Kiss Me Kill Me

by Lauren Henderson

  So that could only mean one thing. I’m the poison that killed him.

  INQUEST ON “KISS OF DEATH” DAN: DEATH BY MISADVENTURE

  EPIPEN WOULD HAVE SAVED TRAGIC DAN, SAYS CORONER

  This is the other part of the mystery: Where was his EpiPen? His mum and dad swore blind at the inquest that he would never have gone anywhere without it. So how could he have forgotten it on the night of the party?

  I wish there was a way to ask him. I wish there was a way to see and touch him. And although I dreamed for so long of kissing Dan’s perfect lips, I wish above all that I never had.

  eight

  PLASTIC SURGERY–FREE ZONE

  One of the very few bright spots in all of this is that I can set my alarm for eight-twenty and still be at school on time. It’s a bare five-minute walk across the back lawn to the main house—or, as it is now, my school.

  I pull on my favorite jeans and a purple sweater with green trim that Grandma got me for Christmas. (The colors sound awful together, but honestly, it looks nice. The green trim is really narrow. Grandma’s good at clothes presents. And it’s cashmere. Yummy.) I twist my hair up and fasten it at the back of my head with a silver clip, long and slender and pointed at one end, like a dagger. I’ve had this for years, but haven’t worn it for a while, because at St. Tabby’s, long hair clips have been out for the last six months. Elaborate big round tortoiseshell clasps, worn over buns at the nape of the neck, are in.

  Count your blessings and all that. It’s a ray of sunshine: at Wakefield Hall Collegiate, nobody cares about what they wear. There are no fashion police walking the corridors to laugh, point, and ridicule you because you’re wearing a hair clip, which means you’re out. It’s super-intellectual here and, like I said, you have to wear the ghastly brown school uniform till you’re sixteen anyway, so there’s much less opportunity for fashion terrorism. The girls barely wear makeup, for God’s sake. Phew. Much more relaxing.

  I grab my old leather satchel and run downstairs just as Aunt Gwen starts to call my name. She’s about to leave for school, too. (She’s a teacher at Wakefield Hall—geography and maths. See how awful my life is?) I wave a breakfast bar at her as she begins to spout off about growing girls needing to sit down to a proper meal in the morning, and dash out of the house, her grating metallic tones following me out the door. It’s ten to nine as I pause outside the entrance to the old part of the school, which only the sixth-formers are allowed to use.

  It’s strange. I’m almost excited to be here.

  Girls are flooding up the drive, the younger ones in their brown uniforms flowing past like a river of mud and through their own entrance in the nasty new modern building, glancing curiously at the older girls in normal clothes as they pass. I scarf down my breakfast bar and look around me at the girls my age. They’re so dowdy by comparison to what I’m used to. Wakefield Hall is the anti–St. Tabby’s. It’s where parents send their daughters to get the best intellectual education money can buy, and, just as importantly, to be isolated in the countryside, free from the temptations of the big city (no fashion crazes, boys, drink, or drugs here). In a way, I’m grateful for that right now. The last thing I need is St. Tabby’s, Part Two: The Revenge. Two years of boring dowdiness is just what I need to recover.

  Nobody fashionable. Nobody wild. And no boys at all (well, apart from that gardener boy, but I’m just going to ignore him completely, so he doesn’t count). Which is good, because I don’t want to kill anyone else.

  Oh, Dan . . . I see him lying on the terrace, the swiveling light of the ambulance below casting those eerie blue flashes over his body. I see them easing him onto a stretcher and covering him with a blanket, and I have to dig my finger nails into my palms to stop myself from breaking down. The pain brings me back to the here and now. There are nasty red half-moons on my palms, but that’s okay. As long as I didn’t cry in public.

  I look around and realize that, while I’ve been lost in miserable memories, everyone else has already gone up the steps. We’re due in our classrooms any minute. No problem. I’ve been exploring this school building since I was tiny. I know it like the palm of my hand. I sling my satchel over my shoulder and dash inside and up the stairs, heading for Lower Six C. Right at the top, down the corridor, first right—

  No! It’s all changed! Lower Six C is now some sort of science lab! Grandmother—sorry, Lady Wakefield—has been doing massive remodeling without even mentioning it to me! And now there’s no one around to ask for directions, because I’m so late that everyone’s in their classrooms already, and I’m going to be there well past nine on my first day of school . . . oh bugger. . . .

  I arrive, panting and doubtless red-faced, at the new and, by the looks of it, not-much-improved Lower Six C, to find everyone already there but me: girls sitting in massed ranks at their desks, teacher looming in front of hers. Horrors. The whole room turns to stare as I stand in the doorway, and I know every girl there is thinking devoutly: I’m so glad that isn’t me.

  I don’t know the teacher in charge, but she’s glaring at me as if I’m something nasty she just stepped in.

  “Scarlett Wakefield, I presume,” she says nastily. “Since you probably haven’t bothered to inform yourself of my name, I am Miss Newman.”

  No one is labeled a Ms. here. Grandmother—Lady Wakefield—is very old-fashioned.

  “Yes,” I blurt out. “I’m so sorry I’m late. I—”

  “Oh, no need to explain, Scarlett. No need at all. We all assumed that you thought you could waltz into class any time you felt like it.”

  “No, honestly, I—”

  “But let me tell you, Miss Wakefield, that just because your grandmother is the headmistress here, and your aunt the head of geography, I will not allow you any special privileges in my class. Your grandmother and aunt have issued strict edicts to that effect.”

  As Miss Newman is yelling at me, I somehow manage to notice that there’s a clear mustache shadow above her upper lip. I think I can see a nose hair or two as well. She probably has hairy knuckles. And I don’t even want to think about what her back’s like.

  “I was going to do you the courtesy of taking you aside and making this little point to you,” she continues after a deep breath. “But since you have failed to show me and your fellow students the courtesy of showing up to class on time, I think I should respond in kind. I see that you are the type of girl to think that she can get away with anything she wants to because she has some sort of special status. Well, believe me, Miss Wakefield, that will not be the case at all for you. Your grandmother wished you to transfer to Wakefield Hall in the sixth form to have the advantages of our superb educational system for your A levels, not because you were to be in any way pampered while you were here.”

  That’s the official story—that I’m back here because Wakefield Hall is second to none in its record of girls getting top marks in their exams. No mention of my being effectively expelled from St. Tabby’s for killing a boy. Grandmother thought that would put a bit of a damper on my ability to make friends. Goodness knows why.

  “You may find a desk and take your seat in the few minutes we have remaining before leaving for assembly,” Miss Newman says, her voice icy enough to freeze hot soup.

  I’ve been ducking my head to avoid her awful sneer. I manage to lift my head and look around me frantically for a spare desk. Oh God. The only one left is in the second row, of course. I’m sitting with the keen, swotty girls. Great.

  I do the Walk of Shame across the room and slip behind the desk, the last one in the row, next to the window. Grandma’s kept the old wooden desks from when she first started the school: they’re ancient and battered, scarred by girls incising them with the nibs of fountain pens that they would fill from the built-in inkwells at the back. You can tell they were inkwells because they’re stained from decades of leaks. Now they’re just used for standing ballpoints in. I lift the lid of my desk and slide in my books. That’s all that gets left in the desks: ther
e are lockers downstairs now, with combination locks, for serious stuff. You can’t have just wooden desks that anyone could open anymore, not when girls have iPods and cell phones and all kinds of expensive stuff that’s highly nickable.

  I look around. Hardly anyone meets my gaze. Great. They all hate me already. Miss Newman has managed to make everyone think I’m trying to take the piss and get away with murder because I’m the headmistress’s granddaughter. God, I hate my life.

  There’s one girl who does look back at me, though, and I’m immediately curious about her. She’s tall, with wide shoulders and well-built upper arms. (I’m not being weird, but I notice these things because of gymnastics, okay?) Her hair is short, dark, and shaggy, falling round her face in an artfully clipped style that makes me think she’s carefully arranged every lock, pieced it with wax or something, to seem so trendily disarranged. Her eyes are wide set and green, and the look she’s giving me is absolutely unreadable. I’ve got no bloody idea what she thinks of me at all.

  The nine o’clock bell goes, and we all stand up and prepare to file into the Assembly Hall so Grandmother—Lady Wakefield—can lecture us all about Wakefield Hall’s core values, and why good character is the most important possession a woman can boast, and all that Edwardian Young Ladies’ Manual stuff she loves so much. And still none of the other girls are making any effort to include me in their tiny circles. I wasn’t expecting to make a best friend on the first day, but this is definitely the worst-case scenario.

  Stupid me. I should never say things like that. Because when the worst-case scenario really does turn up, I’ll be left longing for the time when twenty girls in Lower Sixth C put their noses in the air and wouldn’t look at me, and the twenty-first, having given me a long look, seemed to have decided that it wasn’t worth her while even to make a point of ignoring me on principle. She’s wearing a navy wool sweater with pieces of leather on the elbows, the kind of thing you only see on fishermen or someone’s granddad. It’s very old; I can see how frayed the cuffs are. Her combat trousers look equally ancient, like someone might actually have worn them into combat. They’re clean—she’d never get away with wearing something stained at Wakefield Hall—but they’re definitely screaming “hand-me-downs.”

  I look at the line of girls in front of me, and despite the noses in the air, I do see one reason to be cheerful: none of the aforesaid noses are bobbed or filed-down or artificially sculpted. As well as being fashion, boy, drink, and drug free, Wakefield Hall is equally a plastic surgery–free zone. It’s such a world away from St. Tabby’s that I really doubt anyone here has any connections to the London, Teen Vogue, shiny happy people scene, which means they’re very unlikely to be aware that Scarlett Wakefield is known to the tabloid press by a much more lurid nickname.

  If I’m lucky, I’ll manage to keep my secret. Girls won’t be keen to make friends with the headmistress’s granddaughter. But befriending the Kiss of Death girl? That would be a whole different story.

  nine

  SHOWING OFF

  “Meena, nicely done, on the whole.”

  Mrs. Fisher, our Latin teacher, is passing between the desks, handing out our marked translation homework.

  Meena, a stringy girl with droopy posture, looks very downcast at this verdict. I’ve noticed this already in my first few days at Wakefield Hall—the girls set incredibly high standards for themselves. I thought St. Tabby’s was competitive, but this is way beyond anything that went on at St. Tabby’s.

  “Natalie!” Mrs. Fisher’s brows contract severely as she stops in front of Natalie’s desk. “We’re in the sixth form now; we know the difference between the ablative and the dative case, surely?”

  Natalie starts nodding so convulsively she looks defective, like a toy they’ll have to recall before the head comes off.

  “Well, show me next time!”

  Mrs. Fisher drops the paper on Natalie’s desk rather than handing it to her. Oh dear.

  “Susan! Lovely use of the iambic pentameter! Top marks!”

  Susan, a pretty girl with very pale skin, blushes so hard her entire face floods with red color, like blood poured into milk. She takes her paper back from Mrs. Fisher with a huge smile.

  “Scarlett—” Mrs. Fisher turns to me.

  I smile in anticipation. I’ve always been pretty good at Latin.

  “A lot more work is going to be needed here, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Fisher says. She doesn’t drop the paper on my desk: she stands there, holding it, a horrible indication that there is more criticism to come.

  “Very sketchy work. We’re really going to have to concentrate on your written Latin. I can see that this has not been a priority for you.”

  I wait for the paper to fall on my desk so this public humiliation can finally be over, but she still doesn’t let it go.

  Eventually I realize that she’s waiting for an answer.

  “Um, no,” I manage. “We didn’t have to do any written Latin for the GCSE exam, so . . . um . . .”

  Mrs. Fisher sniffs.

  “So your teacher didn’t bother drilling you in it? Very shortsighted! And now we have to pick up her pieces, don’t we?”

  I nod humbly.

  Finally she drops the paper on my desk.

  “See me after class, Scarlett,” she says. “We might want to downgrade your choice of Latin to an AS Level. That’ll be much easier for you. I’m afraid that our choice of exam board is rather more rigorous than the one you’ve been used to.”

  I stagger out of Latin class a bleeding, broken girl. My pride is in tatters. I have been torn and shredded in front of an entire group of girls for whom translating Shakespeare into Latin iambic pentameter is a light intellectual warm-up before breakfast. Mrs. Fisher clearly thinks I should drop Latin. She as good as told me so. Bloody hell, I think I should drop Latin. I had no idea it was going to be this hard.

  But now I have an awful feeling that I’ve been so humiliated that I have to stick with Latin, just to prove that I can do it. My pride won’t let me drop it, even though in class just now I couldn’t answer one question right. I was so demoralized I couldn’t have managed a sentence as simple as “Sextus has six slaves and Decimus has a big dog.”

  I check my timetable. Oh, thank God. It’s the last period of the morning, and Lower Sixth C has PE. Wakefield Hall is so old-school that they still call it physical education and make it compulsory till you’re eighteen—at St. Tabby’s it was gym, and you could drop it at fourteen in favor of just starving yourself to fit into size XS instead. Great, some exercise to take the edge off. I’m all wound up from being made to look a fool in front of eight Latin swots.

  The changing rooms smell, as always, of feet and armpits. Eeww. I wind my hair into a tight ponytail, pull on the regulation white T-shirt and brown gym shorts, and jog into the gym. Wakefield Hall doesn’t have anything like what we had at St. Tabby’s, our huge gymnasium with its spring-loaded floors and its long tumble track. This is as big, but the floors are wood—much less bounce—no bars, no beams, let alone a tumble pit, and the trampoline isn’t even set up all the time.

  The girls are all filing in, looking, for the most part, extremely dispirited at having to be here—apart from the hockey/lacrosse contingent, a bunch of hard-edged tough chicks with thighs the size of hams and faces pink and weather-beaten from being outdoors in the cool autumn air, trying to kill each other with big sticks of wood. Still, they don’t intimidate me. I know they haven’t trained as hard as I have for the past nine years.

  I know I sound obnoxious. But honestly, these last few days at Wakefield Hall have been pretty rough. Latin was just the worst of a long series of classes that made me realize not only that I have a long way to go to catch up to Wakefield Hall’s academic standards, but that I’m in for a really bad time from my teachers, because they’re bending over backward not to show me any favoritism.

  So it’s understandable, isn’t it, that I’m jumping with joy at finally getting to show off a bit at someth
ing I actually know I’m going to be better at than anyone here?

  “Lower Sixth! Hello!” says a bright, metallic voice. “I am Miss Carter! And we’re all here to get fit and learn good habits that will keep us fit for the rest of our lives, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, Miss Carter,” the girls chorus dully, staring miserably at their shoes.

  This is not a sporty school.

  “So let’s start with a nice warm-up, shall we? Get the blood flowing!”

  Miss Carter is one of those jolly-hockey-stick types. She looks like one of the field-sport girls, all grown up and happily settled down with another ex-field-sport girl in a cozy little cottage on the school grounds. Her hair is short and blond, her skin looks like it’s never seen a makeup wand, and her thighs and arms are as pink and hamlike as those of the hockey/lacrosse toughs. She makes us do jumping jacks and knee-ups in series. It’s unintentionally hilarious. There are more bosoms bouncing around in the gym than in an R&B music video. These girls are totally not wearing decent sports bras. (I worked out my problem over the summer, by the way. You get a minimizer bra from Marks and Spencer’s and wear a pull-on sports bra over that. Two layers. Squash ’em down.)

  Still, there’s a lovely view outside. The outer wall of the gym has floor-to-ceiling glass windows that look out onto a wide stretch of rich green grassy sports fields—hockey on one side, lacrosse on the other, separated from each other by Lime Walk, a long avenue of lime trees raised up slightly with a gentle green hill sloping down on either side of the avenue and smoothing off into the sports fields. The trees are rich with autumn leaves; the grass is green and thick. In a couple of months’ time, the sports fields will be muddy and churned-up from being pounded by cleats on the bottom of the tough girls’ shoes, but right now it’s a beautiful autumn landscape, with the leaves just starting to turn golden.