Amelia O’Donohue Is So Not a Virgin (10 page)

W
hen we got back to the third floor, a group of girls were waiting in line outside my door.

The clinic. I’d forgotten I’d pinned a notice on the ground floor message board that afternoon, hoping the mother would come to me ALO to confess. It surprised me that people had responded—no one had sought my services for months. Must’ve been the onset of exams. People were tense and scared and needed someone to talk to. But lurking among them might be someone with a much bigger problem, I thought.

I grabbed Amelia and dragged her into the bathroom.

“Be my assistant,” I said. “Maybe she’s waiting to tell me.”

“No one’ll tell you anything if I’m there. I’m a Popular. That means no one trusts me, and everyone hates me.”

“No one hates you.”

“Everyone does!” she said, her eyes tearful.

“I don’t.”

She smiled at me. A genuine smile that traveled to her eyes. I’d never seen her smile like this before. It really suited her.

“Can you google from your phone?” I asked her.

“Aye.”

“Then while I’m talking to people, get on the internet; see if you can find out what we should be looking out for.”

She smiled again, much softer now than she’d ever been, and we made our way to our cubicles.

• • •

“Next!” I said, doctor-style. The girls were standing quietly outside, careful not to wake Miss Rose. A girl came in to confess that she was tempted to cheat in geography. I looked to see if she was unable to sit down properly, sore, feverish, or had swollen leaking nipples (blah!), but she didn’t seem to have any obvious symptoms, and I dismissed her after advising her to think carefully before risking everything by cheating.

The next was Taahnya Jennings. I nearly died when she walked in. She’d never approached me for anything in her life.

She was like, “I haven’t got a secret. I’m here to warn you not to take Amelia from me. She’s my best friend. We’re Populars, yeah. You’re, like, a retard. Got it?”

I looked her over. If what I’d heard was true, she’d been pregnant once already. Had she done it again? Had she
waited too long this time and been left with no choice but to give birth?

“Got it?” She repeated. I hadn’t answered her. I was looking at her skirt to see if there was any red anywhere.

“I’ve got it. But can I ask you something first?”

“I might not answer.”

“I’ll take the risk. Have you been feeling okay today?”

“What?”

“Has anything happened to you today that you want to talk about?”

She decided not to answer, curled her lip in disgust, and left.

After Taahnya, Mohawk Vanessa came in. Stories about her sexuality had continued throughout the year. Mandy, Louisa, and Aimee had told everyone Vanessa was angry at the world and on a mission to convert the straights and that they’d regularly heard her and Jill from the fourth floor (Right) in the middle of the night making kissing and other noises. She sat opposite me, picking the skin around her fingernails. To ease her nerves, I started the conversation.

“Did you tell the person?”

“What?” she asked.

“You know, last time you were here you said you loved someone and wondered if you should tell them.”

“Oh, yeah. That. Nah. Well yeah. But that’s not what I want to talk about…This is like big time top secret. Big time…”

I’d only spoken to Vanessa that one time and hadn’t noticed the way she talked. She didn’t sound like an angry marginalized person.

“Right, so I’m just gonna like blurt it out…I saw Miss Rose kiss the chef in the kitchen last night. She was crying afterwards.”

“Really?” I was gob smacked.

“Aye. Like proper kissing. Tongues and shit.”

“He’s married though, yeah?” I asked.

“His wife’s a cow, apparently. Jill heard her call him a prick in the driveway once.”

“Blimey, listen. I don’t think we should say anything to anyone about this. Can you keep it to yourself? I’d hate to get her into trouble. She’s the best thing there is about this place.”

Vanessa agreed. She loved Miss Rose too. “She’s a top bird,” she said.

When Vanessa left, it made me think.

Miss Rose.

W
hen the line of girls dissipated, Amelia came back in. “Any luck?”

“Miss Rose is getting it on with the chef.”

“Really? Worth following up. But she’s rake thin.”

“Some women hardly show at all,” I said. “Depends on your body shape. You find anything online?”

“Not much. Check this out,” Amelia said. “Let’s fill these in and narrow it down.”

Amelia placed several A3 sheets of paper on my bed. At the top of each was a heading:

CHERRY TARTS

GIRLS WITH BOYFRIENDS

GIRLS WHO WOULD HAVE DONE IT AROUND NINE MONTHS AGO

GIRLS WHO MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT CONTRACEPTION

ALWAYS FAT GIRLS

SUDDENLY FAT GIRLS

SCREWED UP GIRLS

STRESSED OUT GIRLS

SICK OR BLEEDING OR UNABLE TO WALK GIRLS

OFF SCHOOL A LOT GIRLS

“Why stressed out girls?” I asked.

“According to the internet, the girl may not even be aware herself.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at this,” she said, handing me her phone. On screen was an extract she’d found online. I read it out loud.

“Denied pregnancy describes a lack of subjective awareness of pregnancy until the end of gestation in pregnant women. Very often, bodily symptoms of pregnancy (nausea, amenorrhea, and abdomen swelling) are absent or greatly reduced, and neonates tend to be underweight: in many cases pregnancy goes undetected also by relatives and physicians.”

“What site is this from?” I asked cynically. “Wikipedia?”

“No, no, this is not a bam up. It’s from like a proper medical journal. Look at this one; they sometimes call it splitting…” Amelia clicked onto another article.

“Psychiatrists call this ability to separate yourself from
reality ‘splitting.’ This is a mental mechanism, which results when a person is under very, very great stress, and instead of dealing with that distress and the very high level of anxiety, they split it off from consciousness. The minute you talk about it to somebody else it becomes real. Whereas, as long as the process of concealment, denial, and splitting goes on, it remains a fantasy.”

She’d also printed out a true story about a nineteen-year-old girl who was seriously freakin’ out about life. She wanted to hide it so much that she had no physical symptoms. She gave birth to a baby girl in her bedroom then chucked her in a rubbish bin and made an anonymous call to the porter. The poor girl was arrested and given five years probation. “See,” Amelia said when I was done reading. “It could be like a mental problem. Like she’s so stressed and stuff that she might have hidden it from everyone, even from herself. Just ignore it, pretend it’s not there.”

“But how could you hide labor?”

“Maybe some kind of mad episode. Or maybe the shock left her clueless. I dunno. Anyway, we should keep an open mind.”

We filled out the A3 sheets using the knowledge we already had. Amelia turned out to be a minefield of information when it came to cherry tarts (though her criterion seemed a bit dodgy
to me—for example, Becky from the first floor was excellent at putting a condom on a cucumber and Roberta from the fourth floor walked funny). She told me something I already knew— that the girl with the ponytail had regular liaisons with the cute, ex-footballer-PE teacher, Mr. Burns, in the woods. She also told me that Louisa MacDonald had done it with a Baltyre boy at the last school dance.

But looking over our completed sheets, we realized that our methodical approach had hardly narrowed down the search at all. Almost every girl in the school fell under one or more of our categories.

We decided to knock on every cubicle door, pretending to need a painkiller or something, take a mental note of anything unusual, then reconvene in my room.

I had the third and fourth floors.

• • •

But oh god, this asthma was killing me. The nebulizer the nurse had given me after I fainted had provided some relief, but it was surfacing again, that feeling that someone had put a pillow over my head and was pressing down so hard that some of the feathers had made their way into my throat. Perched on the edge of my bed, I puffed on my ventolin again. After a few minutes of imagining myself in a calm, airy, painless place
(Edinburgh Uni Halls! Cycling through Amsterdam! On a train to Moscow!), I put on my dressing gown and headed to the fourth floor.

It was well after 11:00. Most of the girls were asleep, but after forty minutes, I managed to wake enough of them up to gain sixteen aspirin, at least a dozen expletives, a few “sorry, don’t haves,” and one seriously big suspect.

Her name was Viv. She was in my English class. Her stomach was so large it leaked loosely from between her pajama top and bottom. Her face was gray with lack of blood. And she was so hostile to the intrusion—“I said get out, I’m sleeping!”—that I just
knew
. I raced down to the third floor to find Amelia in my room.

“What do you know about Viv Metstein?” I said.

Her face glowed with excitement and she cross-referenced the sheets we’d filled in earlier…“Suddenly fat, pale, stressed out…”

“All of the above. What should we do?”

She was like, “Spy!”

“Should we not just ask her?”

“
No!
What if we’re wrong? She’d tell everyone. We have to be sure.”

We waited long enough for Viv to have fallen asleep again. In the meantime, Amelia—using the skills she’d honed from
Crime Scene Investigation
—prepared herself to sweep all other relevant scenes for evidence.

I stood guard as she rummaged through the linen cupboard. I’d been so shocked that I hadn’t noticed anything but the baby. But, in fact, the towels and sheets were covered in clues.

There was blood on several of the towels.

A red sodden pair of pants was under a sheet.

And there was a huge wet lump double wrapped in pillowcases. Without thinking, we peeked in the open end…

…then ran to the bathroom to puke.

Amelia was like, “Oh jesus, what was
that?
”

“The cord and placenta,” I said. “Whoever it was, she obviously knew how to deal with it. Waited a while, clamped it, cut it…”

Several dry-retches later, we hid the towels and offending insides in an old bag in my room, and rinsed the underpants in one of the shower cubicles. Once they were gunk free, we examined them.

White. Asda. Brief. Not labeled. Size eight. Nothing extraordinary. But it narrowed it down to size eight girls on a budget with non-labeling type mothers.

Still could be Viv Metstein. She was flabby, but she always wore clothes that were too small—T-shirts that curled up above her belly button; low jeans and tracksuit pants that cut
a line underneath her wobbly tummy; bras that oozed boob from the edges.

The next piece of evidence to examine was the baby himself. Did he look like Viv Metstein? Did he have her large ears and translucent skin?

We snuck down to the darkroom together and stared at the baby. He did not have large ears. They were tiny and cute, like dried apricots pinned back against his perfect-shaped noggin. He did not have peely-wally skin. In fact, his seemed deliciously sallow. He did not look anything like Viv Metstein.

“Could take after the father,” I said.

“He’s just too pretty,” Amelia said.

“Let’s check her room anyways.”

We crept up to the fourth floor, and gently slid open her cubicle door.

She was snoring, her mouth open and ugly. She was clinging onto a pink teddy bear.

Using my flashlight, I leafed through a pile of papers on her desk. Revision notes for our English exam, letters from home… One piece of paper was folded and crumpled. I opened it, careful not to make too much noise, and put my hand over my mouth. It was an information sheet from the family planning clinic.

Next, I opened her cupboard and pointed my flashlight
towards her smalls—but they weren’t small, they were huge.

Pink. Marks and Spencer’s. Size twelve. And labeled.

Hmm.

• • •

“I need ice cream!” Amelia said as we tiptoed down from the fourth floor. “Follow me!”

I did as I was told, trailing behind her down to the ground floor, across the walkway, and to the side of the dining hall.

“Give me a leg up!” Amelia ordered. We were standing underneath a small window, which was open about an inch.

“We can’t!” I said. “We’ll get into trouble.”

“Just do it,” she said. “If I don’t eat, I’m no use.”

Reluctantly, I cupped my hands and used the little strength I had to heave her foot up towards the window, which she expertly pushed open and climbed through. A few seconds later, the side door to the kitchen opened.

“Welcome to my world,” she said, ushering me inside and closing the door behind her. It was dark inside, but Amelia knew how to find her way around. She grabbed my hand, taking two spoons from the cutlery tray en route, and walked me towards a large steel door.

She let us in, closed the door behind her, and fumbled in the dark for a moment.

“Ta-da!” she said, the flickering light of two small candles revealing our location.

It was a fridge. It was bigger than my cubicle, and filled to the brim with buckets and boxes of food: meatballs in tomato sauce, soup, pasties, Bolognese, partially cooked pasta, lettuce, bread, sprinkles, Flakes, raspberry sauce, wafers, waffles…

“Check this,” she said, opening one of the freezers at the back. Inside were tubs and tubs of ice cream. She took a foot-high tub out of the freezer, poured a stupid amount of sprinkles on top, then lashings of thick red raspberry sauce, then grabbed a can of scooshy cream from a shelf, and scooshed ten inches of white sugar fluff onto the top. To finish off, she stuck ten Flakes around the edges like birthday candles, handed me a spoon, and said, “Bottoms up!”

“It’s freezing!” I said, taking a small spoonful of ice cream.

“Here,” she said, grabbing two expensive-looking sleeping bags from the back of the top shelf. “I hide them here for moments like this.”

“You do this often?” I asked, zipping myself into the down-filled mummy.

“Maybe.”

“Is there enough air?”

“I stayed five hours one time. There’s a wee grate at the top…See.”

Indeed there was.

Satisfied that I wasn’t going to freeze or suffocate to death, I took a spoonful of ice cream. But I felt too breathless and sick to eat.

Somehow, our illegal candlelit refuge felt intimate and safe. Bar Amelia’s frantic gobbling, we were comfortably silent.

After a while I said, “Will you chuck this up after?”

“I’ll try not to.”

“Why do you do that?”

“That’s the biggie. The one my folks pay Dr. Halliday to figure out. Apparently I have low self-esteem.”

“You?”

“Hard to believe, isn’t it? I dunno if it’s true. All I know is it makes me feel better, for a while anyway.”

“Why don’t you feel good? You should. You’re gorgeous, rich, clever, popular.”

Amelia had gobbled an impressive ditch into the tub of ice cream. She put it down and sighed. “All I know is sometimes I feel like a spaceship has dropped me down here from another planet.”

This made me smile. I paused before I said what was on my mind. “I know
exactly
what you mean.”

Amelia smiled at me and it melted the frost on my face. Other than Sammy, she was the first person to look at me as if she understood me. If I wasn’t a miserable pent-up Scot, I might have hugged her and told her I was so glad we were friends now. Instead I said, “We’d better go. We’ve got lots to do.”

Amelia put the tub of desecrated ice cream back in the freezer, and said, “Right, Detective Inspector Ross. Let’s solve this thing.”