‘Alice? Can you hear me, Alice? It’s Mum! I know you’re sleeping now, but I just wanted to let you know I’m here. We’re all here, me and Dad and Nate. The scan is nothing to be scared of, I promise you. Alice? Can you hear me?’
‘Can you hear me, Alice?’ the White Rabbit asks. ‘Can you hear me?’
Before I can answer, the noise begins. It fills the air, a cacophony of drumming that blots out everything else. I fall to my knees and cover my ears with my hands, but the uproar is inside my head, beating against my skull, threatening to break it apart.
I close my eyes and wait for the pain to stop.
I watched them change before my very eyes, Elaine and Yaz. Actually, I should say Lainey and Yaz, because Elaine ditched her name for something much cooler just a few weeks into secondary school.
Lainey and Yaz were like caterpillars who suddenly morphed into beautiful butterflies without having to endure the ugly chrysalis stage. They just woke up one morning and spread their wings and that was that; they were away, fluttering high above everyone else’s heads; dazzling, daring, out of reach.
Yaz started wearing eyeliner and straightened her hair every morning. Lainey dyed her hair from mouse brown to blonde at half-term and pretended the sun had bleached it on her holiday to the Canaries.
They looked great, but when their sparkling smiles accidentally swept across me, they froze like ice. My ex-best friends were cold, careless, detached. It was like I’d never known them at all.
Mum knew that things had gone wrong with Yaz and Lainey; she’d have had to have been blind not to notice. The girls I’d spent every spare minute with right through primary had dropped out of my life like they’d never been there at all.
‘Are you settling in OK?’ Mum had wanted to know. ‘Making new friends?’
‘Sure,’ I lied. ‘It’s a great school. Everyone’s really nice!’
‘Well, if you ever want to invite anyone over for tea or for a sleepover, go ahead,’ Mum said, and I’d smiled and said I would, but of course it didn’t happen. Who would I have asked?
Mum didn’t mention it again. I think she knew how much I was struggling, but she didn’t want to make me feel any worse than I already did.
The bullying started in Year Eight.
It began slowly. It was subtle, clever, the kind of thing you probably wouldn’t even notice if you weren’t the target. My shoe went missing from the changing rooms after a PE lesson and turned up in a flower bed outside. The following week, my school tie vanished and I was given a detention. Random stuff kept turning up in my school bag, too. We had assembly two or three times a week, and had to leave our bags at the back of the hall, so I knew the sabotage was happening then. Once it was a can of Coke with the ring pull removed so that it leaked and made dark, sticky stains all over everything; once a smooshed up fish paste sandwich which wrecked all my books and made everything stink; once it was an actual raw egg.
There were a dozen small things: a glass of water spilled over my dinner at lunchtime, a test tube full of sulphur knocked out of my hands in science, the word ‘loser’ scrawled on my bag in Sharpie pen, a half-chewed toffee stuck in my hair after I’d been foolish enough to sit in front of Lainey and Yaz in English.
I remembered what Serena had once said about Savvy being a bully, but it was always Lainey and Yaz who did her dirty work. Savvy kept her hands clean, and even dished out a compliment or two.
‘Wow, Alice, your hair really suits you like that,’ she said, the day after I changed my parting to disguise the place where I’d had to chop the mess of toffee out of my hair. And, ‘Oh, is that a new bag? How cute!’ the day I came into school with my little brother Nate’s Power Rangers rucksack after the Sharpie pen incident.
Savvy always looked wide-eyed and innocent when she said these things, and it kind of messed with my head, but then I’ve never been quick on the uptake when it came to sarcasm. I knew Savvy was behind the bullying, pulling the strings. Hadn’t Lainey told me last year that Savannah didn’t like losers?
Once, in art, I made a little clay coil pot that was pretty much perfect and earned some praise from the teacher. Savvy, sitting across the table from me, glanced at my creation and then back at her own misshapen pot.
‘That’s brilliant, Alice,’ she announced, sounding slightly amazed. ‘The best one in the class. You’re really good at art!’
It should have been a warning. As we were clearing away at the end, Lainey somehow nudged the pot with her elbow so that it fell on the floor, flattened and spoiled. ‘Oh no!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m so sorry, Alice! I’m so clumsy. It was amazing, too!’ She bent to rescue it, squidging the clay together in her fist so there was no hope of patching it up. ‘Never mind; you can just start from scratch next week.’
Nobody else had even noticed, or perhaps it was just that nobody else cared.
A flash of anger made me tug Lainey’s sleeve as she turned away from me to throw what was left of my pot into the scrap clay bin.
‘Why are you doing these things?’ I whispered. ‘You and Yaz? Can’t you just leave me alone?’
Lainey bit her lip.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and for a moment I thought I could see the old Lainey there, behind the dyed blonde hair and the swagger. It gave me hope. ‘It’s just, well, Savvy doesn’t like you.’
I took a sharp breath in.
‘So do you do everything Savvy tells you to?’ I challenged her, and Lainey just shrugged and looked sheepish. I saw her then for what she was: weak, cowardly, easily led. It made me feel sad.
I looked across the room to where Savvy was pulling on her blazer, picking up her teal-blue leather satchel, flicking back her hair. As I watched, she caught my eye and smiled and waved.
I hated Savvy Hunter more than anyone else alive, but I had to admit she had style.