Chapter Two

Her

I think it’s important to make a disclaimer here. Polly Wolff, the girl who attacked Donovan, has the foulest mouth of any person I have ever met or am likely to meet in the future. She could make sailors and convicts blush and fluster. There’s not a lot I can do about this except try to edit as I retell my tale. If you don’t find swearing big or clever, I imagine Polly Wolff would tell you to **** right off anyway, so you would be unlikely to be friends.

Back to the common room. ‘Go **** yourself, Donovan,’ said the girl with pink hair.

‘God, chill out.’ Donovan picked himself up, rubbing his head. ‘Psycho.’

‘That’s right, tell people I’m a psycho so you feel better when a girl kicks the living **** out of you. Now **** off.’

Donovan skulked away and the new girl and Beasley joined us in our corner. Beasley turned to Freya. ‘You OK, Freya?’

She pretended she’d missed the whole kerfuffle, lost in her book. She nodded for a moment before returning to the land of fiction. I sat awkwardly, waiting for an introduction.

Daisy greeted the pink-haired girl with a hug. ‘This is the new girl, Toria. Toria, this is my best friend, Polly.’

‘Hey,’ I said. Polly was effortlessly cool: tall and willowy enough to be a model, wearing a baggy black jumper, the collar hanging off one angular shoulder. The pink hair was messy, pulled into a knot on the top of her head. It looked regal, like she was wearing a crown.

‘Hey there, Toria Grand. All I’ve heard about today is this new girl all the boys want to ****.’

Say something filthy. We must have been to the same school of making a first impression. ‘Oh god, really? Daisy said I’d be fresh meat.’ I couldn’t think of anything filthy of my own, and I didn’t want it to turn into a competition.

I was as wary of her as I was impressed. She had green-blue ocean eyes and they were definitely sizing me up. She didn’t trust me. Maybe she was right not to. I don’t know.

‘Don’t sweat it,’ Polly said, sitting down opposite me and tucking one long leg under the other. ‘You’re new genetic material and the rest of us are inbred. Your unspoiled DNA sings to us.’

I laughed. ‘Well, at least I’m making a contribution. Although I think I’ll leave reproduction off the agenda until, you know, I know where the toilets are.’

More laughter. I hated myself for being Needella Needyson again but I really wanted them to like me. I don’t know why. It was my first day, I was probably feeling extra vulnerable or something. NEEDY FACE.

Beasley added quietly, ‘I heard that Nathan Blue thinks you’re hot. That’s, like, a big deal.’

‘Which one is he?’

Daisy subtly pointed out one of the checked-shirted masses. ‘The tall one. If we had a prom, he’d be prom king.’

I could barely keep the disgust off my face. He looked like a slightly melted Ken doll. ‘Oh god no.’

‘Hmm, don’t rule it out.’ Polly smirked. ‘He’s got a massive ****.’

I felt myself blush. I’m not great at sex chat. I knew I was meant to gather my sassy gal pals and discuss blow jobs at length at sleepovers but I had never had sex and, regardless of what friends had told me back home, I thought it was a big deal.

‘That’s gross!’ Daisy said, saving me the trouble.

‘If his penis is anything like his face, I’m not interested.’ I figured that was a safe bet.

‘I speak from experience,’ Polly said frostily and I wanted to die at once. I wouldn’t have put them together in a million years.

‘Oh sorry … I –’

‘Toria, I’m ******* with you! I’m kidding!’

I exhaled, social/potentially actual suicide avoided.

Polly addressed the whole group. ‘Now. The real question is: would it be tacky to blow off the rest of the first day and go shopping or is that actually quite cool?’

I won’t lie. The first couple of weeks weren’t easy. I couldn’t decide whether I was imposing on Polly’s group or not. Without question it was ‘Polly’s group’. She and Daisy and Beasley had been best friends since Year 6; Alex had lived next door to Polly his entire life, and Alex and Alice had been inseparable since Polly had set them up two years ago.

She couldn’t help it. When Polly walked into a room or down a corridor people stared at her, and it wasn’t just the pink hair. They were scared of her. Rightly so. During my first two weeks at Brompton Cliffs, I saw her twist a guy’s balls, almost snap someone’s thumb off and lead a guy down a hallway by his hair. Trust me, they all had it coming – they’d been having a go at Polly herself or one of her friends. She served as a protector for the whole group – a Robin Hood figure standing up for her personal band of Merry Men (and women). Eagle-eyed readers among you will have noticed that Polly is Mr Wolff’s daughter. Not that that made her life any easier; after every ball twist or truancy she was almost publicly flogged so the whole school could see she wasn’t getting preferential treatment.

I’m aware I’ve bombarded you with a whole heap of people, but each and every one of them is important to what’s happened this year. Allow me to help out with a visual representation of how sixth-form life is here at Brompton Cliffs, which I carefully observed over the first couple of weeks. It works something like this. (Bear in mind, like I said, I am not a mathsy person):

Figure 1. The Social Dynamic of the Group

I didn’t quite belong. I sat with them at lunchtime and break time, but I couldn’t work out if Daisy had forced the others to tolerate my presence. I couldn’t even decide if Daisy really liked me or not – she was so relentlessly sunny with everyone she came into contact with. I was starting to feel like that bit of loo roll that gets stuck to your heel – I was just being dragged around with them.

While the routine of school was comforting, evenings and weekends stayed much as they ever had been: online. I would get home, where Mum would be waiting to descend on me like a vulture. ‘How was your day? What were lessons like? Did you make any new friends? Have you got any homework?’

Daily bombardment.

I guess the problem was that, while Dad had started work at the end of August, Mum hadn’t even started looking for a new job yet. Back home, she’d worked at the university library, but there were no positions here. She had that caged-animal stir-crazy look in her eye that only someone who’d endured too much Jeremy Kyle and Loose Women got.

Once I’d fended her off, she’d go and watch Pointless with a glass of rioja and I’d go to my room and stay there until it was time for bed, only pausing to eat. Here are some of the things I liked to do online:

1. Catch up on my favourite vlogs. I subscribe to about eighty, so that takes some time.

2. Commenting on said vlogs. Can also take up to two hours.

3. Reblog cool stuff on Tumblr.

4. Google stuff off Tumblr that I think I should get into.

5. Sneer at popular people on Facebook. I’d have ditched Facebook years ago if it weren’t for the fact it’s holding half my photos hostage.

6. Download American TV. It’s not my fault they don’t show it over here faster.

7. Make my own gifs. I’m getting pretty good at this.

8. Check my fandoms. I belong to several fandoms, but by far my favourite is manga and anime: Angel Beats!, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, some yaoi stuff, Neon Genesis Evangelion and, of course, Sailor Moon.

Don’t feel bad for me, I came alive online. I reckon I was way funnier and cooler there than I was in real life. By that point, I’d established that Beasley and Alice also liked anime, but Alice was still being decidedly chilly. I didn’t know what her problem was.

My mum and dad were renting a house not far from school while they sussed out the property market in the area. It was OK, I guess. It was on one of those toy-town housing developments full of identical dream homes. Lots of conservatories, built-in barbecues and BMWs – not a lot of soul.

We lived next door to one of the Pot-Pourri girls. Within the first week I saw her leaving for school at the same time as me and recognised her from the common room. On the second Monday, we left at the exact same time and sort of walked next to each other. It was really awkward. Fortunately, she broke the ice.

‘Hi, I’m Summer. You’re Toria, right?’

‘Yeah. New girl.’

‘How’s it going?’ She had an aspartame voice. Her cloud of blonde hair was backcombed and her eyelashes were spidery with mascara.

‘Not too bad, thanks.’ We must have looked so weird walking together. I was in my army coat, flat black hair parted dead in the centre and she looked like a slightly neglected Barbie doll.

‘Cool. We think you’re really cool.’ I could guess who WE was. ‘Love your shoes.’ She pointed at my leopard-print Converse.

‘Thank you.’ I knew I should return the compliment but it would have been a lie. Thankfully we got talking about teachers – who was cool and who was evil – so that passed the fifteen-minute walk.

A couple of nights later, we ended up walking home together too. Summer invited me inside her house because her brother had a load of French A-level stuff that her mum said I could have since she wasn’t taking it.

It was so weird. Her room was a shrine to some boy band I’d never heard of. They’d only been around since the spring but Summer insisted the fandom was a ‘family’. Every spare inch of wall was covered with posters and cut-outs. If it was anyone else’s room but a teenage girl’s, you’d legitimately think you were in some psycho’s murder room. It was truly chilling; the eyes followed you wherever you moved. I made an excuse after five minutes and left, knowing that Summer Perkins and her friends were not my people. That was a watershed moment. If I was ever going to be one of the cool, pretty hair girls, it would have been then.

I took the road less travelled.

Weekends were the worst. My online friends all seemed to have their weekends planned out months in advance – either visiting family or attending cons in places I couldn’t afford to get to. My new friends at school, if that’s what they were, hadn’t invited me to anything and there was no way I was going to invite myself along. So I was stuck at home.

I remember one Saturday morning Mum came to wake me up with a cup of tea. She plonked it on my bedside table and peeked under the duvet. ‘Victoria? Are you getting up?’ Mum is the ONLY person left on earth who calls me Victoria.

‘No. Let me sleep until Monday morning.’

She pulled the duvet back. ‘Up! It’s not healthy laying in bed all day. You should be outside! Getting fresh air! Meeting nice boys!’ I tutted in dismay. ‘Why don’t you text some people from school?’

That really stung. No one ever texted me. I rolled back over. ‘Go away. I have chronic fatigue syndrome.’ I pulled the duvet back over my head. What was the point in getting up? There was nothing to get up for.

I invented projects for myself to pass the time. One weekend I unpacked my box of Sailor Moon books and spread them out across my bedroom floor. I lined them up in neat rows, in the correct order, and took pictures of my collection for Tumblr. I dipped in and out of them, reminding myself of my favourite bits.

I decided to sketch some of my favourite images, so this involved unpacking my box of art supplies. I painstakingly copied the poses, taking diversions onto the internet to look at cosplay ideas. When I came to colouring I found many of my felt tips had dried up so I started a new project, trying each one to see if it still worked. Somehow, whole days decayed in this manner.

One long Sunday afternoon, Mum had caught the train to meet my Auntie Minna in London while my dad was watching Formula One. An endless angry wasp buzz came from the lounge, and rain fell like pins onto the conservatory roof. This was a new nadir of boredom. Unpacking the very last box from the move, I found my old poetry book in and among some old sketchbooks.

I know. Yes, I had a poetry book. It sounds pretty lame, but for a while poetry was like ‘my thing’. When I was fourteen I entered a national competition and, while I didn’t win, I was a finalist in my age group, had my poem published and won fifty quid in book tokens.

I wrote about Mum. I don’t know if she ever knew it was about her. I don’t honestly know if she ever read it. At the time we really weren’t getting on, even worse than now. That’s what I don’t get about her. In her time, she was meant to be like this major rebel who spurned Vishnu to run off and marry a white guy, but when I dip-dyed the ends of my hair she acted like I was selling drugs to kids or something. You’d think she’d cut me some slack. Anyway, here is the poem (don’t laugh):

She and I

by Victoria Grand – Year 9 – Ilkley Grammar School

She says home, I say go.

I say wish, she says bone.

She says friends, I say best.

I say please, she says test.

She says fun, I say pain.

I say stop, she says again.

She says work, I say drone.

I say listen, she says phone.

She says smile, I say teeth.

I say woman, she says bleed.

She says eat, I say starve.

I say whole, she says half.

She says words, I say noise.

I say girls, she says toys.

She says saying, I say said.

I said she said, she saw red.

Stop pain, teeth bleed

Half-woman, starve again

Listen! Fun! Test friends

Phone home, words work

Toy bone, smile please

Best wishes, whole drone

Go. Eat girl’s noise.

The poem that won was written by some private-school kid pretending to be the Unknown Soldier. I never really stood a chance did I? I used to write my poems in a vintage notebook I’d rescued from my grandma’s attic: sepia-tinged pages bound in skin-soft brown suede. It smelled musty, like libraries and cleverness. I inhaled a lungful. Rereading it, it wasn’t quite as cringe as I’d remembered.

The next weekend, which somehow scraped into the crap underneath the bottom of the barrel to be even MORE boring, I was called on to accompany Mum and Dad into town ‘to help’. I think, in truth, they felt sorry for me so were trying to keep me occupied, although they didn’t say so.

The high street was a pretty sad affair. A lot of shops had shut altogether to be filled with temporary tourist tat shops that would no doubt be clearing off now the summer season was over. Thankfully there was a comic shop with a pretty good selection, although the guys behind the counter stared at me like I was a shoplifter, or worse, a lost girl looking for the make-up counter.

While Mum went into the traditional butcher’s (Worst. Hindu. Ever), I waited outside because I didn’t like the smell of raw meat. My Spidey Sense tingled. I heard them before I saw them: Summer and the other Pot-Pourri girls tottering down the high street, their hot-pant legs the colour of briny frankfurters. God, I really hoped they didn’t see me out shopping with Mum. I turned my comic-store bag around so they couldn’t see the logo.

The Pot-Pourris advertised their presence with whooping, laughing and shrieking. They swung held hands, spreading out to take up as much space as possible. They were hard to ignore and I suspected that was the intention. Their colourful petals had already attracted a couple of guys I recognised from school. One of them gave Becca Ferguson a piggyback.

It would be pretty easy to hate them, but they weren’t doing any harm. They looked to be having a really good time. I didn’t want to be with them but I did wonder when my life was going to begin and what I’d do if it didn’t.

The answer came about three weeks into the first half-term. I’m skipping to the good bit, I promise. It was a weirdly sunny day for late September and so, instead of going into the common room, most pupils congregated outside, enjoying a final outing for the shorts and flip-flops. This made life harder because no one had told me where ‘the gang’ was going to be. That felt a lot like I wasn’t invited – Daisy and Beasley both had my mobile number – but I nevertheless set off in search of my new acquaintances, aimlessly wandering the outdoor areas like a Bedouin. Moreover, I still hadn’t successfully broken in my new Docs. I’d basically bound my feet with plasters, but they were still rubbing.

It didn’t take long to find Freya, who was sat alone on the grass verge next to the football pitch, you guessed it, reading. A group of uniformed Year 9s at various lay-bys on the puberty highway were giving her a hard time.

‘I’m telling you man … she’s deaf or something,’ said one cockroach.

‘Boil!’ Freya’s surname was Doyle. ‘Show us your tits.’

They howled with laughter. The first spoke again. ‘Boil, I’ll give you ten quid if you show us your tits.’

Behind her book and behind her hair, Freya blushed. I’d had enough. I wasn’t scared of spotty stoat-faced Year 9s. I strode up to Freya’s side and yanked up my T-shirt to reveal my bra. Today, a purple one with tiny pink dots.

‘Happy now?’

‘Oh my god!’ The little boys didn’t know what to do. One laughed, one blushed, another walked briskly away, caught in the act.

I carried on. ‘You said you wanted to see some tits! Here you go. Something to wank over, you little tosspots.’

‘Freak!’ the littlest, spottiest, yet noisiest one said before pelting in the other direction.

‘Nice!’ I turned to see Polly ambling down the slope. ‘And nice tits too.’

I chuckled (I do have nice boobs – they make up for the total lack of arse) but I was still fuming. ‘Dicks.’

‘That was inspired, by the way. I’d have punched them, but yours was funnier.’

‘Thanks.’ She joined me alongside Freya and we sat on the grassy embankment.

‘There isn’t an initiation, by the way, but if there was you’d have just passed it,’ Polly told me. ‘We’ve been talking about you a lot. We couldn’t decide if you thought we were freaks and if you’d run off and join the Pretty Girl Gang at the first opportunity.’ Today she was wearing a torn-up T-shirt with a Kewpie doll on the front.

‘God, no way. I spent an evening at Summer Perkins’s house. That was enough.’

‘Is her hair a wig? I heard her hair was a wig and that she’s secretly bald.’

I laughed. ‘No. I think it’s attached.’

‘What? A **** Brompton rumour that wasn’t true? I guess that means I’m not a hermaphrodite then. Shame.’

This was the first time I’d had a one-on-one conversation with Polly. It felt good. I was a little in awe of her, but determined not to show it. ‘If you’ve been talking about me,’ I said, feeling brave, ‘does Alice, like, properly hate me? She’s been giving me the stink-eye since I arrived.’

Polly unwrapped a bagel from her satchel. ‘No, that’s just Alice. She’s only happy when she’s depressed.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘She’s a drama addict, not to mention self-styled Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Her and Alex are very … melodramatic. She thinks that Alex fancies you, but she’ll come around.’ Polly smiled. ‘I’ll make her, because I want you in my friend bag.’

‘“Friend bag”?’

‘Where you put the keepers.’

I smiled, despite not wanting to seem too eager. ‘Good. I very much want to be in the friend bag.’

Polly’s eyes blazed – a little manic almost. ‘Good! What are you doing tonight?’

‘Homework.’

‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that because tonight is going to be the night of your ******* life.’

‘Oh yeah? Why’s that?’

‘Tonight, ************, you’re coming with us to play crazy golf.’