thirteen

“IT WASN’T YOUR FAULT”

God, I’m cross.

I’ve climbed back over the wall, which I didn’t want to do: I wanted to ramble round the woods some more. Maybe take a leaf out of Taylor’s book and climb a tree or two. But then if she caught a glimpse of me through the trees (she’s right, this red T-shirt isn’t exactly inconspicuous) and accused me of copying her, that would do my head in. It was bad enough being called a sneak without her adding “copycat” to the list of insults to throw at me.

I’m furious with Taylor. And I’m jealous of her drive and dedication. I don’t have that iron discipline: if there’s no one else there, I can’t muster up the energy to make myself exercise. One of the reasons I depended on Ricky so much.

I’m more cross with myself than I am with Taylor, I realize. Because she’s doing something she really enjoys, and I’m not. I go through the main school entrance and up to the Lower Sixth C classroom, thinking that, if I can’t climb a rope, I can at least get my Latin grammar book and spend an hour learning some irregular verbs. I really need to make a huge effort in Latin, or I’ll get chucked out of the class.

The classroom is completely empty. Outside I can hear the shrill cries of the third-formers at their skipping games. The first-formers are squeaking excitedly as they play French Elastic, in which two girls stand facing each other with a long loop of elastic round their ankles as a third jumps onto it and pulls it into increasingly complicated patterns. And, drumming along below the high-pitched screaming, there’s the endless repetitive bounce of tennis balls thudding against the high stone terrace wall, punctuated by quick-fire rounds of what sounds like applause, as girls take turns to see how many times they can clap before catching the ball again. I know. Look, I never claimed Wakefield Hall was the height of metropolitan sophistication, did I?

The reason these incredibly old-fashioned schoolgirl games have survived here, as if Wakefield Hall were a living museum dedicated to the 1950s, is because there is nothing to do in the outside world between four p.m. when school gets out, and curfew time. Wakefield, the nearest suburb, is half an hour’s walk down the main drive, and frankly, being a suburb, it lacks decent shops, cinemas, and anything that would really tempt a teenage girl. You have to get a tube for that, and by the time you’ve got to somewhere more interesting, it’s five o’clock, say, and you have to leave by six on the dot to be sure of being back at seven for dinner. You really, really don’t want to miss curfew. Grandmother—Lady Wakefield—throws you straight into solitary and makes you live on bread and water for a month. (I’m only slightly exaggerating.)

So a lot of girls just walk down the drive and have low-fat skim-milk cappuccinos in one of the Wakefield coffee shops. And those are the daring ones. Mostly girls just stock up on sweets and chocolate bars (and illicit drink, I’m sure) to vary the dull monotony of school food, and head right back up the drive again.

We do exchanges with the local boys’ private school, for plays, sports, stuff like that, and the boarders can get weekend passes to stay with friends or family, but the bottom line is that at seven p.m., it’s lockdown in Wakefield Hall Maximum Security Prison. All the day girls shoot out as soon as they can, unless they have orchestra or sports practice or something. Leaving the hapless boarders to entertain themselves as best they can with rousing rounds of French Elastic and Wall Ball.

Believe me, no one can pity us anymore than we pity ourselves.

I know the boarders have parties in their dormitories. I’ve heard the rumors. But it’s not like anyone’s going to invite me, is it? Having the headmistress’s granddaughter over while you swill down cheap cider and watch naughty videos after lights-out isn’t exactly a good security idea. So I sit alone in my room at Aunt Gwen’s every night, staring at my computer screen, ignoring all the hate e-mails as best I can and downloading videos off YouTube. My Latin may be crap, but I’m still studying more than I ever did in my life, out of sheer tedium.

I wander over to the window and put my face to the glass. Some girls from the Lower Sixth—Meena, Jessica, and Susan, the class intellectuals—are clustered under the weeping willow tree on a slight hilly rise. They’re studying together. Bloody swots. Don’t they ever do anything fun? I think of the shiny, glossy St. Tabby’s girls by the fountain, studying Advanced Grooming and Flirtation Skills, and I almost get a wave of nostalgia for how smooth and gorgeous they looked. At least at St. Tabby’s there was something to aspire to. Here, the cleverer you are, the more you seem to feel the need to cultivate the grease in your hair and consider your blackheads a sign of extreme intellect, rather than God’s way of telling you that you should get a better face wash.

Behind the three brainiacs, the trees gather densely, completely concealing the hedge maze so beloved by the younger girls, who spend hours chasing each other through it. I used to do that, too, in the summers we spent here visiting my grandmother, when school was out. I’d have friends round and we’d explore the grounds all day, taking sandwiches for lunch and coming back at sunset grass-stained, exhausted, and blissfully happy. That was when my parents were alive, of course. I haven’t used the word happy to describe my emotional state much since the accident.

God, I’m being maudlin now. Things are bad enough without me “dwelling,” as my grandmother would say, and making them even worse. She does know what she’s talking about every so often.

I turn away from the windows, walk over to my desk, and flick open the hinged top, which is pitted and scarred inside by generations of girls who’ve scratched and inked things onto the wood. But instead of fishing out my Latin books, I stand there, staring at the envelope lying on top of the pile.

Quite apart from the fact that it wasn’t there the last time I opened my desk—putting books away at the end of my last class—there’s something about it that’s immediately perplexing. The writing on the front says Scarlett Wakefield in the oddest printing I’ve ever seen outside of a book. It looks like a robot wrote it. Or an android.

I may have been watching too many American sci-fi TV programs on my computer.

I hesitate for a moment, though I don’t know why. Then I pick it up. It’s sealed, and I need to rip it open. My heart is pounding for some reason. Inside is a single sheet of paper, with four words printed on it in the same weird typeface. Just four words. But they are the four words I have most longed to hear, the words no one ever said to me, and just seeing them printed on the white sheet of paper actually, I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, brings tears to my eyes.

It wasn’t your fault.

I sniff and look out the window and then back at the paper again, just to make sure I’m not hallucinating its message.

It wasn’t your fault.

I sniff again, and take a deep breath. Outside, the screams and giggles and tennis-ball-bounce-and-clap are continuing, just as before, as if the world hadn’t changed for me in the space of a moment.

I fold the paper up the way it was before and slide it back into the now jagged-edged envelope. My head is spinning, but I feel like I have a sense of purpose now.

I’ll find out who left this for me if I die trying.