Secrets at St Jude’s: Rebel Girl

by Carmen Reid

  Penny, who had been running down to tackle Niffy herself, couldn’t resist sneering at Niffy with the words, ‘Yeah, you may look like a boy, but you don’t play like one.’

  Then she ran off up the field, hoping to score a fourth goal.

  Niffy stood still, knocked breathless with hurt.

  No matter how many nice things her friends had said about her hair, this one insult had undone all their good work.

  It had to be true.

  She did look like a boy. Her lanky frame and broad shoulders, topped with this curly mop-head, was horribly boyish.

  ‘Pay no attention!’ Amy urged. ‘That girl is just a total cow!’

  Niffy put her hands up to her head to smooth down the short curls. The haircut still felt so raw and strange. Even worse, it felt cold. The winter wind now whistled round her neck and got in around her ears and under her collar in a way it had never done before.

  In bed last night, Niffy had gone through all the options, including: somehow finding the money to pay for hair extensions; wearing a hat at all times; even buying a wig. But she had come to the conclusion that she didn’t want to attract any more attention. She was just going to have to grin and bear it until her hair grew back.

  The fact that hair grew at a pitiful centimetre a month was something she wished that she didn’t know.

  ‘Foul!’ Niffy heard someone further up the pitch call, so the games teacher blew her whistle and play stopped for a few moments. Enough time for Amy to come over again and slap Niffy playfully on the back.

  ‘Look, it’s not as if she’s so flamin’ gorgeous that the whole world falls at her feet,’ she said, gesturing towards Penny. ‘You know what you have to do, don’t you?’

  When Niffy shook her head, Amy said, ‘Your joke-shop stash. Don’t use it all on the Neb. Surely you’ve got something nice and juicy you can use on her?’ Amy shot another glare in the direction of the B-H.

  At this suggestion, Niffy’s face brightened up again. ‘Yeah! You’re right . . . I’ll take a good look through the selection. See what would suit best.’

  ‘Gina! Phone!’

  Gina was in the study room, half-way through the evening’s revision when she heard the shout.

  Phone calls at the boarding house were rare. There was only one pay phone, which was almost always occupied, and most parents, friends and boyfriends either emailed or called on mobiles during the hours the girls were allowed to use them.

  Gina left her desk and hurried to the little cupboard under a flight of stairs where the pay phone was housed.

  Picking up the receiver, she hoped this wasn’t her mom calling back to say there had been some sort of problem. Maybe the big deal wasn’t going to go through after all.

  ‘Hi?’ she said.

  ‘Is that the lovely Miss Winklemann-Peterson?’ asked a warm and teasing voice which Gina recognized immediately.

  ‘Dermot!’ she said with a giggle. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I have managed to tear myself away from my books long enough to give you a call,’ he replied.

  ‘Did it take you ages to get through?’

  ‘No, first time lucky – all the good little St Jude’s boarders must be swotting hard, not wasting their evenings chatting to terrible influences like me.’

  ‘How’s your revision going?’ she asked.

  ‘Terrible. Horrible. I see a row of Cs . . . even Ds . . . I might even fail history.’

  ‘You will not,’ she assured him. ‘You’re very smart and hard-working.’

  ‘And good-looking?’ he wheedled. ‘Please tell me I’m good-looking too, otherwise I’m going to cry.’

  ‘You’re very, very good-looking,’ she told him, but with another giggle.

  ‘I’ve had an idea. I’ve thought of a way we just might be able to get together away from the clutches of the café.’

  ‘A date?’ Gina asked excitedly. ‘Did you get a Saturday off? Can we go to the movies?’

  ‘Ermmmm . . . well no, not exactly. Saturdays off are a bit tricky at the moment. But this Friday . . .’

  ‘I can’t go out on Fridays,’ she reminded him.

  ‘Well, what about if my mum comes and picks you up and brings you to my house for a revision session? Do you think Mrs Knebworth might agree to that? Surely, even the dragon lady would find it hard to object to that?’

  ‘A revision session?’ Gina was disappointed. ‘That doesn’t exactly sound like fun.’

  ‘We’ll do some revision . . . but then we’ll have some fun. I promise.’

  ‘The movies?’ she wheedled.

  ‘I’m supposed to be saving all my money,’ he protested.

  ‘Dermot! I could pay.’

  ‘No, no, definitely not. Come over, pleeeeeeeease. I’ll get my mum to phone the prison warden.’

  ‘Well . . . OK. But not hours of revision. Do you promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  Although she had the receiver tightly pressed to her ear, Gina could still hear something very alarming suddenly coming from not far outside the phone booth.

  It sounded like a long, piercing, blood-curdling scream.

  ‘What was that?’ Dermot asked, as he’d obviously heard it too.

  ‘Dunno,’ Gina replied. ‘Think I’ll go and find out.’

  ‘Are you armed?’

  ‘Don’t be crazy!’

  But she hurried out of the phone booth and joined the throng of girls who were rushing through the corridor towards the door of the Neb’s sitting room.

  ‘It came from in here,’ one older girl said. ‘Should we go in?’

  She knocked on the closed door. ‘Mrs Knebworth, are you OK?’ she asked.

  The hallway was filling up by the moment, girls coming down the stairs, along the corridors, piling out of the study room. Word was racing around that a hideous scream had just come from the Neb’s private sitting room.

  All at once the door flew open and Mrs Knebworth stood there, red-faced, with an expression of absolute fury across her face.

  ‘Whose is this?’ she demanded.

  Her arm shot out and there, dangling from her hand, was a hideous-looking puppet. It was green and black with a tumble of hair. Its mouth was wide open and it had spiky-looking teeth which seemed ready to bite.

  Its arms were held high above its head and there was some sort of plastic contraption on them, as if it was designed to attach somewhere.

  ‘Whose is this?’ Mrs Knebworth repeated. ‘Does anyone know? Is anyone prepared to own up?’

  No one said a word.

  ‘Someone attached this horrible thing to my very own personal and private loo,’ she added. ‘I lifted the lid and just about had a heart attack!’

  Although these words were uttered in a deadly fierce tone of voice, a little ripple of giggles broke out at the idea of Mrs Knebworth being confronted by an evil toilet puppet.

  ‘I will find out who put this there,’ Mrs Knebworth said, her face set in a deep scowl, ‘and I will punish the culprit. No doubt about it.’

  She narrowed her eyes, directed another long, penetrating glare at the entire crowd in the hallway, then turned back into her sitting room and slammed the door shut behind her.

  Gina looked around the electrified crowd and saw Niffy standing beside Amy. Some sort of look of understanding seemed to pass between them and Gina guessed immediately that Niffy was involved.

  As Niffy turned from the hall into the corridor, other girls seemed to throng around her.

  ‘Did you . . .?’

  ‘Do you know . . .?’

  ‘What was that . . .?’

  The questions were being asked in whispers.

  ‘That is the JimLaBim Toilet Screamer 130,’ Niffy answered quietly. ‘That’s all I’m saying.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE MINUTE HAND was moving towards the hour on the big assembly room clock. Min stared up at the clock in horror. Any moment now and time would be up, the exam would be over. She looked down at her pages
again and saw that they were blank.

  Blank!! What was happening? What was going on? She picked up her pen . . . but there were no questions. She looked back up at the clock.

  Her heart began to hammer in panic . . . then she opened her eyes and once again found herself awake in her dormitory, with a thudding heart, in the small hours of the morning.

  She glanced over at her bedside alarm clock: 2.37 a.m. Great. She’d only had about three hours of sleep and she knew she would have to get up and have another wander around the boarding house before she could even think of getting back into bed again.

  It was what had worked the other night. She’d gone downstairs to the Upper Fifth sitting room, drunk a mug of weak tea and flicked through some back issues of New Scientist magazine until she’d finally felt drowsy enough to come back to bed.

  She would go downstairs and do that again. Anything was better than lying on her bed in the pitch darkness, worrying herself silly about the exams while she listened to everyone else sleeping contentedly.

  Min tied her dressing gown in place and put her feet into her slippers. Then she began the creaky tiptoe down the boarding-house staircase.

  Through the dimly lit corridors she travelled until she got to the sitting-room door. Only as she reached out for the handle and began to turn it did she realize that there was light coming from inside the room.

  At first she thought maybe she should just turn around and hurry back to the dorm as quickly as she could. What if the Neb or Miss McKinnon were on the other side of this door? But she listened carefully. There was no sound, nothing at all coming from inside the room.

  Maybe a light had been left on by mistake, Min wondered, and she began to push the door open as quietly as she could.

  ‘Oh!’ she gasped in surprise when she stepped into the room.

  ‘Oh!’ came the startled response. ‘It’s you! You nearly gave us heart attacks!’

  Sitting on one of the sofas with mugs of tea in front of them were Zarah, another Upper Fifth boarder, and Clare from the year above.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ Min asked in a whisper.

  ‘Same as you, probably,’ Clare replied. ‘Can’t sleep because you’re stressed out about the exams?’

  Min nodded.

  ‘Same here.’

  ‘Me too,’ Zarah replied. ‘But, Min, you’re so clever, why on earth are you worried?’

  Min gave a little shrug. ‘I want to do really well,’ she replied.

  ‘But you will!’ Zarah told her. ‘You’ll probably do better than anyone else in the whole year.’

  Min smiled shyly at the compliment, but it still didn’t put her busy mind at rest. ‘I keep having a horrible exam dream,’ she confided.

  ‘Me too!’ Clare told her. ‘In my one, time is running out, there’s hardly a second left and I’m scribbling and scribbling and scribbling but I know I’ve still got pages of stuff left to write.’

  ‘In mine, time’s running out too, but my pages are totally blank,’ Min said, settling herself into an armchair opposite the two other girls. ‘In fact, the sheet with the questions is blank too. And I’m just in a total panic. Even when I wake up, I still feel in a panic.’

  ‘That’s horrible,’ Clare sympathized.

  ‘What about you?’ Min asked Zarah.

  ‘I don’t have bad dreams because I just can’t fall asleep,’ Zarah replied. ‘I’m only sleeping about two or three hours a night and I don’t have any dreams at all, maybe because my brain is too exhausted to even come up with them. And I’m covered in stress spots,’ she added, lifting the hair at the side of her head to demonstrate.

  ‘Me too,’ Min admitted, showing off her own bumpy rash.

  ‘You guys really need to see the school doctor,’ Clare chipped in. ‘She’ll give you something for that.’

  ‘Do you want some tea?’ Zarah asked. ‘We’re drinking chamomile because it’s supposed to make you sleepy.’

  ‘Yes, but unfortunately it tastes of wee,’ Clare said, holding up her mug and giving it a suspicious sniff.

  ‘Is this the first night you’ve come downstairs?’ Zarah asked, as she went over to the kettle.

  ‘No, I came down on Sunday night and sat here for about forty minutes.’

  ‘Oh, you must have just missed us,’ Zarah said. ‘We’re usually here between about half two and half four in the morning. That seems to be the worst time.’

  The kettle came to the boil quickly and Zarah took a mug from the wooden rack, stuffed a teabag into it and poured boiling water on top.

  ‘So what do you do?’ Min wondered as the mug of yellowy liquid was brought over to her. ‘Do you read? Study?’

  ‘A bit,’ Zarah answered. ‘Clare’s helping me with my maths.’

  ‘Zarah’s helping me with my French,’ Clare added with a grin. ‘Did you know she’s bilingual?’

  ‘No,’ Min replied as Zarah gave a modest shrug.

  ‘My family’s spent a lot of time over there,’ she said. ‘Min, is it true that your friend Niffy is the one who’s playing the jokes on Mrs Knebworth?’

  ‘Oh . . .’ Min hesitated. She thought she was probably supposed to keep this information secret.

  She gave Zarah a smile. Funny how they didn’t know each other well, even though they were the only two Asian boarders in the year. Zarah looked very friendly, tucking her bobbed hair behind her ear and looking at Min with great interest.

  ‘You do know something . . .’ Zarah wheedled.

  ‘Well, Niffy got gated because she was in one of the Lower Sixth dorms when a boy—’

  ‘A boy came in?!’ Zarah gasped.

  ‘No. A boy was in the garden with this bagful of bottles—’

  ‘Of drink?!’ Zarah’s eyes widened again.

  ‘Yeah. And the Lower Sixths had a rope, they got the bag up and then the Neb caught them all, although they did manage to hide the bottles. And although Niffy was there, it was nothing to do with her and she’s just really annoyed she’s been punished.’

  ‘So she’s taking revenge?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘You can tell me, I won’t tell anyone, except Clare, who’s listening anyway.’

  ‘What else has Niffy got planned?’ Zarah asked.

  ‘I don’t know . . . Hopefully nothing else, I think she’s done enough.’

  Wanting to change the subject, Min asked, ‘Do you think it would be OK if I switched on the computer?’

  ‘Yeah, sure, it won’t make any more noise than anything else we’re doing,’ Clare replied.

  Min took her mug of tea and went over to sit at the great big dinosaur of a computer in the corner of the room. She switched it on and waited patiently as it went through its long, whirring start-up process.

  More out of habit than anything else, she clicked through to her email and watched as one lone item popped up in the inbox.

  With a start, she saw that it was from Greg.

  Not really wanting to . . . in fact, dreading the words she might find in this message, Min moved the cursor over and clicked the note open.

  ‘Min, I meant to ask . . . can we still email about our homework once in a while? G x’

  Min had to smile at this.

  She emailed back: ‘Of course, M x’

  ‘Were you emailing your boyfriend?’ Zarah, who was now hovering behind her chair, asked next.

  Min turned round with a start.

  ‘Ummmmm . . .’

  ‘You have got a boyfriend, haven’t you? I heard about him from one of your friends.’

  ‘Well . . . I don’t know if he’s exactly a boyfriend, I mean . . .’ Min felt flustered.

  ‘But you just emailed him?’

  Zarah’s eyes were fixed on Min with fascinated interest again.

  ‘Can you tell me a bit about him?’ she asked.

  All of a sudden Min could think of nothing that she’d like to do better.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘DAD!!’

&nbs
p; The following Friday, at exactly seven o’clock as promised, Amy’s ridiculously young dad, Gary McCorquodale arrived at the boarding house to take her out for dinner.

  Amy rushed into the hallway and threw her arms around him.

  He hugged her hard and kissed her on the cheek.

  For a moment or two, Amy didn’t want to let go. It felt so safe and familiar to have the thick arms around her and inhale his ‘going out’ smell: soap, shaving foam and his favourite brand of aftershave. He smelled of all the hugs he’d ever given her from when she was little: ‘Night-night, be good for your gran and I’ll see you in the morning, princess.’

  Up until now, she’d always felt as if her dad was right there, strong and steady as a rock to look after her. But now, for the very first time, he was admitting a weakness. He was telling her there might be a problem and the problem had the potential to change both of their lives.

  Something about his hug was different: it wasn’t one hundred per cent strong and reassuring; her dad was clinging to her as well. He was trying to get some support as well as to give it.

  ‘Princess, how are you doing?’ he asked her in his gravelly voice when they finally pulled away from each other.

  ‘Great,’ she said, and gave him her biggest, most cheerful smile. ‘You look very smart,’ she added.

  Gary wasn’t tall, or slim or even particularly handsome. He was a bit square and solid and his head was shaven. But still he had a presence. He looked strong and muscular and his clothes were sharp. The open-necked white shirt and the fitted black suit were top-notch, and his shoes were polished to a high shine.

  Even his smell was unusual – not the typical aftershave you’d have smelled loads of times before, but something complicated which mingled black coffee with figs, smoke . . . maybe aniseed.

  He took care of himself, he noticed the little details. His nightclubs were much sleeker and more stylish than any others in the city.

  Amy’s dad was gay.

  He’d not even admitted it to himself until last year. In a weird way, Amy thought she’d known way before he had. He’d not allowed himself to admit it, because he loved Amy more than anyone else in the world – although his mum came a close second – and he’d always thought a gay dad was one added complication in her life she probably didn’t need.