eight

PLASTIC SURGERY–FREE ZONE

One of the very few bright spots in all of this is that I can set my alarm for eight-twenty and still be at school on time. It’s a bare five-minute walk across the back lawn to the main house—or, as it is now, my school.

I pull on my favorite jeans and a purple sweater with green trim that Grandma got me for Christmas. (The colors sound awful together, but honestly, it looks nice. The green trim is really narrow. Grandma’s good at clothes presents. And it’s cashmere. Yummy.) I twist my hair up and fasten it at the back of my head with a silver clip, long and slender and pointed at one end, like a dagger. I’ve had this for years, but haven’t worn it for a while, because at St. Tabby’s, long hair clips have been out for the last six months. Elaborate big round tortoiseshell clasps, worn over buns at the nape of the neck, are in.

Count your blessings and all that. It’s a ray of sunshine: at Wakefield Hall Collegiate, nobody cares about what they wear. There are no fashion police walking the corridors to laugh, point, and ridicule you because you’re wearing a hair clip, which means you’re out. It’s super-intellectual here and, like I said, you have to wear the ghastly brown school uniform till you’re sixteen anyway, so there’s much less opportunity for fashion terrorism. The girls barely wear makeup, for God’s sake. Phew. Much more relaxing.

I grab my old leather satchel and run downstairs just as Aunt Gwen starts to call my name. She’s about to leave for school, too. (She’s a teacher at Wakefield Hall—geography and maths. See how awful my life is?) I wave a breakfast bar at her as she begins to spout off about growing girls needing to sit down to a proper meal in the morning, and dash out of the house, her grating metallic tones following me out the door. It’s ten to nine as I pause outside the entrance to the old part of the school, which only the sixth-formers are allowed to use.

It’s strange. I’m almost excited to be here.

Girls are flooding up the drive, the younger ones in their brown uniforms flowing past like a river of mud and through their own entrance in the nasty new modern building, glancing curiously at the older girls in normal clothes as they pass. I scarf down my breakfast bar and look around me at the girls my age. They’re so dowdy by comparison to what I’m used to. Wakefield Hall is the anti–St. Tabby’s. It’s where parents send their daughters to get the best intellectual education money can buy, and, just as importantly, to be isolated in the countryside, free from the temptations of the big city (no fashion crazes, boys, drink, or drugs here). In a way, I’m grateful for that right now. The last thing I need is St. Tabby’s, Part Two: The Revenge. Two years of boring dowdiness is just what I need to recover.

Nobody fashionable. Nobody wild. And no boys at all (well, apart from that gardener boy, but I’m just going to ignore him completely, so he doesn’t count). Which is good, because I don’t want to kill anyone else.

Oh, Dan  .  .  . I see him lying on the terrace, the swiveling light of the ambulance below casting those eerie blue flashes over his body. I see them easing him onto a stretcher and covering him with a blanket, and I have to dig my finger nails into my palms to stop myself from breaking down. The pain brings me back to the here and now. There are nasty red half-moons on my palms, but that’s okay. As long as I didn’t cry in public.

I look around and realize that, while I’ve been lost in miserable memories, everyone else has already gone up the steps. We’re due in our classrooms any minute. No problem. I’ve been exploring this school building since I was tiny. I know it like the palm of my hand. I sling my satchel over my shoulder and dash inside and up the stairs, heading for Lower Six C. Right at the top, down the corridor, first right—

No! It’s all changed! Lower Six C is now some sort of science lab! Grandmother—sorry, Lady Wakefield—has been doing massive remodeling without even mentioning it to me! And now there’s no one around to ask for directions, because I’m so late that everyone’s in their classrooms already, and I’m going to be there well past nine on my first day of school  .  .  . oh bugger.  .  .  .

I arrive, panting and doubtless red-faced, at the new and, by the looks of it, not-much-improved Lower Six C, to find everyone already there but me: girls sitting in massed ranks at their desks, teacher looming in front of hers. Horrors. The whole room turns to stare as I stand in the doorway, and I know every girl there is thinking devoutly: I’m so glad that isn’t me.

I don’t know the teacher in charge, but she’s glaring at me as if I’m something nasty she just stepped in.

“Scarlett Wakefield, I presume,” she says nastily. “Since you probably haven’t bothered to inform yourself of my name, I am Miss Newman.”

No one is labeled a Ms. here. Grandmother—Lady Wakefield—is very old-fashioned.

“Yes,” I blurt out. “I’m so sorry I’m late. I—”

“Oh, no need to explain, Scarlett. No need at all. We all assumed that you thought you could waltz into class any time you felt like it.”

“No, honestly, I—”

“But let me tell you, Miss Wakefield, that just because your grandmother is the headmistress here, and your aunt the head of geography, I will not allow you any special privileges in my class. Your grandmother and aunt have issued strict edicts to that effect.”

As Miss Newman is yelling at me, I somehow manage to notice that there’s a clear mustache shadow above her upper lip. I think I can see a nose hair or two as well. She probably has hairy knuckles. And I don’t even want to think about what her back’s like.

“I was going to do you the courtesy of taking you aside and making this little point to you,” she continues after a deep breath. “But since you have failed to show me and your fellow students the courtesy of showing up to class on time, I think I should respond in kind. I see that you are the type of girl to think that she can get away with anything she wants to because she has some sort of special status. Well, believe me, Miss Wakefield, that will not be the case at all for you. Your grandmother wished you to transfer to Wakefield Hall in the sixth form to have the advantages of our superb educational system for your A levels, not because you were to be in any way pampered while you were here.”

That’s the official story—that I’m back here because Wakefield Hall is second to none in its record of girls getting top marks in their exams. No mention of my being effectively expelled from St. Tabby’s for killing a boy. Grandmother thought that would put a bit of a damper on my ability to make friends. Goodness knows why.

“You may find a desk and take your seat in the few minutes we have remaining before leaving for assembly,” Miss Newman says, her voice icy enough to freeze hot soup.

I’ve been ducking my head to avoid her awful sneer. I manage to lift my head and look around me frantically for a spare desk. Oh God. The only one left is in the second row, of course. I’m sitting with the keen, swotty girls. Great.

I do the Walk of Shame across the room and slip behind the desk, the last one in the row, next to the window. Grandma’s kept the old wooden desks from when she first started the school: they’re ancient and battered, scarred by girls incising them with the nibs of fountain pens that they would fill from the built-in inkwells at the back. You can tell they were inkwells because they’re stained from decades of leaks. Now they’re just used for standing ballpoints in. I lift the lid of my desk and slide in my books. That’s all that gets left in the desks: there are lockers downstairs now, with combination locks, for serious stuff. You can’t have just wooden desks that anyone could open anymore, not when girls have iPods and cell phones and all kinds of expensive stuff that’s highly nickable.

I look around. Hardly anyone meets my gaze. Great. They all hate me already. Miss Newman has managed to make everyone think I’m trying to take the piss and get away with murder because I’m the headmistress’s granddaughter. God, I hate my life.

There’s one girl who does look back at me, though, and I’m immediately curious about her. She’s tall, with wide shoulders and well-built upper arms. (I’m not being weird, but I notice these things because of gymnastics, okay?) Her hair is short, dark, and shaggy, falling round her face in an artfully clipped style that makes me think she’s carefully arranged every lock, pieced it with wax or something, to seem so trendily disarranged. Her eyes are wide set and green, and the look she’s giving me is absolutely unreadable. I’ve got no bloody idea what she thinks of me at all.

The nine o’clock bell goes, and we all stand up and prepare to file into the Assembly Hall so Grandmother—Lady Wakefield—can lecture us all about Wakefield Hall’s core values, and why good character is the most important possession a woman can boast, and all that Edwardian Young Ladies’ Manual stuff she loves so much. And still none of the other girls are making any effort to include me in their tiny circles. I wasn’t expecting to make a best friend on the first day, but this is definitely the worst-case scenario.

Stupid me. I should never say things like that. Because when the worst-case scenario really does turn up, I’ll be left longing for the time when twenty girls in Lower Sixth C put their noses in the air and wouldn’t look at me, and the twenty-first, having given me a long look, seemed to have decided that it wasn’t worth her while even to make a point of ignoring me on principle. She’s wearing a navy wool sweater with pieces of leather on the elbows, the kind of thing you only see on fishermen or someone’s granddad. It’s very old; I can see how frayed the cuffs are. Her combat trousers look equally ancient, like someone might actually have worn them into combat. They’re clean—she’d never get away with wearing something stained at Wakefield Hall—but they’re definitely screaming “hand-me-downs.”

I look at the line of girls in front of me, and despite the noses in the air, I do see one reason to be cheerful: none of the aforesaid noses are bobbed or filed-down or artificially sculpted. As well as being fashion, boy, drink, and drug free, Wakefield Hall is equally a plastic surgery–free zone. It’s such a world away from St. Tabby’s that I really doubt anyone here has any connections to the London, Teen Vogue, shiny happy people scene, which means they’re very unlikely to be aware that Scarlett Wakefield is known to the tabloid press by a much more lurid nickname.

If I’m lucky, I’ll manage to keep my secret. Girls won’t be keen to make friends with the headmistress’s granddaughter. But befriending the Kiss of Death girl? That would be a whole different story.