Читать книгу White Lies - Zoe Markham - Страница 19

Chapter Seven

I didn’t dream about anything in the end; at least, nothing that I could remember. Beth sent me a Good Luck on your first day! message, but it felt like I’d already done the hardest bit and I wasn’t too worried any more. I’d get to come ‘home’ to Rae and Lilly at the end of the day. It wasn’t home, of course, but it wasn’t so bad. I hadn’t seen much of Scarlett the night before in the end. She’d been out in the corridor hissing angrily into her phone most of the evening, and she wasn’t in the dorm when I woke up. I went down to breakfast with Lilly and Rae, and managed to barrel straight into a tiny woman with sparkling blue eyes and long, pure white hair – like something straight out of a Dickens novel. I felt like a vast, clumsy giant in comparison, as I grabbed her by the shoulders before she could fall.

“Morning, Mrs S,” Lilly trilled.

“Sorry,” I muttered, looking down at my feet.

“My goodness!” She laughed as she clutched her chest. God, I’d nearly killed her. “Nice catch! I’ll have to have a word with Mr Rawlins. I expect he can make good use of you on the netball team! I was just coming to find you anyway,” she said, smiling warmly. “I’m sorry we’ve not had a chance to talk – it’s been absolute bedlam. I just wanted to check that you were settling in all right, my lovely. Have you found everything you need? Is our Scarlett looking after you?”

“Yeah, I’m good thanks. Everyone’s been great.” I didn’t tell her Scarlett hadn’t really said anything to me, other than ‘Welcome to the madhouse.’ I reckoned she probably had enough on her plate without getting an earbashing for not babysitting me.

“Wonderful! That’s just what we like to hear. We put you in with Scarlett because we knew she’d watch out for you, but if there’s anything else you need, anything at all, come and find me. My room’s right down at the end of the corridor past the common room, just through the last fire door.”

“Thanks,” I said, smiling back at her at the same time as I found myself involuntarily inching towards the smell of toast. My stomach growled loudly, and I groaned in embarrassment as she laughed and shooed me into the hall.

“Go on in and get some food. Big day ahead!”

“Mrs S is ace,” Lilly said, pouring me some tea from a huge urn-like monster of a thing and dumping two sugars into it without asking. I must just look the type.

“Yeah, she seems kind. Motherly,” I replied.

“In loco parentis,” a soft Irish lilt purred behind me.

“Hey, Scar! Want some tea?”

I turned to see Scarlett perching on the table behind us, her hair loose, her skin even paler than it had been the night before. Shadows circled her eyes, and she waved a “No thanks” to the tea offer.

“I’m going to head up early, stop off at Costa on the way up and get myself a flat white. I don’t know how you can drink the tea here. It’s an abomination. Do you want to come, Abby? Or will you be OK walking up with these two, do you think?”

“I…” I wanted to go. I never turned down a Costa, and I was counting on being able to walk into the school with someone from my own year. But there was something hard in her eyes, and I bottled it at the last minute. “…I’ll be fine, thanks.”

“Perfect. I’ll see you up there then.” She smiled and hopped down from the table, turning to go, just as her phone started to ring. I watched her sigh as she looked down at the screen, before angrily rejecting the call and flicking the ringer to silent as she left.

“Is she OK, do you think?” I asked the others.

“It’s just the Riley thing,” Lilly answered. “He keeps calling her. Probably apologising for whatever he’s done. She’ll be fine once they sort it. Scarlett’s a legend; she’s impossible to bring down. How many pieces of toast d’you want?”

**

I didn’t see Scarlett again until registration, which was at ten to nine in a room I got lost three times trying to find. The school was huge, where the boarding house was tiny, in terms of numbers at least, and it was hard to reconcile the two as being connected at first. I got my timetable, and it turned out that other than being in the same tutor group, I hardly had any lessons at all with Scarlett. My records must have come through from my last school because I’d been put into different sets to her. My old grades would scream ‘Bottom Set!’ louder than Lilly squeeing over a good-looking guy.

The class sizes were huge, way bigger than I was used to, and there was this weird air of polite disinterest that seemed to filter out from Scarlett to just about every other kid there. No one was nasty, or mean, but no one was exactly friendly either. I sat on my own at morning break, scanning the canteen for any sign of Rae, or Lilly, or even Tyler. I felt like an overanxious, overweight meerkat. Mum texted to say she’d landed safely, and Beth IM’d to ask how the birdwatching was going. I forgot the names of everyone in my classes, and felt myself starting to relapse back into the standard loner that I’d become used to over the years. Teachers wandered over to ask me if I was OK, and I nodded and smiled, but I wasn’t really sure.

Well it takes time, Doofus! Don’t be so quick to throw in the towel, Beth said. You need to be the one making the effort, you know. And she was right, of course, but mostly I was just counting the hours until I could get back to the dorm. It felt maybe all a bit too much too soon for someone with my track record.

At lunch, I spotted Scarlett over at the biggest, most crowed table, surrounded by people seeming to hang off her every word. She didn’t have any food, just clutched a large cardboard cup. I thought about going over, but I couldn’t face just one familiar face in a sea of that many strangers – so I made for the table in the far corner that was dotted with what looked to be the Dungeons and Dragons types. Greasy boys doused in painful acne, eyes downcast. I mentally told myself off for how quick I was to label them, wondering if everyone else was doing the same to me. They were quiet, but polite, like everyone else. Perfectly happy to leave me to my own devices. I ploughed through my chips in peace.

I saw Scarlett stand up and storm out just as I was taking my tray back up, phone clutched to her ear, angry hisses almost lost on the sea of voices and the scrape of cutlery around us. If it was Riley, he was pretty persistent. I had no idea what it was he’d done, but by the look on her face, I didn’t fancy his chances of any kind of reconciliation.

When the bell finally rang for the end of the day, I let myself get caught and carried on the tide of people surging out through the doors, and I didn’t hear her at first.

“Hey! Abby!” She actually looked pretty annoyed when I looked back over my shoulder. “I’ve been calling you for ever!”

“Sorry.” I fought my way awkwardly around and swam back against the tide to get to the wall Scarlett was perched on. “I couldn’t hear. It’s…sort of loud.” Bus engines idled, bus monitors bellowed, and kids screeched and shouted and sang and skateboarded and bounced footballs all around us. A dull ache had settled in the back of my head.

“How was your first day?”

“Oh, yeah, it was…OK. Thanks.”

“Great. Listen, can you do me a favour?”

“Umm, sure. If you like.”

“Could you sign me in when you get back to the boarding house? I need to hang around up here for a bit, and I haven’t seen any of the others yet.”

“I…suppose? Sorry, I’m still kind of not sure how it all—”

“Just write my name in the book. We do it for each other all the time – it’s nothing to worry about. You sign in when you get back down there. The book’s right there in reception. Has no one even told you that yet?”

I bit back my first response. She was the one who was supposed to be looking after me, but it looked like it wasn’t until she wanted something that she showed the slightest bit of interest.

“Look, we’ll catch up this evening and I’ll run through everything with you. But right now I really have a thing, OK? Just sign my name in with yours. It’ll really help me out.”

“Yeah, OK, I’ll…” she jumped down from the wall and headed off in the opposite direction with a backwards wave “…do that for you. No worries.”

The crowd I’d come out in had mostly all dispersed into the waiting army of buses, and the entrance to the school had cleared enough that I felt pretty conspicuous heading back down the hill on my own. Billy-No-Mates, Beth would’ve called me. I wished that I’d thought to grab Lilly’s or Rae’s number. And then I remembered the Costa on the way up, and resolved to visit it on my way down. A slab of their caramel crunch would make everything better.

We never did catch up in the end. Rae explained signing in, and just about everything else to me. One or the other of us did it for Scarlett almost every afternoon when we got back. She was never around. I didn’t see her eat, sleep, or smile. And I couldn’t understand why no one was worried. “Riley” seemed to be all the explanation they needed.

**

“What’s it like?” Lilly asked me, when we were up in the dorm after dinner, almost at the end of my first week. I’d somehow come to feel completely at home as a boarder, but still strangely lost as a pupil. “Having a boyfriend, I mean,” she went on. “Like…really having a boyfriend.”

Rae looked up from her book. “Totally weird question, Lils.”

“I wasn’t asking you,” Lilly shot back.

“Why not? I’ve got a boyfriend!” Rae exclaimed.

“Yeah, I meant…real boyfriends…”

“Oh, whatever! I’ve—”

Lilly shushed her with a wave of her hand, and Rae huffed and went back to her book with a: “Fine then.”

She looked over at me, expectantly, and I squirmed.

“I don’t really…I mean, I’ve sort of only been out with Jase…”

“Can I see the photo again?” she asked.

I handed it over, reluctantly, as Lilly scrutinised it once more.

“I just…can’t imagine being that close to a boy,” she said. “Like, that close, with no top on, and…”

“Bloody hell, Lils!”

“What?” she barked at Rae. “I’m asking a question. I don’t see why I should be embarrassed that I haven’t ever—”

“Guys,” I interrupted, “I really don’t think—”

“I’m not, like, asking you to go all Fifty Shades on me,” Lilly pleaded. “But honestly, what it’s like?”

I wasn’t even one hundred per cent sure what she was asking me. I thought I’d made it pretty clear that we hadn’t…so I assumed she just meant – I don’t know – being with someone. And I was going to cop out of the question altogether, when I stopped and thought about it instead.