We gathered at Tyrone’s house.
Tyrone, Jake and I sat in three armchairs, as if we were part of a court in session. Sam strode about the room, restless and wired, joking in a tense, unfunny way. Ever since I had told him that the Sheds had thought of a way that he could work his way back into the gang, he had been sickeningly cheerful.
‘OK, so show me the money, guys.’ He did a little jive-dance around the room, and I noticed that Tyrone was watching him nervously. The Shermans’ home was one of those houses where nothing is out of place, with no trace of a speck of dirt, where even the ornaments are carefully arranged like soldiers on parade.
‘So waddya want me to do?’ Sam was saying. ‘Jump a train from a bridge? Lay a bit of heavy graffiti on a high-rise building? Like, “THE SHEDS RULE”?’
‘Nothing as difficult as that,’ I said coolly.
Sam stopped moving around for a moment. ‘Not difficult? You’re kidding. Gimme something really hard, man.’
‘It’s a bit less physical than what you were thinking of,’ said Jake, whose left eye had, over the past couple of days, turned a pretty shade of purple and pink.
‘I dunno,’ said Tyrone, smiling. ‘It’s physical in a way – very physical.’
‘Hey, stop jerking around, OK?’ said Sam. ‘Just tell me what I gotta do.’
Jake picked up a plastic shopping bag, then slowly turned it upside down. A pile of clothes tumbled out. School clothes.
School clothes for a girl.
‘What’s this?’ Sam poked at the purple skirt with the toe of his trainer.
‘It’s my sister’s school uniform,’ said Jake.
‘And?’
‘And now it’s yours,’ said Tyrone.
‘I don’t get it.’ Sam crouched down and laid out the clothes – the coat and skirt of a school uniform, the white shirt and socks. It was like a small body on the ground. ‘Is this some kind of sad British joke?’ he said.
I sat forward in my chair and spelled it out for him. ‘If you want to join us, here’s your initiation test. For one week, five school days, we require you to be a bit of an actor – to play a part,’ I said. ‘Every morning on the way to school, you’ll change into these clothes at the shed. When you get to school, you’ll be Sam, the new kid in the class – but Sam with a difference.’
‘Sam, as in Samantha,’ said Jake.
The American stood up slowly. ‘You want me to be some kind of daisy? I always knew you guys were wigged out,’ he said quietly. ‘But this – man, this is just sick.’
‘Your choice,’ said Tyrone casually. ‘All you have to do is be a girl for five days at school. If you agree to do that, you’re in. You’re one of us.’
‘But…I’m Sam Lopez.’ He laughed as if some dreadful misunderstanding had taken place. ‘Sam Lopez does not, excuse me, go around in a girl’s clothes – not for no one, no how. No way.’
‘Fine.’ Jake kneeled down, picked up the clothes and put them back in the bag. ‘You had your chance. We had heard that Sam Lopez had the nerve to do anything. I guess we must have been misinformed.’
‘Listen, you guys, be reasonable. Would any of you agree to pull this kind of stunt?’
‘Nope.’ I smiled. ‘But then again we don’t have to.’
Sam pondered for a moment. Then, muttering, ‘Forget it, you freaks,’ he walked quickly to the door. We heard him stomping up the stairs and slamming the door to Tyrone’s bathroom.
We looked at one another, each of us kind of embarrassed by what had happened.
‘It was worth a try,’ said Jake.
‘Yeah, really great idea of yours, Matthew,’ said Tyrone.
‘To be fair, it does look a bit iffy,’ said Jake. ‘Getting a bloke to dress up as a girl.’
‘All right,’ I snapped suddenly. ‘So maybe I made a mistake.’
‘I hope he’s not trashing the bathroom,’ Tyrone muttered. ‘My mother will go mad.’
It was at that moment that the door opened. It was Sam. ‘Gimme the bag,’ he said, with an impatient, beckoning gesture of the hand.
Jake walked over and passed him the bag.
‘No promises, right?’ said Sam.
‘Of course,’ said Jake.
‘I’m just thinking about it.’
‘Right,’ said Jake. ‘Oh, and there was something else.’ He fished in his pocket and took out a coloured band. ‘My sis uses one of these.’
Sam held the band between two fingers and gazed at it with a look of total, unbelieving disgust, and for a moment I thought Jake was on the way to getting his other eye blackened.
‘It’s for keeping your hair out of your face,’ he explained.
‘I know what it is, doughbrain,’ said Sam. Then, to my surprise, he laughed. ‘You guys have some serious issues.’ And he was gone.
We waited. After a couple of minutes, we heard footsteps on the stairs. The door opened and Sam walked in. The silence in the room stretched for seconds.
‘So?’ said Sam eventually.
‘Oh…my…God,’ Jake murmured.
‘That is just freaky,’ said Tyrone.
‘Wow,’ I said.
Sam stood there, hands on hips, hair swept back in a ponytail. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What is it?’
Something about the tough-guy voice of Sam, coming from this new person, this girl, got to us all at the same time.
It was Jake who started laughing first. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ he gasped.
Tyrone covered his face with his hands, then took a peep between them as if not quite believing what he had seen. ‘Incredible,’ he said.
‘What exactly are you guys talking about?’ Sam asked angrily.
For some reason, the situation seemed to have made me blush. ‘Sorry about this, Sam,’ I said, trying to keep the smile off my face. ‘But there’s no getting round the fact that you are just perfect – you’re one hundred per cent girl.’
With a hard, dangerous look in his eye, he ambled forward. When he reached the middle of the room, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror over the fireplace and turned to study his reflection.
‘Yup,’ he said grimly. ‘I’m a babe all right.’
Suddenly it wasn’t a joke any more. The fact was that Sam looked so good as a girl that what had seemed like a funny idea a few seconds ago had taken on a deadly seriousness.
He slumped down on the sofa and picked his nose in an aggressive, showy way, as if to reassure himself that, even dressed up as a girl and with his hair in a neat ponytail, he was still the same old Sam.
‘So what’s the deal then?’ he asked. ‘Apart from trying to make me look kind of dumb, that is.’
‘We don’t want to make you look dumb,’ said Matthew. ‘We just need to get our own back on the Bitches. Show them up. Get to know some of their sad little secrets.’
‘Hey, come on, guys, all this to put one over on a bunch of chicks?’
‘They’re not chicks,’ I muttered. ‘Just because we hate them it doesn’t mean we have to be sexist about it.’
‘Hey, who’s wearing the skirt around here?’ said Sam. ‘From here on, I decide what’s sexist, right?’
Sitting there, playing with his ponytail, Sam seemed weirdly at ease, as if, now that he was the centre of attention, he could relax – as if, in a skirt, he was more himself. ‘It’ll take a bit of nerve. New school and all.’
‘We’ll be there to help you,’ I said.
Sam thought for a moment. ‘We’d be in this together, right? I’ve never been a girl before.’
‘Of course,’ said Jake. ‘We’re the Sheds. We’re a team, equal.’
Sam hitched a leg over the arm of his chair.
‘OK, count me in,’ he said coolly. He scratched his thigh and there was an alarming flash of his blue Jockey shorts. ‘And will you guys stop looking up my skirt.’
At about this point, I noticed a change in little Sam. He became less defensive and leery. The inappropriate comments became less frequent. He shared jobs with Matthew. I was pleased. I thought we had cracked it.
Life was easier after that fateful afternoon when the four of us agreed that, when Bradbury Hill returned, there would be a new pupil in Year Eight called Samantha Lopez.
Another month remained of the holidays. Jake went on a camping holiday to France with his mother and sister. Tyrone and Sam discovered that they had a shared craze for video games. Sam asked me to take him to a game of what he still insisted on calling ‘soccer’ and he delivered his inevitable verdict: it was a game for wusses.
It would be an exaggeration to say that my little cousin was no longer irritating – his talent to annoy was a perfect, unbreakable thing – but the knowledge that he would be soon sacrificing his precious masculinity in what I had taken to thinking of as ‘Operation Samantha’ calmed him down. He no longer seemed to need to prove himself cooler, smarter and more experienced than the rest of us. He still made the occasional aggressive, smart-arse remark, but the rest of us were able to laugh it off and, as often as not, Sam ended up laughing too.
Although the shadow of his mother’s death still hung over him – he would drift off now and then into a numb, blank-eyed trance when something occurred to remind him of his past – my parents and I found that we could reach him in a way that had been impossible before. Mum had taken to referring to Galaxy in her everyday conversation as if she was no longer this great unmentionable thing, and to my surprise the tactic took some of the tension out of the atmosphere at home.
In the last week of the holiday, I noticed that Sam grew quieter and spent more time in his room. He had taken possession of Chrissie Smiley’s bag of clothes after our meeting. I imagined him alone in there, dressing up, preparing for his debut as a girl as if he were some kind of actor just before his first night, which, I guess, in a way he was.
I would have liked to talk things through with him, to reassure him that, although he was the one who had to wear a skirt, we were all in this together, but, since the plan had been hatched, he had hardly made reference to it.
Somewhere along the line he had seemed to have decided that Operation Samantha was going to be – a one-man – a one-girl – show.
It seemed to me an appropriate gesture to take the boys out for a slap-up meal on the eve of Sam’s first day at school. I selected La Trattoria La Torre, a local Italian hostelry with a decent menu and cheerful service, which Mary and I like to frequent on special occasions.
Sam, I noticed, had been somewhat reserved over the past few days – doubtless his debut at Bradbury Hill was somewhat on his mind – and Matthew seemed a bit subdued too.
So it was not the easiest of social occasions. Sam’s restaurant manners, to put it mildly, left a little to be desired. La Torre, he informed us, was ‘phoney’. Luigi, the manager, was ‘no way Italian’. He pushed his prawn cocktail away, announcing rather more loudly than was necessary that it was ‘gay’.
The Burton family smiled through it all and behaved as if this kind of talk caused us absolutely no problem.
Sam was the biggest nightmare ever that night. I know that the guy had a lot on his mind, what with having to turn into a girl the next day and all that, but did he really have to get the whole restaurant looking at us? I swear that the way he ate his pasta was one of the most truly disgusting sights I have ever seen in my life.
I elected to ignore Sam’s feeding-time-at-the-zoo impression.
Halfway through the meal, Mary nodded to me. I cleared my throat and raised a glass.
‘A toast,’ I said, ‘to Sam’s first day at Bradbury Hill. And to the start of Matthew’s first term of his second year.’
‘Gimme a break,’ muttered Sam.
Matthew stared into his pasta as if it contained the secret of the universe.
‘I just wanted to say,’ I continued, ‘that I have been extremely impressed by the way you both have conducted yourselves over the past few weeks. The situation in which we have found ourselves has not been easy, but I think both Sam and Matthew have been absolutely brilliant. Don’t you, Mary?’
‘I certainly do,’ said Mary.
Sam made a sucking, grunting noise without looking, and I noticed a small, dangerous frown appearing on Mary’s face. My wife is a wonderful woman in many ways, but she does have something of a short fuse.
‘Do you have anything to say, Sam?’ she asked in a strained voice.
Sam looked up, a truly stomach-churning sight with meat and red sauce spread widely around on his cheeks. ‘Nope,’ he said.
‘I’ll drive you both to school tomorrow,’ I said. ‘First day of term and all that.’
For some reason, this casual remark caused the boys to stop eating. They both stared at me with what appeared to be alarm.
‘That’s OK, Dad,’ said Matthew. ‘It’s only ten minutes’ walk.’
‘I think it would be appropriate,’ said Mary.
‘No,’ said Matthew, with a rather surprising degree of firmness. ‘You know how schools are. It’s better if I take him in on his first day.’
‘Maybe Sam should decide that,’ I said firmly.
We all looked towards Sam, who seemed actually to be burrowing into his spaghetti.
‘Sam?’ said Mary.
He looked up slowly, chewing, open-mouthed. When he had finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then, noticing a couple of bits of meat on his knuckle, he frowned, then licked them off.
‘Walk,’ he said finally.
Matthew sent me a message later that night. It read ‘OFFICIAL SAM NOW BOY2GIRL.’