Scarlet Wakefield 01 - Kiss Me Kill Me (10 page)

I’m shocked. And I’m pissed off. I realize how much I’ve been expecting to be the best at PE, how much it mattered to me, at this school where I feel like I’m the worst at every single academic subject I’m taking. It comes over me like an angry wave, and I see bright angry competitive red, and I curl my back and tuck my abs and haul away at lifting my legs with everything I’ve got, and still that Taylor girl is going higher and faster and more effortlessly than I am.

She knows we’re competing. I can tell. And when the whistle goes, the two of us don’t stop. The hockey girls have long climbed down, but Taylor and I keep going, though my feet are only at waist height now, while Taylor’s still doing high lifts, she seems to be on some sort of girl steroids, or maybe she’s an android, while I, frankly, am absolutely knackered.

The whistle’s going again.

“Girls! Time to stop!” Miss Carter is bellowing.

Thank God. I flail for a low bar with my feet, find it, and climb down. My palms are burning, accustomed as I am to a padded bar, not just bare wood. Taylor drops to the floor next to me, and I notice how light her landing is, despite her big muscular body.

I glance at her resentfully. Our eyes meet. It’s a stand-off. Hers are narrowed, wide, and seemingly even greener against the paleness of her skin, outlined by unexpectedly thick dark lashes. For a moment I think Taylor’s going to say something. And then she turns away, deliberately snubbing me.

Cow. I hate her. The only girl I’ve got something in common with here—she’s a new girl, too—and she turns out to be a snotty cow who can beat me at leg lifts.

I hate this godforsaken armpit of a school in the middle of nowhere. I hate the teachers who make me feel like an uneducated moron.

And most of all, I hate this Taylor girl. She’d better stay well away from me from now on.

“WHO PUSHED ME?”

When I was little, my nanny read me that story about the man who knew the king had ears like a donkey. He had to swear on his life not to tell anyone. But after a while, he couldn’t bear it—the secret was too big for him to keep. So he went down to the river and whispered into the rushes: “The king has donkey’s ears! The king has donkey’s ears!”

And then someone wove a basket out of those rushes, and the basket told everyone the king had donkey’s ears. Or something. I’m not really sure about the end of it. And I don’t remember, either, why the king had donkey’s ears in the first place. Some fairy probably cursed him. That’s how weird things always happen in these kinds of stories, isn’t it?

Anyway, I didn’t understand the point of the story when I was small. I was caught up in wondering what it would be like to have donkey’s ears. I mean, they’d be all big and itchy, and how would you hide them? Even under a big hat, it would be pretty difficult. But my nanny said that the story was a fable, which means it’s meant to teach you a lesson, and the lesson was that it’s really hard to keep a secret.

I didn’t get that, either. I mean, everyone already knows it’s hard to keep a secret, don’t they?

I asked my mother, but she just looked at me blankly and waved me away and went on talking to whoever was on the end of the phone. I was too young then to realize there wasn’t much point asking my mother anything important.

But now I understand it was my nanny who got it wrong. The lesson is not that it’s hard to keep a secret.

The lesson is that it’simpossible to keep a secret.

This is too much for me to hold. I feel as if I’m going to explode with it. My head actually hurts with the effort of not telling anyone what I saw.

I can’t ring anyone—the police especially—and tell them anonymously. They can trace any call; they can record anything and prove it’s your voice. It’s the same with e-mails. Everyone knows you don’t have any privacy with e-mails. And handwriting. And computer printers. I’m sure I saw a TV show about that. And right now, I’m so scared that I don’t want to take any risks. Or because there’s always some risk, let’s face it. I want to take the least amount of risks possible. The least amount of stuff that could lead back to me.

Because I have to tell. I have to pass this on. And once I’ve told, I’ll be free. Won’t I? I’ll be free, because it’ll be someone else’s responsibility. I’ll have passed it on to the person who needs to hear it. The person who got blamed for it.

And hopefully, once I’ve told, whenever I close my eyes I’ll stop seeing that moment, the moment I can’t stop remembering. The moment at the party when I saw what I wasn’t supposed to see.

There are three e-mails in my in-box, if you don’t count the spam. And these three definitely aren’t spam. They’re meant specifically for me.

I know that because although I don’t recognize any of the senders’ names, when the subject line says stuff like Killed anyone else yet? or You bloody bitch I hope you die! it’s pretty obvious that they’re coming from Plum and about twenty or so girls who, if Plum told them to eat dirt, would get down there with their faces in the ground and start chewing. You’ve got to admire her leadership skills. She’d be great in the army.

I closed all my e-mail accounts and opened new ones with names no one would think would be me. I changed my mobile phone number. But at Wakefield Hall, I get an e-mail account automatically, and it wouldn’t take a master spy to work out that anything sent to scarlettwake [email protected] would probably reach me. None of them are coming from addresses I recognize, but that doesn’t mean anything.

I know they’re coming from girls at St. Tabby’s.

I shiver, remembering the last time I was there, when they sent me to clear out my locker on my own. No teacher with me. And after the headmistress had made me go into her office to listen to a lecture about bringing the school into disrepute, I was too proud to plead for an escort.

Stupid, stupid. That pride thing gets me every time.

They were waiting for me, of course. Plum, Nadia, Venetia, Chloe, and at least ten others. Captain Plum had rallied her troops. Designer uniforms by Prada and Stella McCartney. The stacked platform heels would make it hard to run, but they didn’t need to. Just circle me, and kick me when I was down.

I stare at the hateful e-mails in my in-box and click on them, one by one, to delete them without reading the content. It’ll just be pictures of me, with “Killer Slut” written over them. Or articles about murdered girls, with “Maybe she stole someone else’s boyfriend” on the subject line.

Whatever they send me, at least it’s not as bad as having them all back me against my locker and shout insults at me. Apart from Dan’s death, that’s the memory I most want to erase forever.

But I can’t. I remember it so clearly it might as well be happening right now.

“Oh look. It’s the school murderess,” Plum began, in that tone of fake surprise that princesses perfect in the cradle. “Who’re you going to kill today, Scarlett?”

Several tart responses sprang to my lips, but I knew that uttering any snappy retorts would be roughly equivalent to lying down on the ground and inviting everyone to jump on me. This was going to be bad enough without me chucking any fuel on the fire. I kept my head ducked and inserted my key into the door of my locker.

“Oh, she’s got ages yet, Plum,” Venetia chimed in. “It’s only noon. She’s got twelve hours to go before she kills someone else’s boyfriend!”

I was rummaging through my locker, trying to block out their voices. I thought I could imagine everything they were going to throw at me, and I’d played it through in my head beforehand, trying to brace myself. But that I didn’t expect, and my head jerked back, bumping into the locker door, much to my annoyance.

Plum was delighted to have got a response from me.

“Yes, that’s right, bitch,” she hissed. “You stuck your tongue down my boyfriend’s throat and you killed him.”

“She’s a slut,” chimed in none other than Sophia Von und Zu Unpronounceable. Despite her being German, she had an English nanny and governess, apparently, and her accent was spot-on: you’d never know she was foreign. I had to admire her effortless command of current British slang as she continued fluently: “A stupid, dirty little boyfriend-stealing slut!”

I was gobsmacked. I couldn’t believe that Plum was actually claiming that Dan was her boyfriend. My brain was frantically scrolling back through the brief time I saw them together, and nothing about their behavior remotely suggested to me any relationship between them. It was Dan who came after me. Well, of course it was! How would I have the nerve to pursue a boy as hot as Dan McAndrew? But if I’d had the faintest idea that he and Plum were together, I would never have gone out onto the terrace with him.

Partly that was self-protection. If I’d accepted an invitation like that from Plum’s boyfriend, I might as well have chucked myself off the terrace directly afterward. But mostly, it was pride, yet again. I wouldn’t want a boy who belonged to someone else. I wouldn’t want to share. If I ever kissed another boy, I wanted to feel that one hundred percent of his attention was on me. That I was the only one he wanted.

I couldn’t help it, even though I knew I was digging an even deeper hole for myself. I pulled back from my locker, looked Plum right in the eye and said sarcastically, “Right. You’re really claiming Dan was your boyfriend?”

There was a split second of silence. Sophia, who was standing next to Plum, darted her eyes sideways to see Plum’s reaction to my challenge, and I knew in that moment that I was right. Dan and Plum weren’t a couple.

It didn’t help me, though. Far from it.

“You stupid little bitch!” Plum hissed. “As if you knew anything about me and Dan! You were only invited to Nadia’s party because Simon wanted to get off with you. I bet you actually thought we’d asked you because we thought you were cool.” She razored me with an up-and-down stare that felt as if I was being sliced to ribbons. “What, did you think we wanted to get fashion tips from you?”

Everyone laughed sycophantically at this witticism.

“Simon thought you’d be an easy shag,” Plum continued cruelly, her eyes still so slitted-up with rage that I could barely see the irises, “and he was right, wasn’t he? Because you hadn’t been there longer than ten minutes before you got my boyfriend to snog you and you bloody killed him, you nasty poisoning little tart!”

I was completely humiliated. I thought about all the trouble I took to buy clothes, to do my makeup, to try to fit in, and all the time no one had any intention of being friends with me. I was just a present for Simon.

I was about to burst into tears, and if I did, I would have had to kill myself. Nothing would be worse than breaking down in front of Plum Saybourne and her circle of mocking faces. Thank God, a bell went, and the surprise of it enabled me to take a long deep swallow, camouflaged by the sound, and squeeze the tears back down into their ducts again.

Plum was momentarily interrupted by the noise—we were in the basement, and the bell really resonated down there, it felt as if the walls were vibrating. I ducked into my locker again and sniffed a couple of times, just to be sure my nose wouldn’t run and give me away. I’d given up caring about getting my stuff now—I just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. But I grabbed some things at random and shoved them into my satchel, so it looked as if they hadn’t managed to distract me from doing what I came here to do.

This clearly infuriated Plum. I felt a push on my back, and I stumbled, off-balance because I was holding the satchel, and only just managed not to hit my head again on the side of the locker.

It made my brain tighten, like a fist closing on itself. I took a deep breath. I grabbed everything from my locker that I could conceivably want or need and I filled up my satchel. Then I slammed the door shut, slinging the satchel over my shoulder, and turned with my back to the lockers, and said in a quiet voice that even I could hear was menacing, “Who pushed me?”

And I looked at each girl in turn. They were all prettily made-up. Their hair was shiny and smooth, their eyes opened wide with mascara, their skin medicated to be acne free, their legs waxed, their heels high.

And me? I was in jeans and a T-shirt, my hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. No makeup. Boring old trainers. And I bet none of them could do a single full-body push-up. I was so much stronger than them. It flashed into my brain that I was longing for a fight. It was an awful, primitive impulse, and it shocked me worse than that push in my back.

“WHO PUSHED ME?” I said, louder now, and I fixed each of them with a hard-core stare. Some of them shuffled their feet; some of them took a step back. Sophia’s saggy rag-doll posture crumpled as if someone just hung her off a peg.

I had to say something for Plum: she wasn’t a coward. She was the only girl who wasn’t intimidated by me.

“I did,” she said, tossing her mane of chestnut hair. “You deserved it. Slut. You’re only here to pick up your things because you’re being expelled, so just get them and go, because no one wants you here.”

Every word was like a stab. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I advanced on her, and I heard myself say:

“You shut up, or—”

“Or what?” Plum taunted, shoving her face forward. “Don’t think you can just sneak back to your grandma’s poxy school for brainiac nerds and hide out there like you hadn’t killed someone! Just because you didn’t have your name in the papers, do you really think all the girls there won’t know exactly who you are after I get through with you? We’re going to make sure that everyone at Wakefield Hall knows exactly who you are and what you did!”

In her anger, she had stepped toward me, shouting her threats right into my face. We were so close I could see how smooth her skin was. I could smell her perfume. I could see the fury in her eyes, matching my own.

And I put out my hands, caught her upper arms and slammed her back against the locker behind her so hard that the entire row of them rattled and shook. With glee, I saw the expression in her eyes switch from anger to fear as I held her there, my fingers biting into her biceps, and she broke off midinsult, the next evil words she had been going to shout caught dead in her throat.

Plum Saybourne was scared of me. And she was right to be.

“If you even try to get in touch with any girl at Wakefield Hall,” I said, dangerously quiet, “I will tell my grandmother what you did. And she will get you expelled from here.”

“No, she won’t,” Plum said, doing her best to toss her head, but failing, as it was trapped against the locker.

“Oh yes, she will,” I contradicted her. “I just had a long lecture upstairs about bringing St. Tabby’s into disrepute. The last thing they want here is anymore scandal or talk about Dan. If they hear you’re spreading it to other schools, they’ll kick you out of here so fast and hard your bony arse will be sore for weeks. And don’t think any other school will take you when they know the reason you got kicked out of St. Tabby’s.”

I’m not sure whether that last bit was true or not, but it still worked on Plum.

“You bitch,” she hissed at me.

“Mirror mirror,” I snapped back.

She tried to bring a hand up to hit me, but I easily held her, the muscles in my arms bunching only slightly with the effort. The grip of my hands, which could hold me as I did huge swings around the asymmetric bars, which could support my weight in a handstand walk, were much, much stronger than any muscle in Plum’s skinny starved-to-a-size-XXS body. She was no physical match for me, and she knew it, and for once in her life, I had managed to cause a genuine, honest look of terror on Plum Saybourne’s beautiful face.