White Lies

She thought for a moment before replying. I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. It was like I was talking to Beth, rather than someone I’d just met.

“So you can’t win.” She nodded. “But, you’re here now, so you won’t have to worry so much, right? No more…migratorying, at least. I reckon everything else will probably just…you know…fall into place.”

“Right.” I grinned. “Maybe. I mean, since I’m all done with the migratorying…”

She laughed. “So, anyway – more importantly – do you like pizza?”

“Is the Pope Catholic?”

She shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you. I never pay any attention in RS. Meat and cheese though, what’s not to love?”

The knot in my stomach began to ease as we made our way down the stairs, and the low-down on Scarlett’s now ‘ex’ that Rae gave me took my mind off other things.

“They’ve been together for years. If it’s really over, she’s going to be seriously cut up. Can you imagine? Total nightmare.”

I nodded. I could – maybe not quite in the way she thought – but I really could.

We headed down the main corridor towards reception, then veered off towards a set of double doors. Rae pulled one open and nodded for me to go through, as laughter spilled warmly out towards us.

“The dinner ladies aren’t back until tomorrow,” she explained, making her way towards the front. “That’s why we always get pizza on the first night back.”

The smell was so familiar, so safe, that it wrapped itself around me like a blanket. My stomach growled, and my brain purred. Rae grabbed a plate and dived in, and I was right behind her. I went straight for the Pepperoni Passion, with a sprinkling of chicken strippers and a garnish of potato wedges. Actually it was more of a mountain of each, and I was just pouring myself a Diet Coke so as to appear slightly less unhealthy, when a familiar voice rang out behind me.

“Thought we had a date, New Girl.”

Tyler. Rae looked around at me, eyes wide.

“Oh, yeah, the grand tour. I forgot. Sorry,” I said, trying to hide my heaped plate behind my back.

“No worries.” He tore off a slice of BBQ chicken pizza, my second favourite, and took a bite. “We’ve still got time.”

“We can show her around, Ty. At ease,” Rae said. I couldn’t quite make out her tone. “Come on, Abby, let’s go find Lilly.” She started off towards the tables, and I made to follow, offering Tyler an apologetic shrug; but his words stopped me in my tracks.

“How is she?”

I turned back to him. “You mean Scarlett?”

“Yeah.”

“I…don’t know. A bit upset, I think?”

Rae’s shout echoed across the room. “Abby! Lilly saved us seats. Come on!”

I gave her a wave, almost spilling potato wedges everywhere in the process, and when I turned back to look at Tyler, he was gone.

“OK,” I murmured under my breath. “Still weird.”

When I went to sit down, Lilly slipped right back into overexcited squeal mode: “Were you just talking to Tyler?”

I nodded, looking down at my plate as everyone’s eyes seemed to swivel my way.

“What is it with you and the hotties? Teach me!”

I could almost hear the ears pricking up all around us, and Lilly came into her own and handled the introductions like a pro. She also filled everyone in on my life history again, so I didn’t have to. I had the feeling she was going to be useful like that. The only downside was that she also told everyone about Jase, despite Rae throwing a chicken strip at her.

“First lesson of dorm life,” she said. “Never tell Lilly anything.”

I forgot everyone’s name pretty much straight away, and worried about whether or not there was mozzarella all over my face, but soon everyone settled back down and concentrated on swapping summer gossip. As interest slowly drifted away from me, I asked Rae about Tyler.

“Do you not like him?”

She scrunched up her nose and shrugged. “He’s all right. Tends to follow Scar around like a bit of a lost puppy though. It gets kind of old.”

“Ah.” So that was why he’d been keen to talk to me. I just happened to be in close proximity to someone he was interested in. ‘How is she?’ presumably was meant as in ‘She’s single now, right? Please confirm.’

“Did they have a thing, or something?”

“He’d like a thing with Scar, obviously. They all would.” She indicated all the boys in the room with a wide sweep of her pizza slice. “But Scar doesn’t date boys from here. And she was pretty serious with Riley for the longest time. I think they were even on about engagement at one point.”

“Wow, that’s pretty…intense…”

“Yeah. Whatever’s happened, she’ll be ripped up inside. She won’t show it though. She’s sort of the school ‘Top Girl’, you know? Kind of has to be all…superhuman and that.”

I didn’t know, not really. If so many people liked you so much, then why wouldn’t you just be honest with them? But I nodded all the same. I didn’t have ‘social skills’ on my CV. What did I know?

“Why’d you ask, anyway?”

“Oh, nothing really, just something he said.”

“Their parents know each other,” Rae went on, around a mouthful of chocolate chip cookie. How had I missed them? “Scar and Tyler were really good friends when they were kids. Went to the same primary, I think. They used to be pretty close, but you know what it’s like when you get older. Everything gets…complicated.”

I nodded. She had that right.

I scanned the room, wondering where the girl herself had got to, and spotted her flaming hair shining over on the far table with a small group of older girls. I watched her out of the corner of my eye for a while; she wasn’t eating, just picking at the food on her plate as she talked. She really was beautiful: porcelain skin, fiery hair, and deep green eyes. Some people had all the luck. She could’ve passed for twenty easily – someone who could’ve been advertising perfume, or designer clothes, or make-up, or any number of other smooth, sexy, desirable things. And there I was, with cheese down my top, someone who’d maybe be handy for advertising the ‘before’ images for diet pills or plastic surgery.

“—earth to Abigail?”

I swivelled my head around, and cringed as I realised I’d been openly staring in Scarlett’s direction. Lilly was trying to talk to me, and as I turned back to her I spotted the clock on the far wall, which reminded me that I needed to call Mum. The thought made me suddenly, achingly homesick, momentarily yanking me out of the strange new world I’d encountered and maybe even begun to enjoy.

I told Lilly that I needed to make a call, and left her to strip the last bones of gossip bare as I headed back through to the common room. It was hot inside, the air greasy with pizza fumes and the unmistakable scent of teenagers massing. I started to feel a bit queasy – and then a lot queasy as pepperoni began to roil on a sea of warm fizzy Coke inside me. I gagged, and bolted down through reception and out into the courtyard, in need of some fresh air and maybe a forgiving tree to throw up behind. I didn’t know the code for the door yet, to let myself back in, so I wedged it open with a handy brick that looked to have been left there for exactly that reason. I scurried over towards the gate, far away from the heat and the smells, and took a few deep breaths of the cool night air.

Once I was pretty sure I wasn’t about to let fly, I turned and rested my back against the gate, looking up at my home for the next fourteen weeks. It already looked more familiar, less imposing than it had a few hours ago. The junk food, Ty’s slightly stalkery weirdness and the chaos of break-ups and sibling rivalries had stripped away the Sunday-night drama veneer of the building to leave the essence of plain old ‘school’ sitting starkly in its place.

I picked out my dorm – looking up to find the window I’d looked through earlier – when the magpie had scared me half to death. The bright pink curtains billowed out of the open window in the breeze. As I watched them dance, I caught a glimpse of a dim figure moving in the shadows inside, before the window hurtled down and slammed shut. The movement and the noise made me flinch, sending ice cubes rattling down into my stomach. I looked nervously around the courtyard, half expecting to see the bird again as the hairs on the back of my neck prickled. The trees rustled quietly, and the courtyard was still.

I pulled my phone from my pocket, before my mind could veer off down any fresh, dark pathways, and made the call.

“Heya, Mum, it’s me.”

I heard the familiar creak of the sofa, and imagined her folding her legs under her, the way she always did.

“Hello, me. How’s it all going? Are you settling in all right?”

“Yeah, fine,” I told her. “Everyone seems dead nice. We had pizza for tea.”

“Pizza? Really?” she huffed. “With all that waffle on their website about the school being committed to ‘creative, healthy nutrition’?”

Wrong thing to say, Doofus! You know what she’s like.

“No, I mean yeah, but it’s all right. There’s no dinner ladies back yet, that’s all. It was nice. It meant we got to chat, kind of mix, you know? You probably can’t do that so well over a…I dunno…bowl of lentil soup or whatever,” I explained.

“Well,” she sniffed, then relented. “That’s great, love, that you’re mixing. But don’t forget how many calories there are in a slice of pizza. Not to mention the fat.”

I’d been on enough diets to know this one. “Two hundred and twenty-seven calories in a slice of Pepperoni Passion. And 11 grams of fat. But you only need to really worry about the five grams of saturated fat, as a rule.”

She sighed down the phone, but I could hear her smile.

Of course, I’d also quit enough diets to know this means bugger all as pizza tastes so good you stop caring after the first slice.

“You know I only worry because I care. I’m so glad you’re settling,” she said. “Didn’t we tell you you’d be fine?”

“Yeah, but you always say that.”

“Well, sometimes we’re right then, aren’t we?”

Silence stretched out for a few seconds, as I childishly refused to concede the point. One out of five wasn’t exactly conclusive.

“Your exams are just around the corner, love. I know it’s difficult, what with your dad and me being sent all over the place, but that’s why we’ve gone with boarding, isn’t it? So you can stay put for once, put down some roots, make some friends you’ll be with for more than six months. We’ve—”

“Yeah, Mum, I know,” I interrupted.

“Well…Good.” She sighed again. “Because it’s not easy for us either, you know.”

The silence stretched out longer this time. I couldn’t say what I was thinking. That if I ever had kids, I wouldn’t join the army. Or that if I was in the army, I wouldn’t have kids. Because it just wasn’t fair on them.

“Abby?”

“Yeah. I’m here. I know. It’s fine.”

“All right then, love,” she said, in her I-don’t-really-believe-you-but-I’m-too-tired-to-argue voice. “Good luck for your first day tomorrow. My plane leaves at five in the morning. I don’t know when we’ll be able to talk next, but I’ll text you as soon as we land. Don’t forget to email your dad. You know he worries too.”

I promised her I would, wished her a safe flight, and fought back the fear that started to crowd in on me the second I ended the call. I wouldn’t see her again until Christmas at the earliest. More likely Easter. Dad’d probably be home long before she was.

I crammed my phone back into my pocket. I should call Beth too, but I’d end up telling her about how I’d lied about Jase, and she’d be mad. I could see the whole sorry conversation we’d have unfolding in my head, and it was too much. I never knew why, but I always told her everything, even when I didn’t want to. I’d text her before bed, to let her know I was OK. She’d understand.

I was heading back across the courtyard when I saw him – just standing there – bold as brass by the open door.

“You again?” I murmured. “You are one freaky bird, Grey, you know that?”

I edged closer to see if he’d fly off, but he held his ground. “You like Grey, right? Way better than Malthus.”

He yawed when I said the second name. I was right – it was rubbish. Sounded too much like Malfoy, and no one likes a Slytherin.

“So what are you, some kind of school pet? Or did you just smell the pizza and fancy your chances?”

I was talking to a bird. Get a grip, Abs.

He cocked his head to the side, eyes dark and shadowed, no hint of the fierce red from before. I took another hesitant step towards him and he launched into the air with a long, loud cry that tore into the hazy quiet of the evening. And I watched as the brick holding the door open started to slip backwards slightly, almost in slow motion, and I knew I should run for it and grab it before it was too late but I couldn’t seem to move. The door gained momentum where I couldn’t, standing rooted to the spot as I watched it slam shut.

What just happened?

I stared at the door, and tried to think.

Grey’s dramatic exit, complete with frenzied flappage, must have caused enough of a draft to shift the brick slightly, and then the weight of the door must have done the rest. Nothing sinister. Nothing weird. Just physics.

Maybe what the boarding house really needed was a big, hungry cat.

When I was finally able to move my feet, I trudged towards the door and hit the buzzer with a sigh. “Sorry, Mr S,” I muttered, as his voice boomed out into the night. “I came out to ring Mum and locked myself out.”

I had to politely endure a friendly but serious lecture on the dangers of wedging communal doors open, which covered everything from fast-moving fires to dangerous paedos and axe-wielding maniacs – Mr S apparently not being one to mince words when the occasion arose. I had to promise not to leave the building after dinner when no one knew where I was, even though I’d been within sight of the front door the whole time and I was fifteen years old for God’s sake, before he let me make my way back up towards the dorm, and my bed. “It’s a big day tomorrow, after all!” he happily reminded me, adding that I’d “Need a good night’s sleep” behind me.

I bit back my prediction that what I’d probably end up with now was one filled with dreams of a flaming, axe-wielding paedo. He meant well, I knew. So I just thanked him, and said goodnight.

Inside

Day Two

‘When did this all start? Can you tell us?’

Not really. It was like saying, ‘When did you start? How did you begin?’

They want a neat, safe little explanation for it all. They want there to be this one point where everything changed. So we can just rewind to there and start over. And there is that one point – it’s staring us all in the face. They just want me to say it.

But I don’t want to talk about it.

I’m not fixable. None of this is.

Everyone’s fixable, they say.

I tell them that she isn’t, is she?

Who? they ask.

I don’t answer them. They already know.

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.