Charm School
Authors: Anne Fine
Contents
About the Book
Who cares if flower earrings are ‘Totally Yesterday’?
Bonny doesn’t.
Nor does she want to know how to bleach her elbows.
She only wants to make new friends.
But the other girls at Charm School are so self-obsessed.
And they’ll do
anything
to win the much-coveted ‘Glistering Tiara’…
Coming to Charm School?
DON’T FORGET TO BRING:
2 halves of lemon (squeezed)
false eyelashes
perfume
earrings
hairbrush
hair comb
hair curlers
hair gel
hair spray
hair glitter
hair bands
hair clips
hair ribbons
Shiny Girl Sparkling Eye Drops
hand cream
cuticle sticks
nail file
lipsticks (assorted colours)
lip gloss
nail varnish (assorted colours)
cotton wool
cleanser – try Glow Girls’s phytolyastil V.I.A. complex tissue
peptide VHJ with hygrascopic elements and natural ceramides,
and a syntropic blend of unique Derma Bio Tropocollagen
(otherwise known as ‘Glop’)
dancing shoes (preferably diamanté)
outfit for song-and-dance routine
gown for the catwalk parade
music tapes for your routines
stain remover
shoe polish
travel iron
spare tights
emergency sewing kit
pearl choker (2-strand, please. 3-strand is ‘Totally yesterday’)
Il faut souffrir pour être belle
.
(You have to suffer to be beautiful.)
C
HAPTER
O
NE
‘I CAN’T CHOOSE
anything,’ wailed Bonny, tossing the brochure on the floor. ‘Not out of this horrible lot. Why can’t I just stay here?’
‘Oh, yes,’ scoffed her mother. ‘Spend the whole day alone here, in a house where the furniture hasn’t even arrived yet. Next door to people we haven’t even met, who might be axe-murderers. Oh, yes!’ She picked up the brochure. ‘Now, quickly, sweetheart. Choose one of the classes, or I’ll have to choose one for you.’
Bonny snatched the brochure and went down the list again. ‘Copperplate Handwriting!’ she groaned. ‘Practical Parenting! Defensive Driving! And Charm School!’ She hurled it back down. ‘All right, all right! I’ve chosen. I’ll do Practical Parenting.’
‘You can’t do that. It says you need a baby.’
‘I’ll borrow one.’
‘Don’t be silly. You haven’t even met anyone your own age yet. How could you find a
baby
?’ Her mother glanced impatiently at her watch. ‘Now listen, Bonny. We haven’t time for any more of this. We have to leave now. This new job’s important to me. I only have one day to brush up my accounting skills and pass the test to get my certificate. And my class starts at nine. So choose now.
Choose
.’
Bonny scowled horribly. The packing. The move. Losing her friends. A whole empty summer yawning in front of her, with
absolutely
no company, before starting again in a strange school. She was as miserable as she could be.
‘Why can’t I just come with you?’
‘What? To Bookkeeping (Advanced)? You don’t know anything at all about bookkeeping.’
It sounded so babyish to say, ‘The way I feel, I’d rather just sit next to you all day, not understanding anything, than be sent off to do something of my own.’ Instead, Bonny said sullenly:
‘So? I don’t even know what copperplate handwriting is, I’m too young to drive, and I may never have a baby.’
Her mother laughed and reached for the car keys. ‘You know what this means, don’t you, Bonbons?’
‘No,’ said Bonny. ‘No, no, no.’ She kicked out at the bright pink sheet of paper that had fallen from the brochure.
‘No!’ she said again. ‘I am not going to Charm School.’
‘Get in the car.’
‘No,’ said Bonny. ‘Not if you paid me forty million pounds. Not if you boiled me in oil. Not if you begged me with tears rolling down your cheeks like pearls.’
‘Get in the car.’
‘If you do this to me,’ Bonny warned her mother, ‘I’ll never speak to you again. I won’t take out the rubbish. I won’t make you pots of tea when you’re tired. I won’t bring home any of the notes from school. And I’ll grow up to be a round-the-world yachtswoman, so you won’t just have to worry about me for a few hours now and then. You’ll have to worry about me
day
and
night
.’
‘Charming!’ said Mrs Bramble.
‘See?’ Bonny said desperately. ‘I am already charming. I don’t
need
lessons in it.’
Mrs Bramble glanced at her watch for the last time. ‘This discussion is over,’ she warned. ‘I have a job to keep, so get in the car and sit on it quietly before I smack it!’
The woman behind the desk peered doubtfully at Bonny’s scowl and Bonny’s faded jeans.
‘Charm School? Are you sure? To me, she looks a little more like Woodwork 1, or Starting French.’
‘French only lasts an hour,’ said Mrs Bramble. ‘And Woodwork 1 doesn’t begin till tomorrow. It’s all today we need.’
Seeing the puzzled look on the woman’s
face
, she went on to explain.
‘You see, I’m just starting a new job and I need to learn better accounting skills. And her father’s still sitting in a lay-by with a broken down furniture van. And obviously she hasn’t had any time to make any new friends yet—’
‘I don’t want new friends,’ Bonny interrupted sourly. ‘I want my old friends back.’
Mrs Bramble bit her lip, then bravely carried on. ‘And what with the telephone not working yet, it wasn’t possible to find a sitter. So …’
She peered anxiously at her daughter, who glared back in a mixture of irritation and humiliation.
‘Still …’ the woman said, still doubtful. ‘
Charm
School …?’
‘That’s all there is,’ said Mrs Bramble. ‘Apart from Copperplate Handwriting. Unless you let her off the baby …’
‘Oh, no,’ the woman said. ‘You can’t do Practical Parenting without a baby. You have to bathe it, you see.’ She gave Bonny a nervous glance, as if she feared someone who looked as sullen and resentful as Mrs Bramble’s daughter would just as soon drown
a
baby as wash it nicely behind the ears. ‘One all-day Charm School it is, then,’ she said, taking the money. ‘And one all-day Bookkeeping (Advanced).’
She handed over the tickets. ‘You’d better hurry,’ she warned Mrs Bramble. ‘Bookkeeping always starts dead on time. Don’t worry about your daughter. I’ll point her in the right direction.’
Mrs Bramble pecked Bonny hastily on the cheek. ‘Bye, sweetheart. See you later.’
And she fled.
The woman ushered Bonny into the lift. ‘You might as well take it,’ she said. ‘Even though you’re not carrying any of the usual stuff.’
‘The usual stuff?’
But just at that moment the lift doors closed, and Bonny found she was talking to herself.
Bonny got out of the lift on the third floor, as she’d been told, and stamped her foot.
‘Horrible!’ she muttered. ‘Horrible, horrible, horrible! I hate this town. I hate this place. I hate the world. I hate everybody!’
‘Wrong floor, I think,’ a voice beside her said.
Bonny spun round and told the man hurrying round the corner into the lift, ‘This is three, isn’t it? Where I’m supposed to be?’
He looked her up and down. ‘I don’t think so, Little Miss Grumpy. Unless, of course, you’re here to help Maura with the sound and the lighting. The only other people on this floor today are Mrs Opalene’s pupils.’
‘That’s right,’ Bonny said stubbornly. ‘And I’m one of them.’
‘Oh, yes?’ As if to show how little he believed her, he put his foot in the lift doorway to stop it closing. ‘So where’s all your stuff?’
A tinned voice spurted out of the lift ceiling. ‘
Please check the doors for obstructions
.’
Startled, the man drew back his foot. The lift doors closed.
Fed up with people as good as telling her to her face that she was a Charm-free Zone, Bonny seized the opportunity to stick out her tongue, dig her thumbs in her ears, and waggle her fingers.
The lift doors opened again, and the man stared.
‘I was quite wrong,’ he said before they slid closed again properly. ‘You were quite right. This is quite obviously the floor you need.’
All along the corridor were photographs of dolls. All sorts of dolls, from innocent blue-eyed china dolls to mischievous dark-eyed dolls. But all had shiny eyes with curly lashes, and clouds of perfect hair, and pearly teeth behind their painted, triumphant smiles. They all had names as well, printed beneath their pictures. Miss Rosebud, one was called. Miss Sweet Caroline was another. Little Miss Cute Candy hung between Princess Royale and Our Million Dollar Baby. And Miss Stardust even had a wand to match her glittery frock.
