Since coming home, she’d been sharply conscious of the city-ness of everything: her vast, faceless school with its gloomy gray corridors, bordered on all sides by uneven concrete—yet more gray—and teachers who, for the most part, nearly looked as desperate as she for the bell to ring.A group of boys were booting a football against the wall of the flats. An elderly woman—Hannah could make out a small, angry face and puff of white hair at a window—rapped on the glass. The boys laughed and carried on kicking. No one had behaved like that on the island. In the village she’d seen clusters of teenagers hanging out by a drinking fountain. They’d been smoking and stuff, but it hadn’t been like this—aggressive. The woman shouted something, but her words were swallowed by the boy’s jeers. “Want a photo?” one of them yelled.Hannah snapped back to the present and realized the boy was addressing her. She pulled herself tall and, fixing her gaze on the entrance to the flats, marched toward it.
