To tell the truth, the bust-up had been coming for some time. El and Zed are the best of buddies most of the time, but that’s because in our little group I stand between them. Just now and then, this huge gulf of difference appears and, for a day or two, we all realise that variety might be the spice of life, but too much variety in a group of three friends can lead to big problems.
Zia is quiet, bright, keeps herself to herself, serious-minded.
Elena is noisy, extrovert. When it comes to school-work, she’s the kind of person who, when asked the capital of America, will say, ‘Hollywood.’
Back in primary school, we could laugh at how different they were. Now, it seems it matters more and more. The big fallout was waiting to happen – it just needed the smallest spark to set it off, boom.
Sam Lopez was that small spark.
Elena had decided that Sam was her project. She has always had these crazes – roller skating, photography, autograph-hunting, basketball – and normally they burn bright for a month or so before fizzling out to be replaced by a new craze.
Ever since Sam had gone back to El’s place and been kitted out with a padded bra, El had taken a special interest in her. There was something in the American girl, a sort of weird vulnerability behind her confidence, that seemed to appeal to El. All that could and should have been blown apart when cute-but-clumsy Mark Kramer asked her to set up a date with Sam. Instead, weirdly, it made El feel even closer to Sam – the whole fancying Mark thing was yet another special thing that they could share. Sam was this month’s craze.
Unfortunately, on that very same day, something happened. Sam and Zia had this massive musical bonding. At first it was funny the way they skipped about the place warbling like a couple of skylarks or chatting about music and groups no one had ever heard of, but after a while, to be honest, it became kind of irritating. Suddenly, as far as Bradbury Hill’s own little singing sisters were concerned, the rest of us had ceased to exist.
Elena took this very, very badly. I noticed her watching them throughout the day, her eyes getting that shifty, narrow look that signals trouble. We had had a plan to go round to Zia’s that night, but Elena cancelled, saying she had a headache (‘All that singing’s done my head in,’ was the way she put it).
The next morning, she was in a brighter, harder mood. At breaktime, Zia and Sam were vocalising as usual. Elena, all positive, asked if she could join in. That was when the trouble started.
All right, so I don’t have the best voice. Was that any reason for them to fall about like they had heard the greatest joke ever told (which they hadn’t)?
I didn’t blame Sam. She’s new round here and no one had taken the time to explain to her that Zia Khan may be all innocent and what-you-see-is-what-you-get, but deep down she’s a scheming, snooty, mean, devious, uppity, smug, swotty, unfriendly, selfish, moody and generally totally horrible little cow.
So I did it. There, in the playground. I told Zia I’d never really liked her and that I felt sorry for her with her perfect little family and high grades. I thought she was crap at guitar and her voice sounded like a Siamese cat whose tail had been caught in the door. And that was just the warm-up.
Maybe I went a tad too far. Suddenly Zia welled up and ran back to the classroom. As Charley followed her, Sam gave me this puzzled look.
I shrugged coolly. Like, was it something I said?
Result. There was this big barney in the playground. Tyrone, Matt and me checked it out. Would you believe that it was a full-on cat fight between Elena and Zia and it seemed that Sam was the cause of it all?
When Zia ran off to have a good old cry about it, I caught Sam’s eye and gave him a guys-together wink, as if to say, ‘That’s more like it. We’ll have some more of that, please.’
But here’s the weird bit. He just blanked me. He had this strange look on his face – it was almost concerned, like he’d got a flood alert going too. Then he just turns and follows Charley Johnson in the direction of the classroom, totally part of the emergency emotional-paramedic squad.
I walked to the classroom, closed the door behind me and slumped down at one of the desks. I wanted to die. I had thought that Elena and I were friends. It was as if this was what she had been thinking of me all those years, as if everything between us had been nothing but one big lie.
I heard the door open behind me. I sat up, grabbed a book on the desk and pretended to work.
‘You OK?’ It was Sam.
‘I’m—’ I was about to tell her that I was just fine but, instead of words, this great, uncontrollable sob just bubbled from inside me. I lost it for a moment. I just couldn’t speak.
‘Easy.’ Sam sat beside me and took my hand. ‘Easy.’
She started talking in a quiet, low voice.
‘Did I ever tell you about this kid I knew?’ she said. ‘He was at one of my schools – an OK sort of guy, funny, popular, kind of a friend of mine. But there was this one thing about him. Just now and then, every few weeks or so, he would say something so mean, so ugly, that he’d get into a fight. And here’s the weird bit. Because he was small and seemed to go out of his way to annoy people who were bigger and stronger than him, it was usually him that got smeared all over the canvas.’
‘Why did he do it?’
It was almost as if when things were going too well that he had to mess them up. He forced people away from him.’
I shrugged. For the life of me, I couldn’t see what Sam’s story had to do with Elena turning out to be the nastiest, most two-faced so-called friend anyone has ever had.
‘So.’ Sam sat forward, frowning as if there was something almost painful about the direction her thoughts were leading her. ‘I started wondering what caused this guy to act the way he did. I asked around. Turned out that the problem had nothing to do with his friends at all.’ She hesitated for a moment.
‘What had it got to do with?’
‘His dad. My friend’s father was kind of out of control, always in trouble with the cops, he was one of those people who go…crashing through life without thinking too much about the effects of what they do. People said that he was a bad father but, the way my friend saw it, he was his dad and that was just the way he was.’
‘I still don’t understand why he got into fights.’
‘One day, when my friend was five, his father did something so bad, so crazy, that his mom kicked him out of the mobile home where they were living. She said he wasn’t fit be part of a family, that she never ever wanted to see him again.
‘And you know what? She never did, and neither did my friend.’
‘That’s a really sad story,’ I said.
‘So the reason why this guy was always causing trouble was simple – he was angry and he was hurt and every day of his life he thought about why his father had left and wondered whether maybe it had been his fault that the family had broken up. For some reason that even he couldn’t understand, he got himself punched and punished and tried to hurt other people. Somehow all that pain – real pain, not the stuff that was churning away inside of him – made him feel better for a while.’
I looked at Sam and noticed that there was a strange and distant look in her eyes that I had never seen before.
‘You must have known this guy pretty well. Was he your boyfriend or something?’
Sam laughed and seemed to snap out of her mood. ‘Nah’, she said. ‘So here’s the bit. My guess is that Elena’s got her own problems – maybe not at home but in herself. She’s jealous of you – how you get on in class, your friends, maybe even…you and me, the music thing and all. So she wants to hurt you.’ She placed a hand on each of my shoulders and looked me in the eyes. ‘You’ve got to slice your own groove in this life.’
I smiled and noticed that, for some weird reason, my heart was beating faster and my mouth was dry. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ I said. ‘Poor old El.’
‘That’s the way to go, babe,’ said Sam. ‘Slice your own groove.’
It was only later, back at home, that I began to wonder about that word she had used. Babe? Babe?
Sam was in the strangest mood that day.
‘Burger Bill’s, guys,’ he said when he met us at the school gate. ‘I’ve had way too much raw emotion. I need some action.’
‘You’re kidding!’ Jake laughed. ‘We’ve already had a warning from the police. There’s no way that Bill would let us in.’
‘Not even if a sweet little girl asked him really nicely?’ ‘You mean, you want to go to the precinct like that?’ I asked. ‘In…uniform?’
‘Can’t risk blowing my cover, can I?’ said Sam. ‘Who’s coming with me?’
I’ve got to make a confession here. I’d started to miss the old, devilish Sam. I wouldn’t have minded having him back the way he was during the holidays. I thought that going along with him on one of his crazy stunts might just remind him how good it was to be a boy, even if he happened to be dressed as a girl.
Jake said he was in, but Tyrone seemed less sure. Normally, he was the least moody of the three of us, but he had been brooding all day. It turned out – Tyrone can never keep a secret for long – that he had been having problems at home and it was all my fault for having this great girlfriend.
As we made our way towards the shopping precinct, I brought Sam up to speed on the situation, but the sympathy he had shown Zia Khan seemed somehow to have disappeared now that he was back among the guys.
‘Whoa, so Ty has to get himself a girlfriend now,’ he said. ‘Boy, that Simone seems to be causing trouble all over.’
Tyrone smiled and led the way to the High Street. His moods never lasted for long.
We checked into some dive of a hotel on the west of town. Then we started looking. It didn’t take us long.
There was a weird atmosphere that evening. Any way we looked at it, we had pulled off a major scam over the past four days. When Sam revealed himself to be a guy at the end of the week there were certain to be some red faces all over Bradbury Hill School.
But, by the way, how exactly was that going to happen? Somehow an easy ‘Yah boo, tricked ya!’ was unlikely to cover the row that was going to break when Sam abandoned his cute coat-and-skirt uniform, his hairband, his padded bra. At this point it began to dawn on us that we had got our great plan off the ground but that now we had to land it without injury to the crew.
Sam walked into Burger Bill’s as if he were there every day, pushing the door and plumping himself down at a table and looking about him, playing with his ponytail in the way that he had taken to doing recently.
We followed in more nervously, scuttling, heads down, to join him.
Bill was fixing some hamburgers while his daughter, who was eighteen and almost as big as her dad, came over to take our order. We had been there five minutes before he noticed us.
He walked over, drying his mighty hands on a tea cloth. As he approached, Sam murmured, ‘Leave this to me, fellas.’
‘I thought I’d told you three,’ said Burger Bill. ‘When I say you’re banned, you are banned.’
‘Excuse me, sir.’ Sam’s voice was a timid squeak. ‘Yeah?’
‘I know that these boys have been in a little trouble in the past, but it wasn’t their fault, sir.’ Sam frowned, as if troubled by a painful memory. ‘It was my brother, the boy who was with them.’
‘Spare me the fairy tales,’ said Bill. ‘Hop it, the lot of you.’
‘He’s gone back to America now,’ Sam said quickly. ‘He’s in a foster home. They said he was’ – he sniffed dramatically – ‘disturbed.’
Burger Bill crossed his arms. ‘Oh yeah?’
‘Ever since my mum died in a car crash…’ Sam’s voice cracked. ‘Simon’s been running wild. Staying over with our cousins in London, every day, every night, we had only one thing on our minds. Mom.’
‘Mum, car crash.’ Bill shook his head. ‘You kids’ll do anything, won’t you?’
And suddenly, to our amazement – to our horror – Sam’s eyes filled with tears. He stared sightlessly beyond where Jake and I were sitting, as if, at that very moment, he was seeing the crash that really had killed his mother. Then, making no attempt to hide his face, he closed his eyes. There were no sobs, no sounds at all, but tears, more tears than seemed humanly possible, ran down his cheeks and splashed on to the Formica table.
A father who was sitting with a couple of little girls at a nearby table, looked over, concerned.
Burger Bill glanced across at me. ‘It’s true?’ he asked quietly.
I nodded.
Shaking his head, as if having to deal with children whose mothers had been killed was just another thing sent to make his life more difficult, he wandered back to the counter.
Sam sat immobile, eyes closed, tears still flowing. When Tyrone laid a hand on his shoulder, he took a deep breath, then wiped his eyes and his nose with the back of his sleeve. ‘I guess we’re staying, right?’ he muttered.
Sure, we were staying, but frankly it wasn’t the greatest party of all time. Bill’s daughter brought us burgers with French fries, but none of us felt like talking now. I noticed that Sam, who normally ate everything, left most of his food.
We prepared to pay. Burger Bill walked over to where we sat. ‘Don’t worry about that,’ he said in a low voice so that none of the customers could hear him. ‘It’s on the house just this once.’
We muttered our thanks. Bill hovered near the table as we stood up.
‘Um, miss,’ he said to Sam. ‘I’m really sorry about your mother and all that.’
Sam nodded and pushed his way out through the glass door on to the shopping precinct.
I don’t blame myself. When kids come into my place and behave like bloomin’ yahoos, it’s my job to put them straight. There was no way I could have known that the long-haired American boy who had caused the fight was upset by the death of his mother.
But I was glad that his sister had put me straight. She was a sweet little thing and what she told me broke my heart for a whole afternoon.
I’m a parent myself, so I understand these things.
We walked out of the precinct to a busy street. The sun was shining brightly and probably for the last time before autumn closed in, an ice-cream van was parked on a side street near by.
Matt suggested that, since we had just saved some money, we should treat ourselves to a cornet. Still a bit down after what had happened at Burger Bill’s, we joined the queue.
Sam was at the back. At the moment when Jake was being served, he said, in a quiet, disbelieving voice, the single word, ‘No.’
Matt and I looked at him. He was gazing across the street where a bright-blue car – one of those really small ones – had parked. On this side, a woman with B-movie blonde hair and wearing jeans so tight they looked as if they had been sprayed on, was leaning on the roof of the car.
On the pavement beyond her, a short, bald guy, dressed in a sharp black suit and wearing dark glasses, was talking to a group of people. From the way they were looking down the street and pointing, it seemed as if the man was being given directions.
‘It can’t be.’ Sam’s face was deathly white. He walked towards the couple.
‘Sam,’ I called out. When he kept going, I followed.
He went down the street, twenty metres or so, then we both crossed over. He began walking briskly towards where the blue car was parked.
As we approached, Sam slowed his pace to take a closer look at the man. I was less interested in his face than in his voice. He spoke loudly in an American accent.
After we had passed, Sam pretended to look into the window of an electrical store. His eyes reflected back at me in the glass. They were dark and wide, but the look on his face was empty of any expression.
‘D’you know that man?’ I asked.
He nodded slowly. ‘It’s my dad,’ he said.