Scarlet Wakefield 01 - Kiss Me Kill Me (13 page)

BEING TARZAN

I know I’m going to catch the branch. When you’ve spent as much time as I have swinging from one asymmetric bar to the other, you’re not worried about your aim. What I don’t know—and this is the big question—is whether the branch will bear my weight.

I always used to climb out of this window when I was smaller, and under curfew, by crawling along the big branch of the oak tree just behind Aunt Gwen’s house. I could still do that, but by the time I’d crawled along it and climbed from one branch to another, down the trunk of the tree, Taylor would be long gone.

So I have to improvise. There’s a smaller, whippier branch a foot below the big one, narrow enough for me to get a grip on it. I launch myself toward it, aiming as close to the trunk as I can, because it’ll be stronger there, and as soon as my fingers clasp round the branch, I let it take all my weight for one split second, and then I kick forward, swing back good and high, and launch myself yet again in a long powerful swing that sends me flying through the air, feet reaching out, arms stretching back, making myself as long and as aerodynamic as possible, so that I land on the thick lush grass yards and yards beyond the tree.

It’s as soft a landing as I could have hoped for. I don’t even stumble: I hit the ground running. Taylor’s only a few feet in front of me and as she looks back, gobsmacked to see me so close to her, she loses a precious second or two gaping at me in amazement.

I’ve got to give it to her: she recovers quickly and snaps her head round again, pumping those super-strong legs, sprinting away from my pursuit. But I have the wind in my sails, and, just as important, I know these grounds so well I could run through them blindfolded. Taylor has barely been at school for a couple of weeks. And it swiftly becomes apparent that she has no idea where she’s going, apart from Away From Me.

I bide my time, keeping pace with Taylor, and the moment I see her hesitate, I pounce. She’s just rounded the corner of a hedge, and there’s the ornamental garden to her left, another hedge stretching away on her right. Taylor doesn’t know which way will be faster. In the moment that she wavers, I speed up, zooming toward her, and as she realizes what’s happening I spring at her, grabbing the back of her T-shirt, crashing into her and forcing her to fall to the ground under me.

Taylor lands really well. She rolls, tucking her head in, and if it wasn’t for having me on her back, she’d have been able to roll right over and come to her feet easily enough. But I’ve thought this through—I’ve sent her crashing into the hedge, and I have her trapped between me and a face full of nasty spiky branches. If she doesn’t want her face torn off, she won’t struggle. And her arms, in that tank top, are bare: she won’t want to get them cut up. I keep her wedged in there, half-sitting on her. We’re both sweaty, but I’m used to spotting other girls in gymnastics, and being this close to someone else’s sweaty body doesn’t freak me out. I put my weight on her to stop her escaping.

“What the hell were you doing in my room?” I ask, my breath coming in big gasps.

Taylor is not as breathless as I am, which I find deeply annoying.

“How did you get out of there so fast?” she asks, her chest heaving but her voice sounding only curious. “Did you just jump out the window?”

“Of course not! I’d have broken both my ankles!”

“Then how did you do that? You couldn’t have climbed down the drainpipe, you would have been miles behind me!”

“I swung off a branch.” God, I make it sound like I’m Tarzan.

Taylor’s green eyes widen. “Jeez!” she exclaims. “Have you done that before?”

“No.”

“Then how did you know it’d hold your weight?”

“I didn’t.”

“Wow,” she says, her eyes widening further.

This is ridiculous. I just caught this girl going through my most private stuff, chased her out of my window, and rugby-tackled her to the ground, and now I’m actually flattered that she thinks I’m some kind of minor super-heroine.

“You can let me out from under this bush.” Taylor tries to turn her head away from the branches in her face. “I won’t run away.”

“How do I know you won’t?” I ask.

I couldn’t beat her in a fight. No way. Look at those rope-climbing muscles. Taylor is probably twice as strong as I am. My only advantage now is that she’s trapped under the hedge.

“Where would I go?” Taylor points out. “You’d only catch me again if I ran. You know this place way better than I do. Besides, you could turn me in to your grandma.”

I stare at her, thinking this over. I can see that Taylor’s right. Eventually—I don’t want to give in too easily and make her think I’m a pushover—I nod begrudgingly and release my grip on her. She wiggles out from under the hedge and sits up cross-legged, wiping leaves and her messy fringe off her face. I realize that I have become distracted from the main issue here, which of course is Taylor’s breaking and entering.

“How dare you break into my room!” I shout.

“I’m sorry,” she says simply.

“You don’t look sorry.”

“Well, it was sort of fun climbing up the drainpipe and getting in,” Taylor admits.

I can completely see that it would be a lot of fun, but that is Not The Point.

“You looked through my private stuff! That is so  .  .  . wrong!” I’m practically seething with anger now.

“Yeah, that was bad,” she says. She looks straight at me. “You gonna tell anyone?”

Oh, I hate her. Hate her. Because she already knows the answer somehow, I can see it in her face. And she’s cut right to it—she hasn’t gone through the ritual of apologizing, explaining, asking me for forgiveness, pleading with me not to tell, all the polite back-and-forth that would make me feel that she’d done some penance for invading my privacy.

“I ought to tell my grandmother right away.” The tone of my voice is sharp and curt, just like Lady Wakefield’s.

“But you won’t,” Taylor says slowly, as if she’s confirming something to herself.

I narrow my eyes at her.

“You’re really pushing your luck,” I snap.

“Yeah, whatever,” Taylor says with a sarcastic roll of the eyes. “I suppose you want to hear me say I’m sorry or something.”

I can’t believe how bitchy she’s being, and how smart. I didn’t tell on her just now, and she’s calculating that I won’t do it this time either. But she’s brave enough to take the risk that I will tell, so she’s apparently not even afraid of expulsion. I’d admire that quality in her if she hadn’t just snooped through my things. “No, I want to know why you were in my room.”

“I don’t know, okay?” Taylor snaps. “Look, I shouldn’t have done it. Anyway, I didn’t see anything important.”

Instinctively, I know she’s lying. But for some reason I also know that she won’t tell anyone what she found. Because if Taylor can recognize that I’m not a sneak, I can see the same quality in her. Both of us fight our own battles: we don’t go running to teachers or anyone else to sort things out for us. We’re both lone warriors. Takes one to know one.

I lever myself up off the grass and wipe off the seat of my jeans. Taylor, sensibly, doesn’t follow suit; she stays sitting there, looking up at me, waiting for my next move.

“Stay away from me from now on.” I point a finger at her and fix her with my best scary stare. “If I ever catch you near my stuff again, you will regret it. That’s a promise.”

I don’t wait for her to say anything. I just turn on my heel and walk away across the grass. I’m still pissed off, but it’s good to have had the last word. Refocusing my attention on the note, I come to the conclusion that although Taylor is a nasty cow who broke into my room, she wasn’t the one who left that envelope in my desk. Taylor only just this minute searched my room, and the note was left for me at least an hour or so ago—probably when Taylor was busy climbing trees. From her sweaty state, she looked as if she’d been in that forest for a good long time. She didn’t have either the knowledge about me—or, from her hostile attitude just now, the empathy—to write a sentence like “It wasn’t your fault.” And most likely, she didn’t have the opportunity to leave the note.

So I can definitely rule her out. Not that that helps much. One girl down, a couple of hundred to go. I need to think very carefully indeed about how to find out who left that note.

I need to set a trap.

COMPLETELY COVERED IN INK

“Oh my God!” I stare down into my open desk. It’s the day after I found the envelope, and I spent all yesterday evening thinking up a Cunning Plan. So here I am, executing it. “Bloody hell, I don’t believe it!”

Sharon Persaud (of the killer lavender hockey stick), who has the desk next to me, turns to look.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“There’s ink all over my books! I don’t know how that happened!”

“Is everything okay?”

“No! God, look at this!” I pick up an ink-sodden envelope and the notebook below it, and wave them both around. “They’re completely soaked!”

Meena, who sits behind me, leans forward.

“How did that happen?” she asks.

“I dunno.  .  .  .” I rifle through the contents of the desk with my other hand. “There was this pen on top, it must have leaked all over my Latin notes, and this other stuff. God, it’s all ruined. I’m going to have to chuck it all out.”

Meena is fishing in her own desk.

“Here,” she says, handing me a pack of Kleenex. “And you can borrow my Latin notes, Scarlett.”

“Wow, really?”

I turn to look fully at her. Her expression is very sympathetic. Meena’s not very attractive. She’s unhealthy-looking, skinny, and pale-skinned for a girl of Indian descent, which makes the dark circles under her eyes even more evident, giving her a slightly raccoonlike appearance. But her smile now is very friendly.

“Thanks so much,” I say. The notebook doesn’t contain my Latin notes, of course: it’s blank. But I wouldn’t at all mind borrowing Meena’s Latin notes. They’re bound to be better than mine.

“Can you read anything, Scarlett?” asks Susan, another girl from my Latin class.

“No,” I say hopelessly. “It’s completely covered in ink. And it’s gone right through to whatever’s inside. Bloody pen, I don’t believe this happened!”

“Yeah, that’s really unlucky,” chimes in Lizzie, the scared girl from gymnastics with the un–Wakefield Hall–like highlights in her hair. “I had that happen to me once in my rucksack. My iPod cover got completely messed up. I had to throw it away. And it was a really nice one, too.”

There’s a chorus of sympathy. I must say, girls at Wakefield Hall are a lot nicer than the ones at St. Tabby’s. They may be wary of me because my grandmother’s the headmistress, but in a genuine crisis, they all demonstrate that they’re fully-paid-up members of the human race. If this had happened at St. Tabby’s, only my immediate friends would have gathered round to coo and empathize. No one else would have cared. Unless it had happened to Plum, or one of her inner circle. In that case, it would have been played for as much drama as possible, and tons of sycophants would have crowded around Plum all day long, as she threw her hair around and pouted and played the situation for the maximum amount of attention.

“What’s all this noise about?” Miss Newman booms from the doorway.

We all jump. Miss Newman’s voice is like a bass drum, cutting through all the chatter with deep, terrifying authority.

I open my mouth to explain, but to my surprise, Meena cuts in first.

“Please, Miss Newman, Scarlett’s had a pen leak in her desk,” she says.

Miss Newman’s phenomenally hairy eyebrows draw together so tightly they actually meet in a monobrow that wouldn’t look out of place on a Greek wrestler.

“Very careless to leave your pens lying loose, Scarlett,” she says. “If they’d been in a pencil case, this wouldn’t have happened, would it?”

My eyes roll despite myself. What decade does she think we’re living in? Who has pencil cases anymore?

“Don’t pull faces at me, young lady!” Miss Newman shouts. “Now go and wash your hands! You’ve barely got five minutes before morning assembly!”

“Here,” offers Susan. She pulls a plastic bag out of her desk, takes some stuff out of it and hands it along the row. “You can put the inky stuff in there, Scarlett,” she suggests. “That way it won’t go all over everything else.”

“Thanks, Susan,” I say gratefully, taking the bag.

Susan blushes and ducks her head. She’s extraordinarily pretty, but I don’t think she knows it. She never wears any makeup, nor does anything with her pale blond hair other than scrape it back into a tight ponytail. She actually reminds me a little bit of Luce, now I look at her more closely. Susan, like Luce, has a little-girl quality to her that conceals a very sharp mind. They both have a fragility that tends to make people—even teachers who ought to know better—underestimate how clever they are.

God, I miss Luce and Alison, so much that it’s like a physical pain. It’s these flashes of memory that hurt the most, the reminders of friends I’ve lost through my own bad behavior.

But I can’t think about anything now but the job at hand. I chuck the bag with the inky things into the dustbin, and nip out of the room and down the corridor to the big tiled loo to wash my hands. I don’t get them completely clean, though. I leave a good amount of ink still staining my fingers, enough so I can flash them around and complain, at every possible opportunity, about the leaky pen that ruined tons of stuff in my desk. Which will be Part A of Operation Inky Envelope successfully concluded. I check myself in the mirror. I’ve managed to get a small ink stain on my nose, which is perfect. Everyone will ask me about it.

I know it sounds tragic. But believe me, if I spend the next few hours showing everyone the ink stains on my hands and whingeing about them, everyone will be discussing Scarlett’s Ink-Stain Misery. Not because it’s interesting in any way, shape, or form, but because there’s nothing else to talk about in this underage girls’ prison.

Okay, that’s not quite true. There’s definitely something hot to talk about here, and his name is Jase Barnes. Mmm. I find myself picturing his wide shoulders, remembering the way he took my hands, and a rush of heat rises up through me and settles in my lower stomach and I start grinning like a lunatic. Before I know it something hard and cold bumps into my forehead. And I realize that I just went so moony over Jase Barnes that I must have leant forward in a daze, over the sink, until my forehead hit the mirror.

I pull back, giggling a bit. Wow, I’m being such an idiot: just picturing Jase turns me to complete and utter mush. I have to pull myself together. I have to find out who left me that note, and what’s behind it, and how Dan died, before I can even think about Jase in any leaning-forward-toward-him-to-be-kissed kind of way.  .  .  .

Oh God, Dan. The giggles dissolve immediately. I look at myself in the mirror and see a guilty face staring back at me. Am I obsessed with solving the mystery of how Dan died just so I can go right out and kiss another boy without worrying that he’ll drop down dead at my feet? Am I making it all about me?

But it isn’t, or it shouldn’t be. It’s about Dan. How he died. And who was responsible. Because if someone left me that note, it means that there’s more to this than came out at the inquest. At least one person knows more than they’re telling. And I’m not going to let things rest till I find out who they are and what really happened that night on Nadia’s terrace. I think about his family, and how upset they must be. I remember his parents being at the inquest, but I was so out of it with my own misery and confusion that I don’t remember them; I can’t picture them; I have no image of what they look like. But it must be the worst thing in the world to have your son dead and not even know how it happened.

And right now, it looks as if I’m the only person with any chance of finding the answer to that mystery.

Because whoever was responsible certainly isn’t telling.