Zodiac Girls: Brat Princess

by Cathy Hopkins

  At one point I glanced over at him to see how upset Mario looked. He wasn’t even watching! He was looking out the window as if there was something more interesting going on out there! I. Could. Not. Believe. It. So I picked up the nearest bowl and threw it at him, being careful that it went over his shoulder and hit the wall (I didn’t want to get him too angry), but close enough to make him look. He did duck, but he didn’t seem worried.

  I threw a few more bowls at the walls and being plastic they bounced off, not that Mario cared. He was looking out the window again. And then he got a newspaper out from somewhere in his wet suit, sat down, crossed his legs and began reading it like he was sitting outside a café in the south of blooming France! I looked around to see what else I could trash from the mess in front of me, but I seemed to have thrown just about everything I could.

  “Finished?” asked Mario after a while.

  I surveyed the destruction in front of me and felt smug. Good job, I thought. That will show him not to mess with me. “Yeah. I think I might have done. Now. Let that be a lesson to you.”

  Mario pointed at a cupboard in the corner of the room. “To me? Oh no. I don’t think so. Dr Cronus definitely said that the lesson was yours this morning. So. Mops in there. Buckets are in there, too. Washing-up liquid, cleaning fluids are at the back of the kitchen under the sinks. Now you clear up this mess and, when the place is ship-shape, you can move on.”

  My stomach suddenly growled a really loud growl, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten since yesterday.

  “But… I… I haven’t even had any breakfast.”

  “And who’s to blame for that, do you think? Who made this mess? It’s in your horoscope that you have to learn that actions have consequences, so you aren’t going to get anything to eat until you’ve cleared up what you’ve done in here. You get me?”

  “Isn’t there anything NICE in my horoscope?”

  “Depends on how you play it. What you make of what life gives you.”

  “Pff. Where’s Mr O? He’s supposed to be my guardian. I’m sure he wouldn’t like it if you didn’t feed me.” I pouted. It was worth a try. I used to be able to wind Daddy round my little finger when I pouted, although that was a long time ago.

  “Mr O has left the premises for the time being. He isn’t too happy with the way you’ve rejected him, I can tell you that much, so don’t be expecting any help from him too soon, not unless you change your attitude, that is. You get me?”

  I went to kick a wall.

  “Uh-uh… I think you get me all right,” he said, and walked over to the door where he produced a key. “Now what you probably need is some chill time, so I’m going to give you that. Think things over while you’re in here. You like it or not, you’re going to stay here at this lodge until we say you can go, and either you play along and make life sweet, or you be difficult and you make life hard. Your choice. Always will be.”

  “Bully.”

  “I’m no bully. And I’m not the one who had the tantrum here. Now there’s water in the tap there if you get thirsty and,” he got up and had a look in the bottom of the pan, “ there’s just a scraping of porridge left, too. In the meantime, the sooner you clear up, the sooner you get out of here.”

  My answer was to pick up another bowl and throw it at him as he left the room. Once again it missed and hit the door as it closed behind him, leaving me alone in a porridge-covered room.

  There was only one thing for it and I took a deep breath and let rip. “Er… WAGHHHHHHHHHH.” I yelled. “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAgh.”

  I waited. Someone was bound to come when they heard that. It was awesome, even by my standards. Someone always came running when I really let rip. But no. Not even the sound of a footstep creeping to the door to listen to what I was up to as had happened so often when I’d had a tantrum at my old schools.

  I picked up a chair and hurled it against the door. It kebonged back into the room as, like the bowls, even the furniture was made of plastic. I made a good commotion, though. That ought to bring them running, I thought.

  Nothing.

  I tried wailing again. I really did feel mad. But once again – nothing. It was as if they’d forgotten about me. Or lost interest.

  Outside, it was starting to get lighter. I ran to the window and looked out. We were in the middle of nowhere. In front was a landscape of hills and fields, shrubs and trees.

  It was my first day. I’d been up barely two hours and it wasn’t even eight o’clock yet. How on earth was I going to survive for a whole month here?

  Chapter Nine

  Routine

  I soon got into the routine. Not that they had won. I had no choice, not if I was going to survive, and I am a survivor. It was play along and be their little Zodiac Girl or starve. Play along or freeze. Play along or be even more miserable than I was on my first night and I thought at the time that that took the prize. But I was wrong. Things got worse and my time in hell was like this:

  5.30 a.m. Wake-up call. Get up. Yeah. Five-thirty in the morning!!!!! I used to think that there was only one five-thirty in the day and that was in the afternoon. Now I knew different. Every morning there was a little note from Mr O explaining various aspects of my birth chart and how they were going to appear that day. In other words, outlining what nasty surprises I had in store – there certainly weren’t any perks to being a Zodiac Girl, that was for sure.

  5.30 – 6 a.m. Wash. For the first time in my life, I have to share soap and toothpaste. It was so disgusting. The soap smells of antiseptic. Yerk. I was sooooo missing my Goddess products. The most mortifying thing, though, was the first time I washed my hair. There was no conditioner and then Mario wouldn’t let me get my straightening iron from my suitcase, which was still locked away.

  “Let it dry naturally,” he said, so revealing just how cruel a torturer he was.

  I felt like my world had come to an end. Curly hair. I’d rather die. In the end I had no option but to let it dry on its own but I shoved it back into a plait before anyone could see how horrible it looked. Then I wore my uniform baseball cap to cover it up further. And mean Selene wouldn’t give me any solution for my blue contacts so I had to go au naturel. Brown eyes. And my nails. I can’t even look at the sorry sight they have become after a week of no manicures. There was no end to my shame.

  6 – 7 a.m. Breakfast – if you could call it that but I had to eat something. Each night I dreamt of freshly baked croissants and home-made raspberry jam, blueberry muffins, cheese toasties and Danish pastries with hot chocolate. Sadly, dreams don’t satisfy your hunger, so I had to eat what there was. Of all the things in this boot camp, having to eat horse food is the second worst (curly hair is the first).

  7 – 8 a.m. Hike around the grounds. Truly. Some days it was raining, one day it even snowed, but that didn’t stop old Sergeant Macho Mario making us march like we were his personal army. And not just march. He made all of us carry heavy backpacks. Every day. In all kind of weathers. The CHEEK of it. It was completely and utterly and totally the most miserable activity I had ever done in my entire life. But there was no getting out of it. Not if I wanted to live. Or eat. Or sleep with a pillow.

  One day, I pretended to play along with the “planets here as people” idea and I asked Mario how many planets there were in astrology and how many were here in physical form. “Ten,” he replied. I did my maths. I’d met only five of them. I surmised that the other five might be nicer. Mario said that they could be if you got them on the right day, but they weren’t predominant in my chart this month. He has a sneaky answer for everything. I sooo hate him.

  8 – 10 a.m. Chores. Yeah. Me, Leonora Hedley-Dent had to do chores. Cleaning. Peeling potatoes. Polishing furniture. And actually it was something to do and made the long days go quicker.

  10 – 12 noon. Lessons with Dr Croniebum. I don’t really know what he was droning on about most days as I tuned him out. More about the ten planets, but I wasn’t interested since
Mario had told me the other five (Venus, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Jupiter) weren’t going to appear like superheroes to make things better. Dr Cronus could make me sit there, but I didn’t have to take it in. All that stuff that Mr O had been on about on the first night, about me being a Zodiac Girl, as far as I was concerned, it was a one-way ticket to Loserville.

  12 – 1 p.m. Lunch. Lunch! Hah. Usually soup and a bit of bread. If you were lucky and hadn’t had the “privilege” taken away.

  1 – 4 p.m. Gardening. Back out in all the elements. Raking leaves. Digging over flower beds. My hands got blisters on them from the spades and did anyone care? Not a bit.

  4 – 6 p.m. Counselling with Miss Bongo from Bongoland herself, Selene Luna in the dining room. She had a variety of methods which entailed dancing about like trees and pretending to be the sea. I asked her what the point of that was and she said it was to get in touch with the free spirit, the nature child that lives within us all. I told her and her nature child to take a running jump off the nearest cliff, which made Jake laugh a lot. He seems to think I am very funny – like a natural comedian. Pff. Just shows what he knows. I was being deadly serious.

  Another task she got us to do was to walk about the room with a partner while one of you closes their eyes and the other guides. She said it was to encourage working as a team – something that I needed to learn having seen in my birth chart that I was as a double Leo who wanted my own way. Birth chart, smurf chart, I thought as I steered Mark into a wall – he got a nosebleed.

  Well, serves him right. The silence thing he does annoys me. Lynn had filled me in on his story. She was good for all the goss. His dad had lost his job a couple of years ago and his family were poor, so he got into shoplifting so that his family could eat and his younger sister could have presents on birthdays and at Christmas. Like, boo hoo, not my problem, I thought.

  They were a bunch of losers. All their problems stemmed from being broke, including Marilyn’s. Her story was no biggie either. Her dad had left. It was an ugly divorce and her mum and Marilyn had to move out of their posh house and live in a smaller place. Worst thing for her, according to Lynn, was not being able to wear her designer gear any more as they couldn’t afford it. Now that I can relate to, I thought as Lynn filled me in on the rest of the story about how Marilyn had become “difficult” and started acting the tough girl at school. Hah! I could show her difficult at school! I knew that murder hadn’t even come into it! She was just a classic case of the divorce doldrums and I’d seen a hundred of those. Saddo, I thought. At my old school, you were the odd one out if your parents were still together. In Lynn’s case, her dad had died and her mum remarried. She didn’t like her stepdad so she rebelled, and, like me had been expelled from her last school.

  “Sometimes I wish I’d done it differently,” she confessed one night after we’d collapsed into bed. “I’m not totally stupid and I can see that, in the end, the person who’s suffered most is me. Changing schools meant leaving mates and now I ain’t got any. Sometimes I feel lonely. In fact being in ’ere is the closest I’ve got to ’aving mates in ages.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “I’ve lost a lot of friends along the way, too. My best mate is my little dog now. Coco.”

  Lynn smiled. “I’ve always wanted a pet. My mum always promised I could ’ave one if I behaved. Trouble was, I never did.”

  Jake’s background was the saddest of all. He had a younger brother who was ill and all the family’s money went on medical bills. Jake had stolen a car and tried to sell it to raise funds. I almost felt sorry for him and the others when their tales of woe came out, but I steeled myself and put up an inner wall just in time. Reminded myself that I didn’t let anyone get too close. It only caused pain if I did. I knew that from past experience. And anyhow, I could fix their problems in a second by lending them some dosh from my private savings account. I’d ask for interest, of course. It could all be so easily sorted. I even offered at a return plus twenty per cent which I thought was quite generous considering the circumstances.

  None of them took up the offer, so I pushed down the sympathy I’d fleetingly felt for them. All their problems could be resolved. Not like mine. None of their stories was as tragic as mine, but they’d never get to hear it, not one of them, not even Lynn.

  6 – 7 p.m. Supper, which was rice and vegetables or baked potato and vegetables. Vegetables! Yeee-uck. I so don’t do vegetables. Or at least didn’t used to. I used to think that broccoli was for losers. And now I have to eat it most nights because, if I don’t, I’d get nothing else. I tried not to think about Tigsy and the stay I missed at the fabocious hotel in Paris. She’d have been eating the best of everything. Dinky dishes on divine designer plates, not this plastic rubbish they use here. And to think of some of the meals I had sent back because they were too cold or too hot or too slimy! I’d kill for them now. Even an avocado would be welcome.

  7 – 10 p.m. Recreation time, meaning more misery in the way of sports activities and workshops, sometimes with Mr O and sometimes with Macho Mario. No real recreation. Like shopping. Or TV. Or eating chocolate or anything that reminded me of home. Mr O was distinctly cooler with me after the first day when I tried to run away, and he kept muttering under his breath about “a waste of time,” and “never in all his days had he met with such ingratitude.” Pfff, I thought. He is so used to being the centre of attention, which is why he doesn’t like it if someone disses him.

  I went along with the routine because I had to, although every day felt like it lasted an eternity. I even had to ask permission to go to the bathroom! But there was no escape. I played along and they thought I’d given in. Idiots! As if. I hadn’t. Not in my head I hadn’t. Someone would pay. And when I got out, I’d soon show Mum and Dad how much their little betrayal had really cost them!

  Of course I did my best to rebel in the first couple of days. Every trick in the book. But these guys were good, they were very good and it was going to take me some time to work out how to get the better of them. I tried feigning a heart attack, a vomit attack, headache, migraine, but they just yawned like they’d seen it all before and – having witnessed Jake’s nut-boy antics and Mark’s prolonged silence, I guessed that they had.

  In the first week, I went without some meals – like when I discovered I had to actually help cook the food. All I said when asked to chop some onions was “Excuse me, do I look like anyone’s slave?” and I wasn’t allowed any dinner! My clothes soon began to feel looser through lack of food.

  I went without my pillows as a punishment for running away on my first day and I went without hot water for starting the porridge fight, which was so unfair because I did clean up in the end – after about eight hours, in fact, which is something of a record for getting me to do something.

  For the first three days, Mario insisted that I was kept apart from the others and made me sit in a stone circle in the main hallway. On my own. For hours on end. He told me that he was actually being kind because some inmates had to sit in a stone circle outside in the cold and that’s what I’d have to do if I didn’t co-operate. And that’s when I decided I’d play along for a while. It was sooooooooooo boooooooooooring in that stupid circle, but being chucked out into the freezing December weather would have been even worse. I finally had to give in and say, whatever. I decided that I would play the game. Whatever it took to get out of here and back to my normal life.

  Some evenings there were more messages from Mr O at the end of my bed. Always about the stars, stuff like – today Mars has been at an angle to Saturn. Or, Pluto was square to the Sun or trident or sextile – with bits of advice thrown in. I asked the others again about the zodiac thing and they knew nothing about it. None of them was a Zodiac Girl or Boy, that was for sure. Seeing as they were my only allies in there, I didn’t pursue it. I didn’t want to be any more of an odd girl out than I already was. I acted like I was going along with it to Mr O though, and smiled and thanked him for his kind messages – then I to
re them up and put them in the bin.

  One thing I swore to myself and that was that no-one would see me cry. I’d never let them know that they had upset me. And one of these days, I would get my revenge. And then they’d be sorry.

  One of the weekly tasks in counselling was to write a letter home. My first one went like this:

  GET ME OUT OF HERE!!! NOW!!!!!

  But then Lunie Pants Selene took a look at it and told me that I had to do it again. “Dig deep, my little flower,” she said. “Tell them how you really feel.”

  So I wrote this:

  Mum and Dad, (I wrote Dear Mum and Dad then realized that they weren’t dear, not to me. Not any more. So I crossed the “dear” out.) GET ME OUT OF HERE NOW!!!! I HATE YOU. I am locked up with a bunch of crazy people who think that they are stars!!!

  That letter got vetoed as well.

  “You asked me to tell dig deep and I did,” I said. “That’s how I feel.”

  Lunie made me do a third one.

  Mr and Mrs Hedley-Dent,

  I have been instructed that I have to write you a letter as a weekly task. I do this under pressure, like everything else in this cold miserable godforsaken place, because I have learned that if I don’t do as I am told then I am punished or starved. I HATE you more than ever and can’t believe you have made me suffer in this way. When I get out of this prison sentence you have put me through, I will be going to live with someone else. I disown you as my parents. And I will sell my story to the papers so that everyone knows what horrible people you are. And then you’ll be sorry. So there.

  Look after Coco.

  From Leonora Hedley-Dent

  “I am soooo going to make my parents pay for this,” I said to Lynn at the end of week one as we went to the gym for sports activities.