The Girl Who Wasn’t in the Yearbook

It was Esme Calloway’s own fault for volunteering.

The school was turning one hundred years old, and Mrs Idowu, who taught history and had the look of a woman permanently three minutes away from a deadline, had put a sign-up sheet on the staffroom door. CENTENARY PROJECT: HELP DIGITISE OUR HISTORY! Beneath it, in careful biro, someone had written the words must be reliable, quiet and not afraid of spiders. Esme was all three. She also had a Friday free period and a strong preference for places where nobody talked to her.

Which was how, on a grey Thursday in October, she found herself in the basement archive of Harcourt Park School with a laptop, a scanner, forty years of yearbooks, and a very large spider named, according to a Post-it, Gerald.

“He won’t bother you,” said Mr Dunmore, the caretaker, who had unlocked the door for her and now hovered in the corridor, jingling his keys. He was a gaunt, polite man who had worked at the school since before most of the teachers. “Just don’t touch the shelves on the left. Damp. And if you find anything that looks, well, irregular, you put it to one side and tell Mrs Idowu.”

“Irregular how?”

“Anything that doesn’t seem to belong.” He said it lightly. His eyes slid away. “Dust, mostly. It’s all dust.”

The archive was a long low room full of metal shelves. It smelled of paper and old pipes. Esme settled on a stool by the scanner with a stack of yearbooks, each one a tall hardback with a gold crest on the front, and began to turn pages. Every picture had to be scanned and every name typed into a spreadsheet, so that in the end the whole school’s history could be searched by anyone with a keyboard.

It was, she thought, quite relaxing. She did 2004 and 2005 in an hour. She found a great many mullets, a boy in a medieval costume holding a plastic sword, and a young Mrs Idowu with an extraordinary fringe. She worked steadily through 2006, 2007.

In the 2008 yearbook, on page 41, there was a photograph of the Debate Society.

Esme read the caption without really seeing it. Debate Society: (L–R) Julian Ashcombe, Oliver Park, Hannah Wells, Mr Pryce (coach). Four names. She typed them in, and scanned the page, and turned it.

Then she turned it back.

There were five people in the picture. Four stood in a row, smiling at the camera: three students in blazers and a tall young teacher with floppy hair. And at the far edge of the frame, half in shadow beside a tall bookcase, stood a fifth. A girl. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. Dark hair in a plait, a blazer a size too big, her hands folded in front of her as if she were waiting to be called on.

She was looking straight at the camera. She was not smiling.

Maybe she was just walking past, Esme thought. Maybe she photobombed. But the girl’s feet were planted exactly in line with the others, and her blazer sleeve touched Hannah Wells’s, and she was standing very carefully in the way you stand when you’ve been told to.

She went on to the next yearbook, 2009. Page 38. Debate Society.

There she was again.

By the end of the afternoon, Esme had found her in six photographs.

Debate Society, 2008. Debate Society, 2009. Prize-giving, 2009: a girl at the edge of the crowd with a certificate in her hand. A school trip to a castle, at the back of a coach. A choir picture, on the end of the second row. A group shot of Year Nine, in the third line, with her eyes fixed on the lens.

Six photographs. Fourteen names under each. Her name was in none of them.

“It’s a mistake,” said Esme to the spider. “Everybody makes a typo.”

Gerald did not appear to have an opinion.

She told herself it was nothing. Yearbooks always got things wrong. People moved. People were absent. Then she turned to 2010, and the picture on page 50, and her mouth went dry.

DEBATE SOCIETY: STATE CHAMPIONS 2010.

It was a big picture, full-page. Four students on a stage holding a gleaming trophy, flanked by teachers, with a banner above them that said HARCOURT PARK WINS. There was Julian Ashcombe at the centre, tall and fair and grinning like a boy in an advert for toothpaste. Beside him, Hannah Wells and Oliver Park. And Mr Pryce, at the end, in a suit now, clearly delighted.

Four students. The caption said four. And the trophy in the middle of the picture had been engraved, in the most prominent place, with a row of names she could just make out through the glare: five lines. Five names.

Only four of them were in the picture.

She took out her phone and zoomed in on the engraving. It was small and badly lit, but she could count the lines. Four names, in a clear slanting hand. And above them, a fifth line, a longer one, where the metal had been scraped smooth.

Someone had rubbed out a name.

“Right,” Esme said, aloud, and her voice went round the basement and came back to her. “Okay.”

In 2011, she was gone. The photographs of the Debate Society in that year had four students, then three. The bookcase in the background was bare. The girl in the plait was nowhere in the choir, nowhere in the trip photos, nowhere in the prize-giving at the end of the year. It was as though someone had gone through the whole school with a very careful eraser.

Esme sat back on her stool.

She knew a little about how people got rid of things. Her mum was an accountant, and she had grown up hearing about “irregularities” and “reconciling the books.” When a number went missing, you didn’t look at the number. You looked at the gap.

She opened the school’s old admissions register. It was a huge green ledger, the kind with a spine like a tree trunk, and it was kept in a filing cabinet near the back. Each student had a number. Each number was entered in sequence, one after another, in the neat blue ink of a long-dead secretary, from 1962 to the present day.

She turned to 2007. She ran her finger down the column.

0911. 0912. 0913.

0915. 0916.

She stopped.

There was no 0914.

It was not that the entry was crossed out. The register was clean. The page had been carefully ruled, and the numbers ran in order down the margin, and every line was filled, apart from one. Between 0913 and 0915 there was a blank space about the height of a line of writing. It might have been a skipped number. It might have been a typing error.

But it was white. Too white. Esme held the page up to the light of the bulb and saw that there was a faint pale patch, like a scar, where something had been removed with a very sharp blade.

“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, you’re kidding.”

She was so absorbed that she did not hear the footsteps in the corridor.

“All right in there?” said Mr Dunmore, in the doorway.

Esme jumped so hard the register slid off her knee. “Yes! Sorry! Just—scanning.”

“You’ve been here three hours.”

“It’s very, um, engrossing.”

He looked at her. He looked at the ledger on the floor, and the open yearbook on the desk, and the page with the trophy and the five lines. She watched his face go through something complicated. For a second, she thought he was going to say something. Then he came into the room, picked up the register, and set it gently on the shelf, his hands trembling slightly.

“Some things,” said Mr Dunmore, “are better left in the dust.”

“Who is she?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“You could,” said Esme. “You’ve worked here forever.”

“Fifteen years.” He did not turn round. “I was new then. Just started. I was cleaning out the Debate cupboard and I found a girl crying in it. A bright little thing. Fourteen. Terrified. She’d been told she’d be leaving at the end of the week, that her scholarship had been withdrawn for ‘conduct.’ She said she hadn’t done anything. I believed her.”

“What was her name?”

“They told us never to say it again.” He paused. “I’m not proud of that. I had a mortgage. But I’ll tell you this much, Esme. There’s a retired teacher called Miss Oyelaran. She taught English in the Nineties, and she was head of debate before Pryce. She lives at Marlow Court, out past the bypass.” He still hadn’t turned. “She kept a lot of things. She’s ninety-one. She might not have much time.”

He went out, and the door clicked behind him.

Esme sat very still among the dust and the spiders. Then she opened her laptop and searched “Marlow Court care home visiting hours.”

Miss Oyelaran was tiny and fierce and propped up on pillows like a queen, in a sunny room with a view of a car park. She had a cardigan the colour of marmalade, a stick, a large print copy of a crossword, and a sharp black eye that fixed on Esme’s school blazer the moment she came in.

“Harcourt Park,” said Miss Oyelaran. “Good God. Is it still standing?”

“It’s a hundred this year.”

“It’s been a hundred and fifteen for as long as I remember. Sit down, child. You’ve got the look of someone who’s come to ask me something.”

Esme sat. She explained. She told it badly at first, in tangles, and then better, laying out the photos, the register, the scraped trophy. When she mentioned the name of Mr Pryce, the old woman’s mouth went thin as a thread.

“Nadia,” said Miss Oyelaran.

The word fell into the room like a stone into a pond.

“Nadia Rahim. She came to us on a scholarship in Year Eight, from the estate on Tanner’s Row. Her father drove a bus. She was the cleverest child I ever taught, and I taught a great many.” She tapped her stick on the lino. “She could argue with a wall and win. She wrote her own speeches. Brilliant ones. And in the spring of 2010, she wrote a speech for the state final that was so good that I wept in the staffroom when I read it.”

“But she wasn’t in the picture.”

“No.”

“The trophy had five names. She was the fifth.”

“Julian Ashcombe’s father gave the school a library,” said Miss Oyelaran, with terrible calm. “Did you know that? The Ashcombe Library. The big glass one. He gave it the same year Julian joined the debate team, and I don’t believe in coincidences, child, I’m too old.” She leaned forward. “I’d retired by then. I wasn’t there. But I had friends on the staff, and I heard what happened. That week, before the final, Nadia’s speech disappeared. And a strangely similar one turned up in Julian’s folder. Every word. Every pause. Every joke.”

“He stole it?”

“Or was given it. I never found out which.” The old woman’s eyes burned. “Nadia went to the head. She said, ‘That’s my speech.’ And the head said, ‘Prove it.’ And she couldn’t, you see, because the originals were gone. Mr Pryce had made sure of that. He was the coach. He wanted the trophy. He wanted a career. And the Ashcombes wanted their son to win.”

Esme found that she’d stopped breathing.

“So they made her the problem,” said Miss Oyelaran. “A girl on a scholarship, accusing a donor’s son? They found a reason. ‘Disruptive behaviour.’ ‘Unfounded allegations.’ They took the scholarship away on a Friday. She left at half-term, and by the next September they’d wiped her out of the books. As if she’d never been.”

“That’s monstrous.”

“That’s schools.” Miss Oyelaran sniffed. “They can be a lot of things.”

She reached under her pillow, grunting, and drew out a battered cardboard folder, tied with pink ribbon. It was soft with age. She put it in Esme’s lap and held on to it for a moment before letting go.

“I’ve kept this for fifteen years,” she said. “Nadia gave it to me the day she left. It’s the only copy. She wrote the speech out by hand, first, you see, before she typed it. She always did. The pages are dated. They have her margin notes, and her crossings-out. Nobody could have stolen them, because nobody knew they existed.” Her voice cracked. “I always meant to do something. I’m an old coward. I let it lie.”

“I’ll do something,” said Esme.

“Will you? You’re fifteen.”

“Yes,” said Esme, and found that she meant it.

It took her another week to find her.

She did it the way one does these things: by being patient, and slightly annoying, and not giving up. Miss Oyelaran remembered that Nadia had always wanted to be a speechwriter. Esme searched, and searched again. Four evenings and a very strange phone call to a local newspaper later, she was sitting in a café in the city centre, opposite a woman of twenty-nine.

She was slim, with a short, sharp haircut, and glasses that caught the light. She wore a sensible grey jacket and had the habit of looking at people as if she were reading their next sentence. When Esme had finished explaining, and laid out the folder on the table between them, she did not say anything for a very long time.

She turned the pages with a fingertip. They were covered in thick blue pen, in a slanting round hand. I think the second paragraph is too long. Cut? In the margin, in the corner, a doodle of a tiny angry bird. The date at the top: 14 March 2010.

“I haven’t seen this in fifteen years,” said Nadia Rahim, at last.

“Miss Oyelaran kept it.”

“I thought she’d thrown it away.” She put the page down. Her hand was shaking, but she held it steady on the table. “I didn’t know if I’d imagined all of it, by the end. You tell yourself a story long enough, you stop being sure.”

“You didn’t imagine it.”

“No.” She gave a short laugh. “No. I got a degree and I got a job and I got very, very good at writing other people’s speeches. The council hires me. Politicians. A bishop, once.” Her mouth twisted. “Isn’t that funny? The girl whose words got taken, writing words for everybody else.”

“Did you ever think of going back?”

“Every day for a year. Then every month. Then I stopped counting.” She looked up. Her eyes were very bright. “What do you want, Esme? Why are you doing this?”

Esme thought about it honestly.

“Because I scanned your picture six times,” she said. “And every time I looked at you, I thought: somebody’s trying very hard to make me not see this girl. And I thought I’d like to be the person who looks.”

Nadia stared at her.

“I’m not asking you to forgive anyone,” Esme said quickly. “I’m not asking you to do anything. I’ll go away, if that’s what you want. I just wanted you to know someone noticed.”

Nadia took off her glasses. She cleaned them slowly on her sleeve.

“The centenary dinner,” she said. “It’s on the twenty-first.”

“How did you—“

“It was in the paper. Julian Ashcombe’s giving a speech.” Her mouth twitched, without humour. “He’s a barrister now. Specialises in ‘reputation management.’” She put the glasses back on. “I don’t want the trophy, you know. I never cared about that. I don’t want him ruined. I’m not that sort of person any more.”

“What do you want?”

“I want my name on the wall,” said Nadia Rahim. “That’s all. One line. In the right place. And I want it to be true.”

The centenary dinner was held in the Ashcombe Library, under a glass roof, with a string quartet and a buffet and a great many people in their best clothes.

Esme stood at the back in her school blazer, holding a small plastic cup of orange juice, and feeling like a spy. She had one folder in her bag. She had a signed note from Miss Oyelaran. And she had, standing quietly at her shoulder in a plain grey suit, the girl from the photograph.

“It’s funny,” said Nadia. “I thought I’d feel something dramatic.”

“What do you feel?”

“Mostly that the sausage rolls are better than I remember.”

Mrs Idowu spoke first. She welcomed the guests, thanked the volunteers, and cracked three jokes about the school’s boilers. Then Julian Ashcombe stood up at the front, tall and sleek in a navy suit, and spoke for ten minutes about excellence. He used the words integrity and legacy. He held up the gleaming state trophy and said it had changed his life. There was warm applause.

Then Mrs Idowu stood up again. She looked at Esme across the room, and Esme, with her heart in her mouth, nodded.

“Thank you, Julian,” said Mrs Idowu. “A moving speech. I wonder if I might ask one more volunteer to say a few words. One of the young people who made this evening possible.” She smiled. “Esme Calloway has spent the autumn in our archive, and I believe she’s found something.”

It wasn’t a long speech. Esme had written it three times and torn it up twice. In the end she said it plainly, standing on the little platform in her too-big blazer with a spotlight in her eyes.

She told them about six photographs.

She told them about the register, with its tiny white scar between 0913 and 0915. She told them about the trophy, and the scraped-out line. Then she held up the folder and read out the date at the top of the first page, 14 March 2010, in a clear voice that only shook a little. She said that this was the handwritten draft of the speech that had won the state championship. She said that the speech was not Julian Ashcombe’s. She said that it had been written by a fourteen-year-old on a scholarship, who had been removed from the school for saying so.

The room had gone utterly silent.

At the front, Julian Ashcombe’s smile had gone fixed and thin, like a smile in a photograph. He did not look at the folder. He looked, with a strange, slow dread, toward the back of the hall, where a woman in a grey suit had just stepped into the light.

“Hello, Julian,” said Nadia.

It was a very small voice, after all that. It carried all the way to the front.

Nobody said anything for a long time. A fork clattered. In the quartet, the cellist stopped mid-note.

Julian opened his mouth, and for the first time in his life, Esme thought, the best arguer in the room had nothing to say.

“That’s—“ he began. “That’s a very old—I was a child—“

“So was I,” said Nadia.

That was all. She did not shout. She did not say any of the things she must have rehearsed for fifteen years in a hundred different mirrors. She stood, calm and bright in the middle of the library, while the headteacher, who had been a deputy once and had looked the other way, went the colour of porridge, and the whole room waited for someone to be brave.

It was Mrs Idowu who spoke.

“The school owes you an apology, Ms Rahim,” she said. “A real one. In writing. And I think it owes you a name.”

She walked across to the glass trophy cabinet. It stood against the wall beside the Ashcombe plaque, and inside it, on a velvet cushion, was the state championship trophy, with its four names and its scraped-out line.

“I’d like this to go to the engravers tomorrow,” said Mrs Idowu, “if that’s all right with you. Properly. In the right place.”

She looked at Nadia.

Nadia looked at the trophy.

“Yes,” she said. Her voice cracked on the word, and she took a breath, and tried again. “Yes. Please. Put it back.”

It took the engravers three days. Esme went to see it on the Friday, after school, when the corridors were empty and the autumn light lay in long gold slabs across the floor. Mr Dunmore was standing at the cabinet, polishing the glass with a cloth, though it was already spotless.

On the trophy, above the four names, in a clean new line that glittered like a coin, was a fifth.

NADIA RAHIM

“Fifteen years,” said Mr Dunmore, softly. He did not look round. “I walked past that cabinet every morning and I never once let myself read it.”

“You told me where to look.”

“I did, didn’t I?” He cleared his throat. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

Esme laughed. She stood beside him for a while, looking at the name in the glass, and the faint reflection of her own face laid over it, plain, young and slightly smudged.

Outside the window, the evening came on. Somewhere in the basement, beneath their feet, Gerald the spider was making a small and tireless repair to his web. The archive was open. The yearbooks were scanned. In the great green register, in the neat blue ink of a very old secretary, there was a new entry between 0913 and 0915, written in Mrs Idowu’s careful hand, and it said what it should have said fifteen years before:

0914. Rahim, Nadia. Present.