Five seconds. Four. Three. I’ve left it too late to run, and that would be cowardly anyway. She’s almost at the tree. I jump out, hands in the air.
“It’s okay!” I scream. It’s humiliating to hear how panicky I sound. “It’s Scarlett! Don’t hit me!”
twelve
THE LARA CROFT OF TEENAGE GIRLS
We stare at each other for a long moment. God, Taylor looks scary holding that branch, with her muscles bulging. She’s wearing a white tank top with the wide straps of a sports bra showing at her neck, and loose green combat trousers hanging off her hips. I can see a flash of an incredibly flat and muscular stomach showing between the T-shirt and the trousers. She looks like a U.S. Marine, or an action heroine—the Lara Croft of teenage girls. After what feels like hours, she lets the branch fall to the ground. I’m very relieved to hear it land.
“How did you know I was here?” I ask.
“I could see your T-shirt,” she says. “Next time you come sneaking through the woods, wear something that blends in better than bright red, okay?”
“I wasn’t sneaking,” I say indignantly. “You were making a racket I could hear from miles away. No wonder I wanted to see what was going on.”
“I wasn’t that loud,” Taylor says, but I have her on the defensive now.
“Yes, you were. You were grunting like a wild boar.”
“I was not!” She’s furious. Her eyes narrow. “So what are you doing here? I expect you’ve got a key to the gate, because you’re, like, the granddaughter of the stately home, or something?”
“There’s a gate?”
Taylor jerks her head back, indicating the far side of the woods. “Back there,” she says. “Don’t tell me you climbed the wall.”
“Oh right,” I say sarcastically, “like you’re the only person who can climb anything, I suppose. At least I didn’t give myself rope burn.”
“I only got rope burn because I was coming down fast to see who was spying on me.”
“I wasn’t spying on you!”
“Right. That’s why you walked right out into the open and said ‘hello,’ I guess.”
“Oh, forget it.” I’m angry too, because she’s caught me. I suppose I was spying on her a bit. I turn on my heel to go.
“Wait a minute,” Taylor says sharply. “You’d better not tell anyone about seeing me here.”
If she’d just asked me nicely, or not said anything at all, just taken it for granted that I wouldn’t tell on her . . . that would have been fine. But the threatening tone of her voice makes me want to kick her in the shins.
Instead I just walk away.
“Don’t you dare tell anyone!” Taylor shouts after me. “I mean, it, Scarlett!”
“I’d cross my fingers if I were you!” I shout back.
Of course I’m not going to run to a teacher and tell her that Taylor’s climbing a rope in the woods. What kind of suck-up does she think I am? But equally, I’m not going to reassure her if she’s going to be that nasty and suspicious.
She can just sweat it out for a while, till she realizes I’m not going to tell. I hope it makes her really nervous.
Serves her right for being such a grumpy cow.
I look at the envelopes, lying on the bed next to me. One is bulging slightly. Well, it would. Two hundred and fifty pounds, in ten-pound notes, make a pretty big wodge of cash. And the other one . . . the other one is practically flat. Again, that makes sense. All it has inside is one folded sheet of paper.
I still haven’t decided whether I’m going to do this or not.
I pick the two white envelopes up and slide them into a bigger one, a brown manila envelope, fiddling the metal tongue through the little hole, pushing it down to close the flap. And my brain slides off suddenly into one of its weird tangents, the way it does when I’ve been really good with my diet and I get a bit dizzy and feel like I’m floating a foot off whatever surface I’m supposedly on.
Why are they called “manila” envelopes? my brain is asking. Did they get invented in Manila? And where is Manila, anyway? Is it some town in Portugal? I’m assuming it’s a place, but it might be a person, mightn’t it? Some man named Carlos Manila who invented brown envelopes?
Oh God, it’s like my head is getting sucked into a spin cycle. . . . I can’t write anymore, my hand is shaking. . . .
Okay, I’m back. I did that meditation exercise my therapist taught me. I visualized a washing machine slowing down. I completely focus on watching it through the little glass window. I see the drum. It’s making that clanking noise as it turns slower and slower. The spin cycle’s ending. The drum comes to a complete halt. I watch it for a minute to make sure it doesn’t move again.
Phew.
It’s not exactly hard to see how nervous this is making me. Is it a bad idea? Should I just undo the manila envelope, rip open the one with the cash, and put it back in my wallet? And shred the other envelope?
I think about that, but the trouble is, when I imagine that picture it makes me feel even worse. Even more panicky and spin-cycley. And guilty. Much, much more guilty.
And as my therapist says, if there’s one emotion that’s really toxic for me, it’s guilt.
thirteen
“IT WASN’T YOUR FAULT”
God, I’m cross.
I’ve climbed back over the wall, which I didn’t want to do: I wanted to ramble round the woods some more. Maybe take a leaf out of Taylor’s book and climb a tree or two. But then if she caught a glimpse of me through the trees (she’s right, this red T-shirt isn’t exactly inconspicuous) and accused me of copying her, that would do my head in. It was bad enough being called a sneak without her adding “copycat” to the list of insults to throw at me.
I’m furious with Taylor. And I’m jealous of her drive and dedication. I don’t have that iron discipline: if there’s no one else there, I can’t muster up the energy to make myself exercise. One of the reasons I depended on Ricky so much.
I’m more cross with myself than I am with Taylor, I realize. Because she’s doing something she really enjoys, and I’m not. I go through the main school entrance and up to the Lower Sixth C classroom, thinking that, if I can’t climb a rope, I can at least get my Latin grammar book and spend an hour learning some irregular verbs. I really need to make a huge effort in Latin, or I’ll get chucked out of the class.
The classroom is completely empty. Outside I can hear the shrill cries of the third-formers at their skipping games. The first-formers are squeaking excitedly as they play French Elastic, in which two girls stand facing each other with a long loop of elastic round their ankles as a third jumps onto it and pulls it into increasingly complicated patterns. And, drumming along below the high-pitched screaming, there’s the endless repetitive bounce of tennis balls thudding against the high stone terrace wall, punctuated by quick-fire rounds of what sounds like applause, as girls take turns to see how many times they can clap before catching the ball again. I know. Look, I never claimed Wakefield Hall was the height of metropolitan sophistication, did I?
The reason these incredibly old-fashioned schoolgirl games have survived here, as if Wakefield Hall were a living museum dedicated to the 1950s, is because there is nothing to do in the outside world between four p.m. when school gets out, and curfew time. Wakefield, the nearest suburb, is half an hour’s walk down the main drive, and frankly, being a suburb, it lacks decent shops, cinemas, and anything that would really tempt a teenage girl. You have to get a tube for that, and by the time you’ve got to somewhere more interesting, it’s five o’clock, say, and you have to leave by six on the dot to be sure of being back at seven for dinner. You really, really don’t want to miss curfew. Grandmother—Lady Wakefield—throws you straight into solitary and makes you live on bread and water for a month. (I’m only slightly exaggerating.)
So a lot of girls just walk down the drive and have low-fat skim-milk cappuccinos in one of the Wakefield coffee shops. And those are the daring ones. Mostly girls just s
tock up on sweets and chocolate bars (and illicit drink, I’m sure) to vary the dull monotony of school food, and head right back up the drive again.
We do exchanges with the local boys’ private school, for plays, sports, stuff like that, and the boarders can get weekend passes to stay with friends or family, but the bottom line is that at seven p.m., it’s lockdown in Wakefield Hall Maximum Security Prison. All the day girls shoot out as soon as they can, unless they have orchestra or sports practice or something. Leaving the hapless boarders to entertain themselves as best they can with rousing rounds of French Elastic and Wall Ball.
Believe me, no one can pity us anymore than we pity ourselves.
I know the boarders have parties in their dormitories. I’ve heard the rumors. But it’s not like anyone’s going to invite me, is it? Having the headmistress’s granddaughter over while you swill down cheap cider and watch naughty videos after lights-out isn’t exactly a good security idea. So I sit alone in my room at Aunt Gwen’s every night, staring at my computer screen, ignoring all the hate e-mails as best I can and downloading videos off YouTube. My Latin may be crap, but I’m still studying more than I ever did in my life, out of sheer tedium.
I wander over to the window and put my face to the glass. Some girls from the Lower Sixth—Meena, Jessica, and Susan, the class intellectuals—are clustered under the weeping willow tree on a slight hilly rise. They’re studying together. Bloody swots. Don’t they ever do anything fun? I think of the shiny, glossy St. Tabby’s girls by the fountain, studying Advanced Grooming and Flirtation Skills, and I almost get a wave of nostalgia for how smooth and gorgeous they looked. At least at St. Tabby’s there was something to aspire to. Here, the cleverer you are, the more you seem to feel the need to cultivate the grease in your hair and consider your blackheads a sign of extreme intellect, rather than God’s way of telling you that you should get a better face wash.
Behind the three brainiacs, the trees gather densely, completely concealing the hedge maze so beloved by the younger girls, who spend hours chasing each other through it. I used to do that, too, in the summers we spent here visiting my grandmother, when school was out. I’d have friends round and we’d explore the grounds all day, taking sandwiches for lunch and coming back at sunset grass-stained, exhausted, and blissfully happy. That was when my parents were alive, of course. I haven’t used the word happy to describe my emotional state much since the accident.
God, I’m being maudlin now. Things are bad enough without me “dwelling,” as my grandmother would say, and making them even worse. She does know what she’s talking about every so often.
I turn away from the windows, walk over to my desk, and flick open the hinged top, which is pitted and scarred inside by generations of girls who’ve scratched and inked things onto the wood. But instead of fishing out my Latin books, I stand there, staring at the envelope lying on top of the pile.
Quite apart from the fact that it wasn’t there the last time I opened my desk—putting books away at the end of my last class—there’s something about it that’s immediately perplexing. The writing on the front says Scarlett Wakefield in the oddest printing I’ve ever seen outside of a book. It looks like a robot wrote it. Or an android.
I may have been watching too many American sci-fi TV programs on my computer.
I hesitate for a moment, though I don’t know why. Then I pick it up. It’s sealed, and I need to rip it open. My heart is pounding for some reason. Inside is a single sheet of paper, with four words printed on it in the same weird typeface. Just four words. But they are the four words I have most longed to hear, the words no one ever said to me, and just seeing them printed on the white sheet of paper actually, I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, brings tears to my eyes.
It wasn’t your fault.
I sniff and look out the window and then back at the paper again, just to make sure I’m not hallucinating its message.
It wasn’t your fault.
I sniff again, and take a deep breath. Outside, the screams and giggles and tennis-ball-bounce-and-clap are continuing, just as before, as if the world hadn’t changed for me in the space of a moment.
I fold the paper up the way it was before and slide it back into the now jagged-edged envelope. My head is spinning, but I feel like I have a sense of purpose now.
I’ll find out who left this for me if I die trying.
fourteen
INCREDIBLY HOT GUY
I tear out of the classroom and actually burn rubber on the soles of my trainers as I do a scorching ninety-degree turn on the wooden floor of the corridor. I take the stairs not two but three at a time, and when a gaggle of twelve-year-olds on the last flight are coming up as I’m flying down, I actually do that thing you see in films: I jump onto the banister and let my jeans-clad bum be pulled down it by gravity and the cunning sideways tilt of my buttocks, which gives me extra speed. Thank God the banister is old and highly polished. I’m going so fast I’d be worried about splinters otherwise.
The twelve-year-olds gasp in shock and awe as I whiz past them. I’m high. I’m flying. I’m Scarlett Wakefield and someone else besides me thinks that it wasn’t my fault! I grab the newel post with my left hand, just as I’m about to hit it, and vault off the banister, hitting the ground running.
“Scarlett Wakefield!” calls a teacher from behind me.
“That’s my name!” I sing. “Thank you for caring!”
I don’t think she hears me, because I’m long gone by then, out the door and zooming around the side of the school, through the courtyard, scattering rope-skippers, sending the two French Elastic players with the elastic round their ankles tripping as they swivel round to see who’s sprinting as if she has the devil on her heels. Past the weeping willow, where the swots turn to stare at me—they’ve probably never had a good run in their lives. Round the outside of the maze, skirting Lime Walk, and onto the Great Lawn, aka the hockey pitches, which are still green and grassy, not the slicks of mud they’ll be after Sharon Persaud and her psycho friends have had a go at it with their cleats and killer sticks. I tumble down the steep slope from Lime Walk, and as I hit the lawn I use the momentum I’ve built up and run hard, one two three lunge and push into a handspring, which has such a good landing that I go mad and throw in a bounder straight afterward, which, to be honest, I barely land without doing myself a serious injury.
Three months off gymnastics, and I’m tumbling on grass in trainers. I must be insane. Especially doing a bounder. It’s like a handspring, only you jump into it with both feet together, which is much harder than lunging and kicking into it. People who have freakishly strong legs don’t have any problems with bounders. But if you don’t, you have to work really hard to make it over without landing ignominiously on your bum. When my hands hit the grass, I shove the ground away with everything I’ve got, popping my shoulders as much as I can, and it’s just enough to get me over and back to my feet again.
My head is spinning, and it’s not the tumbling that’s done it. I am high on pure joy. There isn’t a drug in the world that’s worth one gram of my own adrenaline (I didn’t make that up; it’s a Ricky-ism).
Also, I’m very relieved that I didn’t just break an ankle. I stand there, panting, when I hear clapping. I turn round, and a rook flies out of one of the linden trees, cawing loudly. Oh. No applause. Just a bird beating its wings. My shoulders sag. I was actually hoping, pathetically, that someone had seen me and spontaneously burst into—
I look further down the avenue of trees, and see him. That gardener boy again, piling leaves into a wheelbarrow. Only he’s put down his rake, and he’s walking toward me, down the slope. Clapping.
“Hey,” I say, still catching my breath.
He’s beaming at me. He has a lovely smile. And I know this is going to sound crazy, but, as he gets closer, I suddenly realize that he’s drop-dead gorgeous. He has butterscotch skin, a head of short black curls so tight they look as if they were each made by winding them round a knitting
needle, and eyes of such a light, bright hazel that they seem almost gold. I remember when I met him before I thought that eye color was a trick of the light. Well, it isn’t. His eyes really are that golden. He must be biracial, with hair like that and skin that toffee color.
Wow. I stand there and goggle at him. I can’t believe I didn’t notice before how handsome he was. His teeth are incredibly white against his caramel skin. I feel very self-conscious about mine by comparison. And suddenly I’m aware of how old and faded my red T-shirt is, how unfashionable my jeans and trainers are, and that when I was upside down he must have seen a bit of my tummy, which isn’t half as flat and toned as Taylor’s is. It’s genetics, I know, but I’d still kill to have a flatter tummy.
“I didn’t know you did gymnastics,” he says, and then looks a bit embarrassed himself. “Well, why would I? That’s a stupid thing to say. . . .”
He trails off, and I find myself jumping in to keep the conversation going. “Ever since I was small.”
“You must have won a lot of prizes.”
I laugh. “Oh, I’m not that good. Anyway, that was nothing. You should see me when I’ve got a proper spring floor to bounce off.”
And then I catch myself, realizing that I sound like I’m boasting. I am boasting. What’s he supposed to say to that?
“Well, I thought it looked really cool,” he says.
It’s a warm day, and he’s wearing loose jeans and a bright green T-shirt that’s pretty much plastered to him. He’s worked up a sweat, raking leaves and pushing the wheel-barrow, and I can see that though he’s pretty lean, he’s not skinny. I remember noticing his forearms before, which are bulging and corded from hard physical labor. But now I look up and see how wide his shoulders are, how capped they are with muscle.
I realize I’m staring, and I feel a blush flooding my cheeks.
“You’re all pink,” he comments, smiling again. “You were really racing along there.”
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