Secrets at Silver Spires (9 page)

I felt myself tense up as I remembered what had happened at the end of my session, though, when I'd come out of Miss Cardwell's room. I'd looked to right and left as usual, to check that no one I knew had spotted me, and then I'd had a nasty shock because Isis and Sophie had been at the bottom of the corridor looking at a noticeboard. I'd thought they hadn't seen me, so I'd rushed off in the opposite direction, but I'd hardly gone any distance at all when Isis called out, “Hey, Jess, what are you doing here?”

A ping-pong match seemed to start up inside my brain.

Truth?

Lie?

Truth?

Lie..?

I looked at Isis and suddenly realized she knew exactly what I was doing there. She probably even watched me coming out of Miss Cardwell's room. And she also knew I was embarrassed about it and would probably try to deny it.

That decided it. I stood up straighter and spoke as confidently as possible.

“I've been to Miss Cardwell. I would have thought that was pretty obvious.”

They looked at each other, wide-eyed.

Good, I'd shocked them. My heart was beating hard but I felt strong as I turned and walked away, trying with all my might to hold my head up high. “See ya!”

Sitting here in prep, going over that memory, I suddenly felt close to tears. I still hadn't been able to tell the truth to Grace and the others and I was just as ashamed about that as I was about my dyslexia. So why didn't I just tell them and get it over with before they found out from Isis and Sophie?

Was this how little fish in the great big ocean felt? One day, swimming about in the lovely blue sea, and the next, trapped in a net that was tightening and tightening.

Grace didn't arrive till well after halfway through prep, and by that time I'd given up on the chemistry and moved on to history.

“Hi.” She smiled as she slipped into her seat and glanced at her watch. A moment later she was hard at work, and in no time at all I saw that she'd covered a page. I knew she wouldn't mind helping me with a few spellings, though, like
Archbishop
, and
Canterbury
, but I didn't want to ask her for spellings like
priest
and
pilgrim
and other words that were simple and obvious for everyone except me.

“You okay?” she mouthed, when she happened to glance around after she'd been scribbling away for another fifteen minutes.

I nodded dejectedly.

“Sure?” She was looking at my work but I quickly put my arm across it so she couldn't see, because it was so embarrassing.

Immediately that same hurt look came into her eyes – the one I'd seen that lunchtime when I'd been telling her I couldn't come to support her at the tournament. After that she didn't look up any more till the end of prep. She wrote three pages of history altogether, even though she'd had less than half the time I'd had, and I bet there wasn't a single spelling mistake from start to finish.

As soon as my work had been safely handed in so no one could see it, I felt okay to talk about it, and as we went up to the dorm with the others, I tried to sound all light-hearted and unfazed, like Georgie often did. I just wanted Grace to go back to normal.

“I don't think I'll ever get chemical elements, you know!”

“You should have let me help you,” Grace said straight away, big concern on her face, and a trace of that hurt look I'd seen earlier.

“Yeah, I could have done with some help too,” said Georgie. “Except that I refuse to put any effort into something that is never going to be any use whatsoever in my life. I mean, tell me when I'm going to need to know the chemical symbol for lithium, hmm?”

Everyone was laughing by then, and I envied Georgie so much for the way nothing seemed to bother her.

“I know I'll get into trouble with Miss Crane,” she went on brightly, “for not paying attention to her boring, boring lesson yet again, but then if she tried to be a bit more interesting and imaginative, and let us act out little plays all about the elements or something, then who knows, I might be top of the class. So it's entirely her fault!”

One thing I knew for sure was that Miss Crane wouldn't be cross with
me
. None of the teachers were these days. They were all acting like Mr. Reeves, treating me like a little kid. I could get away with the most rubbish piece of work and the teachers were all sympathy and smiles and telling me not to worry, whereas when other people got things wrong, they got accused of not paying attention.

“Anyway, let's not waste time talking about chemistry,” Georgie was saying excitedly. “Shopping tomorrow! Yea! I'm going to get a new necklace – a big fat jewel pendant!”

And that gave me a great idea. I knew Grace was quite keen to go on the shopping trip because she needed sweatbands from the sports shop. Perhaps I would go too, because then I could look round for cheap costume jewellery with stones in. It wouldn't even matter if the stones were blue or green, as long as they were big enough to look like eyes. Okay, they wouldn't look as good as the teardrops would have looked, but they'd be better than nothing. I couldn't help myself getting a bit excited again at the thought. But it wasn't enough to mask my worry about what could happen when it's discovered that some pieces of the chandelier are missing.

Grace and I were both wearing jeans for the shopping trip. Normally we dress completely differently from each other. Grace prefers to stick to tracky bums and plain tops and I like experimenting with different styles. I know some people think I'm weird in the way I dress, and I didn't used to care, but now that I'm feeling so like the odd one out with my learning difficulties, I want to blend in as much as possible.

Katy was wearing a really fashionable tunic over her jeans and a belt that she'd made herself. It looked brilliant. She had fabulous earrings on too, and strings of bright beads around her neck. There was nothing interesting about me except perhaps my patchwork shoulder bag that I made myself, which holds my precious camera and goes everywhere with me. Feeling it swinging as I walked along with Grace and the others made me somehow more confident and secure, almost as though the bag had magical properties, and as long as it was close to me I didn't worry so much about my dyslexia. Although it hadn't magicked away my other problem, had it? The small matter of me being a thief. I shivered and clutched it tighter.

There were two minibuses parked not far from Hazeldean, towards the entrance to Silver Spires. Our lovely assistant housemistress, Miss Fosbrook, leaned out of one of them and called to us that the other one was full up. “So fill up this one, now, girls. There should be plenty of room.”

She slid back into her seat at the front as Naomi and Katy got in first, then Georgie and Mia, and finally Grace and me. I can remember what happened next as though it was in slow motion. Georgie had plunged ahead of Naomi, straight down to the back and was calling out to the rest of us that there were still a few spaces left there. Naomi and Katy were following with Mia, but Grace turned round to me.

“Shall we sit on our own, Jess?” she asked in her usual quiet voice. “I don't think there are any more seats near the others.”

And I opened my mouth to answer but no words came out, because I'd spotted Miss Cardwell sitting at the front next to Miss Fosbrook. She gave me a huge beaming smile and said, “Hello, Jess! You didn't mention that you were coming on the shopping trip when we had our session yesterday!”

I think that was the moment when the net tightened so strongly that I couldn't move. Grace was staring at me with that look I hated, that I'd seen twice before, only now it was ten times worse. I panicked and felt myself struggling to wriggle my way out of the net as I blurted something about changing my mind, and turned and scrambled down the steps of the minibus. Then I ran and ran in the direction of the secret garden, with tears streaming down my face.

“Jess! Jess!” It was Grace's voice.

My tears came harder. What chance did I have of escaping Grace? She was the fastest runner in Year Seven. And after a while I had to slow down because I was puffed out, and then she slowed down too. I know that because I could hear her footsteps, and anyway she was still saying my name, only more and more weakly, until in the end I was plodding along, head down, seeing only flashes of blurry grey ground through my tears, and hearing nothing now because Grace's footsteps were so light.

“Jess, it doesn't matter…”

I hadn't expected those to be her first words. Subconsciously I was waiting for, “Are you okay?”

I stopped walking and felt her arm go round my shoulders, which just made me start sobbing again.

“It doesn't matter,” she repeated.

“Wh…what?” I couldn't manage another word, because my breathing was too gulpy for me to speak properly.

“Let's go and sit down in the secret garden,” was all she said.

We walked in silence and I wondered if there was any way I could still get away without mentioning dyslexia, and yet explain why I'd deceived all my friends by never mentioning my visits to Miss Cardwell. But then, there really wasn't any point in hiding anything any more. Even the dyslexia. I may as well just come straight out with the truth. It was definitely going to come out sooner or later. It would be awful and shameful, but I had no choice.

As soon as we sat down on the bench in the secret garden, I started talking in a flat voice.

“I have to go to Miss Cardwell because I can't spell…”

“It doesn't matter.”

She didn't get it.

“I mean I can't even spell as well as a little kid in Year Four or something. I've just been pretending. I'm useless at reading and writing and it'll probably take ages before I get any better.”

“It doesn't matter.”

She really wasn't listening properly.

“I mean I've been going to Miss Cardwell for ages and I didn't tell you because it's embarrassing. But it's worse than just not telling you, I actually lied to you ages ago when Isis and Sophie asked about what Miss Cardwell said. It wasn't because I was ill that I did badly on the test. I lied about that too.”

“I know.”

How could she have known?

“I don't think you do, Grace.” I looked her straight in the eyes. “I'm saying I'm dyslexic – at least, Miss Cardwell's pretty certain I am. It's just got to be confirmed by the educational psychologist at half-term. And that's why I couldn't go to your tennis, because of all the work I had to do. But I didn't blame you for being mad about that – you couldn't have known I was just trying to get better so it wouldn't be quite so embarrassing. Oh yes, and I also couldn't come because I knew it would take me ages on the internet trying to find out if it was true that Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were dyslexic too, because that's what Miss Cardwell said, but I thought she was probably just being kind, and it did take ages because I couldn't even spell their stupid names…”

Suddenly I was exhausted and I just burst into more tears and buried my head in my hands.

“Oh, Jess, please don't cry!” said Grace. “I wasn't cross because you weren't coming to support me at the tournament, I was cross because I
knew
you were going to Learning Support. I mean, at first I knew there was something wrong because you weren't the same you. You were always in daydreams, but it wasn't like your usual daydreams, when you're picturing things. These were different daydreams, and at times I just felt as though I'd lost you. There was something about the way you always looked down when you said you were going to work on your art, and I could tell you weren't telling the truth, so I followed you one day and I saw where you went…”

I gasped when Grace said that, and it was as though my face didn't know whether to turn white or red. “I didn't know you knew…”

“But I wanted you to tell me yourself. I was so upset because you weren't confiding in me, and I thought I must be a rubbish best friend if you couldn't even tell me you had to have learning support and then you wouldn't let me help you in prep.”

“But it's worse than learning support, it's
dyslexia
!” I said, through sobs.

Now it was Grace's turn to look straight at me. She even raised her voice. “But I've told you, it doesn't matter! It doesn't change what you've always been, it's just got a title now. It's nothing to do with how intelligent you are or anything like that. Surely Miss Cardwell explained that? I know all about it, Jess, because, the thing is, my big sister, Sunisa, is dyslexic too.”

I gasped again. A bigger gasp than before. “Oh!” There was a silence. I couldn't find the words to show how relieved I was.

“It's not made you stop liking your sister, has it?” I finally mumbled.

And that's when Grace burst into tears and
I
had to put my arm round
her
. “Oh I'm sorry, Grace. I didn't mean to upset you. I was just so ashamed of myself for being so bad at easy things like reading and writing.”

Grace stopped crying and looked at me through her tears. “Jess, how can I get it through to you that it's
not
bad. You mustn't keep thinking of it as a bad thing. My sister says that some people don't get it at first, but they always do in the end. Like this girl who used to mock her in class, and was always saying snidey things about her under her breath… Well, one day, the teacher told this girl to remove her glasses, because she wore glasses for reading, and the girl did as she was told, and the teacher asked her to read something from her book, and the girl said, ‘I can't see the words without my glasses,' and the teacher said, ‘Well, now you know what it's like for Sunisa. Your brain can't read the words without help, and neither can Sunisa's.' And from that day on, the girl stopped her taunting. She just hadn't realized till then that actually she was in the same boat as Sunisa. And now they're at uni and they're the best of friends.”