by Grace Dent
“Mmm, not really,” I mumble, feeling a little choked.
“Oh?” Nan says, looking surprised. “No summer adventure? You went off to that pop music festival last year, didn’t you?”
“Astlebury,” I sigh.
Nan pushes some strong brown tea in front of me. “Well, then, what about that . . . Jimi Steele?” she asks. “That good-looking fellow of yours? How’s he doing?”
“We split up,” I say firmly. “For good this time. It’s all got a bit, er, messy. He’s, erm, with someone else now.”
“Crikey!” says Nan. “Well . . . good riddance to him! Never liked him anyhow. Or his silly skateboard.”
I try to smile, but there’s a lump in my throat.
Nan looks at me anxiously. “Dewdrop,” she says, passing me the sugar, “you’re really far too young to be wearing a sad expression like that. Whatever is the matter?”
I really want to tell Nan, but it’s complicated. “I don’t know where to begin,” I mutter.
Nan looks concerned. She stands up and hobbles over to her pantry cupboard. “Well, I have an idea,” she says. “You start right at the beginning. I’m going to make some fruit scones. You talk, I’ll bake. Then if I can’t solve your problem, at least we’ll have lovely scones to eat.”
I look at her, with a small smile growing on my face. “Mmm . . . but have you got any black treacle?” I ask, raising an eyebrow. Nan bakes the most amazing light, fluffy fruit scones, which she always serves fresh from the oven with clotted cream and black treacle, or Thunder and Lightning, as she calls it. They’re the most delicious things on the entire planet.
“A whole tin of it,” winks Nan. “Do we have a deal?”
“Okay,” I say, taking a deep breath to begin.
Chapter 2
three—the magic number
Last autumn, returning to Blackwell after summer break was really cool.
Not only was everyone still gossiping about the LBD’s amazing adventure at Astlebury Music Festival, where we’d been hanging out with the stars and getting our faces all over the tabloid newspaper standing with our close personal showbiz buddy, “Duke of Pop” Spike Saunders, but this term was very special indeed.
The LBD would be Year 11 babes!
Utterly mature. I’d been yearning for this moment since Year 7. Now, the only Blackwell inmates able to look down on us would be the Year 12/13 crowd (including obnoxious bully Panama Goodyear and her perfect-skinned android disciples Abigail Munro and Leeza Palmer), but thankfully they rarely left their A-level common room anyhow. It was the Year 11s who ruled the school!
As Year 11 chicks, we could breeze into lunch on any sitting we desired—no more eating leftover knobbly chicken nuggets that look like deep-fried mice. Yak! And we could use Blackwell’s posh “Senior School” doorway, which sliced up to five minutes off some journeys.
Best of all, we were now entitled to proper wooden seats during Blackwell assemblies. Marvelous. On freezing mornings, the LBD would grab seats in the very back row, in the corner by the radiator. While Mr. McGraw, our clinically depressed headmaster, droned on and on about “school pride,” I’d snooze, Fleur would do homework and Claude would knit a variety of bobble hats for unfortunate associates. Claude’s romance with Damon, an apprentice electrician she met at Astlebury, had taken a serious nosedive since she’d presented him with one of her legendary knitted bobble monstrosities. Sadly, this didn’t prevent Claude from knitting Spike Saunders one too, just in case he felt chilly on his stadium tour of Latin America. Spike sent us a card to say he’d received it, but although we checked Red Hot Celebs magazine every week, we’d never spotted him with it on.
A further super-cool thing about Blackwell this term were the Golden Anniversary celebrations. Okay, this sounded potentially dull, but bizarrely, McGraw had green-lighted a few fab events “to commemorate fifty years of Blackwell at the heart of the community.” In fact, taking place in the first week back at school was a charity nonuniform day, aka “Fancy Friday.” As long as pupils paid £3 each, we could wear whatever we pleased—fancy, fashionable or funny! Neat, eh?
“Why doesn’t the LBD dress exactly the same?” Claude said, giggling. “Like triplets! That would freak people right out. Teachers always say we’re like three peas in a pod.”
“Oh. My. God! Excellent idea,” agreed Fleur, flapping her hands. (Fleur Swan loves dressing up. She once appeared at Liam Gelding’s birthday party dressed as an Egyptian belly dancer, claiming she thought it was “fancy dress.” She then boogied all night in a gold bikini while everyone else was dressed normally.)
“But people will laugh at us,” I worried. “Especially Panama and—”
“Oh, who cares?” butted in Claude. “Let them laugh!”
“She’ll just be jealous, because we’ll look so hot,” Fleur said.
Quickly it was agreed. Friday was going to be Triplet Day. Immediately, Claude started arguing for a “sexy ninja fighting squad” look, while Fleur began planning a “Parisian babe” feel. After a lot of squabbling and shopping we agreed on three black-and-white stripey long-sleeved T-shirts, three black pleated mini-kilts, black high heels, black opaque tights and the perfect finishing touch—powder-pink berets worn at a jaunty angle.
Naturally, Triplet Day was a massive triumph.
Jimi, my Year 13 skater boyfriend, said he’d never seen me look so totally babelicious. He wrapped me in his arms and said he’d never been so proud to be seen with me in the whole two years we’d been together.
And when the LBD appeared at Blackwell that Friday arm-in-arm, sashaying down the main corridor, kids were hanging out of windows whooping and hollering. It was so great! I didn’t even flinch when Panama cornered me in the dining hall to inform me that “saggy-chested dumpy girls” such as myself should avoid horizontal stripes and skirts above the shin. And okay, sadly, we didn’t win the Fancy Friday prize. But that was because Year 9’s Darius Carver painted himself turquoise, festooned himself in plastic wrap and tampons and came as an interplanetary life-form.
But who cares, because the LBD still appeared in the Local Daily Mercury under the headline “Triple Trouble at Blackwell’s Golden Celebrations!” This made Magda, Paddy and Gloria, Claude’s mum, extra happy because they could call all their friends and bore their pants off.
“That was a grand photo of you!” Nan says, laughing as she sifts flour into a white mixing bowl.
“Hmmm . . . ,” I say. “Well, Fleur looked better in it than me.”
“Nonsense!” Nan tuts. “She’s not a classic beauty like you are.”
Triplet Day turned into Triplet Weekend.
I hadn’t laughed so much in ages. That Friday night we wore our berets and T-shirts to the noodle bar Shanghai Shanghai, then afterward we had a sleepover at Fleur’s. (Fleur’s parents had just bought her a “facts of life” book called Your Body, Yourself. Oh my Lord! We had no idea so many unpleasant yeast- and fungus-related things could occur on your bodily parts! Yeucccch!) On Sunday we hit Westland Mall to suss out the fresh fall collections arriving at Top Shop, Morgan and River Island. Of course, that went out of the window when Fleur spotted Baz Kauffman, a Year 12 from Chasterton School, and persuaded the LBD to stalk him around Marks and Spencer snapping telephone pictures of him buying underpants!
At that point in my life, one Sunday last September, I don’t think I’d ever been so happy. With life. With Jimi. With the way I looked. With my friends. Being part of the LBD absolutely rocked.
the new girl
But then, the following Monday, just after registration, we were in form room drooling over a surf hunk centerfold in Bliss magazine, when the door swung open and the doom-meister general Mr. McGraw swept in. Standing meekly in his shadow was a tiny, elfin, decidedly beautiful young girl, with long golden hair hanging loose over her shoulders and a blunt fringe chopped just at her eye line. The girl’s powdery-pale complexion, doll-pink cheeks and cherubic pout were slightly beguiling. Her long floaty gray
skirt, nipped at her tiny waist, a blue cashmere jersey, expensive crocheted tights and black pumps with crisscrossed ribbons were a spurious nod toward the Blackwell uniform.
She had a touch of Cinderella about her. The entire room was silenced by her prettiness.
“Well, helloooo, missy!” leered Liam Gelding as the rest of the boys stared in wonderment.
“Now then, listen here, Class Eleven-B,” sighed McGraw, holding aloft a skeletal hand, “I need your full attention. I have with me here today Miss Cressida Sleeth. Everybody say hello to Cressida.”
“Hello,” Cressida said coyly, twinkling her hand with a slight jangle of thin silver bracelets.
“Hello, Cressida,” chorused the class.
“Isn’t that a hobbit name?” Fleur said quietly.
“It’s Shakespearean,” whispered Claude.
“Now class,” McGraw continued, “Cressida will be joining Eleven-B for the duration of Year Eleven. And as you must be aware, this will be a difficult time to begin a new school what with the GCSEs drawing closer, so I expressly want you all to be especially philanthropic to her.”
“He means ‘kind,’ ” Claude whispered to Liam.
“Oh, I’ll be kind to her, don’t worry,” Liam said, shuffling uncomfortably in his chair. Claude tutted.
Cressida surveyed us all angelically, her eyes like two large, clear gray pools.
“Now, Claudette Cassiera,” McGraw said, putting both hands on Claude’s desk, “I’ve examined your files. You and Cressida share seven classes in common: geography, Latin, chemistry, biology, et cetera. So would you be so good as to help the new recruit settle in?”
“Er . . . no problem, Mr. McGraw!” Claude said, bristling with pride.
“You’d better take a seat,” Fleur said with a wink, pulling back the spare end-of-row chair beside the LBD and patting it.
A new person! How exciting! I thought, giving Cressida my best nonscary grin.
“Thank you,” Cressida said, sitting her teensy-tiny bum down. She smelled of fresh flowers and beeswax hand soap.
“Where’ve you come from?” Claude whispered.
“Windsor,” Cressida said.
“Wow! The Queen has a castle there, doesn’t she?” said Fleur.
“Yes, we lived about a mile from there,” said Cressida a touch sadly.
“What brings you here?” Claude asked.
“My dad’s the new head of chemical research at Farquar, Lime and Young Pharmaceuticals,” she said. “Have you heard of it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s pretty famous. In fact, it sometimes accidentally sprays white dust over the nearby village and the residents break out in a rash . . .”
Claude and Fleur shot me withering looks.
“Anyway,” I said, shutting up, “welcome to Blackwell!”
“I’m Claude, that’s Ronnie, and that’s Fleur!” Claude explained.
Cressida smiled, gazing around the room at the shabby decor and disheveled pupils, then fixing her eyes upon us again. “Cressida Sleeth,” she said, looking like a little otherworldly princess. “Lovely to meet you.”
I didn’t have much to do with Cressida at first.
During study hall she’d perch serenely beside Claude on the end of the row, reading kooky books with titles like How to Channel Your Life Happier! or The Karma Conundrum. Occasionally she’d talk about the ponies she’d left behind in Windsor, or her strong belief in guardian angels, or her endless string of allergies (wheat, pets, dairy, strong sunshine, etc.). I thought she was a bit freaky, albeit in a harmless way. Because her previous school in Windsor didn’t follow exactly the same GCSE curriculum as Blackwell, Cressida spent most of her free time in the library doing catch-up study sessions. Of course, Claude, being the huge boffin she is, began joining her some lunchtimes just for fun.
The weeks whizzed past, and by mid-October the LBD were lost under a mountain of school projects. Suddenly I had a GCSE music project to compose, a mock French oral exam to prepare, a thousand-word Buddhism paper to draft for religion and two creative writing assignments!
“Why do we never have fun anymore?” moaned Jimi when I refused to go over to his house midweek to watch DVDs. I’d been seeing Jimi for almost two and a half years and loved him more than life itself. But things had been getting kind of strained lately.
“I can’t have fun!” I yelled. “My mother won’t let me! I have to study two hours a night or my allowance is getting cut off. She’s threatening to buy my clothes for me. Do you want a girlfriend who looks like a thirty-six-year-old woman?”
“Oh, whatever,” Jimi sighed. “I’ll give Suzette and Aaron a call, see if they want to do some geography homework.”
“Okay,” I said. “See you at school tomorrow?”
“Maybe,” he sulked.
I wasn’t lying. Not only was my mother adamant that I was going to pass these exams, but I was on very shaky ground with her over Jimi. Earlier that month she’d caught me coming home from Jimi’s with a love bite on my neck and my T-shirt on backward.
Oh my God. She was livid beyond belief. It all got totally heavy. We had a big embarrassing talk, and she warned me that any more “behavior” like that and she’d ensure that I’d never see Jimi Steele again. I screamed at her that I hated her. And why did she have me anyway if she quite clearly hated young people? And I bawled that I was leaving home as soon as I could anyway. But once I’d calmed down, I’d decided that my best plan if I wanted to keep Jimi was to start studying. Hard. So that’s what I did.
And that’s why I missed what was happening right under my nose.
the thin lady sings
“Guess where I’m going on Friday night?” Fleur cooed last November as we sat in my room composing an “original piece” for our music GCSE.
Two whole months we’d been slaving away. Depressingly, all we’d captured on DAT so far was me playing a plinky-plonky jazz bass line while Fleur improvised lyrically in a free-form operatic style. Fleur thought it sounded “really crazy and edgy.”
It didn’t, by the way. It sounded like a drunk woman being bundled into a police car while someone attacked my bass guitar with pliers. It was so awful it could have been played by the British Army to disorient enemy troops.
“Dunno,” I said, retuning a bass string. “Where y’going?”
“Cressida’s house!” Fleur smiled. “Cressida’s mum’s going to give me a Reiki healing session. For free!”
“Really?” I said, trying not to sound weirded out. “That’s, er, cool. Do you need healing?”
“Well, Cressida says that I have a very heavy aura,” Fleur said. “It might be because of my inner sadness over my breakup with Spencer.”
“With who?” I asked. Fleur’s boyfriends tend to change quickly.
“Spencer Pickett!” she said. “Half-grown goatee? Ate a lot of Oreos? Rode a very small child’s bike everywhere?”
“Oh him,” I shuddered. “You need to be healed over him?”
“Awww . . . he was quite nice, y’know, Ronnie?” Fleur argued. “He had a good heart, y’know? I could have really fallen in love with him. Well . . . if that judge hadn’t put that antisocial behavior order on him so he couldn’t visit our side of town.”
“What a spoilsport,” I muttered dryly.
“I know!” tutted Fleur. “He only smashed up one bus shelter. Well, two. Okay, three if you count the big SPENNY he spray-painted on the one on Holmacres Drive.”
“Hmmm. Yes, he was quite the guerrilla artist,” I muttered. “So you’re having Reiki over Spencer then?”
“Well, Cressida’s not entirely sure,” Fleur said. “It could be a past-life scarring issue I need help with.”
“Past-life scarring?” I said, trying to keep a straight face.
“Yes!” said Fleur. “Cressida says she gets the feeling I’ve lived before as one of Cleopatra’s ladies-in-waiting! Isn’t that freaky?”
“Hmmm,” I said, putting down the guitar. “Well, what’s f
reakier, I reckon, is how no one ever seems to have a past life working in a pie shop. Or as a public toilet attendant! Do nonglamorous people never get reborn?”
Fleur’s face dropped. She usually laughs at my jokes. “Well, I’m really psyched about it anyhow,” she muttered.
“Oh . . . well,” I said quickly, realizing I’d somehow hurt her. “I’m sure it’ll feel amazing!”
“I know!” Fleur said, brightening a little. “And I’ll get to see Cressida’s house too! It’s one of those big new ones on Larkrise Manor, down the road from Panama Goodyear’s mansion. Apparently Cressida has the entire basement all to herself! And they’ve got a hot tub too, so I’m taking my bikini.” “Cool,” I smiled, feeling slightly rattled inside.
I couldn’t quite get my head around this whole Cressida business. I mean, okay, it wasn’t strange that Claude was studying with her—they had seven classes in common—but now Fleur was warming to her too! It was really unsettling. These days, whenever Claude, Fleur and Cressida came back from biology (a subject I was too thick to take) they always had a side-splitting story or a new-age tip to discuss. Or worst of all, a private joke they’d invented when I wasn’t there.
But when I tried to be friends with Cressida, she just wasn’t interested.
I tried inviting her to sit with me in German, the only class we had together, but she said she suffered migraines if she didn’t sit near the board. I offered to study vocab with her, but she said she didn’t need my help. But weirdest of all, whenever Cressida and I had to walk anywhere together, she’d say absolutely nothing at all.
Not a word.
So I’d yadder away, making jokes and telling stories, feeling stupider and more flippant by the second, trying to fill the silence. Eventually Cressida would finish these little agonizing one-on-ones by turning to me, forcing a smile and saying something like, “You’re very funny, aren’t you, Ronnie? You’re simply always the clown. It must be soooo exhausting being you.”
