Worse Than Boys (2 page)

‘We wouldn’t grass on them either, Heather,’ I told her.

‘Wouldn’t we?’ She still didn’t get it.

‘No. But we’d get them back for it later.’

‘And that’s what they’ll do?’

I sometimes forgot that Heather hadn’t been in primary school with me and Erin and Rose. She had only become friends with us when we’d all come up to
Cameron High. She was new to our crowd, new to the Lip Gloss Girls.

I admit I preferred to think of us as the Lip Gloss Girls, because when we weren’t called that, we were usually just known as Erin’s crowd, and I knew even then I didn’t like that. I would have liked everyone to think of us as Hannah’s crowd instead.

It was Erin who answered Heather’s question. ‘They’ll be planning their revenge already,’ she said. ‘So just watch your back.’

Zak Riley passed by then. I think he’d been listening all along. Zak was in our class, always winding us up. He had a mop of dark hair and he thought he was cool. Zak would never be in any gang. He thought gangs were stupid. ‘You lot are unbelievable. Lassies fighting. Honestly. Will you never grow up?’

He had a cheek. He was short, with bags of attitude and one of those faces you just want to punch.

‘I mean, come on, girls. Peace on earth starts here. You lot just want to fight. It’s boys that are supposed to do all the fighting.’ He looked at me. ‘Hey, Hannah, have you ever been mistaken for a boy?’

‘No,’ I said at once. ‘Have you?’

That sent my friends into a fit of the giggles.

Zak always got my back up. He was mouthy and lived on the same dark estate at the edge of town where Wizzie lived. He would fit in well in Wizzie’s world. I looked round at his nerdy friends. ‘I know we could beat you with our hands tied behind our backs.’

‘You wouldn’t need to do that,’ Zak went on. ‘One look at your face would be enough to send me running back to my mammy.’

I’d had enough of talking to him. ‘Just tell your girlfriend, Wizzie, we’ll be watching out for her from now on.’

He turned to his pals. ‘Wizzie, my girlfriend! Ha! I’d rather kiss a tarantula.’

Zak always had a crowd of friends gathered round him, ready to laugh at his feeble jokes.

‘That wee guy really annoys me,’ I said as they moved off.

But we soon forgot about Zak Riley and Wizzie and any trouble that was coming. There were too many other things on our minds.

Erin’s sister, Avril, was getting married and we had all been invited to the wedding. Something wonderful to look forward to and much more exciting than anything else.

Chapter Three

We all gathered at Erin’s house that night to admire her in her bridesmaid’s dress. Erin lived in a tenement block just a few streets away from me – a roomy flat with ornate cornices on the high ceilings, and polished ceramic tiles lining the entrance close. I lived in a tenement block too, but not half so classy as Erin’s.

Her dress was the colour of burnt gold, and as she posed in front of the mirror with the bedside lamps shining on her strawberry blonde hair she looked to me like some kind of sun princess.

‘You suit that colour so well,’ I told her.

She twirled and the colour seemed to shimmer around her. Erin’s hair had glints of gold in it, anyway. No mousey brown for Erin. There was nothing mousey about Erin Brodie. She glowed.

Heather jumped up and started twirling beside her. ‘This is the first real wedding I’ve ever been to. My
sister went to the Bahamas to get married and nobody could afford to go. I think that’s why she went. She doesn’t like any of us.’

We all laughed. It seemed we all had family problems. Rose’s mum and dad had split up and she spent her time between both of them. Though she seemed quite happy with the arrangement. ‘They’re both trying to win me round to their side. I get presents all the time. It’s great.’

Erin was the only one of us who seemed to have the perfect family. Her mum and dad were always hugging and kissing each other, her two sisters, her brother or anyone else who was close by. Erin was the adored youngest child. The whole family doted on her. Her mother hovered around us when we were in her house. In fact, her mother was a mother hen to all of us. I thought Erin’s mum was great. She was always boosting her children up, telling them how clever they were, how pretty, how well they had done. Maybe that was why they all seemed so sure of themselves.

No wonder, I thought, Erin never wanted to sleep over with any of us. She always had such fun at home. ‘Mum would miss me if I stayed over with any of you,’ she would say whenever we would suggest a sleepover.
And none of us ever stayed with her either. With three sisters and her brother in the house there was no room for guests. Rose never asked. Heather would have loved to have stayed over with her. I felt she hero-worshipped Erin a bit too much. But it never happened.

And me? Mum would only have moaned. Not that she would have missed me, but I could just hear her: ‘Oh yes, just go and leave me on my own. I’ve always been on my own anyway.’ She always made me feel guilty that I’d want any life away from her.

‘I’m wearing my pink dress,’ Heather babbled on. ‘You know, the one with the shoestring straps? I’m going to look like a babe.’

‘Babe was a pig, wasn’t she?’ I said, and Heather giggled and jumped on me, and we both fell back on the bed, laughing.

‘You’ll look like a pig when I’m finished with you,’ she said.

We rolled on to the floor, and it was funny at first. But Heather never knew when to stop. She ruffled my hair, pulled at it, tickling me all the time. I hated that I couldn’t stop laughing, as if I was enjoying myself. As if I didn’t want her to stop.

Finally, I managed to push her off me, angry now.
She fell back, annoyed at me. ‘Look who can’t take a joke,’ she said.

‘You just get on my wick at times, Heather.’ I stood up, feeling stupid, and I hate feeling like that.

Erin put her arm round my shoulders. ‘She wouldn’t dare do that to Rose.’

Heather’s frown suddenly turned to a grin. ‘You’re right. Rose with her hair a mess, with a broken nail. “I’ll die, I’ll just die!” ’

‘I keep my nails long so I can drag them down Wizzie’s face.’ Rose drew her nails down Erin’s radiator, and we all shivered at the sound. Anyway, Rose was used to us going on about her vanity. She thought she was gorgeous, with her thick dark curls and her violet eyes. ‘I’m the one who’s going to be the babe at this wedding. You wait and see.’

Heather giggled. She’d forgotten my bad temper already. I sometimes wondered if she suffered from short-term memory loss. ‘I wish big Anil was going. I really fancy him.’

Anil Gupta, the best-looking boy in the school. Drop-dead gorgeous. Just about every girl fancied him, but not half as much as he fancied himself. ‘As if he’s going to look at any of us,’ I said. ‘Not when there’s a
mirror nearby.’

‘There’ll be other boys at the wedding,’ Erin said. ‘My brother’s pals are all going. They’re a lot older than we are though. I think they’re more likely to be after the three other bridesmaids.’

Erin changed out of her dress and when she was back in her jeans her mum came in with cheese toasties and tea for us all and we sat on the floor and got stuck in.

As soon as her mother had gone, Erin said, ‘Come on, let’s play Light as a Feather.’

Our wish game. One of our favourites. Erin locked the door because her mother didn’t approve – she thought it had a touch of the supernatural about it – then Erin came back and sat with us.

Everyone said you needed at least six people to play Light as a Feather, but we always did it with just the four of us. And it always worked. We were sure that was because we were special. The magic was in us.

First the atmosphere had to be captured. The room had to be dark and eerie. It really helped that the wind had got up and we could hear it whistling through the telephone cables on the street outside. We switched off all the lights except for a dim night light Erin kept by the side of her bed. And then we started to tell ghost
stories. You always had to start Light as a Feather with the ghost stories.

We let Rose tell hers first. That was because her stories were always rubbish, lifted word for word or scene by scene from some horror movie she’d seen on DVD. Then it was Heather’s turn. Heather couldn’t tell a story to save her life. She told us the Monkey’s Paw, one of the creepiest stories ever, and told us the end of the story first. She always did that.

It was Erin and I who knew how to tell a ghost story.

Erin kept her voice mysteriously soft. Her story was all about the ghost of a little girl who comes back to haunt the man who killed her. He sees her one dark night in his car mirror, sitting in the back seat, just staring at him. He looks into the back seat and she’s not there. There’s nothing there. But when he turns and looks into the mirror again, her face is so close, as if she’s right at his shoulder, and he screams and loses control of the car. It tumbles down a ravine. And as it bursts into flame, someone sees the little girl standing on the road, looking down and smiling. She’d had her revenge. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and we all moved closer into the circle together.

Then it was my turn.

Chapter Four

I knew some great stories and made up lots more. And I always told the story as if it had really happened to me. That was my special trick.

‘It was when I had the part-time job in the video shop, remember?’ I knew they all could. Bruno, the owner, knew my mum and he had given me a pocket-money job, tidying up the shelves. I had only lasted a few weeks, because I never did tidy any shelves. All I did was watch videos. Bruno had given me my money one night and told me not to come back.

‘I told you I was fired,’ I said softly, ‘but that wasn’t the truth. The last night I worked there, something terrible happened.’

‘Is this a wind-up? Did this really happen?’ Heather was shushed by the others.

‘Bruno had gone out to deliver some videos and DVDs people had rented, so I was left alone in the
shop. Mary Brown was due to come in. You remember Mary Brown?’

They all nodded. Mary Brown really had worked in the video shop.

‘She had lovely long blonde hair, didn’t she?’ Rose said.

‘All of a sudden the big screen on the wall flashed into life. I hadn’t switched it on or anything. It gave me a scare, but I thought Bruno must have had it on a timer. There were no customers, so I just settled down behind the counter to watch the film that was playing. Right away I thought there was something funny about it. There were no opening credits, no voiceover, just a man in a long cloak with the hood pulled low to hide his face. He was striding across some railway tracks. At first he seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, until I saw he was heading towards a shack on the edge of a town. There was no music, just the wind whining through the telegraph wires, but that only made it scarier, because I could hear the wind whistling outside the video shop too.’

We jumped as the wind suddenly got up and howled outside.

‘Just like that,’ I whispered. ‘It was giving me the
creeps, because the video shop is pretty remote as well. I tried to turn the film off, but I couldn’t find the switch. And all the time that man just kept moving nearer and nearer the shack. And I knew something awful was going to happen. He was coming for someone. Finally, I couldn’t take any more and I stood outside the front door just to get away from it, but it didn’t make me feel any better. That video shop is right on the edge of that big estate, it’s totally isolated. I could see the lights of the houses on the other side of the football pitch, but they seemed a million miles away. There wasn’t a soul about. And it was such a wild night. It was eerie standing out there too. So I went back inside. I tried not to look at the screen, but I couldn’t help it. And I saw he was almost at the shack.’

Rose caught her breath. ‘Wait a minute, Hannah. That video shop is right beside the railway lines … on the edge of town.’

I nodded. ‘I know. I began to think he was coming for me. I tried to tell myself how stupid that was, it was only a film. But by then, I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. He reached the shack. He was at the back door. He began to turn the handle …’ I held my breath, paused for just long enough to keep them in suspense.
‘And right at that second I heard the back door of the video shop begin to creak open.’

Their eyes were wide. I had them.

‘I screamed. I ran outside. I wasn’t waiting there to see who he was or what he wanted. And I ran right into Mary, coming into work. She grabbed me and I told her what had happened.’

‘What did she do?’ Heather asked.

‘She laughed. Said it was only a daft picture on a screen. She told me to wait there and she would go in and switch it off.’

‘And did she?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. Because Mary didn’t come back out again. I shouted and shouted, but there was no answer. I was sure she was winding me up, but I was too scared to go back inside. I was so glad when Bruno arrived in his car. I told him the whole story and we both went inside. You know Bruno, he kept going on about daft lassies. He was going to fire both of us.’

Heather gasped. ‘And was Mary there, lying in a pool of blood, an axe sticking out of her head?’ I sometimes thought Heather had a better imagination than me!

‘No.’ I kept my voice soft. ‘There was nobody there. The back door was wide open and Mary was gone.
Bruno was raging because Mary had left the shop unattended. He went out to check and do you know what …?’

‘What?’

‘When I looked up at the screen on the wall. The film was still running, only this time the man was striding back over the tracks. He was carrying a girl, her long blonde hair trailing on the ground.’

Heather gasped. ‘Just like Mary Brown’s!’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I screamed when I saw it, and Bruno came running back. I pointed to the film, told him that was Mary the man was carrying, I was sure of it. And do you know what he said? He told me not to be so stupid. Mary had probably gone off with one of her boyfriends. She was always doing that. He said that was her fired for leaving the shop unattended. Then he just switched the film off. And the screen went black.’