Paper Aeroplanes (12 page)

She is literally dumbstruck. This is me making a decision for myself, and she has no idea how to deal with it.

She grumbles and mumbles like a mad old lady all the way down to assembly. I just keep focusing on yesterday when I jumped off the wall with Renée. Up on that wall, nothing mattered.

When Miss Grut comes in she has her serious face on. I mean, her face is always serious, but this face looks more serious than usual. Everyone stands and waits to hear whatever it is she is obviously upset about.

‘Ladies, your full attention, please. The bad behaviour of two students has been brought to my attention. Yesterday just after school, two Tudor Falls pupils were seen jumping off the wall at Havelet Bay. The two girls were not identified, but their uniforms were recognised to be ours and I am now suggesting that the two girls responsible come to my office immediately after assembly and own up to this very irresponsible and dangerous behaviour. Should the perpetrators of this activity be you, or someone you know, then let me tell you that not coming forward will have you in much deeper trouble in the long run than admitting to it now. Has anyone got anything they would like to tell me?’

There is a long pause.

‘No? Right, well, I trust that those who are responsible will realise how serious this is and come to my office. OK, ladies, the Lord’s Prayer, please.
Our Father
. . .’

‘Whoever did that is in soooooo much shit,’ whispers Sally.

I feel sick. I have never done anything so bad and I’m terrified of the trouble I’m going to get into over it. This is the kind of thing people get expelled for. I don’t want to get expelled. I want to pass all my GCSEs so that I can go to university. I’ve ruined everything. I feel like a criminal about to get convicted for doing the most awful thing imaginable. I will be expelled and I’ll have to go and work in a shop. And Sally will come in and spend all her dad’s money and laugh at me for being such a loser with no GCSEs, and I’ll have to stay in Guernsey forever. Living with Mum because I don’t have the money to move out. And, and . . .

Oh my God, why did I jump? Why, WHY DID I JUMP? What a mess. I look down the row from left to right, searching for Renée, then I look behind me to my right. I feel so conspicuous. Every move I make seems guilty, and I am guilty, SO guilty. I look back and then to my left. There is Renée, already meeting my eyes. She doesn’t appear remotely worried. In fact, she looks happy. She winks at me. Winks?

I turn back to the front. My breath is becoming harder to keep quiet, then I hear a voice, my dad’s voice. He says,
Remember how good it felt to jump?
And then I realise, I realise that even getting expelled can’t make me regret the fact that I jumped off the wall. Jumping off the wall was the best thing I ever did and no amount of trouble is going to make me regret it. I turn to Renée and wink back. Maybe I
am
the kind of person who jumps off walls.

At break time I find a note in my bag.

Wanna hang out after your clarinet lesson?

I’m so excited I do an involuntary star jump.

As Flo walks towards me I feel really self-conscious of how I’m standing. Am I slouching? Nana always tells me I slouch. I push my shoulders back against the wall and press one foot into it. I don’t know what to do with my hands so I light a fag. Should I watch her walk towards me, or should I turn away and then look up at the last minute and act surprised? I decide to watch her the whole way. She walks as quickly as she can. This is good as it cuts down the length of awkward eye contact, but it does mean she looks kind of silly.

It’s raining, so neither of us wants to go to the beach. Instead we head to the Sunken Gardens, just at the bottom of the Grange before town. It means we have to get past the boys’ school again.

‘You won’t make me run again, will you? I’ll definitely fall over in this rain. For someone who skives cross-country you sure seem to love running,’ says Flo.

‘Cross-country is different, you’re not trying to get anywhere. It’s pointless running.’

I link my arm through hers and we set off, sharing her brolly. As we get near the boys’ school they’re all piling out as usual. Even though I really don’t want to see Lawrence I hope that some of the boys notice me. Seeing as Lawrence is nowhere to be seen, I make sure Flo and I walk nice and slowly.

‘Let’s enjoy this. We’re the only girls around,’ I tell her.

I hold the umbrella up high so they can see our faces. Then, pretending not to be bothered by their attention, I wiggle my bottom ever so slightly and hold eye contact with anyone who looks my way. Flo, on the other hand, is rigid. When I look at her face she looks like she’s about to be run over.

‘What’s the matter?’ I say.

‘What? Nothing? I’m cool.’

It occurs to me, Flo has no idea how to flirt.

‘Relax,’ I tell her. She goes completely floppy and does the fakest smile I’ve ever seen. ‘No, just relax. Just be the Flo who jumped off the wall.’

This seems to have an effect on her. She straightens her back and holds up her head. She’s more like a regimental soldier than a confident young woman, but it’s better than the made-of-jelly routine she was just doing. We walk slowly through the crowd of boys, and giggle at the whistles.

‘See? Nice to be noticed, isn’t it?’ I say, giving her a gentle nudge.

‘They’re looking at you, not me. I’m as sexy as a plank of wood.’

That isn’t true. Flo
is
sexy, she just hasn’t been allowed to notice that about herself yet. She’s skinny but her boobs are big. Her hair is lovely and long, and a deep chestnut brown. Her eyes are smallish but when she puts the right thought behind them they really light up. And sure, her nose is a bit big but her lips are too, and boys love big lips. She seems almost embarrassed by them though.

‘My lips take over my face. Well, the bits of my face that my nose doesn’t take over, anyway,’ she says, like she really dislikes herself.

‘You need to realise how gorgeous you are.’

She laughs, but I’m not trying to be funny. ‘I mean it, Flo, you really are. Somewhere under all that disbelief.’

‘No one has ever said
that
to me before. Sally went through a stage of calling me Humpty Dumpty.’

‘Well, Sally is an arsehole,’ I say, wishing that Sally’s name never had to come up.

‘Dad used to tell me I was beautiful,’ Flo says as she stops walking and drops her head. I feel guilty for making her think about her dad. I move her by her shoulders so we’re facing each other.

‘Well, I think your dad was right.’

I hug her, the umbrella on the ground next to us. There’s a chorus of ‘Look at the lezzers’ coming from the boys, who are still just feet away, but neither of us seems to care. We stand there, hugging in the rain.

By the time we get to the Sunken Gardens we are soaking wet. Hiding from the rain in one of the shelters, we start to read the graffiti.

Renée and Lawrence Woz
’
Ere
.

‘You must have liked him at one point then? Writing your names on the wall is pretty permanent,’ I say, still unsure of what Lawrence did that was so wrong.

‘Yeah, we used to have loads of fun. Until he got all serious.’

‘Why is someone telling you they loved you so awful?’ I ask.

‘It’s not just that he told me he loved me, it’s more about how he expected me to say it back. I don’t like feeling cornered into saying stuff I don’t feel and doing stuff I don’t want to do. And anyway, love at our age is ridiculous,’ Renée says, tapping her toe in a puddle of water.

Putting it like that it makes more sense. People live whole lives together pretending to be in love. I guess Mum and Dad did that for most of their relationship. Then they realised they couldn’t pretend any more but they were stuck with each other, and look where that got them. I’ve never really thought about love being such a big deal before. I just presumed that if someone was kind enough to say it to me, I would be kind enough to say it back, but maybe you shouldn’t just say ‘I love you’. You have to mean it.

‘Shall we write something?’ says Renée, waving a marker pen at me.

I surprise myself by taking the pen. Graffiti? What’s happened to me?

‘What will we write? I’m not writing the word “woz”,’ I say, making sure she knows I do have limits.

‘OK, no “woz”.’

She takes a moment to think, tapping the end of the pen on her bottom lip. Her lips are really dark pink, like she has lipstick on, but she doesn’t. Her brain is ticking over, her eyes look mischievous, then serious, then confused. Then she puts the pen to the wall and starts writing.

Renée
♥
Flo

She does a big full stop after it, puts the lid back on the marker and says, ‘There!’ She looks very proud of herself. I don’t know what I am supposed to say. We sit down.

‘Is that weird?’ she asks, after a few minutes.

‘What?’

‘That I drew a heart. Especially after my speech about love being ridiculous at our age. I didn’t know what else to put. It’s OK when it’s for friends, isn’t it? It’s not like I’m sitting here desperate for you to tell me you love me or anything.’ She does an awkward laugh.

My tummy is flipping at the thought of Sally seeing it. She would kill me. Do I care? Annoyingly I do. She loves having an excuse to make me feel even more crap about myself than I do already. It’s validation for her, and torture for me. Being friends with Renée Sargent will give her the ultimate ammunition.

‘No, it’s fine. It’s nice,’ I say, not wanting to make Renée feel bad. ‘What shall we talk about?’

The rain is getting heavier. We are sheltered from it but I wonder if I have a plastic bag in my school bag that I can use to cover my hair for the walk home. I start to look, but drop my bag when she casually says, ‘SEX?’

My throat tightens. I bet Renée has got off with loads of boys. What am I supposed to talk about in a conversation about sex? I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation about sex.

‘Have you ever done it?’ I ask, trying to make it as much about her as possible.

‘No. Not full sex, but I have done everything else.’

‘Like what? Have you done blow jobs?’ I ask, feeling silly for saying blow jobs out loud.

‘Yeah, they’re all right. You just have to shut your eyes and hold your breath. It never takes long.’

‘How do you know when to stop?’

‘Oh wow, you really haven’t done anything, have you?’ she says, trying to stop herself laughing at me.

The truth is I haven’t. Sally has never let me get close enough to anyone to even try. And she makes me feel so stupid and insecure, and fat and ugly, that unless I’m out of my brain like I was under that bush with Samuel, then I just don’t have the confidence to get to do that stuff with a boy. I avoid her question.

‘Why didn’t you do it with Lawrence?’ I ask.

‘Because I didn’t want to. He would be my first and I don’t want to regret it. But who knows if it will work out that way. I guess it will depend on how drunk I am when the moment comes.’

She laughs, but she isn’t really joking.

‘Renée, you will tell me when you have sex for the first time, won’t you? I think we both know you will do it first.’

‘Sure, friends tell each other everything, right?’

‘Right!’

She draws a noughts and crosses grid on the wall and we start to play. I win.

‘Margaret,’ I whisper loudly as I poke my head out of the cloakroom. ‘The dark ones, just the dark ones.’

She crawls along the corridor on her hands and knees, digging out the carpet tiles with a biro and holding them under her arm as she goes.

‘How many have you pulled up?’ she shouts back, thinking that she whispered it. I turn to Flo, who has six tiles in her hand, and relay it back to Margaret.

It’s lunchtime, and while everyone else is downstairs in the dining room, we are upstairs swapping the carpet tiles in the corridor with the different-coloured ones in the cloakroom. Why this amuses us so much I am not quite sure, but Margaret and I have done it for years. We are the Phantom Carpet Shifters, and for years teachers have tried to catch us in the act. People speculate that it’s us, and Miss Trunks has even checked my fingernails for bits of fluff before, but until they catch us, we are innocent. This time is the most fun ever though, because Flo is with us too.

‘I can’t believe it was you all this time,’ she says. ‘I used to think this was so funny, but Sally said whoever did it was immature.’

We lay the dark red tiles in the spots where the beige ones used to be and press them down with our feet.

‘Why is this so fun?’ asks Flo. We laugh, unable to answer the question. It just is.

‘Teeeeeaaaaacccchhhheeerrrrrr!’ screeches Margaret as she runs back in and dives under all the duffel coats that have fallen off their pegs. Like clockwork I get under the pile on the other side of the room, completely forgetting that Flo doesn’t have my ingrained hiding tactics. From my spot on the floor, I watch her through a buttonhole as she runs awkwardly around the cloakroom with one last tile in her hands.

‘Flo Parrot! Of all the girls to find I never expected it to be you,’ says Miss Le Hurray as she storms in. Flo drops what she is holding like it is made of fire. She looks terrified. I feel so bad that she is left to take the blame. Just as I’m about to creep out from under the pile of coats and fess up to years of carpet tile rearranging, Flo starts to speak.

‘Yes. It was me. It was me swapping the carpet tiles all along.’

What is she doing?

‘It’s always been me. Just me. I’ve done it for years,’ Flo says proudly.

For a moment Miss Le Hurray looks at her like she might be joking. But a confession is a confession, and there isn’t much to question when Flo gets down on her hands and knees and starts pressing in the last red tile from the corridor floor into a gap.

‘Right, I see. Please stop that now, Flo, and follow me downstairs. I am taking you to see Miss Grut.’

Flo follows her out of the cloakroom, turning back at the last second to wink at the pile of coats that she knows I am underneath. I wait to hear the double doors shut before I move.