WHEN MR MCGREGOR FIRST TOLD us about the fete, I remember thinking that here was yet another opportunity for extracurricular social death and ritualised torture, so I made a point of staring steadfastly at the bitumen when he asked for volunteers.
I hadn’t bargained on Meko throwing her hand in the air with a mixture of terror and manic enthusiasm and offering to organise a fashion parade, simultaneously digging her nails into my arm and hissing, ‘You will herp me, Ruisa, yes?’
Nor did I anticipate Mr McGregor cornering me after class one day and suggesting in the nicest possible way – the way the Nazis must have ‘suggested’ that people should relocate to the concentration camps – that, given my musical parentage, I might like to coordinate a second-hand CD and record stall. I did try to explain to him that, between my schoolwork and looking after everything at home, I didn’t have a lot of spare time, but he just patted me on the shoulder and said he was sure I’d do a great job.
So now I had a slight problem.
‘Of course,’ Mr McGregor said when I went to plead my case, ‘everyone appreciates your dedication and enthusiasm, Luisa, but I think you might be over-committing yourself taking on Jet’s concert as well.’
‘Seriously, Mr McGregor, it’ll be fine.’
‘No really, I don’t think it’s a good idea. You’ve got quite enough to do already and …’ He trailed off and guiltily shuffled some papers on his desk.
‘And what?’ I asked.
‘And … I’ve already told Edith and Tiahna that you’ll be helping them out with the mocktail bar. Heaven knows someone has to,’ he added under his breath.
‘What? But Mr McGregor, you don’t understand. I have to do the sound for Jet’s concert. It’s my destiny.’ I know, I know, I can’t believe I said it either, but I was desperate.
‘Look, I’m sure we can find someone else. One of the other fathers maybe?’
‘No!’ I shouted.
Mr McGregor stroked his beard nervously and stared at me the way you might look at a live grenade that just rolled under your door. A more subtle approach was required.
‘Of course, my dad would be happy to lend us all the sound equipment, you know, and help me set it up and everything – so really there wouldn’t be much work involved at all.’ I attempted to smile sweetly – like Nina does when she wants something and Dad’s too dumb to notice that he’s being manipulated. It works every time for her, but I think I need to practise more because Mr McGregor still didn’t look convinced, even though I could tell that the offer of free sound equipment was tempting.
‘All right,’ he said eventually. ‘I guess it will be okay – since I have found some helpers for your other stalls.’
This was also news to me – and not good news.
‘Helpers? What helpers?’
‘Well, obviously you can’t run everything on your own.’
‘Oh no, you didn’t need to do that. I’ve already got lots of people to help me,’ I lied. ‘I’ve been talking to some kids from Year Eight—’
Mr McGregor cut me off. ‘The Year Sevens and Eights are away on camp the week before the fete.’
Doh! I did actually already know that, because I’d forged Dad’s signature on Nina’s permission slip.
‘Oh. Well, the Year Nines—’ I cut myself off. There was no point finishing the sentence, because Mr McGregor knew as well as I did that most of the Year Nines were completely feral and far more likely to set fire to a stall than run it.
‘I was thinking of some students from your own year?’ Mr McGregor looked at me expectantly, as if this was a totally brilliant idea and I should be congratulating him for having thought of it.
‘Year Ten?’ I stammered stupidly as my brain struggled to process the most likely candidates. I ran through them in my head with a growing sense of doom, all the while praying silently to myself, Please, please, don’t let it be—
‘Melissa and Shania, to begin with,’ he said.
My heart bungee-jumped from my throat to the bottom of my stomach and back again.
‘And Kanisha Lamas has very kindly offered to help you and Meko with the fashion parade. What do you think?’
He beamed at me, completely oblivious to the mess he’d just made of my life.
Now that I think about it, maybe Mr McGregor was responsible for everything. If he’d just trusted me to look after the fete the way I said I was going to, the whole catastrophe would never have happened. Melissa and Shania wouldn’t have even been there, and Mr McGregor himself wouldn’t have been arrested. Okay, there’s a fair chance that I’d still have done the dirty on my best friend, but Mrs Kapiniaris would not have developed a phobia about exploding teddy bears and Danny Baldassarro’s butt would not have ended up resembling a double choc-chip cookie.
Melissa Kravitz was the scariest girl in the whole school – even though she was only in Year Ten. She was tall, skinny and might possibly be considered attractive – if you came from another planet. She got away with wearing great slashes of black eyeliner every day despite the fact that we weren’t allowed to wear make-up. She told Mr McGregor it was natural and that her grandmother was a Hungarian gypsy or some rubbish. We all knew it was rubbish because her grandmother worked in the undies section at Best & Less and had ash-blonde hair and drawn-on eyebrows.
For some reason I’ve never fully understood, Melissa Kravitz hated my guts. It’s not like I’ve ever done anything to make her hate me – apart from the fake nose-stud incident, I mean. (Don’t ask! Dad finally gave in and let me get my nose pierced. It’s very tasteful. Honest.) No, she just hated me because I’m me – and let’s face it, there’s not much I can do about that. Except maybe change my name. Melissa Kravitz loved my name because it sounds – sort of – like ‘loser’. So that’s what she called me – Loser Linley. Hilarious, huh?
Melissa Kravitz never volunteered for anything, so imagine her delight when Mr McGregor told her she was going to be helping me out with the second-hand CD and vinyl stall. Take that and multiply it by about a million when she discovered that one of the reasons she was helping was so I could sound-tech for Jet Lucas.
You know how I said before that Jet Lucas could have any woman he wanted? Well, technically that wasn’t true. Melissa Kravitz had decided that if she couldn’t have Jet Lucas, no one else was going to have him either.
Obviously, Kravitz had no control over who he hooked up with outside of school, but within the grounds of Motherwell High, she had appointed herself the gatekeeper of Jet Lucas’ social and sex life – a kind of one-woman anti-dating agency, if you like. I’m pretty sure Jet Lucas had no idea of the services she performed on his behalf, but I doubt he would have cared. Kravitz tolerated the ninnies – just – as a useful tool in the practice of intimidation techniques. But anyone else who even looked in Jet’s general direction soon regretted it.
Melissa’s best friend and partner in crime was Shania Goss. She had flaming red hair, skin like apricot yoghurt (but without the actual lumps of apricot) and tiny little baby teeth, so perfect and pearly white you’d never guess she smoked like a bacon factory. Of course, since Melissa hated me, Shania hated me too – although to be honest the girl didn’t have enough brains to have an opinion of her own, she just did what she was told.
So now you see my problem?
You’re probably thinking, oh, Luisa’s just overreacting. They can’t possibly be as bad as all that. Well, you’d be wrong. Fortunately, Melissa and Shania are not really representative of the Year Ten girls at Motherwell High. No, the others are mostly weirder – but a lot less scary.
Take Kanisha Lamas, for instance. An uber-brain with the social skills of an agoraphobic mollusc, not to mention the fashion sense of a blind camel. No doubt that’s why Mr McGregor thought she might like to help Meko and me out with the Urban Tribes fashion show! Then there’s Edith Morton who, when not discussing the preferred suicide methods of the rich and famous throughout history, can usually be found reading Sylvia Plath to the Year Sevens. (It’s rumoured that one or two have needed counselling after their introduction to the works of Plath, but I suspect it has nothing to do with the poetry and more to do with Edith’s life-threatening allergy to shampoo.) And there’s Tiahna Theodoros, who failed her Year Nine Biology exam because, when asked to locate the diaphragm on a map of the human body, she wrote, Actually I am on the pill!
So you see, compared to that lot Melissa and Shania were in a league of their own. I secretly called them the KGB – short for Kravitz/Goss Bitch-patrol – because being in the same school ground as them was what I imagined it must have been like in Stalinist Russia – constant surveillance, informers everywhere and a rotating schedule of interrogations.
And when the Motherwell High KGB discovered that their twin missions in life – to ensure that no female got within twenty metres of Jet Lucas, and to make my existence a total misery – had just coincided, well, to say they were homicidally inclined towards me would be an understatement.