.

The boys had arrived at Harry's office with blue paint covering their hands and splattered all over their uniforms, happy as Larry. Harry had sent them to the toilets one after the other before she'd let them even enter the administration building, let alone sit at the seat by her desk.

When she conducted the interviews, she was amazed by the apathy felt by both boys in regards to the incident. She had asked them whether Daphne, the Year 9 girl, had done something to aggravate them. She hadn't. She asked whether they had done it for attention. They hadn't done it for that reason either. Harry tried to prompt them in regards to whether they did it out of boredom. They wouldn't even state that was the reason, and that was the standard kid excuse for everything.

When she eventually gave up trying to puzzle it out and asked them for a second time what their reasons had been (they'd both just shrugged the first time, almost as if they'd rehearsed it together), she had finally gotten a response. Both boys had been adamant that they had done it to do her a favour. "She just looks better blue," Drew had said.

Harry had called both sets of parents to advise of the incident and their students' consequences only to receive a mouthful of abuse from the two lots of parents. She had undergone training in regards to having difficult conversations with parents, but this was the first time that she had actually needed to follow through with terminating a call. Some of the names she had been called were insults that Harry hadn't ever heard before (and at her previous school she'd heard kids call each other a lot of insults) and others hadn't even made sense.

By the time she'd ended the call, she was shaking ever do slightly and her head ached from volume of the screeching in her ear. Well, looks like I've already lost two sets of parents again, she thought to herself, as she processed the paperwork. She refused to back down and she still refused to let parents and community members push her around.

What was even more concerning than the behaviour of the boys, however, was the actions of the girls. Like normal teenagers, they had decided that their social lives were much more important than their classes, and had become defiant every time a teacher tried to hold them accountable for their behaviour, which was, "not conducive with the learning environment," as Gayle had put it. While this was nothing new, what was inexplicable was the strange events that seemed to coincide with the students being warned about their behaviour. Doors frequently shut themselves, a window broke while no-one and nothing was near it, a fire started amongst the textbooks, and at one stage a stream of green tree frogs hopped out from behind the interactive whiteboard.

Things were getting weirder by the day.

Standing in her office a week after the Drew and Tom incident, Harry almost longed to go back to the days a week and a half earlier when her largest problem was the dead body in her shed.

Unfortunately time didn't stop. It had almost been a month since she'd started and the 50 year memorial was growing closer by the day.

She picked up the image of Claire Mercy-Rossberg and inspected it, as had become her daily ritual. It was almost 50 years since the Head Mistress' murder. Between the odd occurrences and the mysterious deaths Harry wondered if the school was cursed. If so, deaths supposedly came in threes.

Would this school claim her as the third victim?

....................................................................................................................................................................

Thanks, to those of you who have stuck with me so far. I really appreciate it and I'm amazed at how much I've managed to get done since I started three weeks ago.

A big shout out to atho077! You're super consistent posting everyday of your own high quality and engaging chapters, and you're comments on my work inspires me to pull out the tablet and keep writing after I've put the kids to bed and finished my lesson planning. When I started writing I didn't ever think I'd find the time to write during the week once holidays ended, but I'm finding myself more motivated each and every day!

This chapter was a bit difficult because I'm driving towards the 50 year memorial and as you know that's going to be a key event, but I needed to develop the relationships between Harriet and the students. Please let me know if you think I've got the right mix of 'show and tell' or if you think it's too heavy in the 'tell' side.

Once again, thank you all for your amazing support. Please keep commenting because you're feedback really does help me grow and keeps me motivated. Also if you are enjoying, I would love it if you could please recommend it to like minded readers.

Love AnitaKathleen xoxo