I paused with my hand on the doorknob, taking a moment to centre myself before opening the classroom door. The first morning was always the worst—stepping into someone else’s shoes and trying to act as if I’d always known these corridors, these pupils, this way of working. But my willingness to fill in as a supply teacher wherever one might be needed made me an asset to the local authority, and if I was offered a position, even if it turned out to be in one of the worst performing schools in the area, I was unlikely to turn it down.

Not that Camden Hall School was a bad place to teach—far from it. The last time it had been inspected, it had received an outstanding rating, and it came close to the top of the borough league table each year. Children came here to learn and do well, not to mess around and leave with poor qualifications and no prospect of going on to further education. But that didn’t mean a group of students would automatically accept me replacing someone who was, from all accounts, one of the most popular teachers here.

You can do this. Head high, big smile, and don’t let them get away with any nonsense.

“Good morning, everyone.”

The chatter in the classroom paused and two dozen heads swivelled in my direction as I walked in. I set the awkward pile of books I’d been carrying on the desk, went to the board at the front of the room and scrawled my name in big capital letters with a piece of chalk.

“I’m Miss Keating, and I will be taking over from Mrs Jennings until she’s back from maternity leave.” I glanced around the room as I spoke. A couple of the lads at the back returned my gaze with a flat, uninterested expression, but at least I didn’t spot anyone who looked downright hostile to my presence.

“Has she had a boy or a girl, miss?” someone piped up from the back of the class.

I shook my head. “The baby’s not due for another couple of weeks or so, as far as I know. But as soon as I have any news, I’ll be sure to share it with you. I know you’ll be anxious to pass on your congratulations when it happens. Now, let’s take a quick register so I can match up your names to your faces, though please don’t be offended if I don’t remember all of you straight away.”

As I called out their names, they responded with, “Here, miss,” some of them sounding more enthusiastic than others. My breathing had evened out and I was beginning to feel a little more at home in this classroom, but I kept on smiling as I picked up the books I’d brought and began to hand them out.

“While Mrs Jennings is away, we’re going to be studying Much Ado About Nothing. I looked at the set texts you hadn’t got around to working on yet, and this one is by far the most fun.”

“Fun?” a voice grumbled from the back of the classroom. “You’re having a laugh, miss. It’s Shakespeare. It’s boring.”

I glanced over at the boy who’d spoken. He slouched in his seat, running a hand through his floppy blond hair.

“Jayden, isn’t it?” When he nodded, I went on, “If you think Shakespeare is boring, that’s because you’ve only seen his plays as words on the page. When they’re acted out for you, that’s when they really come to life. And fingers crossed, the English department is arranging for you to go and see a performance of Much Ado About Nothing at the Globe theatre later in the term.”

A few of the kids turned to one another, their faces brightening. I knew from experience that any talk of a trip helped to raise enthusiasm for a piece of work.

“In the meantime, let’s look at the themes of this play before you dismiss it. We have a situation where a woman’s reputation is destroyed purely on the basis of unfounded gossip. Does that seem like something that might still happen today?”

“Yeah, like a social media pile-on,” someone called over from my right.

“Fake news,” another boy added, putting on a bad impression of Donald Trump and getting a burst of laughter in response.

I smiled, warming to my theme. “And the two main characters are a couple who spend all their time insulting each other, because that’s the only way they know to express what they really feel, which is that they’re in love with each other and have been for a long time.”

“Sounds just like Mason and Courtney,” one of the girls at the front of the class said with a giggle. Her friend sitting next to flashed her an oh-you-went-there grin before joining in with the general hilarity.

I cut in before things got too raucous. “So, however dry and stuffy you think this play is going to be, I think you’ll end up changing your minds before too much longer. But why don’t we start by reading some of the opening scene aloud, then we’ll talk about the poetic metre Shakespeare uses, which is consistent through all his works and helps to give him his distinctive voice.” I looked around the classroom again. “Right. I’m going to need a volunteer to read the part of the messenger and someone else to be Leonato.” As I expected, no one raised a hand. In the back row, Jayden and the boy sitting next to him muttered about something and nudged each other, clearly thinking the whole thing was below them. I seized my chance to impose a bit of order and turned my sweetest smile on them. “Anthony…Jayden. Thank you so much for offering.”

A few laughs broke out around the room, tinged with an undercurrent of relief. As Anthony grumbled and cracked the spine on his copy of the play, I perched on the edge of the desk and waited for the two of them to begin reading.

Jayden glanced towards me, a stricken expression in his eyes. “Miss, I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t.” I kept my voice level, determined not to let him defy me in front of his friends. If I failed to establish my authority, the rest of the term would see him—and whoever else thought they could get away with it—skiving and disrupting things for the kids who did want to learn.

He shook his head. “No, I mean I need to go to the toilet. I think I’m going to chuck my guts.” Jayden jumped to his feet, knocking over his chair with a loud clatter against the hardwood floor, and rushed to the front of the room. To the obvious shock and disgust of the rest of the class, he grabbed the wastepaper basket and vomited noisily into it. After a moment that seemed to stretch out forever, dominated by the sounds of Jayden retching and panting for breath, he stood back and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His skin had turned an alarming shade of pale grey, set off by two bright, blotchy spots of red in his cheeks.

“Better out than in,” Anthony quipped into the nervous silence surrounding us.

Jayden gazed over at him, then back to me, his gaze a mixture of apology and accusation that I’d let things go so far, as if it were my fault that he’d given me so little warning before depositing the remnants of his breakfast in my waste bin.

I cast my mind back to the information I’d been given on my arrival at the school, trying to remember my way through the maze of corridors to the admin block. I tried to ignore the nagging voice telling me I should have been more on top of the situation, but the nerves of trying to make a good impression on my first day in a new school were making everything harder than it should have been.

“Come on, Jayden, let’s take you to the nurse’s office and have you checked out. Everyone else, I’d like you to quietly get on with reading the introductory notes to the play—and I will be asking questions about it when I get back, so don’t think you can just slack off while I’m out of the room.”

A chorus of audible groans followed me as I escorted Jayden to the door. The distinct aroma of vomit lingered in the air. I couldn’t leave my class to suffer the disgusting smell in my absence if I didn’t want to have a mutiny on my hands on my first day here, so I turned back and put the wastepaper basket in the bottom drawer of my desk. It wasn’t an ideal solution, but it was the best I could do until I found the janitor and begged him for a replacement bin.

“Wait here a second, please, Jayden.”

I popped my head around the door of the neighbouring classroom. The teacher, who had light-brown skin and wore a neat matching navy-blue trouser suit and headscarf, glanced up from her desk. A couple of students followed her gaze, but most of them kept their heads down, intent on whatever they were working on. A glance at the chalk board showed me a series of complicated-looking maths equations—sequences of numbers and letters I’d barely have managed to decipher back in my own schooldays, let alone now.

“Hey—” I tried and failed to remember her name. We’d met briefly in the staffroom, but most of the teachers there had blurred into one as the head of the school had made his round of introductions. “I have a bit of an emergency on my hands. Jayden here is sick and needs to see the nurse. I can see everyone here is in the middle of something, so if my lot start making any kind of disturbance, please feel free to step in…” I sighed, hoping I hadn’t given the impression I didn’t know how to control a class or get them to behave in my absence.

“No problem.” She smiled at me and made an ushering gesture. “Go, deal with it. Things will be fine, I assure you.”

“Thanks.” I shut the door and led Jayden in the direction of the administrative block. From what I remembered of my brief tour around the premises, the nurse’s room was next door to the school’s main office. “How are you feeling?” I asked him as we walked.

“Not too bad, miss. I think it must have been something I ate. My dad cooked for us last night, and I’m not gonna lie, he can burn a pan of hot water.”

“Okay, well, we’ll get the nurse to take a look at you and make sure it isn’t anything more serious.”

The nurse turned out to be a woman of few words and frightening efficiency. I placed her as somewhere in her late fifties, her iron-grey hair scraped into a tight bun and her white overall crisply starched. All the school nurses I had ever known looked pretty much the same as this, and I was sure they churned them out of a factory somewhere in the north of England.

“So, what seems to be the problem?” She peered over the rims of her wire-framed glasses at Jayden. Trapped by her laser-focused gaze, he stared back at her, mute.

“Jayden was spectacularly sick in the middle of my English lesson,” I explained. “I don’t think he’s allergic to Shakespeare, but you could always check…”

The nurse didn’t so much as crack a grin. I should have known she’d had a sense of humour bypass somewhere along the line. They always did.

“Well, let’s have a look at you, Jayden. Just hop up on the couch for me,” she instructed him.

I hovered uncertainly as the nurse reached for a digital thermometer. I needed to get back to my class, but I didn’t think I could just leave him with her.

She carried on as if I wasn’t there, encouraging Jayden to open his mouth, so she could place the instrument under his tongue and wait for a moment. “Your temperature is normal, so that’s good.” The nurse set down the thermometer and placed a hand to his forehead. “Doesn’t look like you’re running a fever, at any rate. Are you experiencing any sensitivity to light?” Jayden shook his head as she reached for an empty water glass. I thought she was about to pour him a drink, to help him wash the taste of vomit out of his mouth, but instead she ran it over his bare forearm, nodding approvingly as she did. “No rash, so I think we can safely rule out meningitis. In fact, I reckon what we have here is a good old-fashioned case of food poisoning.”

Jayden shot me a look, as if she’d confirmed what he’d told me earlier. He had thrown up because of something he’d eaten. His expression clearly said, “Now do you believe me?”

“That’s fantastic,” I exclaimed. When the nurse regarded me as if I was something she’d scraped off the sole of her shoe, I hastily added, “I mean, it’s good news that it’s not anything contagious. I’d hate for the rest of my class to get sick.”

“So, can I go back to my lesson?” Jayden asked. I had the feeling what he really meant was could he go back to messing around with Anthony.

The nurse bit back a sigh. “No, you cannot. There’s no guarantee you won’t vomit again, and you have to rest.” She turned her gaze to me. “You need to go to the main office and speak to the staff there. They’ll arrange for a member of Jayden’s family to come and collect him. He can wait in the quiet area here until they arrive.”

“Thank you.” I ducked out of the nurse’s room, leaving Jayden sipping from a paper cup of water, and went to speak to the young woman at the desk in the main office.

When I explained the situation to her, she was all warmth and smiles where the nurse had been brisk and unfriendly. “Of course. I’ll give Jayden’s parents a call, let them know what’s happened. You can leave everything with me, Emily.”

I turned on my heel as I was leaving, a thought striking me. “Oh, one other thing. I need to find the janitor. Someone should deal with…er…the mess Jayden made of my waste bin.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll sort that out for you too.”

Reassured, I went back to my classroom. To my disbelief, chaos had not broken out in my absence, and everyone appeared to be studying the text in silence as I’d requested.

“How’s Jayden, miss?” Anthony asked as I took my seat at the front of the room.

“He’s fine, but you won’t be seeing him again for the rest of the day. The nurse sent him home.”

Anthony muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, “Lucky bastard,” but when I looked up, his head was buried in his book.

“Okay, everyone.” I gazed out at the class and adopted my best pay attention to me tone. “I promised when I returned, I would ask you questions about the introduction to this edition of the play, and I always keep my promises. So, when Much Ado About Nothing is described as a comedy of errors, who can tell me what that means…?”