Angry Coral Week Read online

  “We thought yesterday,” I told them. “But the doctors did say not to worry if it didn’t come yet – it’ll be fine…”

  Keisha suddenly flickered into a wicked grin: “I must, must, must-”

  “Improve your bust?” guessed Rachel, innocently.

  “Nah!” she snorted. “I must tell you… what happened last night with Sean!!”

  “Que…?” Rachel raised her eyebrows.

  “We were at the cinema, right, and Sean… Sean brought me ice cream and he had some popcorn, and he was well sweet, holding my hand on the scary bits even though I love horror movies, and then… he put his hand on my thigh! Uh!”

  “Erm…” I struggled, not reading her expression too well. “…Was… was that a good or bad thing?”

  “I don’t know, ’Arley – questions, questions!! And then, and this is where it gets good-” (uh-oh, that dreaded phrase) “-he slowly moved it up, up, up… and grabbed a piece of popcorn that was stuck in the folds of my skirt!”

  Oh. The classic anti-climax move. My evil friend had known all along that she’d have us lower beings entranced by her tale of sexual delinquency (almost, anyway), and had waited until the last sorry second of break to admit that last night had been a total (and I mean total) non-event…

  Or not:

  “So he popped it in my mouth-”

  Right then, the grouchy Mr Handley (our Principal, unfortunately) walked past and chivvied us out of the lunch hall with a foul expression directed right at Keisha and her “provocative??” story…

  * * *

  Maths Paper Two had been vile (as expected) but then again, I hadn’t had too high a hope of getting a Level 7 in that anyway. I was almost (only almost) hit with a deflating little blob of slight disappointment as we left the hall, because it meant that these dreaded tests (which we’d been pressured to do well at all year) were half over, and I’d never get another chance at it.

  Hmm. Hopefully they didn’t have as much importance to our GCSE class-placements as the teachers had foretold. But I didn’t let it bother me, mostly because I was being talked at by a rather fami-liar person at 666-mph:

  “Where did I get to?! Oh yeah, the bit with the popping the popcorn into my mouth – Daw-Handle didn’t ’alf look freaked when I said that! Anyway, Sean put the popcorn in my mouth, and then he tried to get his hand down my top! God! I must attract these people!” she gasped, putting her hand on her heart. “What is it about me that makes them think they can take advantage?! I’m only fourteen!”

  “And how old is Sean again?” I found myself asking, absentmindedly pausing to nibble a fingernail. (Which, by the way, when on crutches, tends to involve standing still on one leg and looking an absolute fool.)

  “Oh, keep up, ’Arley!!” she grumbled, and I didn’t even know if she meant me to keep up with walking, or with the names, ages and occupations of her lengthly train of suitors. “Fifteen…”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, taking my finger out of my mouth and putting my hand back into the crutch.

  The reason for my unusual walking companion was that Devon had disappeared for some compensatory English cramming with Charlie. (Much needed, if he was struggling to read the revision guide, methinks.)

  “So what I was going to say,” Keisha slurred. “Was that I’m done with Sean, but out in the foyer, yeah, was this cute guy serving mega-size bags of Maltesers, and he had Carl on his nametag, so I thought ‘ooh, ’E sounds a bit interesting’ and went over to start chatting ’im up…”

  “So Carl’s your new boyfriend?”

  “Maybe. Hopefully. We’ll see.” (How many different ways did the mouthy moo need to say the same thing, eh?) “I’m seeing him tonight.”

  Dink! New text.

  From Harry… uh-oh…

  I shakily pressed “Read”, and almost fell off my crutches, but Keisha caught me: “Woss that?”

  I quickly scanned it: “Oh, it’s OK; he only wants to know if I need a lift home…”

  “Who? Who?”

  “Well, who d’you really think? My stepdad, duh!” I smirked. (I mean, I’m not the one prone to being picked up from school by sixteen-year-old players on mopeds, am I?)

  “Yes, PLEASE,” I hurriedly text back. “I’m just up the road from school, heading to the roundabout - cu there”.

  “So what’d you say?” Keisha asked, with a twitch of the nose.

  “Yeah. Sorry, but it’s so strenuous, hopping for miles and miles home.”

  “Your house ain’t miles; it’s not even barely streets!!” she snickered, although she had to know that wasn’t true.

  And with that, she loped off at a speed that fits neatly between a cool strut and a casual, not-quite-run. It’s a wonder heel-wearing people can even catch a cold, let alone a bus, when they live way up there in the convenient ozone hole. I wondered if she could see all the girls being born in the maternity ward on Venus, and all the boys congealing in a dusty, sandy, reddish gutter of a pothole on Mars…

  #8 Kit-Katting

  It was nearing Kitty’s bedtime. I’d just put in a good three hours of English revision – or tried to, with the near-constant interruptions from the study party in Dev’s room next door. Kit was having a bath, and Aimee had gone AWOL and was probably sniffling about her labour fears in Ben’s bedroom.

  Drrrrrrrrrrrrr-drrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!

  My phone was vibrating on the bedside table. Not a text vibrate, but a call one. I paused to wonder why they made phones buzz so loudly when the point was for other people not to find out you had a call.

  Chan calling read the screen.

  Chan? At nearly half-past seven, she was meant to be at swimming club. Wednesdays and Fridays.

  “Hello?” I sighed.

  I heard a mournful sob.

  “Chan?”

  “Eeee.”

  “Chan? I thought you were at swimming?”

  “I am,” she shuddered out.

  “You’re phoning me from the pool?”

  “No, you stupid bitch!” she snapped, catching me off guard. “I didn’t go in. I was late and I couldn’t face it.”

  “Then why didn’t you go home?”

  “My mum can’t know!”

  “Know… what?”

  “Know!”

  I swallowed, and paced the room.

  “I went to Tom’s,” she admitted, huskily.

  I didn’t like the sound of that, but I kept schtum.

  “Harley?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You won’t tell anyone, right?”

  “No. I mean… of course I won’t. Obviously. Heh.”

  “Good, ’cause I can’t tell Dani.”

  “Why?”

  “She’ll tell her mum, and she’ll tell my mum.”

  That figured. “Well… I won’t tell anyone that you went to Tom’s.”

  “I didn’t just go to Tom’s. I went to Tom’s, and… and he came to mine.”

  I furrowed my brow, staring at my expression in the mirror as I listened.

  “He came to mine, Harley.”

  My own eyes widened before me. “You had sex?”

  “No!” she half squealed and half snapped. It was a squap.

  “So he literally went to your house…”

  “No.”

  “Your dad’s house?”

  “No.”

  “Then what? I don’t mean to be horrible, but I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

  “He… gave me a KitKat!”

  The look on my own face made me laugh there. I had to turn away from the mirror. Matty had given Kitty a KitKat, which I’d thought was cute because that was my nickname for her.

  “Stop laughing!” she wailed on the end of the line. (She has a thing about that.) “It still hurts. I wish it never happened!”

  “Didn’t you want to?” I fumbled desperately to grasp the situation.

  “Yes… Well, I thought I did. Keisha wanted to, so…”

  After that, there were only
sobs.

  “Chan…” I said softly. “I’m no expert but I’m pretty sure you’ll be OK. Get yourself home.”

  She made a small whimpering noise and hung up.

  As horrible as it sounds, it was a good time to hang up on my end. Kitty had reappeared in her pyjamas, and any second would’ve interrupted our call. My brain and body buzzed with embarrassment when I looked at her. Nickname ruined forever. About the only thing less fair was what had happened to Chantalle. When I crawled into bed, English abandoned, I had a shaky feeling that anything educationally relevant had been siphoned out of my brain during that moral support session. And I wasn’t sure what to do about that…

  #9 Analysisy

  “I thought I had a contraction this morning,” Mum announced, pouring milk onto Kitty’s cereal. “But then there wasn’t another one. Kit was the same, mind – she gave me pain three days before I actually went into labour.”

  “I gave you pain?” Kitty asked. “Like a present?”

  Oops.

  I’d forgotten Devon’s birthday! And I wasn’t exactly in her good books after leaving her out of the 0% revision, 20% welcoming and 80% interrogation night (not that she realised I’d done her such a huge favour – I’d’ve liked an excuse not to have been there), so I’d have to act fast.

  What did I have that was furry, spangly or trinkety in the natty sort of way that looked good on Devon and terrible on me? And more to the point, did I have time to rush upstairs and grab anything, crutches and all, before Harry’d got the car started? Answer? A decided “um, no”.

  “Charlie,” I winced, putting on my best please-please-please-my-one-and-only-fabby-twin-brother face. “D’you know it’s Devon’s birthday today?”

  “Yeah,” he said, through a mouthful of toast.

  “Well, what’d you get her?”

  “Done her a compilation of symphonic metal songs, since she said she liked the voice of that girl who used to be in Nightwish. Well, I had to do something with Tuesday night, when we’d gone to all the trouble of getting the computer booted up – and I was so chuffed to get my mp3 back…”

  “Any chance I could stick my name on it, too?”

  “Sorry, but no. It took me forever.”

  “Why?”

  “Just no, it’s specially from me.”

  “Why?”

  “Sorry, Harley, but it’s just not happening…”

  Oh. It wasn’t like my brother to refuse to do a good deed. (And what a good deed it would’ve been.) There must’ve been something seriously special about it…

  I rifled through my schoolbag. All I had on me was my main subject books (chiefly for revising during break, since most of the lessons had been overruled by, um, the exams themselves), a notebook that I use for remembering the particularly odd happenings of my life for when I sit down to write this, my sandwich-bag pencilcase (full of holes), twenty pence in case my phone went dead or got confiscated or was stolen or otherwise removed from my person, a reading book of the Louise Rennison variety (would’ve been great if it hadn’t been Devon who’d lent it to me), my lunch, and the dreaded pads that I was so embarrassed about anyone having spotted as such.

  No luck there, then. Except possibly the notebook; if all else failed, I could scrawl an I.O.U…

  * * *

  Wow.

  I was off the hook, thanks to the new regime that Devon announced to me and my brother as we ambled our way to the car:

  “Gee, thanks, Charlie, but I’ll have to ask you to keep it…” she’d smiled.

  “You don’t even know what it is, yet,” he pointed out. “It could be a solid bar of gold. It isn’t, by the way, but-”

  “I know.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Because solid bars of gold don’t usually come in wafer-thin cases that rattle like they’ve got disks in them.”

  “Oh, OK…” he mumbled, with a defeated look on his phizog.

  “And speaking of rattling disk cases, I’ve got something for you.”

  “For me?” he asked, confused.

  “Yes. And I’ve got something for you, too, Harley – but this first; I’m holding it!” she said, passing Charlie a case, of which I found myself squinting at the title.

  “High School Musical!!” he gasped, chin hitting the floor, hugging the thing to his chest.

  “High School Musical…?” I repeated, in a slightly less thrilled tone.

  “Uh-huh!” they said in unison.

  Wasn’t that the ridiculously manufactured-sounding film that Kitty’s mates were all raving about?

  “Aw, thanks, Dev – you know I was always too chicken to actually go up and buy it.”

  She beamed. “And now for Harley’s present!!”

  “I still don’t get this…” I frowned, as she plopped a shiny, pastellish rock into my palm.

  “What’s this?” I asked, confused.

  “Brings luck, ’cause I know how nervous you are about the English test…”

  “Oh, thanks,” I said, appreciatively, popping it into my pencilcase. (Though considering the amount of holes it’d gathered, I’d probably lose the little stone as quickly as I’d gained this new, confused sense of having got away with something.) “But… erm… what’s all this about?”

  “Well, it’s my birthday, as you know, and I just thought, ‘wow, I’ve been lucky enough to live and see fourteen’, so I thought I’d give something back to everyone I love, instead of making them ladle gifts onto me all day. And you two I love very much…”

  Creepy.

  “Well, thanks…” I told her.

  And then she gave us both a hug…

  Double creepy…

  Not to say that Dev’s never hugged either of us before. (I mean, she’d hugged Charlie on like a bazillion occasions back when he was depressed, and me a couple of times.) Only that she suddenly looked like the Number One Saint of Constantly High, and it made me feel kinda… well, kinda lousy for not inviting her the other day…

  “But… have you thought about how some people might’ve put in a lot of effort for your presents and stuff?” I asked, pointlessly, thinking more of Charlie and his compilation CD than of myself and my big bag of nothing. “And wouldn’t doing that just make someone feel really bad if they forgot?”

  “Nope. It’s not that I’m being anti­-materialistic; it’s just that I think everyone else deserves the stuff more than me. I have loads of nice things already!”

  “Like?”

  “Like glitter and spangles and sparkly things, and all the clouds in the sky and all the stars up above them, and all that big, black space above that, and the daffodils in my garden, and the best friends a girl could ask for!” she beamed, looking like her own little rainbow with the giant, multicoloured, woollen jacket-substitute of a jumper she’d tied around her waist (because by gum it was hot for May) as more of a fashion accessory than a necessity (although there’s a very thin line between the two, and Devon frequently stomps all over it in her silvery dolly-shoes).

  “Harley!” Harry called, in a not-narked-but-getting-there tone. “Hurry up, or you’ll be walking!”

  So I left Devon and Charlie and got in the car.

  “You two want a lift?” Harry asked, laying my crutches on the back seat.

  “Nah,” said Devon. “Thanks anyway, though…”

  And the two stalked off together…

  * * *

  Mr Wordsworth gave me a wink from the front of the hall (I was sat not too far from there again, right behind Charlie); he had high expectations for me and I knew it.

  Already today we’d done the last (phew!) Maths paper, and the English Reading one, and were now onto the Shakespeare Paper – the one I’d found trickiest; analysing someone else’s work.

  Especially someone else’s work that was written a few hundred years ago…

  The exam dubbed Reading had been your average comprehension thingy that I wasn’t entirely sure I had seen at all in the long gap between Year 6 and 9 �
�� it hadn’t really been too difficult: all question-and-answer on stuff we’d just been given to read. But this was the Shakespeare, and I was completely freaked that it was going to bring my grade down.

  I quickly glanced around the room; luckily Jordy was still sat in the same seat he’d had all week. I hoped he couldn’t see me looking at him, but sure enough, he had his head down.

  Then he looked up, and I flinched.

  Caught in the act…

  He was definitely looking in my direction, but he didn’t meet my gaze; didn’t acknowledge it.

  Jordy Johnson was looking straight past me, as per usual, but this time he was looking right at my own twin brother. Well, they were pretty tight mates. I decided the last thing I needed was to let his indifference bug me.

  All I heard was, “You may start!”, and then I was away, trying my hardest to feign interest in Willy Wobbledagger and his faint grasp on Willy Wobbledagese. Gee, for someone who nicknamed this country, its culture, and the very language we spoke after the guy, I really didn’t understand the half of his centuries-old witterings…

  The clock ticked away to a third of the time gone, and I’d only managed to ramble half a page about pretty much the same thing over and over – but in twenty-nine amazing alternative ways. (Something you’ll have noticed I am very good at.)

  I looked at Charlie, now that Jordy was done doing it and had gone back to his work. He was hunched down ahead of me, finding English as hard as ever. If I’d written half a page, I bet myself he’d written half a sentence. Half a word, even…

  I caught myself giggling slightly, and willed myself to stop since this was an exam.

  Charlie put his hand up.

  Mr Wordsworth came over. “Yes, Charlie?”

  “I… uh… think I’m in urgent need of a jaunt to the pissarium… um… please…”

  Well, he would, wouldn’t he? If there was one thing my brother could do well to match my random witteriness, then that was taking seventeen “um”-ed and “uh”-ed words when about four or five would do - maybe eight if he was being polite.

  “How much’ve you written?” Mr W asked, practically reading his duty off a sheet.

  “Page and a quarter,” said my brother.

  “OK, fine,” said Mr W, escorting him out of the room.

  Whaaaaaaaaaaat?! I’d written half a page, and Charlie had written a page and a quarter! Either Devon was a miracle worker, or my twin was a repressed genius!

  I scanned my eyes quickly over his paper after he’d vacated his seat. There was no way anyone could read what he’d written from here, so I figured the teachers were exaggerating a bit about cheating. Yeah, he’d done a page and a quarter, but his handwriting would class as a size 28 font!