Rebecca's Rules

by Anna Carey

  I felt absolutely awful. Usually when I am given out to I get all annoyed because I don’t think the other person is being fair, but the horrible thing about this was that Alice was right. I hadn’t thought about her and Bike Boy. I’d been totally caught up in my own stuff. I was going to say something, but Alice was on a roll of anger (this was all very unusual for her).

  ‘And I’d tell myself that obviously your situation was much worse, and you had actually gone out with Paperboy and I’d only had about two conversations with Bike Boy and barely knew him, but, still, I felt really bad, and you knew I liked him and then you forgot all about it!’ she cried. ‘Because you’re just thinking about yourself and how miserable you are all the time! Me and Cass could … could be, I dunno, run over by a bus and you probably wouldn’t notice!’

  ‘I would!’ I said, which I suppose was a bit of stupid thing to say.

  ‘Would you?’ said Alice, in the same cross, kind of sarky voice, which wasn’t like her at all. She was getting very red in the face. ‘You know, Cass still sometimes asks whether I’m okay about him. And she tells me whenever she sees him around the area. She didn’t forget all about other people’s problems!’

  And I started to get angry and say ‘I didn’t forget about your problems!’ but I stopped after ‘I’ because of course, I totally had. So instead I said, ‘I’m really sorry Alice. Really, really sorry.’

  ‘Good,’ said Alice, and burst into tears. And then of course, being Alice, she started apologising herself, and I kept saying ‘It’s me who should be apologising’ (though I was secretly relieved she wasn’t still yelling at me, even though I deserved it. I really am a terrible person). So in the end we both apologised, and I gave her a hug, and I kept saying I was sorry until her dad turned up, and she sent me a text about five minutes ago saying she was sorry for yelling at me, not that she really did yell, so there has been a lot of apologising and I think we are still friends. Unless she is just being nice to me in a polite, Alice-ish way and is secretly full of hatred and rage. But I don’t think so.

  I feel really bad, though. A part of me is thinking ‘Well, my problems are properly serious, and she barely knew Bike Boy!’ But then I remember how absolutely awful I felt that day when I saw Paperboy in town with a girl and thought she was his girlfriend. I felt like my heart was broken even though I’d only talked to him once or twice. So poor Alice was probably feeling that bad, and I didn’t even think of her woe. I know I was worried that we were all growing apart, but this is even worse than I imagined. And she and Cass are talking about Alice’s angst together without me. But what I can I do?

  LATER

  Okay. I will start by making up some new rules for myself. And I will stick to them.

  REBECCA RAFFERTY’S RULES FOR LIVING

  I will not go on about Paperboy all the time and tell my friends that I am now just a hollow shell of a girl (even though I am).

  I will not mope. At least, when I am with other people.

  I will find ways to do more interesting stuff with Cass and Alice, so we can bond and stuff and things will get back to normal.

  I will ask my friends about their problems more often.

  Still no mail from Paperboy. I wish I didn’t get my hopes up every time I check the computer. But I do.

  FRIDAY

  I’m writing this in history, where Mrs O’Reilly is telling us about the Renaissance, or something to do with the olden days. I’m not really listening, which I suppose is kind of obvious as I’m writing here. I’m sitting next to Caroline, aka Vanessa Finn’s sidekick, so I can’t even draw amusing pictures of Cass dressed as historical figures and taunt her with them, which is what I usually do when I’m bored in history. Mrs O’Reilly decided that Cass and I can’t sit next to each other anymore. Cass got caught drawing a picture of Mrs O’Reilly dressed as Queen Elizabeth I and giving out to two girls who looked a bit like me and Cass. But we both got into trouble for it, which is extremely unfair if you ask me, not that Mrs O’Reilly did. She said that I was clearly egging Cass on and I shouldn’t think she hadn’t noticed that I seemed to spend a lot of history classes showing Cass something in my copybook. She must have eyes in the back of her head. I never show Cass my amazing portraits unless O’Reilly is writing on the board.

  Anyway, I still feel very guilty about the whole Alice and Bike Boy thing. I think she has sort of forgiven me, but I still feel bad. I told her and Cass about my new rules (apart from the bonding one in case they thought I was weird) and they were quite impressed, though Alice seemed a bit worried about it.

  ‘I’m not annoyed with you anymore, you know,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to think you’ve got to, like, reform for my sake.’

  But I told her that I still wanted to change my ways. To try and make up for my dreadful-friendness I told her that I will steal Rachel’s nicest Chanel lipstick tomorrow, the one Alice always says she wishes she could afford, so she can wear it to Vanessa’s mad party (I often put it on at home before going out when Rachel’s not around, but I’ve never dared take it out of the house before). I don’t think it will make up for not even noticing that her heart was broken, but at least it’s a start.

  And I am sticking to my new rule and I am not going on about Paperboy. I haven’t even mentioned the fact that I haven’t heard from him in ages. I hate checking my mail or Facebook now because my stomach gets all churned up. And then when I realise there’s nothing my tummy feels like it’s sunk into the floor. He never really posts updates on Facebook so I can’t even find out what he’s doing. I almost wish he’d just mail me and tell me he never wants to hear from me again; it would be better than just waiting all the time. Except I don’t really wish that. I really just wish he’d come home and go out with me again.

  But I haven’t mentioned any of this to Cass and Alice, or the fact that now he has gone forever Fridays are nothing more than a torment. Smyth’s the newsagent got a new paperboy who is not attractive at all and whenever he rings I am reminded of my tragic state. Every time I go out to give him his money it is like a dagger in my heart. A dagger made of fivers and the Irish Times. No, that doesn’t sound quite right. But anyway, it makes me all sad and reminds me of the days when I got all excited every time the door bell rang on a Friday. It seems like a million years ago now.

  Oh well, at least Vanessa’s party is tomorrow. I can’t believe I’m kind of looking forward to it. It shows what a sorry state my life is in when the only thing I have to look forward to is a crazy person’s ridiculous birthday party.

  SATURDAY

  Well, I was right about the party distracting me from my Paperboy-related misery. It was so completely ridiculous that it has blocked all other thoughts from my head. I think I’d better write about it straight away because if I don’t I’ll start thinking I imagined the whole thing. I really don’t know why we went now. Even my own family couldn’t believe I was going. When I was getting ready, my mum came in.

  ‘Okay, forgive me if I’ve missed something here,’ she said. ‘But don’t you hate Vanessa or whatever her name is?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, putting on my best strappy shoes. ‘Sort of. A bit.’

  ‘So why exactly are you going to her party then?’ said Mum. ‘And don’t say because it’ll be terrible and you want to see how bad it is, because that’s not really a good thing.’

  ‘But it will! It’ll be funny,’ I said. ‘I mean, it’ll be so ridiculous, and she’s so awful …’

  ‘So essentially, Rebecca, you’re going to the party of a girl you don’t like just to laugh at it?’ said Mum. ‘That isn’t very nice.’ She sounded a bit like Alice, which was quite worrying.

  ‘Mum, it’s Vanessa!’ I said. ‘She doesn’t like any of us either, and she invited us anyway! She just wants people to cheer for her.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Mum in a disapproving sort of way. So much for her trying to cheer me up. She doesn’t seem bothered about my traumas now. My dad’s even worse, though. He’s forgotten al
l about them. The other day he asked me, totally cheerfully, if I’d heard from ‘that nice kid who used to collect the paper money’ recently. He hadn’t even noticed my anguish! My parents are as bad as each other. Sometimes I think they just don’t care about me at all.

  In the end Mum gave me a lift down to the school gates this afternoon, where we’d been told to wait for the bus that was taking us to Vanessa’s ‘Big Birthday Bash’. She wanted to get out of the car and wait until the bus turned up, but luckily I managed to persuade her not to. I have seen my mother try to be cool and chat with a gang of girls my age, and it is hideously embarrassing.

  So anyway, she drove off THANK GOD and there we all were standing at the side of the road. As Alice said, as we shivered in our party frocks, ‘I’m not really sure how this happened.’

  I looked around at the rest of our class, all of whom looked equally bemused. ‘Neither am I,’ I said.

  ‘I think Vanessa’s hypnotised us all,’ said Cass gloomily. ‘I have no idea why I’m here.’

  All our reasons for going didn’t seem very important when we were standing there with bare legs in the freezing cold.

  ‘I think this might be a bit of a disaster,’ said Alice. And as it turned out, it kind of was, especially for poor old Alice, as you will see.

  But, actually, the bus journey itself was quite fun. The entire class was there (even sneery Karen Rodgers, who has been a bit subdued since her sidekick/minion Alison told her to shut up at the Battle of the Bands last year) so it was a bit like being on a school tour (though not an impressive one like Paperboy’s ski lodge adventure). And Vanessa (or rather, the people from the telly programme – there’s no way Vanessa went to any trouble herself) had decorated the bus with balloons and a big banner that said ‘Vanessa’s Big Birthday Bash!’

  Soon everyone, even Karen, was singing along to Jessie’s iPod, which we’d plugged into the bus’s sound system. Some of the music was kind of cheesy but it didn’t matter. We were all just messing around. It was actually like a mini-party – most of us had brought drinks (no booze, of course, though as Cass said later, if anything could make us turn to drink, it’d be Vanessa) and bags of crisps and stuff. Emma produced a giant bag of Percy Pigs and I ate so many I started to feel a bit funny.

  Jessie is going to audition for the school musical and she did some very funny actions to all the songs. Ellie joined in, although she doesn’t want to perform in the musical; she wants to work on the costumes. She is quite dramatic herself, though. Perhaps this is because her mother is very melodramatic as well as hippy-ish (let us never forget that Ellie’s real name is Galadriel after the elf queen from the Lord of the Rings), so Ellie has spent her entire life living with someone who is always sweeping out of rooms in flowing cloaks and things. Seriously. Her mum has a cloak. I’ve seen it. It’s made out of velvet and has stars embroidered all over it.

  So anyway, it was all good fun. And I had managed to swipe Rachel’s lipstick (she will KILL me if she discovers I’ve taken it, especially as she hasn’t figured out yet that I’ve discovered where she hides her make-up bag. She keeps putting it in different places so I can’t get at it. She is a very suspicious person). Alice put on the lipstick when we were on a smooth bit of road (she didn’t dare try it until we got on the motorway in case the bus zoomed around a corner and she got lipstick all over her face) and it looked lovely. It is a magical colour that suits everyone. I gave a few more people a go as well, just to be nice. I’m sure Rachel wouldn’t mind. It was all lots of fun, anyway.

  ‘You know, maybe we can just stay and have our own party on this bus,’ said Cass. ‘I bet we’d have a better time.’

  She was probably right. But after a while, we were out in the countryside, and the bus turned into a giant set of gates and drove up a very long drive to an absolutely ginormous house. Well, a castle really – it turns out it was called Ashford Towers and it’s mostly used for very posh weddings.

  The bus pulled up at the very impressive entrance and we all got out and stared at the castle wondering what on earth we’d got ourselves into. Then a tall, skinny, very stressed-looking woman in a tight black dress and a phone headset thing came out of the gigantic front door along with another camera crew. They all looked miserable. I was just thinking that the stressed woman seemed strangely familiar when Alice said, ‘Wasn’t she the TV woman who was with Vanessa at the Battle of the Bands?’ And she was. She looked a bit older though, which isn’t really surprising when you remember that she’s been spending a lot of time with Vanessa recently. That would age anyone by about fifty years.

  ‘Oh, you’re all here,’ she said. ‘Great. I was beginning to get a bit worried.’ We all started moving towards the door but she said, ‘Wait!’ and we all froze. ‘You can’t go in yet. Vanessa will be arriving soon and we want everyone outside when she gets here. Stay there and I’ll get the others.’

  ‘Others?’ said Ellie. ‘I didn’t think Vanessa actually had any friends, apart from Caroline, of course.’

  ‘Maybe she’s paid people to pretend,’ said Cass.

  And when a bunch of girls and boys came out of the house and paraded down the steps, I thought Cass might be right. The girls were all orange and wearing loads of make-up and had perfectly straight glossy hair and tiny little party dresses and really high heels. And the boys were all orange too, although their hair was gelled.

  ‘Who on earth are they?’ said Alice.

  ‘Right,’ said the woman in the black dress whose name, I remembered, was Sarah. ‘Okay, Vanessa’s class from St Dominic’s, can you line up on either side of the drive? And the kids from … is it the music class?’

  ‘Music, dance, and theatre,’ said one girl, tossing her shiny, shiny hair.

  We all looked at each other in surprise. How did we not know Vanessa went to a music class? And dance and theatre too, of course. Surely if she was in a class like that she’d have been boasting about it constantly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sarah. ‘Okay, you lot come up the front, near the steps. Yes, that’s perfect. Hang on a sec …’ She paused and then spoke into the headset. ‘Yeah, they’re all ready.’ She turned back to us. ‘Right, everyone, Vanessa is on her way.’

  The camera crew bustled around, getting into their places. Then, in the distance, we heard a rumbling sound. Someone shouted ‘Action’. And this giant pink tank came rumbling up the drive, with someone with absolutely huge hair peering out the top. It was Vanessa. As the tank got nearer, she stuck more of herself out of the hole and started waving regally at us. She was wearing a sparkly gold and pink dress with a ginormous frilly flower at the neck.

  ‘Oh. My. God,’ said Cass.

  We all stood and stared in silence as the tank came up to the steps, where the shiny orange people were jumping around and cheering. Then, over the cheering, we heard a familiar shriek.

  ‘No, no, NOOO!’

  It was Vanessa. ‘They didn’t cheer!’ she screeched. ‘They’re all meant to be cheering and they didn’t! Just the ones at the steps were cheering!’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ said Sarah in a soothing sort of voice, like she was talking to a maniac who had to be kept calm in case she went on a killing spree. Which I suppose she was. ‘We’ll do it again. Okay, everyone from St Dominic’s, this time I want you to all cheer and jump up and down when Vanessa comes down. Okay?’

  We all just stared at her. A few people mumbled, ‘Okay …’

  ‘Right,’ said Sarah. ‘Let’s get the tank back to the bottom of the drive and reshoot.’

  The tank rumbled off. Cass, Alice and I stared at each other.

  ‘I’m not cheering for that goon,’ said Cass.

  ‘What do you think will happen if we don’t?’ I asked. ‘Maybe Vanessa will turn the tank on us. I wouldn’t put it past her.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Alice, bravely. ‘One of my great-grand-dads was shot for standing up to the Nazis! If he can do that, we can stand up to Vanessa.’

  ‘Well, when you
put it like that …’ I said.

  ‘Alice,’ said Cass, ‘I don’t think you can really compare standing up to Vanessa to standing up to Hitler.’

  ‘I know,’ said Alice. ‘That’s my point. If he was brave enough to stand up to fascism, we can do this little thing. Who’s with me?’

  It was very inspiring, to be honest. I crossed my arms and clamped my mouth shut so it would be very obvious that I wasn’t cheering.

  ‘But maybe,’ said Ellie, who was next to us, ‘if we don’t cheer they’ll keep making us do it again and again until we give in. And I’m freezing. To be perfectly honest, I will do anything to get indoors.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Cass.

  Ellie was right, it was very cold. The tank was coming back up the drive again, and as it approached Jessie and Ellie and Emma started going ‘Whoo hoo!’ in a sort of sarcastic way. Alice kept her mouth shut and folded her arms. Cass and I decided to compromise and clapped very, very slowly. I hope Alice’s great-granddad wasn’t looking down on us from heaven in disgust at our cowardice.

  Luckily, enough people were cheering to please Princess Vanessa, and when she got to the steps she waved and cried, ‘Hi, everyone! Great to see you all!’ as if she hadn’t just seen us all two minutes earlier when she’d been screaming at us like a psychopath. A sparkly pink ladder was produced and Vanessa got out of the tank and climbed down it. Her dress was very tiny and glittery, and she was wearing gold shoes with red soles. She went up the steps and all the glossy music and theatre people started squealing and jumping around and hugging her.