LITMIR.BIZ

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battered leather notebook in which Rachel was writing was much less plush than the diary Mardy kept at home, but even that seemed another unwelcome link between them. And how furtively Rachel wrote! As if she were an enemy spy …

      Despite herself, Mardy was curious to know what so absorbed Rachel. She got down from the table and made her way to Rachel’s desk – not directly but by a route as aimless as possible. First, she stopped to check Hal’s progress on the chessboard: he had just castled and was preparing to do something devastating with his rook. His eyes for once were narrowed, his lip bitten white with controlled ferocity. Mardy moved on, exchanging pleasantries with Kylie and Susannah at the expense of their friend Michelle, who was off that day with a cold. And so (under the flickering eye of Mrs Yarrow, who was probably itching for a cigarette) she arrived just behind Rachel. Rachel had not seen her approach or she would certainly have put the notebook into her pocket at once. Even so, Mardy could not see what she was writing because Rachel had crooked her arm round protectively and she hung her head low over the paper with her hair falling raggedly around it.

      So Mardy took a long shot.

      “Who is he, then, Rachel?” she asked out loud. “Who are you writing love poems to?”

      Rachel twisted round in alarm, blushed and hurriedly shut the notebook. A moment later it was not there – though Mardy didn’t quite see which pocket she had put it in. All this happened in an instant, during which Mardy found herself backing off from Rachel’s desk as though a hand had pushed her roughly away.

      “Keep your nose out of it, Mardi Gras!”

      Mardy staggered back to her seat. She was breathless and a little frightened at the fury she had managed to provoke in quiet, unobtrusive Rachel. But she was smiling too, because she had won some kind of victory. For Rachel to be made angry, she must have been touched at last. And Rachel did not like to be touched.

      It didn’t take long for the news that Rachel was in love to spread to the Bluecoat girls. The rest of the morning Mardy watched them prodding her like a spider in a jar. English, where they were reading Romeo and Juliet, presented almost too many opportunities to be true. Biology was just as good. Rachel had to wait until the maths lesson after lunch for the teasing to die down. Even then, the mystery of Rachel’s boyfriend threatened to break out in unpredictable ways: an equation here, a co-ordinate there.

      “And who are you co-ordinating with, Rachel?”

      Mardy said nothing. She knew from her days as Queen of Fairlawn Primary just how little work was needed to start a rumour. Once the process was begun, any class would unite in the chase. Beyond Rachel herself, no one would suspect that Mardy was behind it at all.

      Except Hal, of course. “Up to your old tricks, Mardy?” he said to her as they made their way down the corridor after maths. They were being buffeted like channel swimmers in a rough sea and it was with difficulty that Mardy managed to toss her head disdainfully and say: “I don’t know what you mean.”

      “I’m sure you don’t,” said Hal, with his terrier face on. “I’m your friend, remember? I know the way you work.”

      “Oh shut up, Jiminy Cricket! When I need a conscience I’ll advertise.”

      “You’ve got one already,” retorted Hal between buffets. “Remember Theresa Greystoke?”

      “Oh, her!” Buffet. Buffet. “I just felt sorry for the little squirt.”

      Mardy shifted herself so that she was separated from Hal beyond talking distance. She didn’t care to be reminded of Theresa Greystoke.

      For a brief time Theresa had been Mardy’s rival at Fairlawn Primary. Beautiful, clever, an expert juggler and the owner of two ponies, Theresa had arrived from the north in her last year. For a while she had charmed everyone and Mardy had felt her own star beginning to lose some of its glitter.

      But then a rumour started – and no one knew how – that Theresa Greystoke had had plastic surgery on her nose and ears. That those dazzling white teeth were dentures. That one of her bright blue eyes was actually made of glass. It was whispered too that Theresa Greystoke’s father had bribed the headteacher to get good test results. Overnight, and without realising what had happened to her, popular Theresa Greystoke became an outcast.

      Very little of this had come from Mardy directly. She had started the first rumour – only half expecting to be believed – then watched, in growing wonder, as the torrent had swept her rival from sight. In the end, she had rescued her. “Theresa Greystoke is my friend!” she had announced fiercely in the girls’ toilets, where a Year 5 was scribbling something foul on the wall. It was enough. The word went out that Theresa was under Mardy’s protection: the persecution ceased. Theresa herself – poor, trusting Theresa – had been terribly grateful.

      Only Hal knew the whole story. Not that Mardy had ever told him, but he kept his eyes open, Hal did, and he understood Mardy too well for comfort. Mardy thought it over. So Hal thought that Rachel might become another Theresa Greystoke, did he? If Mardy had still been Queen Bee, then yes – maybe. But Rachel and she were on equal terms here. The rest of the class thought little enough of either of them. That made it a fair fight, didn’t it? And it was Rachel who had started it. Mardi Gras!

      The next lesson was chemistry. Outside, the sleet had turned stutteringly to snow. At first the flakes were too large to settle, falling flat on their watery faces. But a little later there was a mother-of-pearl sheen to the asphalt and on the larch tree the small twigs hung exhausted under the weight of newly-gathered ice. In thirty minutes the playground was choked with it. Silent snow. The more Mardy looked at it the more she felt that it wasn’t quite real, that the whole day had got off on the wrong foot and had better retrace its steps. She tried to concentrate on the test tube in front of her, on the blue flame from the Bunsen burner. In the distance – too distant to be made out clearly – there was a thin, whining hum. And plink – a sound like a string snapping or being plucked – and another … Water thawing and falling into pools of ice, ice breaking under its own weight and hunkering down into itself. And the burner’s furnace flame roaring …

      “Ouch!”

      Two rows in front of her, Rachel jumped back in her seat as a tightly-folded wad of paper bounced stingingly off her cheek. Mardy didn’t see who had thrown it. It must have flown past her own shoulder from somewhere at the back of the classroom. But from the way Rachel looked round as she bent to retrieve the paper it was clear whom she thought to blame. At her side, Hal too was peering at Mardy strangely: as if he hardly recognised her.

      Rachel unfolded the paper. It was a piece of lined A4, just like the paper on a dozen pads all around the class. Just like the pad on Mardy’s own desk. As Rachel read what was written there, Mardy saw her face flush darker with embarrassment and anger. She really seemed to be on the point of tears. When she looked round again it was with an expression of such shame and such knowledge, such open dislike – that it was Mardy who turned away.

      “Whatever did you write on that note?” hissed Hal.

      “Nothing! I mean – it wasn’t me who threw it.”

      “No?” replied Hal with frank disbelief.

      “No!”

      Hal crooked a smile and peered at her again with that look of strange half-recognition. “Have it your way.”

      This made Mardy furious. “Why don’t you believe me? Friends should trust each other!”

      For the rest of the afternoon Hal made himself very busy with chemistry notes. When the final bell rang, Mardy waited for him at their usual spot, under the larch tree in the front playground. The snow had stopped falling, had thawed a little and then frozen harder, so that the asphalt was growing a treacherous, invisible skin, with an inch or so of snow underfoot. She saw Hal at an upstairs window once, being hustled along by a group of larger boys. Five minutes later she spotted his back, already halfway down the road from school. That was odd – he must have passed right by her. Even if he wasn’t talking to her, how had she

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