Emma Philbrook: STUDENT LIFE

It’s eight o’clock in the morning. The commons area is all but empty, but no wonder – it’s the first day of school after spring break, and nobody is exactly rushing back. The floors are clean, almost impossibly so. They will be their usual rubber-scuffed and mud-splattered selves in 20 minutes, but for now they shine in the April sun.

There is a pile of cloth crumpled on a table near the far end of the room.

Somebody notices – a staffer, perhaps, or a student struck by its incongruity with its tidy surroundings. They approach, the clop of their shoes bouncing brightly off the walls of lockers....