nine

SHOWING OFF

“Meena, nicely done, on the whole.”

Mrs. Fisher, our Latin teacher, is passing between the desks, handing out our marked translation homework.

Meena, a stringy girl with droopy posture, looks very downcast at this verdict. I’ve noticed this already in my first few days at Wakefield Hall—the girls set incredibly high standards for themselves. I thought St. Tabby’s was competitive, but this is way beyond anything that went on at St. Tabby’s.

“Natalie!” Mrs. Fisher’s brows contract severely as she stops in front of Natalie’s desk. “We’re in the sixth form now; we know the difference between the ablative and the dative case, surely?”

Natalie starts nodding so convulsively she looks defective, like a toy they’ll have to recall before the head comes off.

“Well, show me next time!”

Mrs. Fisher drops the paper on Natalie’s desk rather than handing it to her. Oh dear.

“Susan! Lovely use of the iambic pentameter! Top marks!”

Susan, a pretty girl with very pale skin, blushes so hard her entire face floods with red color, like blood poured into milk. She takes her paper back from Mrs. Fisher with a huge smile.

“Scarlett—” Mrs. Fisher turns to me.

I smile in anticipation. I’ve always been pretty good at Latin.

“A lot more work is going to be needed here, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Fisher says. She doesn’t drop the paper on my desk: she stands there, holding it, a horrible indication that there is more criticism to come.

“Very sketchy work. We’re really going to have to concentrate on your written Latin. I can see that this has not been a priority for you.”

I wait for the paper to fall on my desk so this public humiliation can finally be over, but she still doesn’t let it go.

Eventually I realize that she’s waiting for an answer.

“Um, no,” I manage. “We didn’t have to do any written Latin for the GCSE exam, so  .  .  . um  .  .  .”

Mrs. Fisher sniffs.

“So your teacher didn’t bother drilling you in it? Very shortsighted! And now we have to pick up her pieces, don’t we?”

I nod humbly.

Finally she drops the paper on my desk.

“See me after class, Scarlett,” she says. “We might want to downgrade your choice of Latin to an AS Level. That’ll be much easier for you. I’m afraid that our choice of exam board is rather more rigorous than the one you’ve been used to.”

I stagger out of Latin class a bleeding, broken girl. My pride is in tatters. I have been torn and shredded in front of an entire group of girls for whom translating Shakespeare into Latin iambic pentameter is a light intellectual warm-up before breakfast. Mrs. Fisher clearly thinks I should drop Latin. She as good as told me so. Bloody hell, I think I should drop Latin. I had no idea it was going to be this hard.

But now I have an awful feeling that I’ve been so humiliated that I have to stick with Latin, just to prove that I can do it. My pride won’t let me drop it, even though in class just now I couldn’t answer one question right. I was so demoralized I couldn’t have managed a sentence as simple as “Sextus has six slaves and Decimus has a big dog.”

I check my timetable. Oh, thank God. It’s the last period of the morning, and Lower Sixth C has PE. Wakefield Hall is so old-school that they still call it physical education and make it compulsory till you’re eighteen—at St. Tabby’s it was gym, and you could drop it at fourteen in favor of just starving yourself to fit into size XS instead. Great, some exercise to take the edge off. I’m all wound up from being made to look a fool in front of eight Latin swots.

The changing rooms smell, as always, of feet and armpits. Eeww. I wind my hair into a tight ponytail, pull on the regulation white T-shirt and brown gym shorts, and jog into the gym. Wakefield Hall doesn’t have anything like what we had at St. Tabby’s, our huge gymnasium with its spring-loaded floors and its long tumble track. This is as big, but the floors are wood—much less bounce—no bars, no beams, let alone a tumble pit, and the trampoline isn’t even set up all the time.

The girls are all filing in, looking, for the most part, extremely dispirited at having to be here—apart from the hockey/lacrosse contingent, a bunch of hard-edged tough chicks with thighs the size of hams and faces pink and weather-beaten from being outdoors in the cool autumn air, trying to kill each other with big sticks of wood. Still, they don’t intimidate me. I know they haven’t trained as hard as I have for the past nine years.

I know I sound obnoxious. But honestly, these last few days at Wakefield Hall have been pretty rough. Latin was just the worst of a long series of classes that made me realize not only that I have a long way to go to catch up to Wakefield Hall’s academic standards, but that I’m in for a really bad time from my teachers, because they’re bending over backward not to show me any favoritism.

So it’s understandable, isn’t it, that I’m jumping with joy at finally getting to show off a bit at something I actually know I’m going to be better at than anyone here?

“Lower Sixth! Hello!” says a bright, metallic voice. “I am Miss Carter! And we’re all here to get fit and learn good habits that will keep us fit for the rest of our lives, aren’t we?”

“Yes, Miss Carter,” the girls chorus dully, staring miserably at their shoes.

This is not a sporty school.

“So let’s start with a nice warm-up, shall we? Get the blood flowing!”

Miss Carter is one of those jolly-hockey-stick types. She looks like one of the field-sport girls, all grown up and happily settled down with another ex-field-sport girl in a cozy little cottage on the school grounds. Her hair is short and blond, her skin looks like it’s never seen a makeup wand, and her thighs and arms are as pink and hamlike as those of the hockey/lacrosse toughs. She makes us do jumping jacks and knee-ups in series. It’s unintentionally hilarious. There are more bosoms bouncing around in the gym than in an R&B music video. These girls are totally not wearing decent sports bras. (I worked out my problem over the summer, by the way. You get a minimizer bra from Marks and Spencer’s and wear a pull-on sports bra over that. Two layers. Squash ’em down.)

Still, there’s a lovely view outside. The outer wall of the gym has floor-to-ceiling glass windows that look out onto a wide stretch of rich green grassy sports fields—hockey on one side, lacrosse on the other, separated from each other by Lime Walk, a long avenue of lime trees raised up slightly with a gentle green hill sloping down on either side of the avenue and smoothing off into the sports fields. The trees are rich with autumn leaves; the grass is green and thick. In a couple of months’ time, the sports fields will be muddy and churned-up from being pounded by cleats on the bottom of the tough girls’ shoes, but right now it’s a beautiful autumn landscape, with the leaves just starting to turn golden.

Miss Carter blows a whistle, and the girls stop jumping and jog over to the trampoline. Honestly, she reminds me of a dog trainer. Any minute now she’ll make us all sit up and beg for treats.

“Sharon Persaud! You’re up first!” she yells enthusiastically.

Sharon Persaud clambers grimly onto the trampoline, looking very hostile. Being of Asian origin, Sharon is not as weather-beaten as the white sporty girls, but that she’s one of them is all too clear from the heft of her muscular thighs and bulging calves.

“She scares me so much,” whispers a girl next to me.

I’ve noticed this girl before; she stands out at Wakefield Hall because of her discreet, expensively highlighted hair, a mouse-brown lightened to a subtle caramel. It wouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary at St. Tabby’s, but here it’s pretty unusual. She’s also wearing makeup—mascara and eye pencil—which she needs, because her eyes are very small and deep-set, and they have a perpetually nervous expression, which is intensified as Sharon starts jumping dourly up and down on the tramp. With every landing, the tramp thuds as Sharon’s large, trainer-shod feet plonk down. She’s not jumping high, just heavily.

“She’s taken out two girls’ front teeth with her hockey stick,” whispers Nervous Girl. “They had to get implants.”

“Christ.”

“I’m so happy hockey isn’t compulsory anymore,” says Nervous Girl. “I used to jump away every time I saw her charging down the field with that lavender hockey stick. I had to wear braces for a year, just for my overbite. I couldn’t go through that again.”

“Lizzie, no talking there!” Miss Carter sings out. “Good work, Sharon! Now, who’s next?”

She hasn’t taken her eyes off me, so I know what’s coming.

“New girl! It’s Scarlett, isn’t it? You’re a bit of a gymnast, aren’t you? Off you go, then!”

“Can I take my trainers off?” I ask.

“No, rules are rules for everyone,” Miss Carter says, but her tone is perfectly pleasant, no snottiness, which is a welcome change for a Wakefield Hall teacher.

Sharon jumps down from the trampoline, the wooden floor creaking in protest as she lands. I vault up instead, and though it’s ridiculous, my heart is pounding with excitement. I haven’t been on a tramp for three months. I am so out of shape. But it’s wonderful to be back, even on a soggy tramp with a whole group of girls standing round the sides to gawk at me.

I do a few bounces, to get a feel of the tramp. Then I take off. Jump, set, front tuck, land, three front somersaults in a row. The girls are oohing and aahing, but I tune it out. If at first this was about showing off—showing the whole of Lower Sixth C that yes, Scarlett Wakefield is actually good at something, believe it or not—as soon as I started jumping, that impulse faded. Because the sheer joy of being on a tramp again, working on my skills, has flooded through me like the best kind of drug you could possibly imagine, the kind your own body makes all by itself, and I’m high—literally and metaphorically. Ha ha. I’m flipping myself like a pancake. God, I forgot how much I loved tramp, the height it gives you, the extra bounce that allows you to spin and twist through the air.

Jump, set, knees to chest and right over myself in a tight little ball, open up and land, back tuck. One, two, three. I’m a bit dizzy, but I can’t stop. Front pike, front layout. Easy stuff, but I don’t have traveling room on this tramp, the springs are all exposed and they scare me, particularly in trainers. Ricky, my old coach, blew out his knee doing demonstration jumps on a trampoline in trainers. He turned the flange on one of his shoes under him in a bad landing. With bare feet, it would just have been an ankle sprain, but because of the shoes, his whole foot turned under him and his knee popped with the torque. He had to have a ton of surgery, and his knee’s never been right since. The scars track each side of his knee, wobbly white lines, and the knee itself is oddly shaped, as if you were looking at it through pebble glass.

Ricky’s knee has always been a big symbol, because he messed it up showing off, knowing that he should be more careful because he was in trainers. So now I rein myself in. No twists. Don’t get cocky! That’s how you get hurt! I can hear Ricky’s voice in my head, and suddenly I miss him and gymnastics so much I have to catch my breath.

I don’t go for anything too ambitious. No back handsprings, I’ll travel too far. I finish with a back step-out layout, and it goes so well I blast off into another. It’s old-fashioned, we don’t do it in competition, but I’ve always enjoyed it. You land on one leg and then the other follows, like spokes of a wheel turning under you. It looks dazzlingly pretty.

Everyone’s clapping. I shake my head back, embarrassed, but I can’t deny the thrill. My back feels looser, pulled out by the stretch of the back layouts.

“I don’t suppose anyone wants to follow that, do they?” Miss Carter says, grinning. “Any volunteers feeling brave? No? Then it’s time for circuit training!”

Groans arise. Miss Carter has set up an entire circuit in the back part of the gym, and she briskly indicates what each station is for. It’s really old-school—no music, just the sound of girls panting and groaning next to me, interspersed with Miss Carter yelling things like “Come on, Lizzie!” and blowing her whistle to indicate that we need to change station.

“Anyone who wants to push herself,” Miss Carter calls, “can finish up with some optional leg lifts on the bars!”

I’m across the gym in a flash. The suckers for punishment are me, three hockey/lacrosse tough nuts (they never smile, those girls; I bet they’re so busy practicing their intimidating faces they don’t even smile in their sleep), and the big-shouldered, shaggy-haired girl who has the desk next to me. Wow. Her thighs are bulging out of the brown gym shorts: her quads must be really strong. I look down at my own. Much slimmer, but God, her calves are so cut. I wouldn’t want to be that big (I remember Dan commenting on how small I was and how feminine that made me feel) but I can’t help envying her strength, so obviously on display.

“Good, two keen new girls!” Miss Carter says. “Taylor, isn’t it?”

Big Shoulders nods. She’s not a chatty one, I’ve noticed that already in class.

“Right, up you all go. The rest of you, stretch it out, please.”

We climb up the monkey bars, swivel our hands to grasp under the top bar, and hang in place, waiting for the whistle. When it comes, we grip for dear life and start lifting our feet to our heads—ideally. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the hockey girls barely managing to lift to waist height. They’re strong, all right, but that’s a lot of weight to lift, and they don’t do the ab work gymnasts do. And all that bending over the hockey stick must give them really tight backs. But Taylor is pumping away next to me, her big strong legs shooting up as if she does this all day, every day.

I’m shocked. And I’m pissed off. I realize how much I’ve been expecting to be the best at PE, how much it mattered to me, at this school where I feel like I’m the worst at every single academic subject I’m taking. It comes over me like an angry wave, and I see bright angry competitive red, and I curl my back and tuck my abs and haul away at lifting my legs with everything I’ve got, and still that Taylor girl is going higher and faster and more effortlessly than I am.

She knows we’re competing. I can tell. And when the whistle goes, the two of us don’t stop. The hockey girls have long climbed down, but Taylor and I keep going, though my feet are only at waist height now, while Taylor’s still doing high lifts, she seems to be on some sort of girl steroids, or maybe she’s an android, while I, frankly, am absolutely knackered.

The whistle’s going again.

“Girls! Time to stop!” Miss Carter is bellowing.

Thank God. I flail for a low bar with my feet, find it, and climb down. My palms are burning, accustomed as I am to a padded bar, not just bare wood. Taylor drops to the floor next to me, and I notice how light her landing is, despite her big muscular body.

I glance at her resentfully. Our eyes meet. It’s a stand-off. Hers are narrowed, wide, and seemingly even greener against the paleness of her skin, outlined by unexpectedly thick dark lashes. For a moment I think Taylor’s going to say something. And then she turns away, deliberately snubbing me.

Cow. I hate her. The only girl I’ve got something in common with here—she’s a new girl, too—and she turns out to be a snotty cow who can beat me at leg lifts.

I hate this godforsaken armpit of a school in the middle of nowhere. I hate the teachers who make me feel like an uneducated moron.

And most of all, I hate this Taylor girl. She’d better stay well away from me from now on.