sixteen

COMPLETELY COVERED IN INK

“Oh my God!” I stare down into my open desk. It’s the day after I found the envelope, and I spent all yesterday evening thinking up a Cunning Plan. So here I am, executing it. “Bloody hell, I don’t believe it!”

Sharon Persaud (of the killer lavender hockey stick), who has the desk next to me, turns to look.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“There’s ink all over my books! I don’t know how that happened!”

“Is everything okay?”

“No! God, look at this!” I pick up an ink-sodden envelope and the notebook below it, and wave them both around. “They’re completely soaked!”

Meena, who sits behind me, leans forward.

“How did that happen?” she asks.

“I dunno.  .  .  .” I rifle through the contents of the desk with my other hand. “There was this pen on top, it must have leaked all over my Latin notes, and this other stuff. God, it’s all ruined. I’m going to have to chuck it all out.”

Meena is fishing in her own desk.

“Here,” she says, handing me a pack of Kleenex. “And you can borrow my Latin notes, Scarlett.”

“Wow, really?”

I turn to look fully at her. Her expression is very sympathetic. Meena’s not very attractive. She’s unhealthy-looking, skinny, and pale-skinned for a girl of Indian descent, which makes the dark circles under her eyes even more evident, giving her a slightly raccoonlike appearance. But her smile now is very friendly.

“Thanks so much,” I say. The notebook doesn’t contain my Latin notes, of course: it’s blank. But I wouldn’t at all mind borrowing Meena’s Latin notes. They’re bound to be better than mine.

“Can you read anything, Scarlett?” asks Susan, another girl from my Latin class.

“No,” I say hopelessly. “It’s completely covered in ink. And it’s gone right through to whatever’s inside. Bloody pen, I don’t believe this happened!”

“Yeah, that’s really unlucky,” chimes in Lizzie, the scared girl from gymnastics with the un–Wakefield Hall–like highlights in her hair. “I had that happen to me once in my rucksack. My iPod cover got completely messed up. I had to throw it away. And it was a really nice one, too.”

There’s a chorus of sympathy. I must say, girls at Wakefield Hall are a lot nicer than the ones at St. Tabby’s. They may be wary of me because my grandmother’s the headmistress, but in a genuine crisis, they all demonstrate that they’re fully-paid-up members of the human race. If this had happened at St. Tabby’s, only my immediate friends would have gathered round to coo and empathize. No one else would have cared. Unless it had happened to Plum, or one of her inner circle. In that case, it would have been played for as much drama as possible, and tons of sycophants would have crowded around Plum all day long, as she threw her hair around and pouted and played the situation for the maximum amount of attention.

“What’s all this noise about?” Miss Newman booms from the doorway.

We all jump. Miss Newman’s voice is like a bass drum, cutting through all the chatter with deep, terrifying authority.

I open my mouth to explain, but to my surprise, Meena cuts in first.

“Please, Miss Newman, Scarlett’s had a pen leak in her desk,” she says.

Miss Newman’s phenomenally hairy eyebrows draw together so tightly they actually meet in a monobrow that wouldn’t look out of place on a Greek wrestler.

“Very careless to leave your pens lying loose, Scarlett,” she says. “If they’d been in a pencil case, this wouldn’t have happened, would it?”

My eyes roll despite myself. What decade does she think we’re living in? Who has pencil cases anymore?

“Don’t pull faces at me, young lady!” Miss Newman shouts. “Now go and wash your hands! You’ve barely got five minutes before morning assembly!”

“Here,” offers Susan. She pulls a plastic bag out of her desk, takes some stuff out of it and hands it along the row. “You can put the inky stuff in there, Scarlett,” she suggests. “That way it won’t go all over everything else.”

“Thanks, Susan,” I say gratefully, taking the bag.

Susan blushes and ducks her head. She’s extraordinarily pretty, but I don’t think she knows it. She never wears any makeup, nor does anything with her pale blond hair other than scrape it back into a tight ponytail. She actually reminds me a little bit of Luce, now I look at her more closely. Susan, like Luce, has a little-girl quality to her that conceals a very sharp mind. They both have a fragility that tends to make people—even teachers who ought to know better—underestimate how clever they are.

God, I miss Luce and Alison, so much that it’s like a physical pain. It’s these flashes of memory that hurt the most, the reminders of friends I’ve lost through my own bad behavior.

But I can’t think about anything now but the job at hand. I chuck the bag with the inky things into the dustbin, and nip out of the room and down the corridor to the big tiled loo to wash my hands. I don’t get them completely clean, though. I leave a good amount of ink still staining my fingers, enough so I can flash them around and complain, at every possible opportunity, about the leaky pen that ruined tons of stuff in my desk. Which will be Part A of Operation Inky Envelope successfully concluded. I check myself in the mirror. I’ve managed to get a small ink stain on my nose, which is perfect. Everyone will ask me about it.

I know it sounds tragic. But believe me, if I spend the next few hours showing everyone the ink stains on my hands and whingeing about them, everyone will be discussing Scarlett’s Ink-Stain Misery. Not because it’s interesting in any way, shape, or form, but because there’s nothing else to talk about in this underage girls’ prison.

Okay, that’s not quite true. There’s definitely something hot to talk about here, and his name is Jase Barnes. Mmm. I find myself picturing his wide shoulders, remembering the way he took my hands, and a rush of heat rises up through me and settles in my lower stomach and I start grinning like a lunatic. Before I know it something hard and cold bumps into my forehead. And I realize that I just went so moony over Jase Barnes that I must have leant forward in a daze, over the sink, until my forehead hit the mirror.

I pull back, giggling a bit. Wow, I’m being such an idiot: just picturing Jase turns me to complete and utter mush. I have to pull myself together. I have to find out who left me that note, and what’s behind it, and how Dan died, before I can even think about Jase in any leaning-forward-toward-him-to-be-kissed kind of way.  .  .  .

Oh God, Dan. The giggles dissolve immediately. I look at myself in the mirror and see a guilty face staring back at me. Am I obsessed with solving the mystery of how Dan died just so I can go right out and kiss another boy without worrying that he’ll drop down dead at my feet? Am I making it all about me?

But it isn’t, or it shouldn’t be. It’s about Dan. How he died. And who was responsible. Because if someone left me that note, it means that there’s more to this than came out at the inquest. At least one person knows more than they’re telling. And I’m not going to let things rest till I find out who they are and what really happened that night on Nadia’s terrace. I think about his family, and how upset they must be. I remember his parents being at the inquest, but I was so out of it with my own misery and confusion that I don’t remember them; I can’t picture them; I have no image of what they look like. But it must be the worst thing in the world to have your son dead and not even know how it happened.

And right now, it looks as if I’m the only person with any chance of finding the answer to that mystery.

Because whoever was responsible certainly isn’t telling.