Blue Dome (The Blue Dome Series)
Read Blue Dome (The Blue Dome Series) Online
Authors: J.G. Gill
BLUE DOME
J. G. GILL
Copyright
J. G. Gill 2013
All
rights reserved
First
published in
Great Britain
by
Upsilon
Publishing 2013
ISBN 978-1-910004-00-5
This
book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or
otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the
publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This
is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any individual, either alive or dead
is unintended and is entirely coincidental.
Dedicated to W & D
CONTENTS
If I started at the beginning, no one
would believe me. There are days when I’m not even sure I believe it myself. I
try to pretend I imagined it all, that I’m still the same person I was before I
knew the truth. But it never really works. I find myself teetering on the brink
of memory, before something brings me back
–
something
as small as the imprint of perfume on the air, or Bede looking at me in a
certain way. Then I remember. I’ll always remember. Because I know what
happened to us was real.
Much of what is written here has come
from the diaries I kept at the time. At first they were just bits of paper
scribbled with fractured thoughts
–
a mosaic of my sanity. Now they are so crammed with my life
that barely anything left of me remains outside them. I’ve had to take the
pages, so thickly layered with ink that the sentences have woven themselves
into a dark, dense felt, and rethread the words to make sense of them again.
Even then, my diaries can’t tell the
whole story
–
they only
ever knew about the things I saw. For the rest, I’ve had to rely on my friends’
memories of what happened to piece it all together. Bede’s helped a lot. Although
my brother might be a bit unreliable sometimes (okay Bede, not always, but
definitely sometimes), he’s no drama queen. I know what he’s told me will be right,
even if it was painful and I didn’t want to hear it.
Then
there are the bits where, I admit, I’ve had to guess, based on what I know
about the people involved and the things that followed. Maybe it means I’ve used
‘artistic license’, as my English teacher might call it, but I’m kind of okay with
that. Even if I can’t be sure that I’m absolutely, no-shadow-of-a-doubt right,
I suspect that I’m pretty damn close.
In many ways I’m still trying to work
it all out. On that score, Bede is probably having an easier time than me, but
then he’s always been better at knowing when to accept stuff, and when to let
it go. Still, we both come from a long line of people who’ve needed to get to
the bottom of things. What I’ve realised is that there are some things that
stay in the past, and there are some things that don’t, and the things that happened
when I when I was sixteen will stay with me until the day I die
.
I can’t remember exactly when
I fell out with maths. It was probably about the same time that algebra reared
its ugly head, which I guess means we parted company pretty early on. Let’s
face it, algebra’s like an oil slick: it gets into everything. By the time I’d
reached Year 11, every maths class seemed to be saturated with the stuff.
Maths was every Tuesday
and Thursday afternoon at Wiltdsown High, in one of those new-build classrooms
that looked as if it had been made entirely out of cork. It froze in winter and
boiled in summer.
My desk was in the back left
corner of the room, furthest from the door and closest to the drafty windows. In
other words, the worst desk going. It wasn’t my choice. I’d been talking to Mrs
Burlington about a possible summer internship at the
College
of
Journalism
and
been so psyched about it that I’d totally lost track of the time. By the time I’d
arrived at maths, everyone had already taken their desks. There was just one
left: mine. I took it as an omen that someone had already tattooed the words
Welcome
to Hell
onto its lid and as the term wore on, I couldn’t have put it better
myself.
If it wasn’t bad enough
that my desk was the classroom equivalent of a nuclear fallout zone, the BBTs
had taken the desks immediately in front of me. The ‘BBTs’, as everyone at
Wiltsdown High knew them, were the ‘Blonde, Beautiful Thin’ girls who hung
around in the Main Quad, flashing their standard-issue, perma-tan spaghetti legs
and applying so much lipgloss they looked as if they’d been snogging the inside
of a Vaseline jar. That was, when they weren’t already busy making someone
else’s life a nightmare. I forget now, who first came up with ‘BBT’, but it
used to be ironic and funny. That was, until the BBTs found out about it and
started treating it like a badge of honour. It was much harder to laugh about
then.
The BBTs were untouchable,
everyone knew it. They were the girls who’d smile to the teacher’s face, while secretly
sticking an upturned drawing pin on her chair; the girls who’d wait until the
bell was about to ring, before jamming the short kid’s bag in a window frame so
high that he wouldn’t be able to get it before his next class; the girls who’d
wait until they had an audience of the best-looking guys in the school, before
calling you a fat, ugly slag right in front of them. They were the girls who
had a spooky talent for smelling blood.
I guess it’s obvious, I
was no BBT. I could never have been one either, even if I’d wanted to (which,
for the record, I definitely didn’t). For a start, I wasn’t blonde. In fact,
I’d never been entirely sure what colour my hair was. My dad used to say it was
still making its mind up, caught somewhere between being ‘muddy-rust’ and
‘mousey-ginger’. Not exactly flattering (and that was my dad, so you can
imagine what other people said). If anyone asked me I’d just say it was
‘auburn’. It might not have been technically right, but I figured it was a lot
more glamorous than ‘mousey ginger’. I’d always had a bit of a love-hate
relationship with my hair. It was great that it was long and bushy and I could
hide behind it in class, but at the same time it was mega-curly and a total pain
to control.
The other thing that kept
the door firmly shut between me and the BBTs was that I was really tall. Maybe
that’s a good thing if you’re a guy, but when you’re a girl and one of the
tallest people in school (including the teachers) it’s not cool. Most of the
time I kind of forgot about it so it wasn’t really an issue. I mean, there was
nothing I could do about it anyway, so why stress? In fact, it was actually
pretty useful at concerts, or school assemblies, when I could see what was
going on. It was also really useful on the Wiltsdown Underground, when I could
see above people and didn’t have to breathe in someone’s smelly armpit like
some of my friends did. But the reality was I was never going to be one of
those girls who fitted neatly under the chin of some guy at the school dance,
which was basically a prerequisite of being a BBT.
To put a final nail in
the coffin of ‘BTT eligibility’, I was in no way thin enough to ever be
mistaken for one of those girls. Okay, I’m reasonably slim, but I’m definitely no
celery stick. In fact, I’m not even sure it would be physically possible for me
to get that thin, and certainly not unless someone bombed Mama Jo’s bakery down
on the corner (or Mama Jo simply stopped making meringues the size of my head).
I did try dieting once, but it was kind of boring. The truth is, I like to eat.
It was a normal Thursday afternoon
and I was in maths, taking down the equations Mr Hudson had left on the whiteboard
before he’d been called away. At least, that was what I was trying to do. It
was difficult to actually see the board as the BBTs had decided to sit
on
top
of their desks. I craned my neck to see around them, but it soon felt way
too much like I was trying to do yoga. They were sitting too closely together,
a solid wall of school uniforms and make-up, whispering and giggling like a
bunch of furtive rodents. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but every so
often one of them would speak loudly, on purpose, so that everyone else in the
class could hear. Then they’d all laugh, not like normal people, but as if they
were acting in some really naff play, before glancing around to see if anyone (i.e.
one of the cool guys) was watching. At first I tried to ignore them, and was
actually doing okay until finally they became so loud it was impossible to
block them out.
“Hey, have you heard what
I’ve heard?” one of them said.
“No, what?” one of the
others replied. I could see her out of the corner of my eye, smirking to the
BBT on her left. Someone was about to cop it, I just knew it. There were days
when those girls reminded me of a giant zit, the way their blonde heads would
swell together, then burst apart with something nasty. I just hoped it wasn’t
going to be me in the firing line.
“I heard that Thomas was
caught doing it with Mrs Burlington down the back of the field!”
I breathed a secret sigh
of relief – at least it wasn’t me they’d decided to pick on this time. My
relief was quickly followed by a sharp pang of sympathy for Thomas. I had a horrible
feeling that whatever happened next, it wasn’t going to be pretty. I
concentrated on the whiteboard and tried to keep my face as neutral as
possible. The BBTs had the eyesight of circling vultures and they could see the
facial twitches of prey a mile off. Once they did, boom, it was all over.
The four of them were
laughing hysterically now and a bunch of their loser friends were joining in.
It seemed like everyone was staring at the guy sitting in the corner of the
room opposite me. He had his head down, his long, floppy fringe dangling in his
eyes. Thomas was doing a good job of pretending he hadn’t noticed what was
going on around him. I knew from my own experience, though, he’d be painfully
aware. I felt a hard lump form in my chest.
No one knew much about
Thomas. Actually, scratch that, no one knew
anything
about Thomas. He’d
just been this small guy with shaggy blond hair and pale blue eyes who’d turned
up in our class earlier in the year. Someone said that he’d had major dramas at
home after his parents’ divorce and that his mum had decided to make a new
start in Wiltsdown. He was so quiet though, and barely said a word to any of
us, so it wasn’t like we could just stump up and ask him.
The sound of a loud, wet
belch suddenly invaded my thoughts. I didn’t even need to look up to know where
it had come from.
“What, old Mrs
Burlington? Way to go, Tom-bo.” Vince’s sneering, arrogant voice blazed its way
across the room like a heat-seeking missile.
“Oh, so mean Vince,” said
the BBT who’d kicked off the whole thing in the first place. The other three
ogled him flirtatiously, while I felt my stomach churn. Even the thought of
Vince made my skin crawl. The guy milked his status as captain of the football
team for all it was worth and even the headmaster thought he was God, which
left little hope for the rest of us. It didn’t help that, in addition to the
unquestioning adulation of the teachers, Vince had enough raw animal cunning to
get away with murder. His involvement in the BBT’s stage show was a deadly cue
for all hell to break loose. The BBTs were now chanting “Tom-bo, Tom-bo” over
and over again, as if they had some sort of collective brain injury.
It really was pointless
now, trying to do any more maths. I stared out of the drafty window behind me.
The clouds were becoming steadily heavier and greyer, flexing their muscles for
a storm. I began to wonder how the sky might feel, just at that moment, just
before it let go of the rain. Maybe it was like being a large wet dog in the
seconds before it had a chance to shake itself dry. I thought about Val, the
dog we used to have before my mother died.
Jinx. I’d done it again.
I’d thought about my mother. A faded image of her face swam across my mind and
I felt a pang in my stomach. I closed my eyes, using the darkness to sharpen
her profile. It had been such a long time since she’d died, I wasn’t sure any
more whether the face I saw in my memories was truly hers, or partly a mix of
Aunt Pixie’s as well. Bede and I had stayed with Aunt Pixie for several months
immediately after the accident, while Dad had been recovering in hospital. I
hadn’t seen her for years now and certainly not since Dad had remarried.
Whoever’s face I saw, it
was kind and always made me feel calmer. I concentrated on the shimmering features,
trying to hold them still in my mind. I wondered if there’d ever been a time
when my mother had had to sit through a class like this in order to become an
anthropologist. If she had, then it was kind of reassuring –maybe things could
get better. For the zillionth time, I wished she was still around to ask.
I kept staring aimlessly
out the window, hoping that the BBTs would either give up or jointly become one
of the freaky spontaneous human combustions I’d sometimes read about. No such
luck. I glanced at the clock on the classroom wall and began counting down the
minutes before I could escape cork-classroom hell.
It was then that I
suddenly got the horrible feeling I was being watched. I turned to my right
and, sure enough, there was Thomas, bang in the middle of a full-on stare. He
quickly looked away, but it was too late – we both knew I’d seen him. Weirdly,
it wasn’t the first time I’d caught Thomas staring at me. He’d been doing it a
lot lately, quickly darting his eyes away the second I’d clued onto him. The
first time it happened, I thought I had something stuck in my teeth like
spinach or something embarrassing like that. But after a few days, when he kept
randomly staring at me, I figured it had to be something else. I’d been trying
to ignore him, but this time, unfortunately, I was not the only person who had
noticed.
“Hey, Tom-bo got a thing
for gingers, eh?” Vince shouted.
I looked down at the desk
as I felt my cheeks flush with heat. I could just imagine how bad my face
looked as the redness began to fill in all the white gaps between my freckles.
At first, I hoped the BBTs hadn’t noticed, before realising that my face was
the least of my worries. They’d now whipped up a new chant and were actively
encouraging everyone else to join in.
“Tho-mas loves ging-ers,
Tho-mas loves ging-ers.”
Now I really cringed, big
time. It was hard to work out which was worse, the fact that people who I’d
already shared a class with for two years still didn’t seem to know my name or
the fact that they were calling me a ‘ging-er’. If that wasn’t bad enough,
Justin had also started watching as well. Great. The coolest guy in the class
(maybe even in the whole school) was now going to see just how uncool I was.
Justin’s reputation had preceded
his arrival at Wiltsdown High. The rumour mill had gone nuts in the Main Quad
as soon as the news had broken that a new kid was coming who was so bad he’d
been expelled from every other school in the district. No one knew exactly what
he’d done, which only made the mystery and hype worse. By the time Justin had
actually taken his first step through the school gates, speculation had reached
fever pitch and the guy was guaranteed a one-way pass to BBT headquarters.
I never really knew what
to think about Justin. There were times when I thought he was a right dick, the
way he’d swagger around school, wearing his jeans way down low and trying to
act cool. He was also immediately friends with Vince and the BBTs, which was a
pretty lousy character reference as far as I was concerned.
At the same time, though,
it was always Justin who’d never think twice about challenging something he
thought was unfair, regardless of the consequences for himself. For instance,
there was the time when someone set fire to a table in the science lab and the
teachers had threatened to cancel the inter-school sports day unless the
culprit owned up. It wasn’t exactly a major tragedy for me (‘co-ordination’ is
something I can spell, not something I can do), but the rest of the school went
pretty mental about it. Vince had been training for weeks and had a major hissy
fit in the Main Quad, which only ended once he’d vented his anger by punching
out a Year 9 who was half his size.
But was it Vince who had
the nerve to take the teachers on about it? No way. It was Justin who made the
stand, even though he didn’t do sports. He complained in front of the whole
assembly, promptly landing himself in yet another after-school detention. In
the meantime, whoever had lit that fire was way too chicken to own up. Another
week went by and it looked as if the sports day was well and truly dead. Then,
on the final day, Justin owned up. None of us believed it was him – if it had
been he’d have owned up straightaway with his ‘I couldn’t-care-less’ attitude.
As far as the teachers were concerned though, it didn’t matter, a scalp was a
scalp and the sports day went ahead. I hated to admit it, but I couldn’t help
admire Justin for taking the rap.