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“I MUST TAKE ACTION of some sort whilst the courage of the day is upon me.”
Bram Stoker, Dracula
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BEATRICE SAT QUIETLY on her bed for a moment letting the surprise and gentle euphoria settle over her. If she had been the demonstrative type she might have done a little happy dance; instead she just sat there with a soft smile playing across her plump face.
After a few minutes she reached under her pillow and extracted her diary. She removed the electronic pen from its holder on the side and typed in the password on the front cover. The digital diary popped open and she began to write.
Dear Diary
Today is the first day of the rest of my life...
Today I won the part of Wilhelmina Murray in the Year Twelve production of Bram Stokers Dracula. The main female role, the lead! Yes, me.
Things like this just don’t happen to me, I pray it isn’t some sick joke but I don’t think so. Grace Porter came and told me herself and she’s not the type to tease. She is the director of the play and I think she will do it really well. I confess though, to being very nervous about the idea of acting so many scenes with Gabriel Brenner, who will be playing Dracula. I can’t imagine him kissing me, but I suppose he will have to! He is a very emotionally distant person. But I have no doubt he will embrace his character. Like me, he is possibly the only other person here who takes acting seriously and would like to pursue it as a career. Unlike me he has made no secret of his ambitions.
I desperately want to do well at this. I cannot let my fear of being laughed at prevent me from giving it my all. When I’m on that stage I shall no longer be sad Beatrice Greene, I will be the embodiment of demure and dignified ‘Mina’, discovering once more her great and powerful love. And, dear Diary, speaking of a great love, I must tell you that Owen Lang is producing the play!
She stopped writing and her mind drifted back in time to her first meeting with Owen when she was eleven.
She had lost her parents only a few months earlier; her father had been flying her mother in their private biplane somewhere over the Pacific when it had disappeared without a trace. She had gone to live with her paternal grandmother, who was lovely but really old.
They had discussed boarding school and agreed it made sense for her to go. Compass Court wasn’t the most exclusive school in England, but it was only fifteen miles from her Grandmother’s house and Beatrice wanted a “normal” school life. She didn’t want to go to a school where the pupils strutted around like spoilt princesses acting as if they owned the place – which for her was an actual possibility. On her sixteenth birthday she had inherited the interest on her parents’ fortune and the capital remained in trust until she turned eighteen, something that would happen this summer whether she wanted it or not. Even without the considerable bulk of the capital, Beatrice suspected she was already by far the wealthiest of any of her peers, and probably all their parents too!
The media attention on her had been limited after the death of her parents, mainly because she was only a minor at the time, but she didn’t want to encourage their interest and had deliberately kept her wealth to herself and maintained a low profile throughout her years at Compass Court.
On her first day at school she had kissed her governess goodbye and made her grandmother’s chauffeur leave her at a curve in the drive so she could arrive inconspicuously. She had dragged her heavy trunk the last hundred yards herself until a school porter had spotted her and run out to help.
Entering the front hall on the first day of term at the large imposing school, she had been completely overwhelmed by the cacophony of noise as hundreds of pupils streamed up and down stairs greeting their friends.
A small boy came and stood beside her. He had a thin but nice face.
“It’s a bit daunting, isn’t it?” he smiled at her.
Beatrice nodded, deeply grateful that someone had spoken to her.
“I have no idea where to go.” She saw lots of doors but no signs.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you. I’ve been here before a few times as a visitor. My older brother is in Year Nine and he promised my mum that he’d help me get settled.” The boy looked left and right, obviously trying to locate his brother. A look of relief came over his face. “There he is!” He waved his arms and raised his voice to get attention. “Daniel! Dan! Over here.”
Daniel looked like his younger brother but his face was meaner-looking, like a ferret, Beatrice thought. Her new friend was much better-looking. Daniel walked over to them. “Don’t ever show me up by yelling for me again. I’m not here to serve you, bug breath.”
“But mum said...”
“But mum said,” mimicked the horrible brother. “You’re on my turf now, you little turd, and in my world you don’t exist, got it?” Daniel’s eyes flicked to Beatrice, who was looking at him in disgust, and then back to his brother. “You go that way, okay? First door on the right. So don’t go running to mum saying I didn’t help you.” Then he stomped off.
Beatrice looked at her friend in silent sympathy. He rolled his eyes, apparently immune to the insults.
“Older brothers are the pits, aren’t they?” he said. She shrugged, not having any basis for comparison.
“I guess it’s just you and me versus the world today.” He continued, “Don’t look so worried, I’ll figure it out. How could I not with a damsel in distress to take care of?” He smiled at her and she felt all melty inside. He even picked up her hand luggage, a small rucksack that had been sitting at her feet. She wondered if he was a fan of books about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, he seemed so chivalrous.
He nodded down the corridor “We’ll try that door, shall we? Though knowing Daniel, it’s probably a girls’ toilet.” The crowd of other pupils seemed to swell around them; he reached out, took her hand and began to pull her through the throng. “I’m Owen Lang by the way.”
The noise echoed loudly all round the hall. Beatrice deliberately misquoted from It’s a Wonderful Life, her favourite film of all time, and quietly whispered, “Owen Lang, I’ll love you ’til the day I die.”
Their newfound friendship lasted nearly a year. They were allocated to different schoolhouses and had hardly any lessons together. He became friends with Jerry Doury, Gabriel Brenner and Nate Naverly, the boys he shared a room with, and the four of them became quite a tight group. She made a few friends, but none that were close.
At first he found time to meet her in the library, to sit with her at breaks and to laugh and chat in the corridors, but gradually those times grew fewer and fewer. One Saturday she was hanging around outside the North Tower Common Room waiting for him as arranged, when Gabriel Brenner came out instead. Leaning back into the room behind him he mockingly called, “Hey Lango, your girlfriend’s here.”
“Stuff it, Brenner. Tell her I’ll be out in a minute, and be nice to her,” she had heard him reply. Beatrice turned red with embarrassment, but Gabriel had been nice to her, chatting about the weather for a few minutes. Owen had come out and apologised to her, then the two of them had gone into the local village for lunch.
A month after that the same situation had happened again, only this time it was Nate who opened the door.
“Lang! It’s the girlfriend again,” Nate had shouted.
She heard Owen curse, then say “She’s not my girlfriend, okay? Just some girl who latched on to me!” She didn’t stick around to hear anymore. He didn’t come after her. She felt as if she was alone again.
That was when she began comfort eating.
She watched sadly as the months went by and he became more and more like his brother, in both looks and personality. Where had the nice boy with the kind face gone? Where was her chivalrous Knight who cared about the feelings of others? She was sure he was still in there, he just needed someone sweet to bring him back out from behind his stroppy teenage persona. But he would never accept her looking the way she did; image had become too important to him.
Snapping her diary shut, Beatrice crawled under her bed and pulled out her tuck box. It was full of biscuits, packets of crisps and bars of chocolate. She put a post-it note that said “Help Yourself” on the largest box of biscuits and carried the whole lot down to the East Tower Common Room. She knew they wouldn’t last five minutes.
She went back to her room, put on her gym kit and snuck out to the school playing field. It was already dark though it was only early evening and she shivered in the cold February air as she did five laps. At dinner that night she ate a tuna salad.
Much later as she lay in bed, she closed the book she was reading and re-opened her diary.
As I was saying dear diary, today is the first day of the rest of my life.
My father was fond of the phrase: “The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”
It’s lettuce all the way from now on. This isn’t for Owen or I would have done it a long time ago. This is for me now, I have an opportunity and I want to be the best Beatrice I can be. Of course if I am at all successful and Owen happens to notice, well that’s just an added bonus.
She drew a little smiley face, returned her diary to its place under her pillow, turned out her bedside light and went to sleep.