The storm raged all night. Sasha drifted between sleep and waking, hovering in a state of nightmarish inertia. At one point she heard the creak and slam of the door as her mother arrived home and later she heard a cat howling, and she dreamt that the black cat she had seen earlier was clawing at her face.

But when she finally woke in the morning the storm had disappeared, almost as rapidly as it had arrived, and the demons of the night seemed to have vanished. As she walked to the taxi rank in the dawn sunlight, everything seemed normal and Sasha couldn’t help feeling foolish for her fears of the evening before.

The usual group of popular girls was hanging around the gates of the school as Sasha and Doreen arrived. One of them made a comment and laughed loudly and another lit a cigarette for herself and a friend. Sasha looked down to avoid making eye contact with any of the girls but Doreen nudged her.

“Check that guy out,” she whispered to Sasha. Sasha glanced up and noticed a smooth-looking man chatting to the group of girls. He was in his early thirties and his clothes were all branded. Sasha didn’t need to see the shiny, metallic-blue M3 BMW parked at the curb to know he spelled money.

Sasha didn’t recognise him as a local and wondered where he was from. It irritated her how the girls seemed to fall at his feet, giggling and flirting with him just because he was good-looking and flashy. She wondered how they could be so stupid, especially when she saw him take a plastic Ziploc bag of blue tablets from his pocket and hand it to one of the girls. Drugs, obviously. That would explain the money.

She hurried past the girls, glad they were distracted enough by the good-looking stranger not to tease her. There were often guys hanging around with that group, and a number of the girls thought nothing of being kept by sugar daddies, so Sasha didn’t really think about the stranger again. That is, not until something strange happened later on in the day that made her remember those pills she had caught sight of.

Pretty was a troublemaker. There was no way around it. She smoked, drank and clubbed way too much and attended class infrequently, and when she was occasionally at school she back-chatted the teachers and disrupted lessons. Which was why it was so strange that, all of a sudden, today, she was the most subdued learner in the class.

Sasha thought at first that Pretty might be sick because of the glazed, feverish look in her eyes, but then remembered that it was Pretty she had seen the stranger give the packet of tablets to. She wondered what drug it was, and whether she should be worried, but didn’t know what to do about it. After all, no-one had forced Pretty to take the drugs.

During the course of the day, Sasha noticed that it wasn’t only Pretty who seemed to be affected. The whole group of girls who had been loitering outside the school gate that morning had the same dead look in their eyes, and when they walked, their movements seemed awkward and robotic.

What weird new drug was it, that the stranger had sold the girls, Sasha wondered. Should she mention it to anyone? She considered telling her LO teacher, but then thought about what would happen if it ever came out that she had split on the girls. She would never live it down. Besides, she didn’t have any real proof that the stranger had been selling drugs. And if she was completely honest with herself, there was a small part of her that felt the girls deserved whatever they got.

Sasha decided to keep quiet unless anything else happened. And if it hadn’t been for the flash of metallic blue that caught her eye as she left school that afternoon, she would have completely forgotten about the stranger and his weird tablets.

***

Tell us: Who do you think the man selling drugs is?