The return of SMITH & JONES

A school reunion, a glass of bubbly and two fabulous misfits

- Milly Johnson

I can't believe you forced me into this,’ Jenny said to her best friend of many years, as they stood outside Brightside Senior School for the first ever reunion. The front doors were thrown open and above them were strings of bunting and balloons bobbing in the evening breeze.

‘Why are we here?’ asked Jenny.

‘Because we are dense and feckless,’ said Lana with a chuckle. She'd met Jenny Jones here when they were plonked together on a double desk and neither had been thrilled about that. But somehow over the following weeks they'd started to bond. Maybe it was in the face of the common enemy, their form teacher Miss Hooton, who was renowned for giving her pupils unkind nicknames. She'd called Lana ‘feckless’, and said she would never amount to anything in life. And Jenny was ‘dense’ because she just couldn't grasp maths at all. At least she couldn't grasp it the way that Miss Hooton taught it. She fared rather differently when Miss Tinker took over while Hooton was having her bunion removed.

They walked in and marvelled at how it smelled exactly the same: fusty, a bit like sweaty plimsolls. Memories missiled at them: getting told off for sliding down the hallway when it had just been polished, hanging around 5C hoping to get a glimpse of Connor Devlin, the most gorgeous boy in any school, ever. Sarah Montgomery, the school ‘It’ girl, who lorded it over everyone because her family were loaded and had a holiday home in the Bahamas.

They went into the great hall where a bar and a buffet table were set up.