by C. J. Flood
‘Please don’t be melodramatic, Rosie,’ Dad said. ‘We’re parenting you, that’s all. We want you to make the most of your education, enjoy your time at school. Really, Boo, would it be so bad to get to know some other people? It would be such a weight off if you could just try.’
His eyes were so hopeful I could barely look at them. Why couldn’t he fly off the handle now and again, like Fab? Give me something to rebel against. But no, he was holding his arms open for a hug, and I needed it just as much as he did, because I was so disappointed in myself, and I couldn’t handle him being disappointed in me too.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll try. If you stop calling me “Boo”.’
Thirteen
Grease rehearsals had begun at lunchtimes as well as after school now there were only a few weeks before the end of term, so my hope, as I headed into the canteen was that Charlie, Alex and Mia would be in the Drama block with Chase and all the other theatre minions.
They walked in just as Pat was filling my bowl with chips. Pat was one of the few dinner ladies who’d appreciated the zine Ti and me had made one rainy Wednesday. We’d pushed it under the kitchen door, a little book full of reviews of the school-meal range, with hand-drawn pictures, and it had made her laugh so much she had given us extra food when she served us ever since.
‘Long time no see, my sweet,’ she said, handing me the overflowing bowl. ‘Where’s your sister?’
I shrugged, too embarrassed to explain that Ti had been expelled, or that I’d taken to eating a bag of crisps in the toilet cubicle at dinner time.
Waving a note, Charlie made a beeline for the hot food counter, cutting in front of all the kids in the queue with total confidence. Somehow she managed to make school uniform look like it wasn’t school uniform. I couldn’t work out how she did it. She wore a white shirt and navy jumper and black trousers or skirt like everyone else, but it just looked different.
‘We’re in the play,’ she said to the general area, smiling her sweetest, ‘so we’re prioritized for dinner. Jacket potato and beans, please. No butter. I hate butter. Butter’s foul.’
Pat handed her the food she’d asked for, then passed the same to Mia and Alex who had followed with the same requests. Poor them, unable to even enjoy the simple pleasure of butter. The worst thing about seeing them – except for seeing them – was that now I couldn’t pour gravy (which was free, and therefore extra delicious) on top of my chips. But actually, who cared? They already tormented me, I might as well take the edge off with a nice load of gravy.
‘Lot of calories in that,’ I heard Charlie say, and so I emptied the jug. Defiantly I picked up a spoon as well as a fork at the cutlery area.
‘Blooooooom,’ Alex whispered, catching up with me as I pushed my tray to the tills. Charlie laughed too loudly, and the flamethrowers started, and it was so odd how sensitive they made my face. I could feel the air passing over every millimetre of it, and I tried to focus on that sensation, instead of what I might look like, or how humiliating it would be to spill what had become a kind of chip soup.
After you’d paid for your food, there were three steps into the main part of the canteen. One time a Year Seven fell backwards down them on his chair, still holding a forkful of his dinner, and the whole room just came alive with laughter. It was funny, especially as the kid was fine, but can you imagine if that was you? The kid still gets called ‘chair’ today. Like it’s his name. Like: ‘Oh, hi, Chair. How are you?’
‘Blooooooom.’
Alex wasn’t letting up, and my bowl and glass juddered a little on my tray. Still I kept my head up like Dad insisted, and looked for a free seat at the end of one of the long tables. The people that designed the layout of school dinner halls definitely didn’t remember what teenagers are like. If they did, they would litter single places round the edge of the room, along with tables of twos and threes, instead of these nightmare stretches of twenty-six.
Kiaru and Alisha glanced at me as I stepped down the stairs and I was musing on how they managed to hold their place smack bang in the middle of the school hierarchy when the world tilted and my chip soup began sliding along my tray. I tried to correct it, but my apple juice had tipped over and the sudden pool of liquid made me jump, and then somehow with a roar in my ears, I was sitting down hard, in exactly the way that it was important not to.
‘Blooooooom!’ went the call, much louder than usual so as to be heard over the cheers and whooping and laughter, and I looked around, with gravy burning my thighs through my tights and hot chips crushed between my fingers to see Charlie, Alex and Mia stood in a line at the top of the stairs, happier than I’d ever seen them – happier than I’d ever seen anyone – like my fall was the crowning production of the season. Charlie held her hand out, like she wanted to help me, though she was laughing so hard that she was actually crying, and something came over me, rage I suppose. I took her outstretched hand with my gravied one, and still sitting on the bottom step I gripped for all I was worth, and maybe because she was at the top of the stairs, or because she wasn’t expecting it, I managed to pull her down with me.
She fell on to her knees before Alex or Mia could save her, and her jacket potato – no butter – rolled with a slap into my mess of gravy and chips.
The kids standing to get a better look let out a gasp, and Charlie wasn’t smiling any more. Alisha crouched beside me now, with her hand on my back, and Kiaru held out a fuzzy-looking grey bundle of toilet roll, like Granny used to have, and their faces were concerned, the only ones in the whole horror show not gawking.
‘Psycho!’ Charlie shouted, leaping up as Chase made her way over to us. I wiped my meaty hands unsuccessfully on Kiaru’s ball of tissue, and then we were marched to Kes’s office where I found myself accusing Charlie of pushing me down the stairs in an on-the-spot explanation of my mad-seeming behaviour.
Unable to tell who was lying, Kes gave us each a week of lunchtime detentions, and though I knew Charlie would probably get a note from Chase to say she was needed at rehearsals, I was overflowing with relief. Lunchtime detentions meant my parents would be none the wiser.
‘You’re going to be sorry for doing that,’ Charlie said to me, as we left.
‘I don’t think I am,’ I said, buoyed a little from sticking up for myself. ‘I reckon it will always be one of my top five favourite things that I’ve done.’
‘I wonder if it’ll always be one of your mum’s top five favourite things you’ve done,’ she said drolly, and my feeling of security drained from me. ‘Or if maybe she’ll get really stressed.’
Fourteen
The chips-and-gravy incident didn’t help with the ‘bloom’ call, but people that wouldn’t normally smiled at me as I went about the school, and I felt like maybe the gammy leg stump I’d been trailing since Ti had left was healing over a touch. Especially when Alisha found me in the chaos that is the end of the school day, and put her hand on my arm.
‘Did you enjoy your dinner?’ she asked, and we grinned at each other, as though we were already friends. Alisha wore a smart grey coat with a thick blue scarf wound round her neck, and with her warm hand still on my arm, I felt sort of spectacular. She hadn’t spoken to me since Year Seven when she told me my Maths textbook was upside down, but I’d always liked her from afar. She and Kiaru seemed kind and clever, like they knew how to have a good time without hurting anyone.
Ti thought they were snooty because they wore pretentious glasses, and had houses on Castle Road, but I found them interesting. They arrived at school together every morning in this sleek black four-by-four with tinted windows, and sat at the front of every class. It impressed me the way that they passed notes and sniggered like everyone else, but never got called out by the teachers because they could answer all the questions too.
‘Rosie Bloom,’ she said, and I pressed my lips together, embarrassed by the dumb feeling of pride rushing through me at her attention. When she smiled, her face was even more lovely, her cheekbones high and round
, and I felt myself smiling back without choosing to.
‘Can you hang out after school?’ she said. ‘We want to ask you something.’
Linking her wrist through my arm, the way I’d seen her do dozens of times to Kiaru, she led me through the corridors, and outside to the gym, where he was waiting for her.
All the way, she talked about Grease, and how she should have been given a bigger part because her singing voice was way better than most of the cast’s, and how Pirate FM wanted to do an interview with the ‘stars’, which was annoying because they were too inarticulate for the radio.
‘Sure, they have faces for TV, but none of them should open their mouths!’ she moaned, and I laughed but all I could really think about was what she wanted to ask me.
Kiaru lifted his chin in the barest minimum of hello, so I didn’t bother smiling. I hoped for a minute to sneak a text to Dad; it was his turn to collect Joey, but he’d worry if I wasn’t back by four. Right now I wanted to seem free and easy, and so I just cruised along beside them, as if I often hung out at other kids’ houses, rather than going straight home to make sure my mum and brother were okay.
As we walked out the back of the school, seeds and grass stuck to my tights, which still smelled of gravy, and the long grass at the edge of the common whipped my legs. Alisha’s breathing was heavy as we marched, but that didn’t stop her talking. She laughed at her own jokes, without waiting to see if anyone else found them funny, and I wondered if she didn’t notice our lack of response, or didn’t care.
Kiaru didn’t laugh out loud once, and I realized I hadn’t ever seen him do that. Maybe laughing out loud was deeply uncool. I’d have to keep a check on it.
When Alisha ran out of chatter, she sang. She was so uninhibited she reminded me of Ti, except her voice was husky and lovely, while Ti sounded like a punk who’d smoked too many cigarettes. Alisha sang a melancholy Pulp song that Mum played to death up in the attic, and I felt sad, but I didn’t want her to stop. Not that she would have, the impression I was getting.
We walked out of town to Castle Road, to where Kiaru, it turned out, lived in the huge white pillared house next door to Charlie Fielding’s. I wondered when he’d moved in, and if they bumped into each other a lot, and what he thought of her. He didn’t like her enough to give her his granny tissue at least. It was still balled up in my bag, like a memento from a concert, which even I knew was embarrassing.
He led us from the drive round to the back of his house to a huge sloped garden edged with a row of tall Scots pines, through which you could see the ocean. His gate opened out near the cliff path down to Durgan, the same as Charlie’s did, and I felt a pang of envy.
Ti thought the Castle Roaders believed the beach belonged more to them than it did to the rest of us because of their gates, and if you saw the Fieldings’ summer set-up with deckchairs, Dalmatians, inflatables and barbecues, you might agree. Mum said Ti was jealous, but I’d heard her call Sophie obnoxious when she’d complained about how much money they had to spend maintaining their vintage speedboat.
In the bottom right-hand corner of the lawn, adjacent to the boundary of Charlie’s garden, a shed with a glass front overlooked the sea.
‘Summer house,’ Kiaru said, standing aside so we could enter.
‘Can we not just go in the house? It’s cold,’ Alisha said, but Kiaru ignored her. He put his hair behind his ears.
‘Welcome,’ he said stiffly when we were all crammed inside.
The walls were covered in drawings of mountains, all peeling at the edges and sun bleached like they’d been up for a hundred years, and the sofa was red faded gingham with patches on the arms, and a patchwork quilt draped over the back. Lowering herself to sit on it, Alisha sent up a puff of dust.
Kiaru gestured for me to take the other side of the sofa, and pulled a beanbag from a corner. It took a while for him to find a dignified position – his legs were too long, and he seemed spiderish in his tight black school trousers and baggy white shirt – and he adjusted the colourful woven bracelets on his left wrist as Alisha teased him for his longness.
Laughing beside me, she was hot as a radiator, and I tried to relax and join in, but I was worried that as soon as she asked me her question my face would go bright red. Her sweet perfume smelt musty from being sprayed and resprayed on to her coat and scarf, and it joined the dust to make my nose itch, and I hoped my first impression wouldn’t be blowing snot everywhere in an unprecedentedly powerful sneeze.
‘So, Rosie,’ Alisha said finally, ‘Did your girlfriend really try to kill Ms Chase? And is she due in court for breaking the rules of her injunction?’
My mood sank. They wanted gossip.
‘My friend.’
They looked at each other, communicating something important, and I missed that so much, knowing someone well enough you could tell each other things with your eyebrows.
‘It’s a long story,’ I said, and it would have been much easier to make an excuse and head home, but I owed it to Ti to at least try to clear up some of the rumours flying around. Besides, Alisha’s black eyes were kind, and still half impressed, and I didn’t want to disappoint her.
‘That is the weirdest thing I ever heard!’ Alisha announced when I got to the revenge poo, and I wondered if I had made an error, but then she started laughing, and Kiaru joined in, and so I carried on, growing more enthusiastic. I told her about our purple balaclava, and Ti using a trampoline to get into Chase’s garden, then stepping in the metal dog bowl.
‘So that’s what you do at the weekends,’ she said, as though it had been bothering her for a while.
‘Used to, we’re not allowed to see each other any more.’
Alisha pulled a sad face for one second, but her smile couldn’t be suppressed for two. ‘So what did you see? Did you discover anything juicy about the secret life of Chase?’ Her eyes glittered in anticipation, and I told her about the shadow Ti had seen, and the romantic music, and how that was what had drawn her too close to the house.
‘Chase lied about Ti after. She said she threatened her, when she didn’t, so I don’t know . . . Maybe she did have something to hide . . .’
‘How do you know Ti didn’t threaten her?’ Alisha said.
‘Because I was just next door. I heard everything, and Ti would never threaten anyone.’ I was lying again – I hadn’t heard what happened at all, but I meant it just the same.
‘Didn’t she punch Charlie Fielding a few weeks ago?’ Kiaru said.
‘That was Ophelia. And no, she didn’t punch her. They were practising a routine, and she fell—’
Alisha hooted.
‘It’s true!’ I said automatically, though I wasn’t certain myself, in spite of Ti’s best efforts to convince me.
‘Ti says Chase was stupid, casting like she did,’ I said. ‘Something was bound to happen.’
‘She likes to use natural emotion to get the best performance,’ Alisha said. ‘That’s all.’
‘Ophelia ended up getting chucked out of school!’
‘That’s hardly Ms Chase’s fault though, is it? Ophelia needs to learn to hold onto her temper.’
‘Ti says Charlie and Mia wound her up.’
‘They probably did, but that just makes what Ophelia did even more daft. You can’t react to girls like that, it’s what they live for . . . Not that Ophelia’s much better. It’s a shame though, ‘cause she’s a good actress. She would have been perfect as Rizzo. Much better than that wet lettuce, Mia.’
‘As if she’d ever be the leader of a gang!’
‘I know. It worked with West Side Story, though, didn’t it? Chase’s approach. Will and Ophelia were dreamy in that.’
‘I still don’t think it’s right, using people’s emotions against them, and then throwing them out like pieces of rubbish.’ I sounded exactly like Ti.
‘That’s show business,’ Alisha said, and I thought I saw Kiaru rolling his eyes. Was he losing interest in her? Or was it me he found boring?
‘She’s shy, that’s all, and she thinks that—’
‘Are Titania and Ophelia really their names?’ Kiaru interrupted, and something in his voice made me defensive on Ti’s behalf.
‘Her dad loves Shakespeare,’ I said. ‘What, d’you think people up the Beacon don’t know about him?’ Another old line of Ti’s.
Kiaru looked annoyed, but Alisha put her hand on his arm. ‘Finish telling us what happened at Chase’s. You said Ti didn’t threaten her?’
‘No, she didn’t, but I ran off, and left her to take all the blame, and then I promised to confess because I felt so guilty, and I thought they might let her back in, if they knew there were two of us, that we were just messing around, but Kes said it wasn’t the threat so much as the kind of student she was, and made me think of my family, and told me I should be getting As—’
‘He thinks you could get As?’ Kiaru said at the same time that Alisha said: ‘You realized it was a waste of time.’
‘Maybe. Or maybe I just wimped out.’
‘You’re a good friend to have tried,’ she said.
I shook my head. ‘A good friend would have confessed.’
‘A good friend wouldn’t want you to get expelled because they did something asinine,’ Kiaru said.
Alisha shrugged, like, maybe that isn’t a bad point, and I felt worn out all of a sudden, because I had no idea what asinine meant, only that it was something horrible he was assigning to Ti, and as they examined me with intelligent eyes through their tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, the frames so similar I wondered if they had picked them out together, I felt lonelier and more confused than ever.
Because for so long I’d sworn it was everyone else that was wrong about Ti, but what if it was me?