Princess Incognito: a Royal Pain in the Class

by Humphreys, N. J;

  “And I hate you,” she shouted back at me, slamming the door behind her.

  I had imagined so many different meetings between Agatha and me, but none of them ended up like this. This was a disaster, an epic, Sabrina-made disaster that I had to try and fix.

  Agatha had already smashed a mirror inside the teachers’ toilets. Outside, she could smash up anything.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I had never run so fast in my life. Or maybe I had. It was hard to tell. Uncle Ernie used to make me run around our taekwondo gym and I was pretty quick. But the gym wasn’t spinning then. Everything was spinning now. I found it tough to even get to my feet in the teachers’ toilets. Finally I reached the door and heard Agatha’s angry voice echoing down the corridor. She was swearing at everybody now and shoving students out of the way.

  “Wait, stop, Agatha,” I called.

  But my voice sounded pretty lame. My head was ringing like an alarm clock. I started running, but the school corridor was fuzzy. Luckily, the playground was bright and sunny and that seemed to wake me up a bit. Plus, I noticed that Agatha was slowing down. She hadn’t eaten anything for lunch. She had no energy left.

  The other students leapt out of her way, as if she were a venomous snake. No one wanted to get attacked. She headed straight for the school gates, but no one had the guts to stop her. They were all cowards. Even her so-called friends, her pack of laughing hyenas, didn’t stand in her way. It was obvious that Agatha was going totally crazy. She was trying to run away from school. But no one cared. In fact, they turned away from her. They were probably delighted to see the back of her. I would have felt the same way before I found her in the teachers’ toilets.

  But the girl sitting on the wet floor of the teachers’ toilets wasn’t Awful Agatha. She was lost and lonely. She needed help. We all needed help, but we can’t always ask for it because we have to keep all these stupid, stupid secrets.

  No one understands that more than me.

  That’s why I ran even faster across the playground. I noticed Charles dashing towards me, still chewing a mouthful of macaroni and cheese.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, as cheese sauce dribbled down his chin.

  That boy just cannot eat properly.

  “Not now, Charles,” I replied breathlessly.

  I had to save all my energy for catching Agatha. The last thing I needed was a conversation with Charles.

  “Why are you chasing Agatha? Is she the thief?”

  I raced past him, ignoring his daft questions.

  “Is she the thief? Are you being a detective?” I heard his squeaky voice shout in the distance. “Don’t chase her, Sabrina. She’s running out of school. It’s not home time. If you run out of school during school time, it’ll be truancy. You’ll get suspended for truancy, Sabrina.”

  Even in an emergency, Charles didn’t know when to shut up. I really wanted to hear that, didn’t I? I’d already worked out that one or two busybodies would’ve spotted Agatha and me going in and out of the teachers’ private toilets—which we were not allowed to use in the first place. Then, they’d find the smashed mirror all over the floor. What kind of students smashed the mirror of a teachers’ toilet? We’d be suspended, maybe even expelled. Agatha was already on a final warning. Now she had smashed a mirror and was about to play truant.

  No matter what happened to me, I had to catch her.

  I was certainly getting closer. “Agatha, don’t run out of school, please,” I panted.

  I was so out of breath, I didn’t even think she’d hear me. But Agatha turned round. “Leave me alone,” she said through gritted teeth.

  There were tears running down her face. Her sweaty, wet hair was stuck to her face. She looked terrible.

  “No, Agatha, you can’t,” I called, but my voice ran away from me, faster than my useless legs. They were slowing down. My heart thumped against my ribs. My brain banged against my skull. Everything hurt.

  But Agatha looked more tired than me. Her arms flapped around like pieces of string. She wasn’t even running in a straight line anymore, but zigzagging like a clumsy crab. I was almost behind her now. I tried to reach out and touch her shoulder, but just missed. We were seconds away from the school gates and a world of misery. My world was already the worst ever. But I knew that once I stepped through the school gates, my world would become even worse than the worst world ever.

  I was so close now. I could hear Agatha’s breathing. I tried one more time.

  “Please, Agatha,” I wheezed. “Stop running.”

  She turned around. Her face was a puddle of mucky sweat and tears. She pulled a strange face that wasn’t angry or sad. It was, sort of, empty.

  “I can’t,” she mumbled.

  And we burst though the school gates and into the street. But Agatha wasn’t looking at the street. She was still looking at me. Without looking where she was going, she didn’t see the road, the cars or the bright, red bus that was driving straight towards us. She didn’t see the traffic because she was still staring at me. It was almost as if she wanted to focus on me and not think about what was coming. Everything was happening so fast. I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out.

  Then came a scream—the loudest, scariest scream of my life. It was the terrifying shriek of the bus’ brakes as the big, red beast screeched towards us.

  With her eyes still fixed on me, she took one more step towards the road and closed her eyes.

  Now all I could hear was screaming. The bus brakes, students behind me in the playground, strangers on the street—everyone was screaming.

  And then, for some strange reason, Uncle Ernie popped into my head. I thought of his taekwondo lessons and the daft things he always said to me. His favourite poem was written by some old, dead bloke called Kipling. It was called If, which must be the most boring name for a poem in history. But Uncle Ernie thought it was an epic poem. Whenever he threw kicks and punches at me, he always repeated the same lines from the poem. I can’t remember the lines exactly, but they were something about keeping your head when everyone else was losing theirs. At first, I thought the poem was about chickens, because chickens lose their heads all the time. But Uncle Ernie explained that we are sometimes faced with a crisis when everyone around us panics and we must stay calm to fix the crisis. That’s what the poem really meant.

  And when I heard all that screaming, I finally realised what Uncle Ernie was going on about. Everyone was panicking. They were all losing their heads. But I must stay focused. I must keep calm and carry on. I am Princess Sabrina of the House of Valence. I am not a chicken. I will not lose my head.

  So I took off. I dived towards Agatha. Never mind a chicken, I soared like an eagle. I ignored the screaming and flew towards my old enemy. For a split second, Agatha looked shocked.

  “What are you … ARGH!”

  She couldn’t say anything else because I’d already knocked the air out of her lungs. I grabbed her around the waist. It was a perfect rugby tackle, even if I do say so myself. We flew sideways across the pavement. I must have been running faster than I thought because we seemed to be in the air for ages. Finally, we landed hard against concrete and rolled towards the canteen dustbins. The cooks had shoved them outside the school gates for the vans to collect later.

  But we couldn’t stop rolling.

  We clattered into one of the dustbins so hard, it started to topple towards us.

  “Look out!” I cried.

  But it was too late. The dustbin began spilling its rubbish—all the leftover food and drink from the school canteen—towards us.

  It was pigswill.

  It was horrible, disgusting, foul-smelling pigswill!

  And it was pouring all over our hair, our faces, our school blazers, everywhere.

  Agatha and I sat up slowly. We couldn’t really see each other. We were drenched. We wiped our eyes and just looked at each other. She had custard running down her nose. I had soggy potatoes and gravy coming out of my ea
rs.

  We couldn’t think of anything to say, anything at all.

  So we burst out laughing instead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  We had to wait outside the Cannibal’s office. Miss Shufflebottom had pulled us out of the pigswill and dragged us through the gates and back into school. She looked more upset than we did. I thought she was going to start crying. Her hands were all clammy and wet, probably because the pigswill was dripping onto her clothes, too. She didn’t even think to take us to the toilets first. We stank. We looked like the Vomit Sisters, which is a fabulous name for a pair of punk singers.

  We looked like punk. But we smelled like puke.

  Miss Shufflebottom had made us sit on either side of a dopey, green plant with rubbery leaves. She probably thought she was keeping us apart, as if a plant could stop us from fighting. She took her bottom and shuffled off down the corridor, leaving us alone. I spotted Agatha wiping her eyes.

  “Are you crying?” I asked.

  “Get stuffed.”

  “No, you’re not crying.”

  Agatha turned and glared at me. “What are you going on about, weirdo?”

  “I don’t think you’re crying. We don’t cry, do we? Not at our age. That’s what I think anyway.”

  “I think you’re a nutcase.”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  “Only a nutcase would dive in front of a bus.”

  I giggled. Then Agatha giggled. And then we both giggled. Now we were the Giggling Sisters.

  “Yeah, that was crazy,” I said.

  “Yeah. Nutcase.”

  Agatha tapped her foot against the floor. “Thanks.”

  “What did you say?”

  “You heard.”

  I had heard, so I’m not really sure why I’d asked such a dumb question. I suppose I was shocked, or I wanted to hear someone say something kind about me in this lonely place. Someone who wasn’t Uncle Ernie.

  “What’s it like?” Agatha asked.

  She was still looking down at her school shoes. They were covered in green, mushy leftovers from the canteen.

  “What?”

  “Having no parents.”

  Now I had a sharp, stabbing pain in my throat. I thought I was being strangled. “I do have parents,” I croaked in a choked voice.

  “I just can’t live with them at the moment,” I added.

  “Same thing.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Well, whatever it is, you’re lucky.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was many, many, MANY things. I was princess of a dangerous country that I couldn’t go back to. I was living with an uncle who wasn’t really my uncle who said he was a handyman when he wasn’t really a handyman. I was thousands of miles away from the greatest parents in the history of greatest parents. I was acting out this big fat lie of a life that I couldn’t tell anyone about and I was covered head to toe in pigswill!

  But what I certainly, definitely, absolutely was not, was lucky.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, really softly, because my voice was wobbling and this was no time for my eyes to start stinging.

  Agatha looked at me for the first time. “Do you see your parents every day?”

  “No, not at the moment, but I will soon.”

  “Then you’re lucky. I wish I didn’t have to see my parents ever again. I wish my parents were dead.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “My Mum and Dad ain’t like your parents. They’re not like any parents. I see the other kids with their parents. They do all that normal family stuff, like going to the park or to the cinema, but we never do any of that.”

  “Well, we can’t really go to the park or the cinema either,” I said, truthfully.

  “My Mum and Dad hate each other’s guts,” Agatha continued. “He never comes home. She never goes out. And when they do see each other, they fight. And then they drink. And then they fight and drink. Sometimes, if I come home too early or I upset them, they will … ah, you don’t care. Nobody does.”

  “My parents sometimes argue, too,” I said. “And they drink wine at dinner parties. Do your parents drink wine at dinner parties?”

  Agatha laughed, really sarcastically. “Nah, they just have wine parties.”

  I didn’t get the joke, but Agatha seemed to find it hilarious. She couldn’t stop laughing. And then she went strange. Her laughing turned into crying so I had no idea if she was happy or sad.

  “You’re such an idiot, Sabrina. I thought you were clever. You’re just as thick as me!”

  Agatha had never called me by my actual name before. It made my belly go funny.

  “I probably am a bit thick. I don’t understand anything anymore,” I sighed. “But I know one thing. I miss my parents.”

  “I hate my parents,” Agatha said in a low voice.

  “You don’t hate your parents.”

  “You don’t know my parents.”

  We didn’t say anything else for a while. I stared at the name on the wooden door. A. E. Cannington. I wondered what the Cannibal’s initials stood for. Accident and Emergency probably. Agatha and I were one accident and emergency after another.

  And then I remembered what caused our latest accident and emergency.

  “Your parents don’t give you any lunch money, do they?” I asked.

  Agatha was back to looking down at her dirty, old shoes. “They don’t give me anything.”

  “You know, my Uncle Ernie thinks he’s a bit of a chef. He’s not. He just watches Masterchef on TV, but he does make too many sandwiches for me every day. I could give you one, if you want.”

  “I don’t want charity,” Agatha snapped.

  “It’s not charity. It’s a cheese sandwich.”

  Agatha thought for a moment. “What kind of cheese?”

  “Don’t know. Cheddar, I think.”

  “Is that the dodgy one with the disgusting red skin?”

  “That’s Edam.”

  “Yeah. That cheese is well dodgy. What’s your cheese?”

  “Cheddar cheese. It’s not the red one.”

  Agatha nodded to herself. “Yeah, all right, but not in front of the others. Give it to me in the toilets.”

  “Not the teachers’ toilets though,” I said quickly.

  We both grinned at each other. I was rather pleased with that joke.

  “It don’t matter anyway,” Agatha said darkly. “The Cannibal will suspend me and then I’ll be sent home. I’ll have to spend a week with them.”

  “I can’t even imagine what a week would be like with my parents,” I said, thinking about my old, magical life at the Palace.

  “I do. She’ll spend all day asleep on the sofa and he’ll spend all day shouting. And if he’s not shouting, then … I can’t do nothing right, not with him.”

  Agatha started weeping. “I don’t wanna be suspended,” she whispered.

  “You won’t get suspended,” I said cheerily.

  “Of course I will, you Muppet. I smashed a mirror and ran out of school.”

  “Nah, I’ll say the mirror was an accident and you were so upset about the mirror that you got scared and panicked. I’ll make up a really convincing story for the old Cannibal.”

  Agatha rolled her eyes. “No one is gonna believe a made-up story from a Goody Two-Shoes like you. You’re not a brilliant liar like me.”

  I smiled at Agatha. She wasn’t awful, really, not anymore.

  “You’ve got no idea,” I said. “I tell the biggest lies every single day.”

  MY CONCLUSION ABOUT ME

  So that’s my story so far. Well, that’s my real story so far. I haven’t even started on my fake story yet, the one I’m supposed to write for Miss Shufflebottom. I’ll write some rubbish in a minute about being a boring girl from a boring school in a boring town. That’ll be my homework. It’s meant to be the story of my life, but it might as well be a fairy story. It won’t take me long. I’m getting quite good
at this writing stuff. And I’m getting really good at lying. I wish I wasn’t, but I live in the land of make-believe now.

  But it’s getting a tiny bit better.

  Miss Cannington decided not to suspend Agatha in the end. I made up some nonsense about smashing the mirror by mistake after using the wrong toilets because, you know, I’m a new girl and totally stupid. So I ran right out of school because I was terrified and confused. It was an EPIC lie. My biggest lie yet. I was convinced that the Cannibal would know I was lying. My story sounded completely fake. But like I said, I’m getting really good at lying.

  The Cannibal sent final warning letters to our families. Uncle Ernie read the letter and then said the same stuff about keeping a low profile, like it was my fault. Agatha’s parents didn’t even read the letter. They were still sleeping when the postman delivered the letter, so Agatha tore it up and threw it away.

  Her parents sleep a lot during the day.

  We have very different families.

  But Agatha and I have agreed not to hate each other any more, at least for now. I’ve promised to give her one of Uncle Ernie’s sandwiches every day and pretend it’s not a big deal. And she’s promised to act like she’s not bothered about the sandwiches. We have agreed to do our sandwich deals near the teachers’ toilets. That’s going to be our secret meeting place from now on.

  We have also made a promise that we must keep, no matter what.

  No talking about our parents.

  Ever.

  That’s our rule.

  She wants her parents to disappear. I want mine to turn up and take me back to the Palace. We both know that we can’t get what we want. So we’d rather not talk about it. And anyway, our eyes sting whenever we mention them and we’re too old to have stinging eyes at school.

  Agatha isn’t sure if we should be friends yet, but she’s already sent me three messages asking about taekwondo. And she’s not the only one!

  Cheeky Charles has even asked if Uncle Ernie could give him taekwondo lessons. Uncle Ernie said he wasn’t teaching a self-defence class for wimpy kids. So I told Charles I might teach him one or two simple moves when he comes round later. I don’t think it’s a great idea, but it’ll stop him going on and on about his detective maths quizzes and puzzles.