by Lou Morgan
There was a series of rapid knocks on the door. Tigs rolled her eyes. “It’s open!”
“It’s so not…” Grey’s voice was muffled by the heavy wood and Tigs almost fell over herself in her rush to get to the door. It was either incredibly sweet or really pathetic – Izzy couldn’t quite decide which.
However, Grey wasn’t alone on the landing, which meant that Noah was treated to the full force of Tigs’s best smile, as Grey breezed past her and threw himself down into an enormous armchair covered with a shimmering silvery fabric. In his torn jeans and his beaten-up Converse, he should have looked totally out of place, but there was something about him that said he belonged. It was easy for him, for Tigs … for all of them. All of them except for Izzy, anyway – and maybe Noah – and she felt almost jealous. Even Kara seemed to fit in here – she and Tigs had started school on the same day and as far as Izzy could tell, they’d been friends ever since. Well. Perhaps ‘friends’ was too strong a word for it, but there was definitely something there. Something that Izzy wasn’t sure she’d ever have with Tigs, or with the others. Thinking about it like that, maybe Grey was the odd one out. ‘Odd’ being the operative word.
“Right. So. School’s out. Monster exams coming up … anyone else had ‘the speech’ yet?” Grey glanced around the room.
“Back in December,” chorused Dom and Mia.
Grey blinked at them. “Your mum doesn’t muck about, does she?”
“No.”
“‘I’m not worried about you disappointing me.’” Grey’s impersonation of his mother was uncanny – even down to the way he moved his hands as he spoke, his fingers fluttering from side to side. “‘I’m worried about you disappointing yourself.’ It’s like there’s a book they get this stuff from.”
“Exams, though.” Squeezed into the middle of the sofa, Juliet looked a lot younger than everyone else, her eyes wide and earnest behind the thick frames of her glasses. “They’re a big deal. I mean, if we don’t do well in these…”
“Spare me.” Grey’s voice had an edge to it. “I got all this earlier.”
“Maybe they’re right. That’s all I’m saying. We should take this stuff seriously.” She was twirling her long pendant necklace around her finger, the way she always did when she was nervous. It was a red glass bead, stretched into a teardrop the size of her thumb. Juliet never took it off. At school she wore it over her collar and tucked underneath her tie, and no matter how many times the teachers had threatened to confiscate it, they never had.
“Fine. But does everybody have to keep going on about it? Like that’s going to help! It’s not like we’ve never sat exams before, is it? We’re Clerkenwell students. That’s what we do.”
“Not like these, though…”
“Juliet? Do me a favour? Stop talking, yeah?”
Their exchange had soured the mood in the room, taking it from celebratory to tense in less than a minute. Grey had said what the rest of them were already thinking, and Juliet had come a little too close to voicing everything that they were afraid of. They were Clerkenwell students, Grey’d been right about that. Their parents were successful. Their school was successful. They had no choice but to follow suit. Failure, at anything, was not an option.
It was Tigs who broke the silence. She was standing in the doorway, holding a small white paper bag. “As I was saying. I might be able to help with the whole … revision thing.” She rummaged in the bag and pulled out a stack of white oblong packets, tossing them to each of the group in turn.
The box rattled slightly as it landed in Izzy’s hands. It was made of thick, glossy cardboard, embossed with the words FokusPro in heavy bold lettering. Nothing else. Inside were three silver blister-strips of tablets, shining in the light. They felt cold to the touch as she shook them into her hand, almost as though they were sucking the heat from her skin.
“You can thank me on results day,” said Tigs smugly. “They’re the new thing in the States. All the college kids are taking them for finals.”
“A study drug?” Noah stared at the box resting on his palm. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? Won’t we get in trouble?”
“It’s fine. I swear. They’re just a bunch of vitamins and supplements or something. They’re meant to help you work for longer, remember stuff better. All that. And it’s not like anyone’s going to know, is it?”
“Where’d you get them?” Izzy poked a hole in one of the blisters with her nail and popped out a tablet. It was bright yellow, stamped with a small circle. It smelled awful – like something rotten. She frowned at it, then glanced at the others. No one else seemed to be bothered.
“Internet. Obviously.”
“The internet?”
“It’s fine! I used the Maternal’s account. She gets all her stuff from this pharmacy. Noxapharm or something.”
“Well, that fills me with confidence…” Izzy couldn’t tear her eyes away from the pill in her hand. Something about it felt … off. Like that smell. Nothing good could smell like that, surely?
“Oh, come on. It’s called ‘FokusPro’. They wouldn’t be allowed to call it that unless it had been tested and everything. It’s literally just a bunch of algae and stuff. That’s all it does. Helps you concentrate.” Tigs scrunched up the paper bag and lobbed it across the room. “I mean, what’s the worst that can happen, right?”
Chapter Two
As she glanced around the room, Izzy was relieved to see everyone looked as puzzled as she felt. Most of the others were doing exactly the same as she was – tipping the silver blister strips out of their packets and frowning.
“So. It goes like this.” Tigs held up a hand to make sure they were all watching her. When Juliet was a fraction of a second too slow to look up, Tigs rolled her eyes and coughed. “Hello, Jools? This is kind of important.”
“Sorry.” Juliet looked like she wished the sofa would swallow her up.
“As I was saying…” Tigs leaned back against the glossy dark paintwork of the doorway, counting on her fingers. “Three strips of pills. Twelve pills in each strip. One pill every four hours you’re studying, up to a maximum of four doses a day.”
Noah narrowed his eyes, watching Tigs from the end of the sofa. “So you’re saying there’s –” his eyes rolled towards the ceiling as he did the maths – “nine days’ worth of this stuff?”
“I think that’s what I just said, wasn’t it?”
“Well, no. What you said was—”
“Fine.” Tigs was already starting to look bored. “Four of these a day and then it’s done. Exams will be a walk in the park and we can get on with the summer.”
“You know there’s more than nine days till the end of our exams, though, right?” Noah had folded his arms across his chest and was watching Tigs, one eyebrow raised.
She sighed. “Thank God you’re here, Noah. I don’t know how I’d have figured that out without you.” As she spoke, she stepped away from the door and sidled up to him, patting him on the head. From the way he winced, Izzy thought she probably did it a little harder than she needed to. “Look, how you plan your revision timetable’s totally up to you. I’m just the one saving your sad little futures right now, not your nanny.”
Izzy still didn’t like it. The whole idea of taking some kind of pill that Tigs (of all people) had ordered over the internet made her uneasy. What was in them, exactly? It was all very well saying it was vitamins and seaweed, but how could they know for sure? And that was before even considering the fact it was basically a study drug. Whatever Tigs said, it still felt like cheating, somehow.
Despite all this, Izzy couldn’t quite bring herself to hand the pills back – not even to put them on the table in the middle of the room and leave them there.
After all, no one else was. And even though they were friends now, sitting in Tigs’s ridiculous apartment at the top of a tower, in a couple of weeks they would be sitting at the narrow desks of the exam hall, and each one of them would be completely on their own. W
hen it came to the results, there was only one top spot on the list – everyone else was just a high-ranking loser. It was the first thing anyone learned about life at Clerkenwell.
Izzy slid the blister strips back into the box and pushed it into the pocket of her jeans. She didn’t have to take any of them, did she? But this way, at least she could make that choice later on, depending on how the revision was going.
It wasn’t like they hadn’t known the exams were coming. They’d been prepped and prepped and then prepped some more. There had been mock exams, and mocks for those, too. And now. Now it was the real thing. These exams wouldn’t just grade them, individually and as a group. It also graded the school in the league tables, and nobody wanted to be the one to bring the average score down.
Izzy rubbed her hands together, trying to warm up her palms. The peculiar chill she’d felt earlier seemed to have sunk right into her bones and made them ache. Maybe it was all in her head – nobody else seemed to be bothered. It was just her imagination. She was worried, that was all. Worried that someone would talk – that one of the others might not be able to keep the secret. Worried about getting caught. And what would happen then? Did any of the others have as much to lose as she did?
The atmosphere in the room had relaxed, and Tigs had turned her attention to perching on the arm of the chair currently occupied by Grey, all the while flipping her glossy hair back over her shoulder. She was studiously ignoring him which – if Izzy knew Tigs, and she was pretty sure she did – meant that she was trying to work out a way of ‘falling’ off the chair and into his lap. When it came to Grey, Antigone Price was the embodiment of that old quote about never, ever, ever, ever giving up. Grey didn’t get a say in the matter.
That was quite enough for Izzy. She walked over to the sliding glass door on to the balcony that ran the whole width of the flat, hauling it open and stepping out into the cool air. All of the City – and, beyond, all of London – lay spread out below her. It wasn’t like the view from her own family’s flat was bad, either, but the difference between the thirteenth floor and the thirty-fifth was staggering. From up here, people were no bigger than ants, tiny coloured specks bustling this way and that, threading through the Barbican’s walkways to the complex at the centre, or heading back out towards the Tube. Izzy peered over the metal railing, holding on tight and pressing her knees against the glass panel below it.
“Long way down…” she whispered into the wind. That was the other thing about being this high up – it was never not windy. It could be the calmest summer day imaginable down at ground level, but this high up, there was never less than a stiff breeze. It tugged at her hair, whipping it out over the rail. Izzy tried not to look down again, but she couldn’t help it. It was the same every time she came up here, and the same every time she went out on her own balcony. Her eyes were always drawn downwards, as she imagined how long it would take to fall…
Forcing herself to let go of the rail, she took a step back into the safer territory of the balcony, towards the windows and the rough concrete wall. Her fingers ached as she uncurled them. She hadn’t realized just how tightly she’d been gripping on. And that was since she’d got the better of her fear of heights. There hadn’t been much choice, had there, after they’d moved into a tower block. However expensive or sought-after the flats might be, they were still a long way off the ground.
A quiet swoosh noise behind her, followed by a click startled Izzy and she turned round to see Tigs smiling at her from the other side of the sliding door.
Which was closed.
Tigs’s fingers were resting on the locking mechanism.
“Tigs…” Izzy brushed her hair back from her face, but the wind blew it straight back again. “Tigs!”
There was a solid clunk as Tigs swung the locking handle into place. From the other side of the glass, she smiled sweetly at Izzy, and then lifted her other hand. She was holding a small remote control. Batting her eyelashes, she tipped her head to one side and pressed one of the buttons on the little remote. The curtains on the inside of the glass swished smoothly closed.
Izzy was shut out and cut off.
“Hey!” she shouted at Tigs, but there was no answer. Of course there wasn’t. She was already homing in on Grey again and this was her way of making sure Izzy was out of the picture.
Not that there was a picture for her to be in, anyway. It didn’t seem to matter how many times Izzy said it, Tigs never believed her. There wasn’t anything between her and Grey. Never had been and sure as hell never would be. It was, funnily enough, one of the first conversations she and Tigs had ever had – if ‘conversation’ could also mean ‘Tigs warning her that Grey was off-limits, whether he liked it or not’. It hadn’t bothered Izzy at first. All she’d wanted was to fit in, to settle into her new school, new home, new life and to put the past behind her. She’d got it – Tigs was marking her territory, defending her pack, whatever. Now, though, it was getting annoying.
“Tigs!” Izzy banged her hand on the window. “Not funny!”
Again, there was no response.
“Well, that’s just great,” Izzy sighed and turned away from the window. There was nothing for it but to wait until Tigs decided to grow up and open the door. Might as well enjoy the view…
Lights were starting to come on in some of the windows in the long, low blocks that made up most of the rest of the Barbican. In other flats, the balcony doors were slid open as people came home from work and stepped out into the evening air. A gust of wind blew a snatch of music up, even to this height, from whatever was happening on the forecourt of the Barbican centre. It sounded like jazz, briefly, and then it was gone. On the far side of the complex, the glass office towers of the City were still buzzing with activity. Tiny little desks sat in rows along the glass sides, as if in a vast dolls’ house.
And Izzy? Izzy was locked on a balcony.
There was a clunk from the far end of the balcony. Izzy looked round and straightened her hair – apparently Tigs had taken less time to get a grip than usual. But it wasn’t Tigs who stuck her head round the door of one of the bedrooms. It was Kara. Izzy’s hair whipped into her eyes yet again, and for a second she envied Kara’s short hair. At least she didn’t have to worry about the wind.
“I thought you’d been gone a while,” Kara said.
“Yeah. She’s got a weird sense of humour, hasn’t she?” Izzy nodded to the locked door and the drawn curtains.
Kara smiled sadly. “Tell me about it. Tigs has always been like this. Don’t take it personally. I spent the first couple of years I knew her thinking it was just a thing. Thinking she’d wake up one morning and we’d just be fine, you know?” She looked out over the City, then back to Izzy. “But this is just how she is. She doesn’t like people getting too close.”
“Like anyone gets the chance.”
“Yeah, well. You better come back in before she realizes I’ve opened the door. She’ll kill me.” Kara was no longer smiling.
Great as the view might be, Izzy wasn’t going to hang around on the balcony any longer, and she quickly followed Kara back inside They hurried through what was obviously a spare room – with a bed that Izzy guessed was as big as her entire bedroom, piled high with velvet and silk cushions – and slipped out into the long hallway. Laughter trickled down from the far end.
Izzy followed the sound to the kitchen, where she found Grey backed into a corner beside the enormous fridge. Between him and the door was, of course, Tigs. Making the most of her opportunity, she had switched into full-on flirt mode and was leaning in so close to him that Izzy was surprised she hadn’t actually started trying to climb into his arms. Typical Grey, he looked completely unfazed by any of it, which must have been driving Tigs crazy. She used her charm like a weapon and, normally, it knocked people sideways – parents, teachers, half a dozen of the guys from school. And now Grey. Only nobody had ever told Grey that that was how it was supposed to go.
He caught sight of Izzy standing in
the kitchen doorway and his face brightened.
“Where’d you go?” he said, more or less shoving Tigs out of the way as he tried to squeeze past her.
“Needed some air. Got a bit more than I was expecting.” Izzy raised an eyebrow at Tigs, who pouted.
“God. Some people can’t take a joke.” There was a sour note in Tigs’s voice, but it seemed like that was the end of it.
From the living room, there was the sound of someone clearing their throat. “So,” said Mia. “Are we going to do some work or what?”
“You’re actually kidding me?” said Tigs as she led the way out of the kitchen. “You want to work? Tonight?”
“Look, maybe your mum’s not going to be quizzing you on how to work out the volume of a cone over breakfast…”
“Dude.” Noah was looking through the huge collection of pristine books on the shelves across the room, the spines all arranged by colour. He didn’t even look away from the bookcase. “It’s one-third pi r-squared by height. You totally know that.”
“That’s not the point…” Mia was blushing.
Izzy dropped on to the sofa beside Mia and nudged her. “Don’t mind Noah. It’s not like he can help being a know-it-all.”
Noah snorted. “Oh, sure I can. Maybe I just like being one.” He grinned at Izzy, who threw a notebook at him, aiming directly for his head.
Noah ducked as it flew across the room. It clattered against the window and he straightened up again, glancing behind him. “Shame. Want to try again?”
“The point is—” Mia raised her voice slightly, trying to be heard over Noah.
“We get the point. You want to be dull and actually, like, revise. Well, fine.” Tigs flung herself across a giant floor cushion. “You’re no fun at all.”
“I’m plenty of fun. I’ll just be more fun once the exams are over.” Mia started to flip through the pages of her folder.
“Hey, Tigs.” Dom leaned towards the cushion from his spot on the floor. “You know who’s really fun…?”