Mum said cycling in this weather was too risky, so she drove us to school in our little Kia. We made a stop outside Oscar’s block in Jupiter Street, so he could take Woofer up to the flat, change his clothes, and pick up a book he needed.
“What did your mother say?” my mum asked when he got back in the car.
“Nothing,” Oscar said. “She’d already gone to work. She says she gets much more done if she turns up before everybody else.”
“Does she do that a lot?” I asked, thinking how much I would miss it if Mum and I didn’t have our sleepy little ritual at the breakfast table. It wasn’t that we said very much to each other, but I always got a quick morning hug and a noisy, tickly, raspberry on my neck while she pottered around making coffee, setting out muesli and toasting bread rolls in our mini oven.
“No, mostly when I’m at my dad’s,” Oscar said.
Mum wasn’t the only one to take her car this morning, so it was crowded outside the school gates.
“There’s nowhere for me to park,” she said. “It’ll have to be a stop-and-hop today. Are you ready?”
“Sure, sure,” said Oscar, who was already scouting through the rear window for his friends.
Mum stopped and we hopped.
“Have a nice day,” Mum called out, and drove on the moment we had shut the car door. The car behind her was already sounding its horn. I waved, but I don’t think she saw me.
“Alex!” Oscar called out to one of his classmates. “Hey, Alex…” He ran ahead. I followed behind, plodding along at a more reluctant pace. Most of the snow in the school playground had already been trampled into a thin grey slush that spattered everything and everybody when you ran through it. Now what was my first lesson again? My brain felt like foam rubber.
Some of the boys from Year 10 were having a snowball fight. Or, more accurately, an ice-ball fight because the slush turned into grey, rocky lumps of ice when you pressed it hard enough. I stopped in my tracks. I had no wish to be caught in the crossfire.
Oscar had realized that I was lagging behind. He slapped Alex on the back of his shoulder with a wet, woollen mitten, making a loud splat.
“Be with you in a sec.”
“You off to rescue your girlfriend, then?” Alex said, looking put out.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Oscar said calmly. He was used to being teased about it. “Clara, get a move on.”
I couldn’t move. I just stood there staring at the older boys, one in particular. Martin. Martin from Year 10. Not because he was bigger than the other Year 10s, or much stronger for that matter. He was just meaner.
“Clara…”
By now Oscar had reached me. He turned to see what I was looking at. “Oh, drat,” he muttered. Even Oscar was a little scared of Martin.
The bell went, but Martin and his fellow snowball fighters ignored the shrill ringing and kept up their strafing. They were no longer aiming at each other, but at anyone who tried to get through the door to B Block. Lumps of ice crisscrossed the air and we could hear cries of pain and howling when they found their targets.
“Clara, they’re only snowballs,” Oscar said. “You’re a wildwitch. Surely you’re not scared of being hit by a measly little snowball?”
But I was.
“Come on,” he urged me. “We’ll make a run for it. If we get hit, I’m sure we’ll survive.”
He slapped me on my shoulder, less hard and loud than when he slapped Alex. Then he set off at full tilt and somehow I too managed to peel my boots off the tarmac and follow him. I narrowed my eyes so that I could see only the ground in front of me and expected at any minute to be struck by a wet, hard ball of ice.
I wasn’t. Something much worse happened.
Just as I was about to run up the steps and through the door, I slammed into something. Someone. I lost my footing and fell, arms flailing.
The pain wasn’t the problem. My puffer jacket cushioned most of the impact, but I bashed my knee against a step and when I sat up, I saw that I had ripped my leggings. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that the person I had run into was Martin.
Slowly he got to his feet. His skater trousers were wet from slush.
“What’s up, Martin,” the bravest of his friends called out. “Wet yourself, did you?”
Forced laughter erupted from the group, croaky and a little nervous. I just sat on the steps while he loomed over me; he looked huge as I stared up from below, and I couldn’t make out his face very clearly, he was so close to me that a wide stretch of black polar jacket was almost the only thing I could see, that and two broad, bare hands, wet and fiery red from squeezing snowballs together.
“Loser,” he snarled at me. “Look where you’re going.”
I usually do. I would always give a wide berth to anything that looked like trouble. I was rarely bullied or teased, mainly because I was so good at not standing out. Before you can tease someone, you first have to notice they are there.
Except now Martin had noticed me. And then some.
He bent over me and now I could see his face, almost as red as his hands; his eyes were strangely swollen and reduced to glittering cracks in all the red. He scooped up a handful of filthy slush from the steps. I barely had time to close my own eyes before the icy mixture of gravel, salt and melting snow was rubbed into my face. Then he stepped over me and walked off, seemingly indifferent to his entourage. They followed and made a big deal out of trampling me as if I wasn’t there. One knee hit my side, a couple of them slapped me across the back of my head with wet mittens, and one boy stamped on my foot.
“Oi. Leave her alone!”
It was Oscar, of course, who earned himself a slap with a mitten in passing, but none of them stopped. The message was clear: I was someone you could walk all over, an insignificant little nobody who got what she deserved for failing to get out of the way quickly enough. Have a nice day, Mum had said. Yeah, right.
“They’re the losers,” Oscar said through clenched teeth as he helped me back on my feet. “Are you OK?”
“Yes,” I muttered. Wet, filthy and with a face that felt as if it had been scoured with wet sandpaper. But apart from that OK.
“Why didn’t you do something?” Oscar said. “Make them go away, just like the seagulls, or some other wildwitch trick. You just let them… walk all over you.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” I said. “You make it sound as if I can just magic them away. I can’t.”
“Your Aunt Isa would never have let them walk all over her,” he insisted.
Well, no. I would have liked to see them try…
“I’m not Aunt Isa.”
“No, and you never will be if you don’t stand up for yourself, Clara.”
I was starting to regret ever telling Oscar about the wildwitches. I’d just had a totally rotten start to my day and now I’d be spending most of the morning in wet and filthy clothing. And Oscar was making it sound like it was all my own fault. That hurt. Much more than my foot and my knee and my snow-scoured face.
“What have I done?” I said. “Why are you being like that? You always…” I stopped myself just before I said “look out for me” because it would have sounded pathetic. But it was true. He’d always protected me. Ever since we were toddlers in the sandpit; he’d always defended me, and he put up with being teased by the others who would gleefully claim that we were snogging even though we had never done any such thing. Oscar was my friend, and he happened to be a boy. That didn’t make him my boyfriend. Once, one warm afternoon during the summer holidays a long time ago when we were seven or eight years old, we had even sworn a blood oath, with Oscar making a small cut in his arm and in mine, with his grandfather’s old pocket knife. I think Oscar had seen it in a movie somewhere.
Oscar heaved a sigh.
“I just don’t get it,” he said. “You can do all those really cool things. Shanaia says Chimera is afraid of you. But you still won’t help her get Westmark back. And now you’re letting that half-brain Martin and his moronic friends walk all over you. Clara, get a grip. It would be different if you couldn’t defend yourself. But you can.”
“You’re right,” I said. “You don’t get it. If it’s that easy, why don’t you do it?”
I picked up my bag and brushed off the worst of the slush. I couldn’t even look at him and my eyes were stinging. I didn’t want to fall out with him. It was a horrible feeling that tore at my insides, as if I had just swallowed a whole box of thumb tacks. But he’d always known what I was like, and he used to like me just as I was. Why did he now suddenly want me to be someone else?