‘If I were a butterfly …’
She scowls at the page. It’s worse than ‘What I did on my holidays’. Everyone else seems to be writing: faces to pages, pens to paper, words flowing.
“Stop looking out of the window, Iris!”
Mr Martin always has a down on her, she thinks as she turns back to the blank page. He’s walking closer, coming to check what she’s done. ‘If I were a butterfly’, she writes, ‘I’d be dead by winter’. Dead. Flat on the pavement, delicate scaled wings scraping against the concrete, smeared by thoughtless shoes. Or worse: pinned in a collection like the one in the museum. She glances around the classroom and wonders: would that really be so much worse than being pinned to this desk, day after day, one of thirty specimens? ‘British school child, age fifteen, local variations in school uniform’, just as the Victorian collectors laid out their butterflies. She has drifted again, hand still, eyes focussing across the field.

“Iris! Do you want to have to stay after class to finish your work?”
Her gaze drops, but her mind is full of green grass, chasing the daisies that start where the playing field ends. A row of lime trees mark the boundary between the school and the uncut meadow where fritillaries and cabbage whites dance with buttercups and poppies.
‘If I were a butterfly,’ she writes again, ‘I wouldn’t be here. I’d be out in the sunshine, making the most of every second of my short life!’
“Iris!” Mr Martin shouts.  “Where’s that girl going?”
But the words grow faint in Iris’s ears as she pelts down the corridor, through the doors, across the sports field, over the fence by the lime trees and into the meadow.