Alice in Time

by Penelope Bush

  My red face is just subsiding and my heart is returning to its normal rhythm when the person I have sat down next to leans over and says, ‘You should just ignore her, you know.’

  I look round and once again the blood rushes to my cheeks and my heart goes mad again. I’m sitting next to one of the Sixth Form boys. What’s he doing sitting this far forward? I’ve never seen him before – he must be new. I mean, he’s not the sort of person you could miss. He’s absolutely gorgeous. His hair is longer than most of the boys’ and it’s caramel-coloured. He’s got blue-grey eyes and no spots. And he’s talking to me. Then I remember that only a few minutes ago the whole bus was sniggering because Sasha had called me a virgin and I want the floor to open up and swallow me.

  I spend the rest of the journey trying to look busy, checking my timetable and stuff, but I can see, out of the corner of my eye, that the boy is watching me the whole time.

  Eventually he leans towards me and says, ‘Are we going to sit here all day? Not that I’d mind if I could sit next to you, but I think we should go into school. This is only my second day and I don’t want to blot my copy book this early in my academic career.’

  I realise that the bus has stopped and everyone is piling off, until only the Sixth Formers are left. One of them – Ryan I think he’s called, he’s in the sporty set – says, ‘Are you coming, Seth, or what?’ I realise that I’m blocking the boy in, so I hurriedly get up and go down the bus. I can feel him behind me, and try to hold on to the memory of his fresh, lemony aftershave, which made me almost giddy when he leant towards me. As I climb off the bus, I’m dying to turn and get another look at him, but daren’t. Then I feel his hand on my arm.

  ‘See you around,’ he says, and disappears with a group of boys into the Sixth Form block.

  I hurry into our form room so I can tell Imogen about him. Imogen always gets to school before me and sure enough there she is, sitting at our desk, in the corner at the back, reading a book.

  The form is divided into groups. At the moment they’re all hanging around because our form tutor hasn’t arrived yet. Basically there’s the boys, who keep to themselves, except a few of them who are slightly more mature than the rest and fancy themselves a bit and try and chat up some of the girls. The girls are split into roughly three groups. At the bottom of the heap are the no-hopers. These are the girls who are hopelessly swotty and don’t care what they look like. They mostly have spots and greasy hair and still wear socks. I know this sounds awful, but it’s just the way it is. Generally this lot don’t get bullied because it’s too easy and they’re below the radar of someone like Sasha, who wouldn’t deign to even look at them. Next are the girls that I think of as normal. Some of them verge on the geeky, they do their work and wear the right uniform, and some aspire to the other group, the group that is headed by Sasha.

  Sasha’s group sees itself as the pinnacle of everything. If you’re not in her group you don’t exist, unless you’re being made fun of. Imogen refers to them as the ‘Handbag Brigade’ because they actually come to school with handbags instead of school bags. They all wear as much make-up as they think they can get away with and they like to pretend not to do any work.

  And then there’s Imogen, who doesn’t fit into any of these categories and so, by association, neither do I.

  Imogen sees me coming and puts the book away. I’m glad because I suspect that, deep down, she’d rather carry on reading it. Let me explain Imogen to you and what it is about her that sets her apart. For starters, she’s got a completely different hairstyle from everyone else. Most of the girls have their hair long and straighten it. Some, like Sasha and her ilk, even have streaky highlights in theirs. Imogen has her hair, which is quite thick and almost black, cut into a style. It’s like a bob, only it’s shorter at the back and comes down into points at the front. It looks really grown up and it suits her because she’s very mature in some ways. She doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks of her. Some of the girls are a bit wary of her because, if provoked, she can be sharp tongued, though not in a catty, personal way like Sasha, so people tend to leave her alone, including Sasha, and she likes it that way.

  Imogen is good at every subject, though not in a swotty way. It’s just the way she is. She dresses differently as well. Most girls wear their skirts really short and go round all day with the top two, and sometimes three, buttons of their blouses undone. Of course, we have to wear school uniform and ours is deadly dull and boring: black skirt or trousers, white blouse, grey jumper and a black blazer. I suppose it’s better than St Winifred’s uniform, though. They have to wear purple and green tartan skirts and purple blazers.

  Anyhow, Imogen looks completely different in her uniform. She’s got an old skirt that she bought at a vintage clothes shop. It’s like something they used to wear in the sixties. It’s quite heavy material and it’s pleated all the way round in big fat pleats and it comes well below her knees. Also she wears a long-sleeved white shirt that doesn’t have a collar. She calls it a grandad shirt but she always wears a baggy jumper over it. Her jumper is made of really soft, fine wool. Not like the regulation acrylic jumpers we’re supposed to wear. She never seems to get hot. She wears thick, woolly tights. These are stripy, though you have to get quite close to see this because they’re grey and black. Imogen wears black Doc Martens in the winter and black and white baseball boots in the summer. I think she looks dead cool and the teachers never complain that she’s not in regulation uniform. Actually, I think some of the teachers are a bit in awe of her, because I bet she’s cleverer than some of them.

  We’ve been best friends since primary school. Most girls seem to go round in groups of three or four but Imogen and I just stick together. When we moved up to this school, some girls did try and attach themselves to us, but Imogen always seemed to put them off and if she’s happy with it just being us two then so am I. Luckily for me she is never off sick and so far it’s worked out all right.

  I plonk myself down in the chair next to her. I want to tell her about the bus, and Sasha’s remark, but I don’t because I’m too embarrassed to repeat it, and anyway I know Imogen won’t understand how awful it was because she never gets embarrassed about anything. She’d probably tell me that I should have told Sasha in a very loud voice that it’s better to be a virgin than a slag. She doesn’t understand that I could never, in a million years, do that. I can’t not tell her about the new Sixth Former, though.

  ‘There’s a new boy in the Sixth Form,’ I say as casually as possible. ‘He’s dead nice.’ I want to add, ‘and he actually spoke to me’, but this doesn’t sound very cool so I don’t bother. Sometimes I wish Imogen wasn’t so together and mature so we could have a good gossip about the new hunk and get all girly over him. I don’t tell her that I know his name, because I want to keep it to myself.

  I keep saying it in my head: ‘Seth, Seth.’ It sounds like a sigh and I imagine myself whispering it, in a moment of passion, into his perfectly formed ear. I’m just about to drift off into a new daydream featuring myself and Seth when there’s a commotion in the classroom. I look up and naturally Sasha is starring in the main role.

  ‘You’ve all got to come. It’s going to be the best party ever. But you can only get in with an invitation.’ She’s handing these invitations out. She pauses by me and Imogen. ‘I don’t want any gatecrashers.’ And then she moves on.

  Imogen has got her book out again and is reading.

  ‘Did you see that?’ I say, although I know she did.

  ‘What?’ Imogen doesn’t even look up from her book.

  ‘Sasha’s given party invitations to everyone except us. She’s even given one to Isobel Murray!’ Sasha dislikes Isobel nearly as much as me, but obviously not quite as much. Sasha keeps glancing over at us. I turn my back on her and I can feel tears forming in my eyes and I hate myself for it. Imogen looks up and sees my face. She sighs.

  ‘Would you go to her party if she’d given you an invitation?’ she says to me.
>
  ‘No way.’

  ‘Well, then, what’s the problem?’

  ‘I hate her.’

  ‘You shouldn’t let her get to you. She’s not worth it.’

  We’ve discussed this a thousand times. Imogen says that it’s really her that Sasha doesn’t like but that Sasha knows Imogen doesn’t care what she thinks so she picks on me instead because I always react to it. I know this is true and I’ve tried really hard to pretend I don’t care, but even if I ignore her, I always give myself away by blushing.

  Imogen is putting her book away. ‘It’s quite funny, really,’ she says. ‘In order to make her point, Sasha has had to invite everyone except you and me – even the people she despises. So if they actually all turn up to her party she’ll be really fed up.’

  She’s got a point, and I smile at the thought of Sasha having to entertain all the greasy-haired geeks at her oh so cool party. She’s obviously hoping that they won’t go. By the time Mrs Draycott comes in to take the register, I’m feeling a lot better.

  The first lesson is double art so the whole form traipses off to the art room. Usually I enjoy art, although I’m not particularly good at it. Art is Imogen’s favourite subject and she is brilliant at drawing, but then her mum is an artist, so she’s at an advantage there. When we arrive, Mrs Burton isn’t there so Sasha starts going on about her party in a loud voice, trying to wind me up.

  I wander over to the still life which we’ve been working on for the last few weeks. We’re supposed to be doing it in different styles and at the moment I’m trying to do it in a Cubist style and it’s not working very well. The still life has been set up on a board in the corner and is beginning to look a bit sad. The apples are a tad wrinkly and the shiny teapot is beginning to lose its shine. I’m about to pick the whole thing up and carry it to the table in the middle when Sasha shouts out.

  ‘Hey, look, everybody.’ She’s over by Mrs Burton’s desk, waving a piece of paper. ‘It looks like Burty isn’t coming in today. She’s left this for the cover assistant. It says we’re to get on with what we’ve been doing.’ She fakes an enormous yawn, screws the paper up into a ball and throws it in the bin. Oh, great. That means that for the next two hours Sasha is planning on winding up the class cover assistant and nobody will get any work done. Already Sasha’s behaviour has got everyone excited and the class is really rowdy now.

  Beside me Imogen sighs.

  The door opens and the cover assistant walks in. Everybody sees her, but we all pretend that we haven’t. She’s not like the usual assistants. For a start, she’s a lot older and very efficient-looking. She looks more like a headmistress than our own headmistress. ‘My name is Miss Shears,’ she bellows.

  Even a half-blind two-year-old could tell that this is not a woman to mess with, but then Sasha doesn’t seem to have as much intelligence as a two-year-old because she’s still giggling away in the corner with her friends.

  ‘Right. Enough. Silence!’ Miss Shears’s voice gets gradually louder with each word. ‘Why aren’t you getting on with your work?’

  Now we’re all madly getting out our drawing boards and paper, except Sasha, of course. She’s tipping her chair back and filing her nails. ‘Mrs Burton didn’t leave us any,’ she says with a smirk.

  Miss Shears’s eyes narrow and she glances towards the bin. I just know that she’s going to find the instructions and that Sasha will never own up to throwing them away and that the whole class will be in detention.

  But I’m wrong; instead she strides over to where Sasha is sitting and puts her patent-leather shoe on the chair strut, bringing the chair down with a jolt. Even this doesn’t knock any sense into Sasha, although she does look as though she’s about to complain, and then thinks better of it. After all, Miss Shears hasn’t actually touched her, thank God, or we would never hear the end of it.

  ‘Right, I shall just have to think of something for you to do, then.’ She picks up a spare chair and places it on the desk in the middle of the room where I was going to put the still life. ‘I’d like you all to draw this.’

  Everybody groans, even Imogen, and some people glare accusingly at Sasha. Art is usually fun. Mrs Burton believes in us expressing ourselves and there’s no such thing as ‘going wrong’. If you tipped a pot of paint over your work by accident she’d just smile and say, ‘Incorporate it into the design.’

  This chair thing is a nightmare. It’s torture. I glance over at Imogen but she’s got her tongue poking out a bit, a sure sign that she’s concentrating, so I make an effort and start drawing, though I’m not really sure where to start. Do I start at the bottom and work upwards or at the top and go down? What if I get to the bottom (or top) and find I’ve run out of paper and can’t fit the thing on? I can feel a headache coming on. Eventually I decide to start in the middle with the seat bit, but the whole thing is so boring that I go off into a daydream.

  It’s not a full-blown daydream yet, I’m still evolving it. It involves me being so brilliant at art that the headmistress decides that I can do extra lessons after school. If you’re thinking that’s not much of a daydream, just wait. She decides that I need to do some life drawing, from a real-life nude, and when I turn up there is Seth sitting on the chair – with nothing on. I’m concentrating really hard on imagining this when Miss Shears comes up behind me and says, ‘It could be a bit bigger, don’t you think?’ It takes me a moment to realise that she’s talking about my drawing.

  Having been round and looked at everyone’s work, Miss Shears hands out more paper and says, ‘Right, I want you all to start again, only this time stop thinking of it as a chair. Start looking at it as a series of shapes. Don’t draw the legs; draw the space between the legs.’ She goes up to the chair and pokes all the airy spaces with her finger. ‘Does anyone know what these are?’

  Of course, nobody does. They’re just nothing; I mean, how can you draw air?

  ‘These,’ she says, ‘are Negative Shapes. Don’t ignore them. They are just as important as these.’ Now she’s poking the metal legs. ‘If it was a solid object, what shape would it be?’

  Now I’m deeply confused but Imogen’s hand shoots up. ‘A rectangle.’ She looks strangely happy.

  ‘Exactly,’ says Miss Shears. She’s drawing a three-dimensional oblong on the board and then she fits the chair into it. I see what she means now and my second attempt comes out much better, even if I say so myself. By the end of the lesson, everyone has a pretty good drawing, except Sasha and a few of her friends, who were just messing about most of the time and passing each other notes.

  When the bell rings, we go off to maths. Imogen is in the top group so I don’t have this lesson with her and I traipse off with the middle group. Thankfully Sasha is in the bottom group for maths so I don’t have to put up with her. I’m hopeless at maths, but I work really hard at it, mainly so that I don’t get put in the bottom stream with her.

  I sit down next to Lauren Hall. We usually sit together in maths and while she’s quite nice, she is very shy and it’s not that easy talking to her. But today she seems to be making an effort, because she asks me if I’m going to Sasha’s party.

  ‘No,’ I tell her, ‘I haven’t been invited.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think it matters,’ she says, ‘everybody’s going.’

  I’m just wondering whether or not it’s worth explaining to her that I have actually not been invited, rather than just overlooked, when Mr Green comes in and we have to stop talking and get on with the lesson.

  Chapter Five

  At lunchtime I meet up with Imogen by the lockers. We’re supposed to go outside at lunchtime and ‘get some fresh air’. Just to make sure we do, they have Sixth Formers patrolling the school to throw us out. This is mean on so many levels. Firstly, we’re too old to run around like the Year Seven and Eight kids, so we just stand around freezing to death. It’s not so bad for the boys; at least they can play football. Also, it’s not fair on the Sixth Formers. They get a nice common room to hang ou
t in at lunchtimes and they hate it when they have to patrol the school, so they take it out on us if they find anyone inside. Today Imogen says, ‘Come on, let’s go to the art room. If Burty’s not here today she won’t be hanging around.’

  ‘We’ll only get chucked out by some grumpy Sixth Formers,’ I tell her.

  ‘If any do come in we’ll just tell them that we’re tidying up for Burty. They can’t check with her because she’s not here.’ This seems like a good plan and beats freezing our tits off outside. I’d hate to lose what I’ve managed to grow so far; which isn’t much, unlike Imogen who’s been blessed in that department.

  The art room isn’t the best place in the world to eat lunch. It’s filthy. Every surface is covered in dried-up paint and the sink in the corner is a work of art in its own right. I reckon if Burty pulled it out and entered it in the next Turner Prize she’d stand a pretty good chance of winning.

  Imogen starts drawing in her sketchbook and eating her lunch at the same time. I feel restless, though, and wander around the room eating my lunch as I go. Imogen is going on about the art lesson and how brilliant it was to actually be taught some drawing. Most of the time Imogen is sort of distant and self-contained but when she’s excited about something, she gets really intense and won’t stop talking. Sometimes the intense Imogen makes me uncomfortable. Maybe, deep down, I’m just shallow.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I say to her. ‘You can draw really well already. And besides, can’t your mum teach you? She’s an artist.’

  Imogen’s mum is so cool. Whenever I go round to their house she’s in her studio, which is really the dining room, but she’s taken it over. There’s always a strong smell of turpentine and linseed oil, which can be a bit weird because it’s next to the kitchen and when it mingles with cooking smells the whole thing’s a bit overpowering. She always has the radio on really loud, playing something classical and dramatic and really noisy. Because she gets so wrapped up in her work, housework doesn’t come very high on Imogen’s mum’s list of priorities, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say their house is a tip, like ours, it is definitely chaotic, but in a good, sort of artistic way, so that I always feel relaxed there. I often think that if I can’t live with Dad then I’d like to live in Imogen’s house. It’s the sort of place where you could just be yourself and not get hassled all the time.