Miss Carter blows a whistle, and the girls stop jumping and jog over to the trampoline. Honestly, she reminds me of a dog trainer. Any minute now she’ll make us all sit up and beg for treats.
“Sharon Persaud! You’re up first!” she yells enthusiastically.
Sharon Persaud clambers grimly onto the trampoline, looking very hostile. Being of Asian origin, Sharon is not as weather-beaten as the white sporty girls, but that she’s one of them is all too clear from the heft of her muscular thighs and bulging calves.
“She scares me so much,” whispers a girl next to me.
I’ve noticed this girl before; she stands out at Wakefield Hall because of her discreet, expensively highlighted hair, a mouse-brown lightened to a subtle caramel. It wouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary at St. Tabby’s, but here it’s pretty unusual. She’s also wearing makeup—mascara and eye pencil—which she needs, because her eyes are very small and deep-set, and they have a perpetually nervous expression, which is intensified as Sharon starts jumping dourly up and down on the tramp. With every landing, the tramp thuds as Sharon’s large, trainer-shod feet plonk down. She’s not jumping high, just heavily.
“She’s taken out two girls’ front teeth with her hockey stick,” whispers Nervous Girl. “They had to get implants.”
“Christ.”
“I’m so happy hockey isn’t compulsory anymore,” says Nervous Girl. “I used to jump away every time I saw her charging down the field with that lavender hockey stick. I had to wear braces for a year, just for my overbite. I couldn’t go through that again.”
“Lizzie, no talking there!” Miss Carter sings out. “Good work, Sharon! Now, who’s next?”
She hasn’t taken her eyes off me, so I know what’s coming.
“New girl! It’s Scarlett, isn’t it? You’re a bit of a gymnast, aren’t you? Off you go, then!”
“Can I take my trainers off?” I ask.
“No, rules are rules for everyone,” Miss Carter says, but her tone is perfectly pleasant, no snottiness, which is a welcome change for a Wakefield Hall teacher.
Sharon jumps down from the trampoline, the wooden floor creaking in protest as she lands. I vault up instead, and though it’s ridiculous, my heart is pounding with excitement. I haven’t been on a tramp for three months. I am so out of shape. But it’s wonderful to be back, even on a soggy tramp with a whole group of girls standing round the sides to gawk at me.
I do a few bounces, to get a feel of the tramp. Then I take off. Jump, set, front tuck, land, three front somersaults in a row. The girls are oohing and aahing, but I tune it out. If at first this was about showing off—showing the whole of Lower Sixth C that yes, Scarlett Wakefield is actually good at something, believe it or not—as soon as I started jumping, that impulse faded. Because the sheer joy of being on a tramp again, working on my skills, has flooded through me like the best kind of drug you could possibly imagine, the kind your own body makes all by itself, and I’m high—literally and metaphorically. Ha ha. I’m flipping myself like a pancake. God, I forgot how much I loved tramp, the height it gives you, the extra bounce that allows you to spin and twist through the air.
Jump, set, knees to chest and right over myself in a tight little ball, open up and land, back tuck. One, two, three. I’m a bit dizzy, but I can’t stop. Front pike, front layout. Easy stuff, but I don’t have traveling room on this tramp, the springs are all exposed and they scare me, particularly in trainers. Ricky, my old coach, blew out his knee doing demonstration jumps on a trampoline in trainers. He turned the flange on one of his shoes under him in a bad landing. With bare feet, it would just have been an ankle sprain, but because of the shoes, his whole foot turned under him and his knee popped with the torque. He had to have a ton of surgery, and his knee’s never been right since. The scars track each side of his knee, wobbly white lines, and the knee itself is oddly shaped, as if you were looking at it through pebble glass.
Ricky’s knee has always been a big symbol, because he messed it up showing off, knowing that he should be more careful because he was in trainers. So now I rein myself in. No twists. Don’t get cocky! That’s how you get hurt! I can hear Ricky’s voice in my head, and suddenly I miss him and gymnastics so much I have to catch my breath.
I don’t go for anything too ambitious. No back handsprings, I’ll travel too far. I finish with a back step-out layout, and it goes so well I blast off into another. It’s old-fashioned, we don’t do it in competition, but I’ve always enjoyed it. You land on one leg and then the other follows, like spokes of a wheel turning under you. It looks dazzlingly pretty.
Everyone’s clapping. I shake my head back, embarrassed, but I can’t deny the thrill. My back feels looser, pulled out by the stretch of the back layouts.
“I don’t suppose anyone wants to follow that, do they?” Miss Carter says, grinning. “Any volunteers feeling brave? No? Then it’s time for circuit training!”
Groans arise. Miss Carter has set up an entire circuit in the back part of the gym, and she briskly indicates what each station is for. It’s really old-school—no music, just the sound of girls panting and groaning next to me, interspersed with Miss Carter yelling things like “Come on, Lizzie!” and blowing her whistle to indicate that we need to change station.
“Anyone who wants to push herself,” Miss Carter calls, “can finish up with some optional leg lifts on the bars!”
I’m across the gym in a flash. The suckers for punishment are me, three hockey/lacrosse tough nuts (they never smile, those girls; I bet they’re so busy practicing their intimidating faces they don’t even smile in their sleep), and the big-shouldered, shaggy-haired girl who has the desk next to me. Wow. Her thighs are bulging out of the brown gym shorts: her quads must be really strong. I look down at my own. Much slimmer, but God, her calves are so cut. I wouldn’t want to be that big (I remember Dan commenting on how small I was and how feminine that made me feel) but I can’t help envying her strength, so obviously on display.
“Good, two keen new girls!” Miss Carter says. “Taylor, isn’t it?”
Big Shoulders nods. She’s not a chatty one, I’ve noticed that already in class.
“Right, up you all go. The rest of you, stretch it out, please.”
We climb up the monkey bars, swivel our hands to grasp under the top bar, and hang in place, waiting for the whistle. When it comes, we grip for dear life and start lifting our feet to our heads—ideally. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the hockey girls barely managing to lift to waist height. They’re strong, all right, but that’s a lot of weight to lift, and they don’t do the ab work gymnasts do. And all that bending over the hockey stick must give them really tight backs. But Taylor is pumping away next to me, her big strong legs shooting up as if she does this all day, every day.
I’m shocked. And I’m pissed off. I realize how much I’ve been expecting to be the best at PE, how much it mattered to me, at this school where I feel like I’m the worst at every single academic subject I’m taking. It comes over me like an angry wave, and I see bright angry competitive red, and I curl my back and tuck my abs and haul away at lifting my legs with everything I’ve got, and still that Taylor girl is going higher and faster and more effortlessly than I am.
She knows we’re competing. I can tell. And when the whistle goes, the two of us don’t stop. The hockey girls have long climbed down, but Taylor and I keep going, though my feet are only at waist height now, while Taylor’s still doing high lifts, she seems to be on some sort of girl steroids, or maybe she’s an android, while I, frankly, am absolutely knackered.
The whistle’s going again.
“Girls! Time to stop!” Miss Carter is bellowing.
Thank God. I flail for a low bar with my feet, find it, and climb down. My palms are burning, accustomed as I am to a padded bar, not just bare wood. Taylor drops to the floor next to me, and I notice how light her landing is, despite her big muscular body.
I glance at her resentfully. Our eyes mee
t. It’s a stand-off. Hers are narrowed, wide, and seemingly even greener against the paleness of her skin, outlined by unexpectedly thick dark lashes. For a moment I think Taylor’s going to say something. And then she turns away, deliberately snubbing me.
Cow. I hate her. The only girl I’ve got something in common with here—she’s a new girl, too—and she turns out to be a snotty cow who can beat me at leg lifts.
I hate this godforsaken armpit of a school in the middle of nowhere. I hate the teachers who make me feel like an uneducated moron.
And most of all, I hate this Taylor girl. She’d better stay well away from me from now on.
ten
“WHO PUSHED ME?”
When I was little, my nanny read me that story about the man who knew the king had ears like a donkey. He had to swear on his life not to tell anyone. But after a while, he couldn’t bear it—the secret was too big for him to keep. So he went down to the river and whispered into the rushes: “The king has donkey’s ears! The king has donkey’s ears!”
And then someone wove a basket out of those rushes, and the basket told everyone the king had donkey’s ears. Or something. I’m not really sure about the end of it. And I don’t remember, either, why the king had donkey’s ears in the first place. Some fairy probably cursed him. That’s how weird things always happen in these kinds of stories, isn’t it?
Anyway, I didn’t understand the point of the story when I was small. I was caught up in wondering what it would be like to have donkey’s ears. I mean, they’d be all big and itchy, and how would you hide them? Even under a big hat, it would be pretty difficult. But my nanny said that the story was a fable, which means it’s meant to teach you a lesson, and the lesson was that it’s really hard to keep a secret.
I didn’t get that, either. I mean, everyone already knows it’s hard to keep a secret, don’t they?
I asked my mother, but she just looked at me blankly and waved me away and went on talking to whoever was on the end of the phone. I was too young then to realize there wasn’t much point asking my mother anything important.
But now I understand it was my nanny who got it wrong. The lesson is not that it’s hard to keep a secret.
The lesson is that it’simpossible to keep a secret.
This is too much for me to hold. I feel as if I’m going to explode with it. My head actually hurts with the effort of not telling anyone what I saw.
I can’t ring anyone—the police especially—and tell them anonymously. They can trace any call; they can record anything and prove it’s your voice. It’s the same with e-mails. Everyone knows you don’t have any privacy with e-mails. And handwriting. And computer printers. I’m sure I saw a TV show about that. And right now, I’m so scared that I don’t want to take any risks. Or because there’s always some risk, let’s face it. I want to take the least amount of risks possible. The least amount of stuff that could lead back to me.
Because I have to tell. I have to pass this on. And once I’ve told, I’ll be free. Won’t I? I’ll be free, because it’ll be someone else’s responsibility. I’ll have passed it on to the person who needs to hear it. The person who got blamed for it.
And hopefully, once I’ve told, whenever I close my eyes I’ll stop seeing that moment, the moment I can’t stop remembering. The moment at the party when I saw what I wasn’t supposed to see.
There are three e-mails in my in-box, if you don’t count the spam. And these three definitely aren’t spam. They’re meant specifically for me.
I know that because although I don’t recognize any of the senders’ names, when the subject line says stuff like Killed anyone else yet? or You bloody bitch I hope you die! it’s pretty obvious that they’re coming from Plum and about twenty or so girls who, if Plum told them to eat dirt, would get down there with their faces in the ground and start chewing. You’ve got to admire her leadership skills. She’d be great in the army.
I closed all my e-mail accounts and opened new ones with names no one would think would be me. I changed my mobile phone number. But at Wakefield Hall, I get an e-mail account automatically, and it wouldn’t take a master spy to work out that anything sent to scarlettwake [email protected] would probably reach me. None of them are coming from addresses I recognize, but that doesn’t mean anything.
I know they’re coming from girls at St. Tabby’s.
I shiver, remembering the last time I was there, when they sent me to clear out my locker on my own. No teacher with me. And after the headmistress had made me go into her office to listen to a lecture about bringing the school into disrepute, I was too proud to plead for an escort.
Stupid, stupid. That pride thing gets me every time.
They were waiting for me, of course. Plum, Nadia, Venetia, Chloe, and at least ten others. Captain Plum had rallied her troops. Designer uniforms by Prada and Stella McCartney. The stacked platform heels would make it hard to run, but they didn’t need to. Just circle me, and kick me when I was down.
I stare at the hateful e-mails in my in-box and click on them, one by one, to delete them without reading the content. It’ll just be pictures of me, with “Killer Slut” written over them. Or articles about murdered girls, with “Maybe she stole someone else’s boyfriend” on the subject line.
Whatever they send me, at least it’s not as bad as having them all back me against my locker and shout insults at me. Apart from Dan’s death, that’s the memory I most want to erase forever.
But I can’t. I remember it so clearly it might as well be happening right now.
“Oh look. It’s the school murderess,” Plum began, in that tone of fake surprise that princesses perfect in the cradle. “Who’re you going to kill today, Scarlett?”
Several tart responses sprang to my lips, but I knew that uttering any snappy retorts would be roughly equivalent to lying down on the ground and inviting everyone to jump on me. This was going to be bad enough without me chucking any fuel on the fire. I kept my head ducked and inserted my key into the door of my locker.
“Oh, she’s got ages yet, Plum,” Venetia chimed in. “It’s only noon. She’s got twelve hours to go before she kills someone else’s boyfriend!”
I was rummaging through my locker, trying to block out their voices. I thought I could imagine everything they were going to throw at me, and I’d played it through in my head beforehand, trying to brace myself. But that I didn’t expect, and my head jerked back, bumping into the locker door, much to my annoyance.
Plum was delighted to have got a response from me.
“Yes, that’s right, bitch,” she hissed. “You stuck your tongue down my boyfriend’s throat and you killed him.”
“She’s a slut,” chimed in none other than Sophia Von und Zu Unpronounceable. Despite her being German, she had an English nanny and governess, apparently, and her accent was spot-on: you’d never know she was foreign. I had to admire her effortless command of current British slang as she continued fluently: “A stupid, dirty little boyfriend-stealing slut!”
I was gobsmacked. I couldn’t believe that Plum was actually claiming that Dan was her boyfriend. My brain was frantically scrolling back through the brief time I saw them together, and nothing about their behavior remotely suggested to me any relationship between them. It was Dan who came after me. Well, of course it was! How would I have the nerve to pursue a boy as hot as Dan McAndrew? But if I’d had the faintest idea that he and Plum were together, I would never have gone out onto the terrace with him.
Partly that was self-protection. If I’d accepted an invitation like that from Plum’s boyfriend, I might as well have chucked myself off the terrace directly afterward. But mostly, it was pride, yet again. I wouldn’t want a boy who belonged to someone else. I wouldn’t want to share. If I ever kissed another boy, I wanted to feel that one hundred percent of his attention was on me. That I was the only one he wanted.
I couldn’t help it, even though I knew I was digging an even deeper hole for myself. I pulled back from my loc
ker, looked Plum right in the eye and said sarcastically, “Right. You’re really claiming Dan was your boyfriend?”
There was a split second of silence. Sophia, who was standing next to Plum, darted her eyes sideways to see Plum’s reaction to my challenge, and I knew in that moment that I was right. Dan and Plum weren’t a couple.
It didn’t help me, though. Far from it.
“You stupid little bitch!” Plum hissed. “As if you knew anything about me and Dan! You were only invited to Nadia’s party because Simon wanted to get off with you. I bet you actually thought we’d asked you because we thought you were cool.” She razored me with an up-and-down stare that felt as if I was being sliced to ribbons. “What, did you think we wanted to get fashion tips from you?”
Everyone laughed sycophantically at this witticism.
“Simon thought you’d be an easy shag,” Plum continued cruelly, her eyes still so slitted-up with rage that I could barely see the irises, “and he was right, wasn’t he? Because you hadn’t been there longer than ten minutes before you got my boyfriend to snog you and you bloody killed him, you nasty poisoning little tart!”
I was completely humiliated. I thought about all the trouble I took to buy clothes, to do my makeup, to try to fit in, and all the time no one had any intention of being friends with me. I was just a present for Simon.
I was about to burst into tears, and if I did, I would have had to kill myself. Nothing would be worse than breaking down in front of Plum Saybourne and her circle of mocking faces. Thank God, a bell went, and the surprise of it enabled me to take a long deep swallow, camouflaged by the sound, and squeeze the tears back down into their ducts again.
Plum was momentarily interrupted by the noise—we were in the basement, and the bell really resonated down there, it felt as if the walls were vibrating. I ducked into my locker again and sniffed a couple of times, just to be sure my nose wouldn’t run and give me away. I’d given up caring about getting my stuff now—I just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. But I grabbed some things at random and shoved them into my satchel, so it looked as if they hadn’t managed to distract me from doing what I came here to do.
Scarlet Wakefield 01 - Kiss Me Kill Me Page 9
