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“YES, THERE IS SOMEONE I love, though he has not told me yet that he loves me.”
Bram Stoker, Dracula
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FLORA KINCAID TRIED hard to concentrate as her mathematics teacher droned on about the hypotenuse of a triangle. Looking at the blackboard for inspiration she copied down what he had written: “Soh-Cah-Toa”. It had something to do with some old Greek called Pythagoras and his lame pal Isosceles.
She couldn’t think of a single situation in real life where she would ever need to calculate the tangent of a right angle. She tuned out again. Ellie would explain it to her later. Or maybe not, she thought with a smile, as she noticed Ellie was staring out the window at some boys exercising on the school playing field.
The words Soh-Cah-Toa reminded Flora of a cheerleader chant back home in California. She envisioned jumping up and down, pom-poms waving, shouting “Sock-it-to-ya! Pythagoras is totally blah, Math class is really slow. Go team go!”
Okay, maybe it wasn’t the best of chants. Not that it mattered now. She had hoped to try out for cheerleading again this year but instead her mom had moved Flora to a boarding school in England, while she herself toured round Europe with her new husband. They didn’t have cheerleaders at all in England. She wasn’t too depressed about that though, chances were she would have fallen on her ass at tryouts again, or worse; the year before last she had been so nervous that she had thrown up spectacularly in the trash can before going in. The result hadn’t been pretty. Even worse, she’d been just wiping her mouth when all the popular kids had come past and seen the evidence. She had been called Puke-Chick for weeks after that, and had not been selected as a cheerleader.
In some ways her new school was totally stuck in the Dark Ages; the uniform was gross: girls had to wear unflattering knee-length skirts and the boys had awful drainpipe-like trousers, all in an ugly grey. Also, totally mediaeval, was the fact that students could get Internet access only in the library. Flora suspected they did that to make sure that anyone at all even went into the library. Who even needed books these days when everything was online?
But Compass Court Boarding School had a lot of other stuff going for it as far as Flora was concerned. She had been seriously lucky to share a room with Ellie Parkhurst, for a start. Ellie was popular and outgoing and the two of them had become best friends. Flora often wondered if she would have loved Compass so much if Ellie hadn’t taken her under her wing. Probably not.
The other main attraction of Compass Court was Gabriel Brenner. He was seriously hot and she felt it was love at first sight. At least it was on her side; she still had to make him notice her properly.
Another great thing about Ellie was that her boyfriend, Nate, who was in the year above them, was Gabriel Brenner’s best friend. What could be more perfect? Flora regularly daydreamed about the four of them going on double dates. It didn’t help, though, that she was still only fifteen and he was already seventeen. But it could happen – if Ellie had managed to get Nate to fall for her, then why couldn’t Flora get Gabriel?
Until recently Gabriel had been pretty “unavailable”. He had an older girlfriend who was a real live fashion model. But it was all over the school now that they’d had a row on Valentine’s Day and he’d broken up with her.
So now Gabriel was young, free and single! Just like her. Flora smiled and wrote his name in the right-angle triangle she had just copied off the blackboard, and then turned it into a heart shape.