by Jean Ure
“Well, you could,” said Mum. “We can always cancel the boarding. I’m sure they won’t mind.”
But I didn’t want to!
“It’s all right,” I said. “We can do it the following week.”
It was silly, but I actually spent a lot of the weekend worrying that I might have destroyed Rachel’s confidence. She seemed to have so little! But really I hadn’t done anything wrong so I don’t know why I should have felt guilty. Rachel got you like that. One minute you’d be wanting to scream at her – like when she carried on and on about something, or skipped around clapping her hands like a five-year-old and embarrassing you – and the next you’d find yourself feeling all warm and slurpy, just wanting to take care of her.
I was relieved when I arrived back at school on Sunday to find her already there and the usual big beam splitting her face as she saw me.
“Zoeeeee!”
I said, “Hi, Rach.”
She started burbling straight away. “I asked her! My auntie. I asked her about the stay-over. She said it’d be OK to do it the following week cos that’s when it’s half term. She said to see if it’s OK for you. Is it OK?” She looked at me, anxiously. “You could still come on the Friday and my auntie could take you back to the station next day. So is that all right, do you think?”
I said, “I’m sure it will be. I’ll just have to check with Mum in case she’s made any plans, but I don’t think she has.”
“Check with her now,” begged Rachel. “Please, Zoe, please! Do it now!”
I knew if I didn’t give in she would just keep nagging. She stood by me, gnawing at a fingernail, as I made the call. The others all hung around, pretending not to listen and listening just as hard as they could.
“It’s OK,” I reported. “Half term is fine.”
“Thank God for that,” said Fawn. “The suspense was killing me.”
“Yay!” Rachel did one of her little skippity-hops round the dorm.
Fawn shook her head, Chantelle rolled her eyes, Tabs giggled. I just cringed. It was one of those moments. Why did she always, always have to go and ruin everything? It was so embarrassing! Little did I know, there was more to come …
Friday was the day we were going to the theatre. Rachel was so excited! All week long she’d kept telling us how she’d been shopping with her auntie and they’d bought her this new dress, specially.
“Specially?” said Fawn.
“Yes!” Rachel bounced, happily. “A new dress, specially!”
“Just for going to the theatre?”
“It’s an occasion,” said Rachel, all self-important, like it was something Fawn should know without having to be told. “But I’m not letting you see it till the last moment!”
“Can’t wait,” said Fawn.
“You do realise,” added Chantelle, “that we’re not going to meet the Queen?”
Rachel giggled. She obviously thought Chantelle was being funny.
Friday after tea, we went up to the dorm to change. That was when we finally got to see it. The Dress. Omigod, I nearly died! It was bright yellow and all hung about with bits. Bobbly bits. Silly little puffy sleeves and a big bell skirt. And Rachel inside it, simpering and twirling, inviting my approval.
“What d’you think?”
“I –” I swallowed – “It’s … um – uh …”
Horrible was the word that immediately sprang to my lips. Fortunately the others arrived before I could actually say it. Fawn gave a shriek.
“Is that it?”
“It’s her dress,” I said.
“That’s what you’re wearing?”
They all stood, transfixed. Rachel stopped her twirling and put a finger in her mouth.
“Her new dress.” I pulled back my lips, sending an agonised grimace in Fawn’s direction. “Her new dress that her auntie bought her. Specially.”
Fawn got the message. “Very eye-catching,” she said.
“D’you like it?” said Rachel.
“Wouldn’t suit everybody,” said Tabs.
“Wouldn’t suit anybody,” snorted Chantelle, when Rachel had gone off to the bathroom.
“Hasn’t she got anything else?”
They all turned, accusingly, to me, as if I could do anything about it.
“It’s grotesque,” moaned Fawn. “And yellow. Yuck!”
I had to agree. Even apart from the general awfulness of it, yellow was just about the worst colour she could have chosen. It made her look all washed out, like she had some sort of ghastly disease.
“You’re her friend,” said Chantelle, poking at me. “Tell her!”
But how could I? She was so proud of herself!
“It’s going to make people laugh at her,” warned Tabs.
“It’s going to make people laugh at us,” said Fawn. “Unless we disown her?”
“I think we should,” urged Chantelle.
Even Chantelle and Tabs were agreeing they would rather not be seen in the company of such horror.
“I vote we tell her,” said Fawn. “Either she puts on something else or we don’t want to know.”
They were looking at me again. I turned, rather helplessly, to Dodie. “What do you think?”
“It wouldn’t be very kind,” said Dodie.
“Not very kind if people laugh at her, either,” said Fawn.
“Well, no, but they wouldn’t do it to her face. It’s not like she’d actually know.”
“We will!”
“Oh!” Chantelle tossed her head. “What’s it matter? Let her wear it, if it makes her happy. She’s totally bonkers and that’s all there is to it. At least we’ve got her hair sorted. We can work on her wardrobe later.”
I was so grateful to Chantelle. And to Dodie. Fawn was obviously running out of patience. She is one of those people that just hates to look ridiculous. Well, I don’t suppose anybody actually likes looking ridiculous, but it is worse for someone like Fawn. She is so slim and pretty, and always so elegant. I could see that being seen with some weird bonkers person in a vile yellow dress all hung about with bobbles would be seriously upsetting for her image.
Still, the rest of us had fun getting ready together. It was just as I’d imagined boarding school would be! Even Fawn seemed to forget her mood for a while as we compared outfits. She herself was wearing this beautiful daisy-print skirt, while the rest of us were all in skinny jeans and sparkly tops. Rachel’s eyes widened as she saw us. She said, “Oh! Jeans. I didn’t know we could wear jeans!” I thought of suggesting she quickly go and change into a pair, but the only ones I’d ever seen on her were a bit baggy and shapeless, and besides she had bought the yellow dress specially. It would have seemed a shame not to let her wear it when she was so proud and happy. And the others, by now, all seemed resigned.
We mostly kept our coats on in the school bus that took us to Norwich so it wasn’t till we reached the theatre that Rachel was displayed in all her glory. I expect one or two people did snigger quietly to themselves, but if they did I didn’t notice, and thank goodness Rachel didn’t, either. Dana came up to us in the interval and said, “And what has she come as? A daffodil?”
To which Chantelle smartly retorted, “Or is she a Buttercup?”
“No way!” said Dana.
“No way!” giggled Rachel. “Who’d want to be a Buttercup?”
“Nobody with any sense,” said Tabs.
I didn’t think Fawn had heard. She had been doing her best to distance herself, going over to join some Days, chatting in a corner. Rachel had already embarrassed her – and me, to be honest – by laughing far too long and far too loudly whenever anything funny had happened in the play, and by refusing to stop clapping when the curtain came down. I’d had to jog her elbow, in the end, and say, “That’s enough, Rach!” so I wasn’t really surprised when Fawn went stalking off.
Still, something must have got through to her, because at the end of the evening, as we boarded the bus to take us back to St With’s, she gave Rachel a
little nudge and said, “Go on, Daffy! Get in.”
Rachel scurried after me. We always sat together. In tones of pure delight she hissed, “Daffy!” She was pleased as could be.
On Monday in English, Miss Seymour said that now we had actually seen the play she had an end-of-term project for us. She wanted us to divide into three groups – Daisies, Buttercups and day girls – and for each to put on a short scene, no longer than ten minutes, using Shakespeare’s characters.
Dana said, “Any of Shakespeare’s characters?”
“Any from A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” said Miss Seymour.
“Ah. Right.” Dana turned and nodded self-importantly at the rest of us. “Any from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And no longer than ten minutes.”
Us Daisies stared at her, pityingly. Who did she think she was impressing? She was truly pathetic! Even Rachel at her embarrassing worst wasn’t as bad as Dana and her know-it-all bossiness.
I was going through another one of my being-fond-of-Rachel phases. On the train going home on Saturday she’d babbled nonstop about having a nickname at last.
“And all because of my dress! Wait till I tell my auntie … She didn’t want me to buy it.”
I wondered, in that case, why she had let her. Still, at least Rachel had got the nickname that she’d so badly wanted. She wasn’t to know that Fawn had tried to disown her.
Miss Seymour told us that we would all get to perform our Shakespeare scenes on stage, in front of the whole school.
“So I’d like you to go away and think about it,” she said, “and see what you can come up with.”
At break next day Fawn gathered us all together and announced that she had had an idea.
“We could do our own version of the scene where Titania wakes up and sees Bottom wearing the ass’s head and falls in love with him.”
She looked at us, expectantly. Waiting, no doubt, for someone to go, “Yesss!”
“Where would we get an ass’s head?” wondered Tabs.
“We’d make it! No problem. It would be really funny,” urged Fawn. “And there’s just the right number of parts: Titania, Bottom and four fairies.”
“Fairies,” said Chantelle. She pulled a face.
Hurriedly, Fawn said, “There don’t necessarily have to be four of them. There don’t have to be any at all, if we don’t want them. It’s just that I’ve thought of something really funny for them to do!”
“But they’re not funny,” said Dodie. “Not in Shakespeare.”
“We can make them funny! We don’t have to use Shakespeare’s words.”
“So whose words are we going to use?”
“Ours!” said Fawn.
“Ours?” Tabs sounded alarmed. “Why can’t we just use Shakespeare’s?”
“Cos his fairies aren’t any fun. Mine are going to be fun,” said Fawn.
Doubtfully, Tabs said, “Oh.”
“Look, just don’t worry! I’ll see to it. I’ve got it all worked out.”
“I’m not going to be a fairy,” said Chantelle.
Fawn heaved a sigh.
“All right, you can be … something else. Oberon! I’ll bring Oberon into it. You’re too tall for a fairy, anyway. Though on the other hand a really tall fairy—”
“No.” Chantelle put on her stubborn expression. When she decides she doesn’t want to do something, there is no moving her. “I don’t mind being Oberon, but I’m not going to be a fairy.
“OK, OK,” said Fawn. “You be Oberon.”
“Right.” Chantelle nodded. She liked that idea.
Tabs, rather nervously, said, “What about Bottom? Who’s going to play him?”
“I thought Zoe.”
“Oh! Yes.” The relief in Tabs’s voice was obvious. In all honesty, she is a bit plump for playing fairies, but on the other hand, who would want to play Bottom? All rude and crude and wearing an ass’s head?
“Zoe,” said Tabs, in tones of deep satisfaction. “She’d be great!”
I would? “Why me?” I said.
“Cos when you read it in class the other day, you had us all in fits,” said Fawn.
It was true, I’d got everyone laughing. I’d used what Dad calls a ‘hayseed’ accent, which is really just a sort of pretend West Country and which I can only do cos of one of my grans coming from there. We are always teasing her when she says ‘oi’ instead of ‘I’. But I had played it up a bit! Miss Seymour had said, “That was shameless, Zoe! But you certainly breathed a bit of life into the part.”
“Everyone else,” said Fawn, “was just so wooden.” She meant everyone else except her. Fawn really fancies herself as an actor. To be fair to her, she is actually good. Well, very good, in all honesty. “Being able to make people laugh,” she said, “is a real gift.”
I couldn’t help feeling flattered. Fawn doesn’t very often praise anyone; she is quite a critical sort of person.
“OK,” I said. Maybe I wouldn’t mind playing Bottom. He was one of the main parts, after all.
“And don’t worry,” Fawn promised, “I’ll give the fairies lots of proper words to say.”
“Can I be Peaseblossom?” begged Dodie.
“Yes! You can be Peaseblossom, Tabs can be Mustard Seed and Daffy can be Cobweb. Cos of your hair,” Fawn explained. “All nice and cobwebby.”
“Well,” I said to Rachel, as we wandered back into school, “that should be fun! Don’t you think?”
Rachel bit her lip and didn’t say anything. She didn’t even giggle.
“When Fawn said about your hair being cobwebby, she didn’t mean anything bad,” I assured her. “She just meant it’s, like … very fine and delicate. Like cobwebs. It was a compliment, if anything.”
Still Rachel said nothing. So then I thought perhaps she was upset because of not being given one of the leads.
“It is going to be a proper part,” I reminded her. “Not like in the play where you just say stuff like ‘Hail!’ and ‘Cobweb!’ You’re going to have real lines. And maybe,” I added, on a note of sudden inspiration, “if you asked Fawn to let you play Mustard Seed instead of Cobweb, you could wear your dress! Nice yellow daffodil dress.”
After all, Fawn had said the fairies were going to be funny. What could be funnier than a bright yellow dress all covered in bobbles?
“Honestly, it’ll be fun,” I said. “On stage, like in a real theatre. In front of the whole school. I’m looking forward to it!”
I was wittering, now. Just blabbering on, trying to get some sort of response out of her. But I couldn’t. And then, a few days later, she dropped her bombshell.
“You can’t do it?” Fawn’s voice rose in disbelief. “What do you mean, you can’t do it?”
“I can’t do it,” said Rachel.
“Why can’t you?”
“Cos I can’t.”
She said it apologetically, like she knew she was letting people down, and especially Fawn, who had gone to such trouble writing pages and pages of script, but still she said it. Over and over. It was all we could get out of her: she couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t even say why. When pushed, she just said that she didn’t want to. Didn’t want to, wasn’t going to. And that was that.
I would never have guessed she could be so stubborn. She was worse than Chantelle. At least with Chantelle you could understand why she didn’t want to do things. Like not wanting to be a fairy. Chantelle was the under-fifteens hockey captain. Hockey captains don’t get all dressed up in little flimsy dresses with gauzy wings attached. She didn’t need to explain. But Rachel did, and she just wouldn’t! It made us all lose patience with her. Even me.
Dodie, trying to be helpful, said that if she was scared of stage fright, she wouldn’t be alone.
“I was absolutely paralysed last year, when we did The Snow Queen! I was, wasn’t I?” She turned to the others for confirmation. They all solemnly nodded. “I was, like, all shaky and trembling and feeling sick.”
“That’s right,” agreed Fawn. “You kept w
ailing that you couldn’t go on.”
“Yes, cos I couldn’t remember any of my lines!”
Dodie looked expectantly at Rachel. We all looked at Rachel. Rachel just munched on her lip and said nothing. What was the matter with her?
“I couldn’t even remember the first few words,” said Dodie. “I just wanted to run away and hide!”
“So what happened?” I said.
“Oh. Well! Everybody told me I’d be all right once I was on stage, and someone gave me this huge shove—”
“That was me,” said Chantelle.
“Was it? I never knew that before!”
“It worked, though, didn’t it? It got you on stage.”
“And saying your lines,” prompted Fawn.
“Yes! They all came back to me. Just like that! They do,” said Dodie. “Honestly!”
“It’s not as if you’ve got that many, anyway,” said Fawn. She was beginning to sound quite irritated. “There’s only about six of them! It’s not very much to ask, I wouldn’t have thought.”
“It’s not,” I agreed, feeling that I had to speak up in support. Fawn had worked so hard on her script! And she had taken real care to give everyone a proper part. She had explained to us that every single line was important.
“I can’t just give yours to someone else,” she told Rachel. “It would throw everything out!”
“In any case,” said Tabs, “we’re all supposed to take part.”
“This is it,” said Chantelle. “We’re a team.”
Rachel took a deep breath, like she had come to some big decision. We waited, hopefully.
“I wouldn’t mind helping backstage,” she said.
Fawn made an impatient scoffing sound. “We don’t need any help backstage! It’s not like it’s some big production. We’re not having loads of props or scenery.”
“No, but I could help with the costumes and stuff. Like for Bottom! When he wakes up wearing a donkey’s head. I can think of ways we could do it! I’d be good at that!”
“It’s an ass’s head, actually,” said Fawn.
To be honest I am not at all sure what the difference is, but I had been wondering myself how we would manage it. Fawn, however, dismissed the idea somewhat crushingly.