One, two, three, four, five rows along. Third row up. I wiped black soot off the number above the lock to check that it was right, then with a shaking hand I inserted the key and turned. The infinite possibilities of the contents streamed through my head. I tried to reason with myself, accept that it could simply be empty, but part of me was still childishly hoping I would discover something that would put my mind at rest and make everything better. Part of me knew there was a chance that its contents would make everything worse, but the hope overrode all my fears. I took one final deep breath and opened the door. I was met with a note stuck to the inside with blue tack, purple pen on yellow paper, Milly’s handwriting in its usual friendly scrawl. I had no choice but to read. It was too late to go back.

'Keep having a dream about a bird pooing on my primary school teachers head. I laugh then she chases me with a broom up a tree. Had any recurring dreams?'

I read it over and over, stunned by its insignificance, almost disappointed. It was so short, so unpoetic and blunt and stupid. Why couldn’t she have known? Reading it then, after all that had happened, it seemed so insensitive, thoughtless even. But how could she have known?
Even so, it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough to say goodbye.

Finally the tears came. The tears that had been mysteriously absent from my life during the month that others had practically drowned in them. I collapsed to the floor and wept until I was shaking too much to wipe away the tears, my body numb with cold. Finally when I could cry no longer I unsteadily got to my feet and looked once more in the locker. There was my PE kit in a Tesco bag and a few books, and the blank paper, blue tack and pens that we kept to we kept to write our notes.

I took the paper and a pen without thinking and in a trance walked into the nearest classroom. I fell into a chair, not caring about the soot it was covered in, and began to write.

'I’ve had the same dream almost every night for the last month.

I’m in a well, clinging to the edge. I’m exhausted and my arms are aching from hanging on.

Above me there’s white light, peaceful, not blinding.

Below me is a dark blue darkness and it’s terrifying, but so inviting because I don’t have the
strength to hang on any longer, and all I want to do is let go.'

I looked out across the classroom, saw the desks in their perfect lines, and chairs strewn about, on their sides, upside down.

'I’m sorry for the late reply. It’s taken a month for the camera crews to piss off and stop hanging around the gate like vultures, filming people leaving flowers. I guess it’s also taken a month for people to realise that all flowers do is die.

I came to the gate too of course. I went there every day as most people did, just to stand in the cold with my eyes glazed over before going home to eat, sleep, then dream about the well again. When I wasn’t at the gate I was helping Mrs. Logan at the shop. I saw her once in the backroom, frantically Googling whether to order lilies or roses. People came in droves to buy flowers. As snow began to fall it covered up the older ones and people kept coming back to buy more. When I walked through the gate this morning I could sense them under my feet like you can sense the corpses in a graveyard.'

I looked out the glassless window, it was snowing again and a freezing wind was blowing it into the classroom to settle on the floor where it mixed with the ash and soot.

'Everything’s changed now. Not just the season or the weather; the people. There’s a silence that never breaks.

We never used to shut up did we. We’d talk all through class and all through lunch and then just so we wouldn’t stop for one minute we left the locker notes. Drawings, cartoons, ideas, questions... No one asks questions anymore. No one talks or chats, they just sympathise and tut and sigh and cry. The snow’s piled up all over the village because nobody’s clearing it. I hardly see people outside anymore. You know one thing that I never would’ve thought I’d care about? There’s no snowmen. Not a single one. We’d have put a stop to that, you and me, if that had happened before. The funny this is, when I came here, despite my brain tying itself in knots, I still got that thrill of walking on fresh snow. I guess some things never change.

Mum’s been going round to Susie’s house a lot. I suppose that’s a good thing, but every time she leaves the house, she won’t go without clinging onto me for a good minute and telling me how much she loves me. It’s like she’s a child and I’m dropping her off at nursery. It feels so desperate.

The council says we’ll all eventually get moved to a kind of emergency school in Kincoddin, but they’re too terrified that they’ll be seen as insensitive if they make us go too soon. So everyone just stays inside and goes on the computer I guess. No one dares to be seen having fun sledging or playing outside under the circumstances.

At one point I wondered if everyone was just pretending. Secluding themselves and tutting and sighing and crying because they’d been taught that that was the right reaction. I knew that practically speaking, my life had been changed, but part of me just wanted to move on. I just wanted to sledge and make snowmen and try not to notice how there were significantly less children playing on the fields. I thought that made me heartless, but I suppose now it just made me in denial.

I’d been clinging on for so long Milly. My arms were so tired and I just wanted to fall down down down down down the well. I didn’t care where I’d end up. In counselling probably. I just wanted to give in. Lie in bed all day and all night and not speak and not smile and not cry. I wanted to feel nothing at all because it was better than feeling the anger and the misery, and the shame that came when I didn’t feel sad.

Then finally one day I noticed that the camera crews had gone, and the police tape around the school had deteriorated and lost its intimidating facade, and I remembered the locker and I wondered if perhaps you had left one last note. When I read it I felt so angry that you hadn’t said goodbye, but I know now that you would have written at least something worthy of an English B grade if you had known. By the way, you missed the apostrophe in ‘teachers’.

I miss you.'

With that I rose and pushed my chair back, took my letter in one hand, and walked back out into the corridor to where the locker stood open. I left the paper on the shelf before reaching into my pocket for the key and shutting it. I walked down the corridor, past five, four, three, two, one rows of lockers. They gradually grew more and more damaged the further down I went, on number one the door was missing and the remaining metal had morphed and drooped downwards. The only light came in through cracks in the wall and ceiling. I turned left into my old maths class, climbed over a fallen, blackened bookshelf, and squeezed through a section of collapsed wall into the canteen. The sickly green gloss formerly on the tables had gone, revealing a strange deformed plastic. At the back of the room part of the ceiling had collapsed onto the counter and I could see through gaps in the rubble the kitchen, the skeletons of microwaves and industrial blenders floating in a sea of destruction. I turned left through an empty double doorframe and I headed down another corridor, aware of a freshness to the cold air that blew across my skin, and the brightness of daylight coming from ahead. Then suddenly a great creak erupted from above me and I was on the ground, the air knocked out of me. I wheezed for air, a great piece of ceiling beam pinning me down, pain rippling through my back. I blacked out for a second, drifted in and out between a strange state of half-consciousness, everything dark and encompassing, a tiredness wrapping around me and drawing me in. My eyes flickered open and I saw ahead of me, a ray of light through concrete and rubble, and snow, fresh white snow. And slowly, using all my strength, my heart pounding and my vision blurred, I began to crawl towards the light.