New Girl

by Carmen Reid

  Miss Chrysler blew the whistle long and loud and began to run towards them.

  ‘Stick below the shoulder!’ she was shouting. ‘First rule of hockey! Stick below the shoulder!’

  ‘I’m sorry – I’m so, so sorry,’ Gina was repeating, both to Willow and to Miss Chrysler. ‘I didn’t know. I’ve never played this before.’

  The blood was pouring freely down Willow’s face; it was already at the collar of her white shirt.

  When Miss Chrysler got her first full view of the injury, she was clearly panicked. ‘Oh my goodness! Sit down, sit down,’ she urged Willow. ‘Oh my goodness,’ she repeated, looking even paler than the injured girl. ‘Are there any first aiders here? And can someone run for the nurse . . . Run!’ she shouted.

  One of Penny’s wingers took off in the direction of the main school building.

  ‘Min, you have to go over,’ Niffy urged. ‘New girl’s decked Willow and you know the most about this stuff.’

  Min began to trot towards Willow, but there was a reluctance in her sloping shoulders and bowed head.

  Gina watched as Min came over and began to issue instructions without even looking directly at Willow. ‘We need to lie her down, Miss Chrysler,’ she said. ‘Apply light pressure to the bleeding. Maybe we could use a sweatshirt, or paper towels.’ At this request another winger shot off towards the changing huts.

  Gina, who knew first-aid basics from camp, helped to ease Willow down onto her back. ‘You’re going to be OK . . .’ she reassured her, but she felt as anxious as Miss Chrysler. This was all her fault.

  ‘Where’s the wound?’ Min asked, kneeling close to Willow now, but with her head still held at a strange angle, as if she couldn’t face looking at the injured girl directly.

  ‘Her face – it’s all over her face!’ Miss Chrysler was close to tears and rapidly losing all credibility in front of the group of girls.

  Min twisted her head and took a look, then jerked away again. ‘Forehead, OK, that’s fine. No soft tissue, loads of blood, but a surface wound.’ She sounded impressively knowledgeable. ‘Possibly concussion,’ she added, ‘but we’ve got to press on the wound lightly to slow the blood loss.’

  The winger who’d gone to the huts was racing back with a great ball of paper towel in her hand. As Min stood up to take the paper from her hands, she seemed to buckle slightly and then just crumpled to the ground.

  ‘Oh hell, there goes Min!’ Niffy exclaimed.

  ‘What on earth . . .?!’ Miss Chrysler shouted out.

  By the time the school nurse had bustled out onto the playing field, she had two patients to care for. She briskly instructed several girls to support Willow as she walked to the first-aid room for treatment.

  Min had to be cared for on the field. Gina worked with the nurse as Min’s legs were raised above the ground. Gradually she came round from her faint.

  ‘What happened to you?’ the nurse asked. ‘Is it the sight of blood?’

  Min nodded weakly.

  ‘Dear, oh dear. Something to do with the vagus nerve, I believe.’ She was patting Min’s face with a wet paper towel. ‘Often hereditary. Anyone else in your family keel over at the sight of blood?’

  Min shook her head. ‘Hardly!’

  ‘OK, stay down here for at least five minutes, then your friends can help you back to the boarding house, where you’re to take it very easy for the rest of the afternoon. Right, I need to go and see to the other casualty.’

  The nurse treated the useless Miss Chrysler to something of a glare as she set off again.

  Niffy and Gina linked their arms round Min’s waist and shoulders to help her back to the boarding house; Amy accompanied them.

  ‘Imagine being a games teacher and not knowing what to do with a bump on the head!’ Niffy said indignantly. ‘She was absolutely useless.’

  ‘Totally,’ Amy agreed. ‘You were good though, Gina.’

  ‘Oh no . . .’ Gina shrugged off the praise. ‘I feel so bad. I had my eyes closed. I hit the ball without even looking!’

  ‘You got her on the follow-through,’ Niffy said, then added kindly, ‘Don’t worry about it. I’m sure she’ll be fine. Cracking shot though!’ She grinned at Gina.

  ‘Yeah!’ Amy agreed. ‘I didn’t think you’d be such a big hitter.’

  ‘Oh . . . just luck, I guess,’ Gina replied, but felt more than a little pleased at the compliments.

  ‘We’ve only got one more house match, on Saturday, then the hockey season’s over,’ Niffy began. ‘Willow’s out, so I’m thinking, if we give newbie here a few tips, a little bit of practice, show her how to direct the swing . . . What do you think, Amy?’

  Think about what? What were they talking about? Gina wondered.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Amy replied. ‘Give it a go.’

  ‘Gina,’ Niffy began, grinning again. ‘Welcome to the team!’

  ‘WHAT!’

  ‘And the gang,’ Min said weakly from between them.

  Chapter Six

  ‘MOM . . . I’M NOT calling at a bad time, am I?’ Gina knew that she probably was, but she’d had to take her chance on the pay phone when she’d been able to grab it.

  ‘Oh . . . hi! Gina!’ The voice on the other end of the line sounded surprised.

  ‘Sorry . . . I just wanted to catch up with you all and it’s hard to get to the phone here. Cells aren’t allowed!’ Gina still couldn’t believe this.

  ‘Oh . . . yes, I remember reading that now—’

  ‘You knew that and you still let me come here?!’ Gina was outraged.

  ‘Well, anyway’ – her mother didn’t want to get into this – ‘how was your first day at school, baby?’

  ‘Just terrible,’ Gina told her immediately. ‘It’s horrible. It’s the worst place I’ve ever been to. When I say it’s soooo last century, I really mean it. This place is frozen in time, Mom. I mean, there’s a history teacher who is in her sixties! She’s called Miss Ballantyne and I bet she was teaching when you were here. Wasn’t she?’

  ‘Miss Ballantyne?’ Lorelei repeated. ‘I don’t remember . . . I don’t think I remember the names of any of the teachers . . .’

  ‘Really?’ Gina pressed. ‘Not one of them?’

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ Lorelei reminded her.

  ‘So when is your idea of a joke going to be over, huh?’ Gina went on. ‘I’m really sorry I didn’t study hard last semester, but I will make it up to you . . . Please, Mom, will you let me come home?’

  When nothing but silence came back at her down the line, Gina wheedled, ‘Pleeeeeease . . . Mommy?’

  ‘It’s too early to come home,’ Lorelei told her firmly. ‘You don’t win your bet if you come home now, Gina. Just give it a chance,’ she insisted. ‘I think you’re going to really love it.’

  When Gina snorted at this, her mother added, ‘Well, at least parts of it. Give it a chance.’

  ‘I suppose you loved hockey, did you?’ Gina demanded. ‘You enjoyed running up and down wet grass with wooden sticks hitting a very hard ball around. It’s deadly. I hit someone in the face in my first game and there was blood everywhere.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re exaggerating as usual.’

  ‘I’m not!’

  ‘How about class?’ Lorelei was much more interested in this. ‘How did you find that?’

  ‘Boring,’ Gina told her. ‘But all the geeky girls here seem to love lessons – they can’t stop studying all day long. They are weird – honestly, all of them. I don’t think any of them has ever met a boy, ever.’

  If Gina thought this was going to get her home early, she was so wrong. This was music to Lorelei’s ears.

  ‘Aha, Gina. Here’s hoping some of that rubs off on you too,’ she said.

  ‘Huh!’ It was all Gina could do not to slam down the handset there and then. Instead she managed to listen to her mother talk about Menzie and the fantastic weather and a few other things that made her feel sick to her stomach that she wasn’t at home.

&nbs
p; When the call was over, she stumbled out of the phone box and wondered where would be a private enough place to go and cry or at least shout and punch a pillow, but then Niffy ran down the corridor and tapped her on the shoulder.

  ‘Got to come with us, newbie. Sideshow Mel’s first performance of the term. You can’t miss it!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘C’mon, we’ll get Amy out of the study room and go up.’

  It wasn’t difficult to tear Amy from her homework, then the three set off up the stairs past the warren of bedrooms, all different shapes and sizes.

  ‘Mel’s in Year Five and is the boarding house’s resident sexpert,’ Niffy explained. ‘Well, she thinks she is. This is always good for a laugh, believe me.’

  Gina followed them up the narrow staircase towards a door on the first landing, not knowing what to expect. Sexpert? No girl she’d met at St Jude’s so far seemed likely to know the first thing about sex.

  Niffy knocked on the door and announced, ‘Hi, Mel, it’s Niff and friends.’

  ‘Come in!’ called a voice from the other side.

  Gina followed the girls into a tiny single room, where two other Year Four boarders were already sitting on the bed, while an older girl Gina guessed was Mel was perched on a chair in front of them.

  ‘Come to find out what I’ve been up to on my holidays?’ Mel asked. She was a strange-looking girl, thin but in a droopy way, not the lively, athletic thin of most of the other boarders. She had a large head with bushy dyed-blonde hair, and she’d painted thick circles of kohl around her protruding violet eyes.

  ‘I have been such a naughty girl.’ She grinned as Niffy, Amy and Gina scuffled round the room looking for somewhere to sit. ‘I should charge for this information, I really should. You must be Gina?’ she asked. ‘The new girl?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Gina confirmed.

  ‘Welcome to the boudoir. Now . . . I was just telling Flo and Minty about my new man – and I mean man, girls, man.’ Mel held out her hands the required twenty centimetres or so apart, and both Flo and Minty began to giggle.

  ‘Circumcised!’ Mel whispered.

  ‘No! And what did that look like?’ Amy asked straight off.

  Mel turned to her desk, rummaged for a sheet of paper and a pencil and obligingly drew two sketches on a sheet of paper. ‘With and without,’ she instructed, passing the paper around. ‘It’s useful to know these things.’

  Gina studied the paper and wanted to laugh: both drawings looked ludicrously banana-shaped. If someone came at her with one of those, it would be impossible not to laugh hysterically.

  But at least this was more like girl life as she knew it. Maybe St Jude’s girls did know what boys were; maybe there would be a chance to meet some soon. Lovely though Aidan was, he was in California. Maybe there was someone over here who could take his place – in her daydreams at least.

  ‘And what did you do with it?’ Niffy asked with something of a disbelieving smirk.

  ‘Well, since we were in the cinema, I told him to put it away till later,’ Mel replied.

  Amy gave a little snort of laughter at this, but Niffy persisted. ‘And later?’

  The violet eyes rolled slightly. ‘Later, we had a little romp around on the sofa. He is such a good kisser. The best – absolutely no drooling at all. I feel a bit sorry for you, still having to go through the drooling and fumbling stage.’

  At those words, Squid Boy popped up in Gina’s mind: she quickly nudged him out of the way with an image of Aidan, but then tried to block out Aidan too because any day now, she expected to get the news that he was Ria’s new boyfriend. Well, she was in Scotland. Could she blame them?

  ‘So, Brian—’ Mel was saying.

  But the name Brian brought peals of laughter from her audience.

  ‘What’s wrong with Brian?’

  ‘Erm . . . everything?’ Amy offered.

  ‘Brian and I had a very nice little grope. He loves my breasts.’ Mel looked down proudly at the two small bumps hidden under her school cardigan. ‘More than a handful’s a waste,’ she added. ‘Then my mum came in and said his taxi was at the door.’

  ‘Did your mum see you?’ Flo asked, slightly shocked.

  ‘No, she knocked. I’ve trained her—’

  Just then there was a sharp tap at Mel’s door.

  ‘Melanie Forsythe, what’s going on in there?’ said a voice on the other side.

  ‘Just chatting – come in if you like,’ Mel said loudly. In a whisper, she added, ‘Lucinda alert.’

  The door opened and two of the Year Sixes crammed into the tiny space: Lucinda and Maxine. Gina had already been warned about this pair of bossy rule-enforcers and saw that they didn’t look too pleased at the sight before them.

  ‘Not boasting to the little girls again?’ Lucinda asked, managing to make both Mel and her audience feel insulted.

  ‘No. We’re having a cosy chat about our maths homework, aren’t we?’ Mel fired back.

  ‘And so what would this be then? A visual aid?’ Maxine bent down to the bed and picked up the sheet of paper with Mel’s graphic graphics.

  ‘Functions,’ Niffy said breezily, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘That’s an upside-down bell curve’ – she pointed at one of the drawings – ‘and this’ – her finger traced slowly over the second – ‘is a steep parabola.’

  She happened to know that neither Lucinda nor Maxine were studying further maths, so suspected she was on safe enough territory.

  ‘Hmmm’ – clearly Maxine wasn’t convinced – ‘your bed bell’s about to go, so why don’t you scarper off upstairs and leave us to Mel’s romantic fiction.’

  Gina followed the others out of the room. All the way up the stairs, they joked about Mel.

  ‘A real man, girls,’ Niffy mocked, holding out her hands half a metre apart. She burst out laughing. ‘I don’t know if I believe a single thing she says.’

  ‘It’s all true,’ Amy assured her. ‘She’s a total slapper.’

  ‘Five, four, three, two . . .’ Amy counted under her breath as Mrs Knebworth approached to bid Daffodil dorm goodnight.

  The door swung open and the Neb stood before them, glowering at them in a way that was really quite worrying.

  ‘Does anyone in here happen to know about the biscuit raid on the kitchen cupboards?’ she boomed from the depths of her ample chest. Many a wasted handful was constrained with heavy-duty corsetry down there.

  Four surprised and innocent faces turned to her at these words and hurried to say, ‘No!’

  ‘The main kitchen is out of bounds. Strictly and utterly out of bounds,’ she told them sternly; then, in a different tone of voice, she asked, ‘How was your first day, Gina?’

  First of all Gina thought she should be honest and admit that this was all a terrible mistake and ask when the next flight for LAX was leaving. But there was something about the way Mrs Knebworth arched her eyebrows and focused her steely blue eyes, something about her rigid hair and sheer bulk, that made her terrifying. When she asked a question, there was no doubt that she was ordering you to give her the answer she expected.

  ‘Erm . . . I’d say . . .’Gina began. ‘I’d say it was all . . . pretty interesting.’

  ‘Yes, I heard you laid someone out on the hockey field. Best to swing low, sweet chariot,’ she added bafflingly. ‘Good, good. Now, don’t stay up too late, girls. Not healthy for the grey matter.’ She tapped the side of her head.

  As soon as she’d left the room, Niffy turned to Amy and asked, ‘Did you?’

  Amy smiled and nodded.

  ‘Her special stash? Her personal supply?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I always find the first five minutes of Desperate Housewives is the safest time.’

  ‘You sneaky thief!’ Min exclaimed.

  If Gina had wondered what they were talking about, her answer came just as soon as Amy threw back her duvet to reveal four packets of biscuits in a vari
ety of flavours: chocolate, chocolate orange, caramel crunch and jam-centred.

  ‘Nice one!’ Niffy told her.

  In between mouthfuls of biscuit, Amy decided to get Gina up to speed with the entire sexual history of the dorm.

  ‘I’ve snogged, obviously – that’s kissing with tongues,’ she added, not sure if ‘snogged’ translated into American, ‘and had my boobs felt and just the tiniest bit of knicker-tweaking. Niffy’s snogged and boobed, and Min, well . . . Min has her mind on higher things.’

  Min snorted at this.

  ‘What about you?’ Amy asked, handing round the caramel crunches once again.

  ‘Oh, snogging.’ Gina said the unfamiliar word, then, because she was feeling just the tiniest bit more at home with these girls than she had the night before, she confided, ‘I had this gross boyfriend – I only refer to him as Squid Boy because—’

  But she didn’t finish the sentence because her words were already drowned out by the groans and giggles of the others.

  ‘Squid Boy!’ Amy repeated. ‘I don’t think we need to know more! Soggy?’

  Gina nodded.

  ‘Slimy?’ Amy asked.

  Gina nodded again.

  ‘Arms like tentacles?’

  When Gina nodded to this too, Amy said, ‘Don’t worry. We’ve all been there. Plenty more fish in the sea—’

  ‘Plenty more squid in the sea,’ Niffy interrupted.

  ‘And only four more days till the weekend,’ Amy went on, ignoring Niffy. ‘That’s when we go fishing.’

  ‘Watch out, Jason Hernandez!’

  Chapter Seven

  AMY AND NIFFY had spent an hour every evening out on the hockey pitch with Gina, practising before the match on Saturday morning. But now that the game was about to start and Gina was in her hideous games clothes, shifting her weight nervously from foot to foot as she stood close to the goal mouth, she didn’t exactly feel confident.

  Well, the practising had been fun . . . She had had a laugh with Amy and Niffy and had felt as if she was starting to get to know them better. But this was serious. Everyone here today wanted to win, that was obvious.

  ‘Don’t worry, you’ll hardly have to do anything. We’ll win,’ Niffy had assured her before the start of the match. Their team was made up of some Year Fours and some Year Threes. Apparently it was something called a ‘house’ match: everyone in the school was in one of four different ‘houses’ which competed against each other.