Kiss of Death (6 page)

And again, Taylor and I watch as Plum and Nadia roll their eyes and toss their hair back in unison, exchanging little superior smiles with each other.

“They’ve definitely made up,” I say to Taylor. “Very interesting.”

“It must have happened last night,” Taylor says. “ ’Cause they didn’t look at all friendly at the concert.”

“No, they didn’t,” I agree. “Do you think Plum’s lulling Nadia into a false sense of security so she can get some more stuff on her and have her revenge?”

“Or she’s just going with ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,’ ” Taylor suggests.

“The thing is, together they’re unstoppable,” I comment, looking over at them as we move into the king’s bedchamber, girls oohing and aahing at the state bed, canopied with red damask trimmed with gold, heavily frilled, its cornice and headboard painted red and gold too, looking as regal as you could imagine.

“If they were making friends again last night,” Taylor adds, “they weren’t running around setting smoke bombs or trying to push you downstairs.”

“Unless that was their idea of bonding,” I say jokingly.

But now I’m staring at Alison and Luce, who are absorbed in talk. Alison’s fiddling with her long mane of hair, which I think she must have lightened in the last months; I remember it being more carroty. Now it’s a strawberry blond, straightened out of its frizzy curls, and it looks really striking. She’s wearing the unofficial St. Tabby’s uniform this season—a rock-chick look, narrow jacket and T-shirt over leggings tucked into slouchy suede boots. For Alison, who used to live in exercise clothes, this is a really big deal. Equally so for Luce, who’s in a variation of the same outfit, but with ballerina shoes. Clever—they keep her tiny little wiry body in proportion. In the boots everyone else is wearing, Luce would look as if she’d pulled on her mum’s Wellingtons.

They look so smart now, Luce and Alison. Wearing makeup, trendy haircuts, scarves draped fashionably round their necks. Like they’ve had the kind of makeover I did, when I went to a fashionable boutique and threw myself on the mercy of a surprisingly nice salesgirl.

So maybe,
I think hopefully,
they don’t care about my betrayal of them anymore, now that they’ve turned into full-blown, head-to-toe St. Tabby’s girls.

And then Luce, sensing my gaze, swivels her head away from the hangings of the state bed to look directly at me. Our eyes meet.

The shock is huge. I feel like she punched me in the breastbone. It’s the first time Luce and I have truly looked at each other since our awful breakup. For a brief, breath-holding moment, I have a blinding flash of hope that everything will magically be all right; that she’ll manage a small smile for me, or even make a gesture that says I should come over and talk to her and Alison.…

And then she squinches up her eyes, crinkles her nose, and pokes her tongue out at me in an unmistakeable grimace of contempt. I’ve seen Luce pull this face at people before: a girl in one of our gymnastics competitions who tried to do what Taylor would have called trash talking, or a bus inspector who lectured us about having proper ID to prove we were under sixteen and entitled to free fares (as if any of us looked our ages back then).

But she’s never done it to me.

It’s achingly familiar, and it really hurts. I’m shocked at how painful it is. Luce looks really embarrassed that she did something so childish; she goes bright pink and whips away out of the room, dragging Alison with her, saying something to her urgently. Tears actually spring to my eyes at the sight of Luce and Alison scurrying away from me.

“She should be more careful,” Sophia observes behind me, her tone serious. But since Sophia’s tone is always serious—she has no discernible sense of humor—I pay little attention to this comment.

“What do you mean?” Lizzie, perpetually curious, instantly asks.

“Lucy,” Sophia says, clicking her tongue in disapproval. “She was sent to therapy last term, for anger issues. She should be careful not to look angry in front of the teachers.”

It takes me a moment to realize she’s talking about Luce.

“Really?”
Lizzie is immediately agog, and so am I; I sidle toward Lizzie and Sophia, ears pricked up, whipping open the Holyrood information leaflet that up till now has been scrunched up, ignored, in my hand.

“Yes,” Sophia informs her. “After Dan died”—I sense Sophia and Lizzie look sideways at me, and I pretend to be utterly absorbed in the map showing Holyrood’s layout—“Plum was very nasty with Alison and Lucy. You know, because they were Scarlett’s friends. Not straight after the party: it started a few days later, after Scarlett was expelled. Plum never left them alone. They called Scarlett the Kiss of Death girl in the newspapers, of course, so Plum would get everyone to make kiss noises at Alison and Lucy.”

“Well, that’s not
so
bad,” Lizzie starts hopefully, but Sophia’s flat voice cuts right across her.

“Because Dan died of an allergy,” she continues, “like a poisoning, Plum was pretending that Alison and Lucy might be poisonous too. No one would sit with them at meals, or near them in class. It was quite bad for them. All the younger girls copied it too—they would scream if they walked close to Alison and Lucy in the corridors. Only the teachers didn’t know what was happening. Everyone else knew.”

That’s so unfair!
I’m screaming in my head.
Alison and Luce didn’t have anything to do with Dan dying! They weren’t even there!
And then I’m struck by the timing—it started “after Scarlett was expelled.” That would mean just after I went back to school to clear out my locker: once the inquest verdict on Dan (death by misadventure) had come in, the headmistress of St. Tabby’s asked me to leave (I
wasn’t
expelled, technically) because of all the press camped outside the school. Plum confronted me, with her posse behind her, and I humiliated her in front of them, slamming her into a locker, seeing naked fear in her eyes for the first time ever.

She took it out on Alison and Luce,
I realize slowly.
I made her look weak in front of her sidekicks, and she took it out on my best friends. I went off with my stuff, free from her for a while, at least. And she promptly turned round and tortured Alison and Luce, until Luce snapped with “anger issues.”

“She pushed Plum down a flight of stairs,” Sophia’s telling Lizzie now. “Plum landed on Mam’selle Bouvier and twisted her ankle.”

Good for Luce!
I think, grinning from ear to ear, but still pretending to be deep in concentration on the leaflet.
Bet Plum stopped giving you a hard time after that!
Plum’s scared of physical confrontation: I saw that when I held her against that locker. And tiny though Luce is, gymnastics, with all the conditioning that we do, means that she punches far above her weight.

And then the penny drops.
She pushed Plum down a flight of stairs.

My breath stops. My heart sinks.

“So they call in Lucy’s parents and say she has anger issues and must go to see a therapist,” Sophia says.

Lizzie snorts.

“Sounds more like she has Plum issues!” she comments.

“Hah! That is very good. Yes, she has Plum issues,” Sophia says approvingly.

“Come on, girls,” Miss Carter says, bustling up behind us, chivvying us along. “The best is still to come—don’t you want to see Mary’s private rooms?”

Sophia and Lizzie follow her, and as I walk slowly in their wake, Taylor falls in beside me.

“You hear all that?” she mutters.

I nod, not trusting my voice quite yet.

“She
pushed Plum downstairs
!” Taylor hisses. “I think that’s
very
interesting!”

She’s quite right. But I can’t manage a response; I’m haunted by the wording of that note left in our room last night. Right now, it
does
feel exactly as if I can’t outrun the past. My own past—my guilt about what I did to Alison and Luce. Not only abandoning them to go to a party; now, as it turns out, leaving them behind at St. Tabby’s to be tormented by Plum as scapegoats for me. I couldn’t help being sent away from St. Tabby’s, but it’s awful to know that Alison and Luce ended up paying for stuff I did. They were already furious with me for dumping them. It must have been real salt in the wound to be taunted by Plum in my name.

And then there’s my family’s past: my family’s and Jase’s, the Wakefields’ and the Barneses’. Things our parents did years ago, awful things that Jase and I are paying for in the present. My mother, according to Aunt Gwen, might have had an affair with Jase’s father, who, according to Jase’s grandmother, deliberately ran down and killed both my parents. It’s as bad as it could be. Really terrible, sad, miserable family drama.

It’s not fair, not at all, but there’s no point saying that things aren’t fair. Jase and I are stuck with them, and we have to try to work them out. Or, the way I feel at the moment, be buried alive underneath their weight.

Even the excitement of seeing the tapestry-hung bedchamber where Mary, Queen of Scots slept, imagining her walking on this very floor, sleeping in this very bed, can’t penetrate my misery. Weirdly, the only thing that helps is stepping into the tiny supper room where a brutal murder took place.

“Right here, one night, Mary was having a nice, quiet, cozy dinner with her attendant ladies and her secretary, David Rizzio,” Ms. Burton-Race narrates dramatically, “when her estranged husband, Lord Darnley, burst in on them. Mary was pregnant with the baby who would be James the First, King of England and Scotland, but her pregnancy didn’t stop her husband; he stormed in and dragged Rizzio from the table. Rizzio clung to Mary’s skirts, begging for his life, but Darnley had no mercy. Together with a group of other men, Darnley stabbed his victim to death—
fifty-six times.
His blood soaked into the floor of the outer chamber and he bled to death in front of Mary.”

We know this already, but only from reading about it in dry history books. Being in the place where it happened is infinitely more powerful. Gasps and squeaks of horror echo off the walls of the small turret room as we react to Ms. Burton-Race’s words. I imagine Mary, watching helplessly, probably sobbing and screaming, as her husband and a gang of thugs haul her friend away and stab him to death.

This is a horrible admission, but that image actually makes me feel better. I mean, talk about putting things into perspective. It’s like reading really gruesome mysteries, or watching horror movies. Atrocious things happening to other people—in fiction, or the distant past—are weirdly comforting. Catharsis, my classics teacher would call it. The ancient Greeks worked it out centuries ago. You watch gruesome stories onstage, you go down to the depths with the actors, and you emerge feeling lighter afterward.

I take a deep breath, feeling some of the weight lifted off me. And I manage a reassuring grin for Taylor. I must say, those ancient Greeks weren’t completely stupid.

The Holyrood gift shop isn’t that big, but it’s very well stocked with products calculated to appeal to its visitors. One whole wall is dedicated to shiny, pretty objects with the word
princess
embroidered or printed or stamped onto every surface. China mugs. Teddy bears. Cushions. Jewelry. Perfect for girls who’ve just been worked into a royal frenzy by Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Darnley jewel. All the princess items are pink and gold, and all are adorable enough to have packs of girls cooing as they pick them up and show them to each other.

“My God, what
is
that?” Nadia says as we emerge from the gift shop, many girls clutching bags in which are resting their princess-themed purchases. Most of the purchasers mumbled excuses about buying presents for younger sisters; only Lizzie Livermore was brave enough to admit openly that the princess mug was for her own hot chocolate. I have to say, I admire her for that.

Nadia’s not staring at any gift shop purchase, though; her gaze is fixed on the large building directly across the road.

“That,” Ms. Burton-Race says with a thread of embarrassment in her voice, “is the new Scottish Parliament.”

“My God,” Plum drawls. “I thought it was a
leisure center.
With flats upstairs for aspiring yuppies.”

She and Nadia giggle snobbishly in unison. But the thing is, Plum isn’t wrong. The Scottish Parliament is a very odd building indeed. It stretches out at all kinds of odd curves and angles, with bits sticking out of it that don’t seem to do anything at all. The front of it has a cantilevered metal-and-glass roof projecting out into space, which looks like an oversized bus shelter, and the roof is covered in what looks like enormous twigs, as if a giant bird had been building a nest, got bored halfway through, dumped a whole bundle of sticks, and flew away. There are more oversized twigs stuck to the front of the building in irregular clumps. We all stand and stare at it for a while, feeling that Plum has pretty much summed it up with her leisure-center comment. You expect to smell wafts of chlorine coming out from the vents.

“There
is
the option of a Parliament tour,” Aunt Gwen starts, and next to me, Lizzie actually whimpers in fear.
“But,”
Aunt Gwen continues, looking at her reprovingly, “the word
option,
by its nature, indicates that the tour is not
compulsory.
”