Kiss Me Kill Me

by Lauren Henderson

  I grin. Taylor is the most macho girl I’ve ever met in my life. If I can trust her—and that’s a big if—she’ll make the most amazing ally.

  And maybe I don’t have that much choice in the matter. A girl who can shin up drainpipes and recognize the flash of binoculars catching the sun, who can make up a story on the spot to save someone else from being caught, well, put it this way: it feels a lot safer to have Taylor on my side than against me.

  “So that’s actually Versace?” I am saying, wide-eyed, as Lizzie and I stroll out of the cafeteria and onto the main terrace. Actually, my eyes are wide because I’m so bored I’m having to exaggerate, forcing the muscles to stay open, but Lizzie doesn’t pick up anything unnatural about my expression. She’s not exactly the Brain of Britain, I’m quickly coming to realize.

  “Yeah!” Lizzie pats her handbag triumphantly. “It was in Lucky last month, and Lindsay Lohan was carrying one just like it, but in chocolate, on the cover of Heat two weeks ago.” She pauses for thought. “Well, actually, her bodyguard was carrying it, because she was holding a coffee and a pack of cigarettes, so she’d given it to him to hold, or something, but anyway, she has one just like it!”

  “That’s so cool,” I say.

  The above sentence is carrying me through most of this conversation. It’s the day after I saw Lizzie slip the note into my desk, and I’ve wasted no time in smarming up to her: I made sure I was just behind her in the cafeteria queue for lunch. Then, craftily, I said something about hoping they had salad today, because I was on a huge diet, and Lizzie immediately responded with the comment that if they served lasagne one more time she was going to completely lose it, because honestly sometimes she thought she put on weight just by looking at a tray of lasagne, which is just disgusting on every level—wheat and cheese and red meat, honestly—sometimes she thought the school was just trying to fatten us up like pigs! And then Lizzie started to do a running commentary on every single food choice in front of us with a rundown of its calorie, fat, and sugar content, and we found a table and sat down together, and Lizzie never stopped talking once, except to draw breath.

  After that I’ve basically just been agreeing with everything she says, which seems to be working perfectly. Blimey, she can talk. I’m beginning to think Lizzie is as lonely as I am, though for a very different reason. She’s a complete fish out of water here, with her elaborately tasseled bag, her highlighted hair, and the lip gloss she doggedly applies every half hour in imitation of her heroines, even though no one here has the least appreciation for whether her lips are sticky and strawberry-scented.

  Her main subjects of conversation are diets and fashion. It’s a shame for Lizzie they don’t offer an A level in Celebrity Accessorizing, because she’d nail that exam with no revision necessary. In the hour I’ve spent with her, she’s given detailed descriptions of the latest trends in Prada shoes, Stella McCartney belts, and, for all I know, Marc Jacobs bobby pins.

  I couldn’t quite recall the specifics, because I’ve been tuning out as much as possible, just nodding and smiling and murmuring “That’s so cool” at regularly paced intervals. Gucci, Pucci, and Fiorucci have melted together in one fashion-obsessed rhyming blur. I’m as keen to look nice and trendy as the next girl, but Lizzie is up to her neck in the quicksand of celebrity lore and sinking fast. I can almost feel my brain melting into gray mush as I listen to her stream of consciousness.

  At least now we’re walking. After we finished our paltry lunch (there was salad, which was all Lizzie took, and I followed suit to ingratiate myself with her, and now I’m so hungry it feels as if my stomach’s eating itself) we wandered outside. I was crossing my fingers that Lizzie wouldn’t, at this stage, find anything suspicious in the fact that the girl into whose desk she slipped an anonymous note yesterday was suddenly hanging out with her today. But I’m now realizing that Lizzie has absolutely no one to talk to here about the things that really matter to her—which teenage celeb pop star owns which latest Louis Vuitton handbag—and she’s so desperate for conversation with a like-minded person that she’ll take it wherever she can get it.

  I don’t know what she’s been doing up till now. Probably talking to the Lime Walk trees about Stella McCartney stilettos.

  Lizzie is so busy rattling on that she doesn’t notice that I’m subtly steering the direction we’re taking. Past the girls playing clap ball and French Elastic, around the stand of weeping willow trees, up to the opening of the maze.

  “So then I rang up the main branch,” she’s babbling, “the one in New Bond Street, and asked how long the waiting list was, and they said five months. Can you believe it? Five months! And I said, But it’ll be completely over by then! I mean, Lindsay Lohan has it now!”

  “Well, her bodyguard does,” I mutter, unable to resist.

  “Sorry?” Lizzie says, turning to me.

  “Um, yeah!” I say. “I mean, who wants to wait five months for a handbag?”

  “Well, exactly!” Lizzie agrees. “So I said, well, is there a different color? Because I don’t have to have it exactly the same as Lindsay’s. I mean, it’s not about copying her or anything.”

  Luckily, she doesn’t expect a response to this barefaced lie.

  Just then she realizes the direction in which we’ve been walking.

  “Are we going into the maze?” Lizzie asks nervously.

  We’ve just arrived at the entrance. It’s now or never. If I can get her in, we’ve done it. I take a deep breath and make my voice as casual, as light and breezy, as I possibly can.

  “Yeah, I usually sit in the middle after lunch,” I say.

  “The middle? You know how to get to the middle?”

  “Oh yes, it’s really easy.”

  Lizzie stares at me. Her eyes are quite small, but she’s carefully penciled and shadowed them till they look a lot bigger than they actually are. If she were at St. Tabby’s, she’d be wearing a lot more makeup, but Wakefield Hall is really strict—you’re not allowed to wear makeup till you’re fifteen—and Lizzie’s pushing the envelope with the amount of eyeliner she’s wearing as it is.

  Even with the makeup, though, Lizzie’s eyes are tiny at the moment, because she’s squinting them in confusion. Then they open a bit, and she says, her forehead clearing of its frown, “Oh yeah! I forgot that you live here, sort of. I mean, that it’s like your home.”

  I nod. “There’s a trick to getting through the maze super-fast,” I say, “like a shortcut. Here, I’ll show you.”

  I step forward, through the entrance. The Wakefield Hall maze isn’t the oldest one in England (that’s Hampton Court) or the biggest (that’s at Longleat, and I think it’s made of sixteen thousand yew trees, i.e., it’s massive) but it was planted over a hundred and fifty years ago, and the yews are ancient, tightly packed, and so intertwined by growing so close together that they’re a wall as thick and strong as if it was made of stone. Most girls, I know, are scared to come into the maze: the hedges are so dense that it doesn’t get a lot of sunlight, especially because it’s shaded by the overgrowing oaks that surround it. The little girls dare each other to go inside for five minutes, and usually come out trembling with fear.

  But to me, it’s just another part of my home. I remember my dad taking me in on his shoulders when I was really small. It’s so tall that even sitting up there, on my six-foot dad, I couldn’t see over the top of the hedges.

  I always felt safe when I was with my dad. I know that, even though I don’t remember much about him or my mum. They died when I was five, and the memories I have of them are all blurred at the edges, like old, fading photographs, where the dark is slowly moving in from the sides to obscure the picture.

  But I know I always felt safe when he was around.

  My dad showed me the shortcut the summer before they died. He was worried about me wandering inside and getting lost, and the shortcut is easy to remember: he made me repeat it till he knew I had it thoroughly memorized. Right, left, right, left, through the de
ad end, and right again. The dead end is a sort of hidden opening, which you can only find if you know it’s there: you’d swear it was a solid cul-de-sac of hedge unless you went right up to it, and then you see the narrow chink to your right, just room enough for someone to wiggle through. Ted Barnes knows about it, because he’s the one who prunes the maze—it’s his job and he won’t let anyone else do it.

  And then I think about Jase Barnes, incredibly handsome Jase Barnes, with his golden eyes and butterscotch skin, and wonder whether, now Ted’s getting older, he’s letting Jase prune the maze hedge, and then I flash to a fantasy of it being Jase walking by my side now, instead of Lizzie, who’s dutifully following me, still rabbiting on about celebrity handbags, and the thought sends butterflies through my stomach, which actually, though it sounds pretty and romantic, is actually quite an unsettling and dizzy-making sensation.

  Jase Barnes. Kissing Jase Barnes, like I kissed Dan, feeling Jase Barnes’s hands on me.

  Jase Barnes, so tall and handsome, with those wide shoulders . . .

  I shiver and push the thought of Jase firmly away from me. I can’t even think about him now. Still, this quest, this need to find out why Lizzie left me that note, is all about Jase Barnes, in a way; it’s not only about what really killed Dan, it’s also about whether I will ever be able to trust myself enough to kiss another boy ever again.

  This quest is the single most important thing in my life.

  “It’s so dark in here,” Lizzie’s saying in a whiny voice.

  I’m nipping through the maze so fast she’s having to trot to keep up. She’s like a Labrador, I realize, silly and trusting, ready to jump up and lick anyone who’s being at all nice to her. I wonder how she got like this. And then I think about what happened to me to stop me being trusting. Lizzie’s like a kid no one’s ever truly been nasty to. She trots on blithely, as if the world were sugarcoated, like a child in the beginning of a fairy tale before she meets the monsters and the evil fairies and has to fight for her life.

  I am very jealous of Lizzie.

  “Is this really a shortcut?” she’s whining.

  Of course it isn’t. I would never show Lizzie the shortcut. It’s a family secret.

  “Nearly there!” I say brightly.

  And that’s the truth. In a few more twists and turns, we emerge into the center of the maze, and Lizzie gasps in amazement and appreciation.

  It’s really pretty in here. The oak trees are trimmed so that on sunny days there’s sunlight streaming down into the center of the maze, no overhanging branches to shadow the marble statue with the bench sculpted into its base, a statue that my great-great-great-grandfather (I think, I get confused by all those greats) had commissioned specially for this place. Then he planted all the yew trees around it, so they would grow to form the maze and conceal the statue.

  The oak trees need cutting back, I notice: it’s a bit dark in here, a bit overgrown. But that’s perfect for my purpose today.

  You can hide much better in the shadows.

  I walk over to the bench and sit down, smiling at Lizzie. “Isn’t it lovely?” I say in the same fake bright tone of voice. I pat the bench next to me. But instead of following and sitting down obediently, like a good little Labrador, Lizzie stands hesitantly in the entrance.

  “It’s so dark!” she complains. “And it feels damp! I don’t like the damp.”

  “It isn’t damp,” I say crossly, “it’s just a bit overgrown.”

  “Well, I don’t like it.” She’s acting as if she’s six years old rather than sixteen. “It’s creepy. Can we go now?”

  I brace myself to convince her to stay.

  “Come on . . . ,” I start, but that’s as far as I get.

  Lizzie turns to look behind her, at the opening in the hedge through which we just entered the center of the maze. And then a figure barrels into her out of nowhere and rugby-tackles her to the ground. They fall in a thrashing mess of tangled limbs and roll over till they come to rest almost at my feet.

  “Taylor!” I yell, jumping up. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

  “I thought she was going to try to get away,” Taylor says sullenly.

  “Of course she wasn’t going to get away!” I practically yell. “She’s in the middle of the maze! Where would she go?”

  “She looked like she was going to make a run for it,” Taylor mutters.

  “Ugh!” I shake my head in disbelief. Surely Taylor’s seen enough of Lizzie’s character to realize that she’s too much of a scaredy-cat to seriously contemplate running through the maze on her own. Look at her—one little rugby tackle and a bit of rolling on the grass and she’s crumpled up sobbing helplessly. “Lizzie? Can you sit up? I’ll give you a hand.”

  Lizzie looks up tearfully and takes my proffered hand. I pull her up and we both sit down on the bench, as originally planned before Taylor went all ninja on her.

  “I’m sorry about Taylor,” I say, glaring at the girl in question. “She gets a bit carried away sometimes.”

  “She hurt me!” Lizzie wails.

  “Yeah, she doesn’t know her own strength.”

  “Hey, stop talking about me as if I was your tame gorilla!” Taylor snaps.

  “Well, don’t throw people around like you were starving and they were between you and the banana tree!” I snap back.

  Lizzie looks terrified, as well she might.

  “You two are really scaring me!” she moans.

  “Well,” I say to her, “all you have to do is tell us what we want to know and I’ll take you straight out of here. Okay?”

  Lizzie’s expression is pretty much what Little Miss Muffet must have looked like when the spider sat down beside her.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says feebly.

  “Oh come on, Lizzie.” I’m impatient now. “The note you left in my desk! You’re not getting out of here till you tell me all about it.”

  Lizzie wells up like a fountain turned on full blast. “I can’t tell you!”

  I sigh, and look at Taylor, who’s pantomiming sticking her finger down the back of her throat to indicate how nauseating she finds Lizzie’s sobfest.

  “Lizzie,” I say, “you tell me or I’ll tell my grandmother all about the note, okay? Your choice.”

  It’s a totally empty threat, of course I won’t tell my grandmother. But Lizzie doesn’t know that. And she goes white at the thought of being hauled into the headmistress’s study to be cross-examined.

  “I know this wasn’t your idea,” I say, taking a guess.

  But Taylor and I have talked this over, and neither of us believes that the note originated with Lizzie. She’s such a wimp. It’s hard to believe her generating something like this. My assumption is that she’s acting on behalf of someone else . . . someone who isn’t a pupil at Wakefield Hall. Luce? Alison? Is it far-fetched to think that, while they don’t want to talk to me directly, they might have got Lizzie to leave me a note designed to make me feel better? It’s not much of a theory, but I don’t have a better one at the moment.

  “Aaaaaaaaaah . . .” Lizzie’s sobbing so hard I’m getting worried that her eyeballs are going to pop out under the pressure.

  Taylor leans forward. She’s clearly decided to up the threat level.

  “Listen, you little crybaby,” she starts, in a voice so menacing that I get chills.

  “Is everyone okay?” asks someone just around the corner of the maze.

  The next moment he emerges. I stare at him, horrified. I might have fantasized about coming into the maze with Jase Barnes, but it didn’t involve having two other girls present as well. And it certainly didn’t involve him catching me in the middle of an interrogation.

  twenty

  THE HOTTEST GARDENER EVER

  Jase is carrying a big pair of shears, and his T-shirt sleeves are rolled up to the caps of his shoulders, making his upper arms look bulgy with muscle. His faded old blue jeans hang loose on his lean hips, and th
ere’s the faint sheen of sweat on his cappuccino skin. His tight black curls are a little damp with exertion.

  If my grandmother had just entered the center of the maze wearing a bikini and a tiara, she couldn’t have been more effective at getting our attention than Jase Barnes looking like the hottest gardener ever in his sweaty work clothes. We turn, stare at him and promptly freeze to the spot, as if we’re playing a game of Musical Statues.

  “Scarlett?” he says. “Are you okay? I was pruning the hedge, and I heard someone crying. I thought they might be lost in here.”

  His voice trails off as he takes in the scene. Suddenly I see the situation through Jase’s eyes. One girl, slumped on the bench, crying her eyes out. Two girls, standing over her menacingly. Taylor and I must look like a pair of really nasty bullies.

  And I hate bullies. How did I get myself into this? Because, although my motives are good, what we’re doing is bullying Lizzie. No question about it.

  I feel like a piece of dog poo.

  Taylor and Lizzie flick their gaze in my direction, though they seem physically incapable of actually turning their heads away from Jase. I know exactly what they’re thinking: this hunk of gorgeous boyhood, this slightly sweaty essence of handsomeness, actually knows my name? Knows me well enough to talk to me this familiarly? How lucky am I?

  “Um, Lizzie was upset,” I say weakly, “and we were trying to cheer her up.”

  “Doesn’t seem to be working, does it?” Jase points out, and there’s an edge to his voice now. He puts down the shears and comes over to the bench, kneeling down in front of Lizzie.

  “You all right, love?” he asks gently.

  Lizzie’s ducked her head now and is rubbing at her face furiously. Finally, she lifts it to look at Jase, and Taylor and I involuntarily take a step back. Even Jase can’t help jerking his head back reflexively. Lizzie looks like she’s got hives. Her face is swollen and red and blotchy, and because of the rubbing, her eyeliner’s all smudged, giving an extra Goth-y touch to the horror of her facial swelling.