The Foster Child

by Jenny Blackhurst

  I don’t know what to say. After everything that happened in London, this small triumph feels like a dream come true. ‘I . . . I’m honoured.’ I touch a hand to my chest. ‘You don’t know how much it means to me to get a vote of confidence like this from you. It’s wonderful, thank you.’

  ‘Don’t thank me.’ Florence beams fondly at my over-the-top display of gratitude. ‘You’re the one who’s gone the extra mile for this school. We need people like you here, Imogen. We need you like you wouldn’t believe.’

  61

  Ellie

  ‘You will not believe what happened to me today.’ Ellie shoves open Mary’s bedroom door without knocking and the older girl jumps up from the floor, a guilty look plastered on her face. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Mary snaps, and Ellie wonders if she’s still annoyed at her after their argument two nights before. ‘You should knock before you burst into someone’s room. What if I’d been naked?’

  Ellie’s face flushes – Mary has never been this short with her before – but even her sister’s temper does little to dampen her mood. ‘Sorry. Aren’t you going to guess?’

  ‘You got asked to the dance by Tommy Ross,’ Mary says, with something of a sneer in her voice.

  Ellie frowns. ‘Huh?’

  Mary shakes her head impatiently. ‘Never mind. What happened?’

  ‘I gave Naomi Harper that shirt and she said I was cool. Me! I think it’s the most anyone’s spoken to me since I started school, except to be horrid to me. And she asked me to sit with her at lunch! Sit. With. Her. Do you have any idea what a breakthrough that is?’

  Ellie stops to take a breath and notices the crestfallen look on Mary’s face. ‘What?’

  Mary sighs and rubs a hand across her face. For a second she looks much younger than fifteen; Ellie has never seen her as vulnerable as she is now.

  ‘What?’ she asks, starting to panic. ‘What is it, Mary?’

  ‘It’s nothing, Els. Just promise me one thing, okay?’

  ‘You’re not going to ruin this for me, are you? Please don’t tell me that the only person who has been friendly to me since I got here is trying to trick me, because I won’t believe you.’

  Mary’s eyes fill with tears. ‘The only person who has been friendly to you? Haven’t I been friendly to you? Haven’t I been the best friend you’ve had here? I’ve looked out for you – I’m looking out for you now! All I’m asking you to do is not to let Naomi Harper get too close. Please, Ellie, you can’t trust her! I’m not even asking you not to be friends with her; I want you to have friends. I’m just saying keep your guard up.’

  But Ellie is only eleven, and although sometimes she feels decades older, she wants more than anything just to be able to make friends and let her guard down.

  ‘I’m sorry. Of course you’ve been the best friend I have here. You still are; you’re the best sister I could have asked for. But you’re not in my year, and no one can survive school with just one friend. Some days I’m so lonely that I help the dinner ladies clean up the canteen for someone to talk to. And now I might not have to do that any more.’ Tears cut wet tracks down her cheeks. ‘I just want so badly to be normal.’

  Mary crosses the room, knocking half a dozen school books from her bed to the floor and throws her arms around Ellie, pulling her into her chest. Ellie leans her head on Mary’s shoulder and sobs into her school jumper. Mary strokes her hair, whispering into her sister’s ear.

  ‘Shush, shh, it’s okay. It’s okay, Ellie-bean. I was just trying to look out for you, but I can see how convinced you are that Naomi is a good person and you want to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I was wrong about her.’

  Ellie gives a watery smile. ‘Here, let me pick that stuff up for you.’ She reaches down to pick up the books from next to the bed, but Mary jumps as though she’s had an electric shock.

  ‘No!’ she shouts, and Ellie pulls her hand away. There is a sheaf of papers poking out from under Mary’s bed, and Ellie pulls them out.

  ‘What’s this?’

  Mary looks devastated as Ellie’s eyes wander over the A4 pieces of paper. They are crumpled, with Sellotape at the top and bottom, and they look as though they have been ripped down from whatever they were taped to. Ellie takes in the content, feeling her stomach lurch at the crude drawing of a little girl, a puddle of water at her feet and the caption Smelly Ellie smells of piss scrawled at the bottom. ‘Mary?’

  Mary lets out a sigh and sinks to the floor next to Ellie, puts an arm around her shoulder.

  ‘I pulled them down from the bus stop earlier, before you came out of class. I got all the ones I could see and I don’t think many other people saw them.’

  Ellie thumbs through the stack; there are ten in total, all identical copies of the first. ‘Do you think Naomi did this?’

  ‘I did,’ Mary admitted. ‘But after what you said about her being so nice to you, it can’t be her. I didn’t want you to see them, Els, I’m so sorry.’

  Ellie sits in silence, staring at the picture, unable to pull her eyes away. The picture is childlike but undeniably Ellie, and her name is on it of course. Whoever wrote the words dotted their i’s with little hearts, and Ellie recognises it as Naomi’s signature handwriting. She’s seen her doodles all over her notebooks, and remembers thinking how adding the hearts must slow her writing down, at the same time wishing she herself was cool enough to pull that off. That doesn’t mean anything, though: anyone could dot their i’s with hearts to make it look like Naomi drew the picture. But in her mind’s eye she sees Naomi’s friend holding her tightly as the other girl poured fresh piss into her trousers, thinks about how that must have been planned in advance: bringing the canister, going to the toilets and one of them weeing in it, giggling as they did so about smelly Ellie smelling of piss. How could she have been so stupid? How could a couple of kind words be enough to erase those images from her mind, even temporarily?

  ‘It was her,’ she whispers, and she knows it as surely as she has ever known anything. She wonders what would have happened to her if she had sat down at Naomi’s table at lunch. Did she, in her cowardice, unwittingly avoid another joke at her expense? She was stupid to think that she would ever make friends in a place like Gaunt, a town that chews up outsiders and spits them into the gutter. A town that proclaimed her evil but has the darkest heart she has ever known. ‘She doesn’t want to be my friend,’ she murmurs. ‘She never did. No one does.’

  Mary squeezes her shoulder. ‘You’ll make friends, Ellie, I promise. You just have to be more careful who you trust. You’re so lovely, you just want to think the best of everyone, but you have to toughen up a little. You have to show them that they can’t treat you like this, or they’ll carry on for as long as you’re here.’

  ‘I’m not going to let her get away with it,’ Ellie vows, her voice tight and almost unrecognisable. ‘I’m going to show her that she can’t treat people like this. I’m going to show her, Mary. I’m going to show them all.’

  62

  Ellie

  As always, Ellie is the first into her form room. She likes it; it means that she can sit and read her book, and everyone else can filter in and ignore her as though she doesn’t even exist. Today is no exception.

  The classroom begins to fill up, children wandering in in twos and threes, talking about what they did the night before, what TV they watched and who texted who and said what. Before long the hum is a buzz, and Ellie has neither spoken nor been spoken to.

  Naomi Harper is one of the last to arrive. Her hair is wild around her head in a just-out-of-bed style that probably took her an hour to perfect, and she has a light dusting of make-up on her pretty face. She carries her school bag not with the uncomfortable slump of someone who is trying to fade into the background but as if it is an expensive handbag and she expects to command attention with every step. The other children greet her like a celebrity, and Ellie gives in and looks up, accidentally catching her eye. Naomi flashe
s her a small smile that just yesterday would have warmed Ellie’s heart and given her fresh hope but that today makes the small knot of discontent in her stomach squirm.

  Naomi takes her place at her usual desk near the front of the class and as always spins instantly in her seat to chat to the two girls behind her. Ellie watches her as inconspicuously as she can –

  I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU

  – as she tosses her hair and giggles coquettishly. She pulls something out of her bag and Ellie see that it is the shirt she gave Naomi the day before. Before she knew what she was. The girls around her ooh and pretend to look interested, taking it from her and holding it up, passing it around. Naomi smiles and says something, gesturing towards Ellie, and the girls all turn to look in her direction. Naomi holds up a hand in greeting and Ellie averts her eyes, pretends not to notice.

  YOU WILL GET WHAT IS COMING TO YOU, NAOMI HARPER.

  63

  Ellie

  Naomi hasn’t asked Ellie to sit with her at lunch again so Ellie takes a seat at a table nearby. She hasn’t seen any of Naomi’s posters around school, even though she’s looked for them – the ones that Mary took down from the bus stop might have been the only ones, but she doubts it. They are waiting somewhere, plastering the walls of the library or the gym, somewhere the entire class will walk in and see them. Every time she pictures the scene, Ellie can feel her blood physically boiling beneath the surface of her skin. She imagines it now: Naomi beginning to laugh and point, the whole class staring at Ellie and doubling up in peals of laughter, right up until the posters peel themselves off the walls, ripping and tearing at the Sellotape that holds them as though they have come alive and flying towards Naomi and her giggling friends, wrapping themselves around their faces, screwing themselves up into balls and flying down the throats of the stupid vacuous Harperettes and their evil queen.

  Ellie’s whole body is hot now. The blood that pumps through her veins is thick lava pounding a rhythm in her ears, thump thump thump, and she can no longer hear the giggling of the stupid girls or the incessant chatter and whooping of the boys, the yelling of the teachers to sit properly on the chairs or keep in line. Everything fades to muffled static.

  The lights in the hall flicker and everything goes black.

  64

  Ellie

  The dining hall is filled with screams. Ellie’s eyes are closed against the darkness and she can feel that something bad is happening, but she’s not afraid. It’s not coming for her. The bad thing is coming straight through the darkness and it’s getting stronger and stronger; she can feel it almost as strongly as if it is her, and maybe it is. Maybe it is part of her. She concentrates all the energy she has on sending it towards Naomi Harper and her friends.

  The teachers are yelling, telling the children to calm down. Ellie opens her eyes and she can see them pulling at the strings that open the thick curtains concealing the high windows of the hall. Were they closed before? Or did she do that too? When she tries to remember the way the hall looked before the screams started, all she can see are the bright artificial lights – would anyone have noticed the curtains shutting out the natural light? Sometimes the teachers close them for drama practice to check the lighting on the stage; maybe someone forgot to open them.

  No one forgot to open them. You did it. You knew this was coming . . .

  Daylight spills into the hall as the heavy curtains ease slowly backwards. The screams have died down now, replaced by a buzz of excitement and the voices of the teachers trying to calm down a hall full of excited teenagers. Nothing this exciting ever happens at Gaunt High School. Ellie can hear wild speculation all around her about how the lights failed, why the curtains were closed, but her eyes are fixed on one table in particular, one where the screams have not stopped.

  ‘Miss! Miiiisssss!’ One of Naomi’s friends is on her feet, waving her arm desperately at the group of teachers. The other two are squatting down next to where someone lies prone on the parquet floor.

  Teachers surround them in seconds, but not before Ellie catches a glimpse of Naomi lying serenely as though she is merely taking a nap.

  It is as if Miss Maxwell feels Ellie’s gaze upon Naomi and the surrounding chaos, because of all the children who are watching her now, it is Ellie whose eyes she locks on to. Ellie, not screaming or becoming hysterical, but watching intently. The head teacher’s face clouds with fear and something in her snaps into action.

  ‘Get these children out of here,’ she barks at one of the others, an art teacher whose name Ellie doesn’t know. ‘And call an ambulance.’

  One of Naomi’s friends is crying, the loud, messy sobs of a truly overdramatic pre-teen. Another is muttering something over and over, and Ellie strains to hear her, milking every ounce of pleasure there is to be had from this mayhem. Didn’t she say they would pay? Didn’t she promise Mary that Naomi Harper would suffer? And here they are, screaming and sobbing and afraid, and she barely had to do anything at all. Simply imagine it. Granted, it wasn’t as entertaining as she imagined – no dancing pieces of paper choking the life out of Naomi and the Harperettes – but still, she has achieved what she set out to do.

  She still can’t hear the girl’s words, but she can read her lips. ‘Her hair,’ she’s saying. ‘What’s happened to her hair?’

  And just at the last minute, just as Ellie is herded from the dining hall by the art teacher whose name is inconsequential, she catches a glimpse of Naomi Harper’s hair on the floor. Only it is no longer attached to her head. Now it lies separate, sheared away until only short tufts remain, sticking out at odd angles from her scalp.

  A nice touch, Ellie thinks with a smile. A nice touch indeed.

  The teachers don’t know what to do with them. The whole school is so abuzz with what has happened in the lunch hall that the students are practically uncontrollable. No one knows whether Naomi is alive or dead, or how this happened, or why. But Ellie knows how, and Ellie knows why, and when she slips away during the confusion, no one even notices she’s gone. Just like always.

  She opens her bag and peers inside, smiles when she sees exactly what she was expecting. The scissors sit on top of her books, their glint an evil wink as though to say, ‘We did it, Ellie, you and I. We got her.’

  She walks quickly and with purpose, her excuse ready if anyone were to catch her outside of the school grounds: I was afraid, I was afraid that whoever killed Ms Gilbert was coming for all of us. There is a delicious irony in that excuse – whatever killed Hannah Gilbert is coming for all of them, and she is the only one who knows it.

  When she reaches her destination, she reaches into her bag and pulls out the scissors, wipes them quickly with her sleeve and drops them neatly through the grid covering the drain.

  65

  Imogen

  I stare at the grid, each square seeming to increase in size as I look at it. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine . . . nine weeks since my last period. That means I have three weeks until my first scan is due and I still haven’t told Dan about the baby. I was so close that one time, until the phone started ringing, breaking whatever spell I was under. Standing in that cupboard, all my fears and insecurities came seeping back in, and when Dan asked again what the dinner had been in aid of, I stuttered that it was just because I loved him. Maybe it will always be this way, swinging between wanting desperately to have a baby of my own to love and being terrified of having a tiny human to keep safe and not screw up irrevocably. Does every pregnant woman feel this scared? It’s a wonder the human race didn’t die off a long time ago if so.

  ‘Ready for you.’ Edward’s voice shatters my thoughts and I’m glad of the distraction. Florence Maxwell called me in yesterday to request my help following a major incident at the school. The police were called and a child was taken to hospital. I wasn’t even that surprised when I heard the girl’s name: Naomi Harper. I rushed to the school to talk to the children affected – apart from Naomi, of course, who was still being t
reated for head injuries – but Ellie wasn’t on the list of those needing help. I didn’t even have time between my sessions to seek her out, although I saw Mary when I left the suite for a toilet break.

  ‘Mary!’

  She jumped nearly a mile at the sound of my voice and swirled around. ‘Oh, it’s you.’

  ‘Have you seen Ellie? Is she okay?’

  Mary frowned. ‘She’s in class. Why wouldn’t she be okay? She’s the one . . .’ She clamped her mouth shut.

  ‘She’s the one what, Mary? Are you saying she had something to do with this?’

  Mary looked at me, disappointment etched on her young face. ‘I was going to say she’s the one person we don’t have to worry about today. Not because she did this, but just because for once the bullies stayed away from her.’ She looked intently at me. ‘I thought you were on her side. I thought you believed in her?’

  ‘I do.’ I cursed my stupidity. It was one thing to have private doubts but another thing altogether to show them to the children. ‘It’s just with Naomi being the one who . . . and Ellie being so fragile . . . I didn’t know if Naomi might have pushed her too far this time.’

  ‘Naomi got what she deserved. And if Ellie did do something, well I wouldn’t blame her.’

  It was the first time I’d heard even the slightest concession from Mary that Ellie might be involved in any of this, but I didn’t have time to process it there and then. I wonder now if I should have pushed harder.