‘How would you like it if I told your parents I’d caught you eating a bacon sandwich?’ Miss Hosmer snaps at him.
‘What do you mean, Miss?’
Murad says something else, but I can’t tell what it is. Zan’s voice obscures it; she whispers something.
‘You know what I mean,’ says Hosmer. ‘You’re letting yourself down, and you’re letting your family down.’
‘Why? Because he’s eating bacon?’ Zan’s voice. She sounds angry.
‘Oh – do you think my family’s Muslim, Miss?’ Murad laughs. ‘My dad kind of is. But my mum isn’t. She’s whiter than you, and a hippy. And we all eat bacon.’
I look up at Zannah. ‘Fucking hell,’ I say.
‘Watch,’ she orders.
Her recorded voice in the video says, ‘Why have you turned bright red, Miss? Is it because you’ve realised you’ve messed up and you owe Murad an apology?’
‘Throw the panini in the bin, and then leave this classroom, please,’ says Hosmer. She doesn’t sound angry any more, just cold and remote.
‘No, I won’t,’ says Murad. ‘I’ll leave if you want me to, but I’m not throwing my lunch away.’
‘And I’ll leave too, but only once you’ve apologised for your racism,’ says Zannah.
‘I haven’t got a racist bone in my body, Suzannah.’ Hosmer sounds tearful now.
‘It might not be a bone,’ Zan quips. ‘Maybe it’s a racist intestine.’
‘Or a kidney,’ Murad says.
I nearly drop my phone when there’s a sudden burst of loud noise. Miss Hosmer has started to shout in a hysterical way that borders on shrieking. I can’t make out her words but it’s something about going to the head right now. The clip ends abruptly, while she’s still in the middle of yelling.
‘Jesus,’ I say quietly. ‘So …?’
Zannah’s ready. She starts talking faster than I’ve ever heard her talk before. ‘So, what happened next is, I held up my phone and told her I’d recorded it all. She started screaming at me, how dare I record her without permission, how dare me and Murad accuse her of racism when she was the least racist person in the world, she was going to go and get Mr Stevens right now and we had to wait there while she did, that was our only chance, or else if we dared to leave the room before she came back with Mr Stevens, we’d be expelled, and she wouldn’t care about the impact on our GCSEs to expel us right before them. All of that – how we wouldn’t even get good references. It was scary, Mum! Not only her psycho screaming, but the threats – like, I reckon she could make Stevens expel us if she really wanted to? He hasn’t got a clue what’s going on half the time, and he relies on her to run the school, basically. Then she was about to leave the room to go and get him, and she turned back suddenly, marched over to me and yelled, “Give me your phone!” Before I could agree or disagree, she pulled it out of my fucking hand and ran out of the room. I ran after her, because, like, she can’t just do that? I couldn’t see her. She wasn’t on the corridor, and I should have been right behind her. You know where I think she was?’
I shake my head, stunned. Zannah cannot get expelled. That can’t happen. This is a disaster. Dominic will think this is the end of the world.
‘Hidden away in a classroom or a stationery cupboard, deleting the recording off my phone. She pulled it out of my hand before I’d had a chance to turn it off, so she had full access, no passcode needed. And guess what?’ Zannah blinks away tears and sniffs. ‘When Stevens turns up and I tell him I’ve got footage of Hosmer being racist and then denying it, and he asks to see it, there’s nothing there. No film. All gone. I tell him Hosmer’s deleted it, she denies it—’
‘Wait. Did she deny making the racist comment?’
‘Yes!’ A tear rolls down Zannah’s cheek. ‘She flat out denied it. Said me and Murad had made up this lie, and it was serious and you can’t just call people racist, you can’t just lie about people, and I mean, like … exactly! You can’t just lie!’
‘But we can prove she’s lying,’ I say. ‘I’ve got the film on my phone. How did you—’
‘Soon as she started screaming at us, I thought, “Shit, why did I tell her I had it recorded?” I was angry and