A Royal Match (9 page)

To be fair, she knew what a horrible thing she’d done before she’d read out his name, but it was too late – the
damage was done.

‘You complete and utter slut,’ Honey shouted, pulling her head back in from the window where she’d been blowing out her cigarette smoke. Then she came over and slapped me hard across the face.

Even Georgina looked horrified.

Star screamed at her, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get out, you absolute bitch!’

I started to cry. I couldn’t help it. It was all just too much. One minute I was the envy of all, with my fake boyfriend, the next minute I was being vilified because an HRH fancied me. Also, my face stung. I’d never been slapped before.

Honey was just standing there, and I was worried she wanted to have an all-out fight, so I was glad when Georgina said, ‘Look, Honey, I think you should leave.’

Honey flounced out of the room, followed by Georgina, Arabella and Clementine. Clemmie cast me a sympathetic look, but I threw myself onto my bed and sobbed.

Star was really sweet and said I should have been singing from the rooftops, having received a summons from royalty.

She was the best friend ever and suddenly I felt really guilty about ever wanting to be in with the cool girls and making her put up with Honey and the others, just to satisfy my egotistical wishes.

Actually I’d started to think that Georgina might not be so bad. And not just because she called me darling, but
because she seemed to understand my humour, and she’d helped me out with my bedding when Misty had weed all over it. God, I was so stupid.

‘I’m really sorry about reading out the letter,’ Star told me.

‘It’s OK. You weren’t to know.’

She passed me some lip-gloss. ‘Wear your pain like lip-gloss…. Besides, you’ve still got me.’ We had a big cuddle. ‘And Jay!’

But that just made me start crying again.

‘Calypso, it isn’t that bad, really. Who cares about bloody Honey?’

‘It’s not that,’ I told her, trying not to cry anymore. ‘It’s Jay.’

‘What? You’re not being paranoid, are you? Seriously, he just wrote to you! He must really like you.’

‘I’m not being paranoid,’ I told her. And then it all came tumbling out. ‘He’s my mom’s gay PA.’

And then she cuddled me even harder, only it was a wobbly sort of cuddle because she was laughing so hard. ‘You are so mad! Gay?’

She was laughing so hard now that she fell on the floor. ‘Gay Jay, your mum’s PA!’

And then even I had to laugh, because I hadn’t realised how it all rhymed before. After that, I told her the whole tragic tale of my pathetic attempt to fit in with Georgina and her cool pod of friends. Star didn’t get it – well, I didn’t expect she would – but I felt better having told her,
although I was now petrified that someone would walk in and hear her singing, ‘Gay Jay, my
mum’s
PA,’ which I couldn’t get her to stop doing for ages.

Eventually I turned the conversation around to parents generally, and Star did her impressions of her parents and their friends when they were stoned. ‘You know … like, stop crying, man, you’re freaking me out.’

It all felt so comfortable, Star and I alone and just being how we’d always been, that I almost forgot about Honey and the trouble I was going to be in. But then Star reminded me by asking what I planned to do. We both knew bad things were about to happen.

It is a law at Saint Augustine’s that you don’t pull boys that other girls have already declared their territory – especially when that girl is Honey O’Hare. In a school where bitchiness was a currency, Honey was filthy rich. I had seen her destroy girls in the past.

When we were in Year Nine, a girl from Year Seven called Josephine annoyed Honey by being disrespectful towards her. I don’t even know what she said, but Honey mounted a relentless campaign against her and pretty soon Josephine was crying herself to sleep every night. By the end of term she was self-mutilating – cutting herself with blades from the art room. The school tried to get her parents to visit her more to reassure her, but they refused, saying Josephine would just have to deal with the problem, which even the meanest teacher in the school would agree was really mean. Eventually the school suggested to her
parents that Josephine might not be suited to boarding school life.

Honey went around the school with a big grin on her face for weeks after that. I was pretty sure I didn’t have the guts to self-mutilate, being as grossed out by blood as I am, but I was definitely going to be crying myself to sleep.

It wasn’t long before Honey came screaming back into the room, shrieking at the top of her voice, ‘You are so dead, bitch!’

Then she grabbed the letter from Freddie and tore it into about a million pieces. OK, maybe not a million – but only because she didn’t get the chance. Georgina managed to grab it from her, so she only managed to tear it in half.

Arabella, Star and Clementine pulled her off me, because by then she had grabbed my head and started pulling my hair out, while spitting obscenities into my face and telling me about the various painful ways I was going to be murdered.

A crowd of girls was gathering outside in the corridor, trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on. I was rubbing my head and trying to gather my thoughts together, when Misty came in and started barking. Shortly after that, Miss Cribbe came in with her knitting and threw everyone out of the room, apart from Star, Georgina and me.

Misty squatted as if about to wee, and Miss Cribbe shooed her out too and went bright red. If Misty hadn’t done that, I am pretty sure we would have been in big trouble.

My mobile started ringing, but Miss Cribbe took it from me before I could answer it, saying that it was time for lights out – even though it was only nine-thirty and lights out was officially meant to be ten! None of us argued, though.

I couldn’t get to sleep that night.

‘Are you awake?’ Georgina asked me after the lights had been out for a while.

My head was still hurting from Honey pulling my hair and I could still feel the sting of the slap on my cheek. Georgina was Honey’s best friend and I couldn’t help being a bit scared of what she might say or do. So I didn’t say anything.

Georgina went on. ‘Personally, I think Honey is overreacting, darling.’

Her words seemed to echo in my head. I thought of all the benchmark moments of the term – how she’d called me darling, stood up for me, given me her duvet when Misty weed on mine. Then I recalled all the other benchmark moments of my time at Saint Augustine’s and the way Georgina and Honey had isolated me so terribly and made me feel like the school freak.

Star was muttering in her sleep.

‘Darling?’ Georgina repeated.

I suppose I took it as a good sign that at least she was still deigning to call me darling.

‘I didn’t ask him to write to me,’ I explained. ‘It’s not my fault. Can’t you make Honey see that?’

‘Arabella told me about the whole duelling thing you had with him.’

‘But I didn’t ask him to write!’ I repeated.

For a long time she didn’t say anything and I was left hanging by a thread, afraid of being back in the freak seat again.

‘Honey has a lot of issues,’ she said, after what seemed like half an hour – I’d almost fallen asleep. ‘Seriously … a lot of issues.’

Hello
, like I hadn’t noticed! The insane bitch had just tried to murder me. ‘Oh, I didn’t know,’ I replied softly.

‘Yaah, there’s all sorts of stuff going on between her mum and her latest step-dad-to-be, Lord Aginet.’

Good. A part of me was glad she was having a horrible time of it at home. ‘Oh, that’s sad,’ I said.

‘But Arabella and Clementine stood up for you, darling.’

I tried not to make too much of the fact that she hadn’t added herself to that list and just said, ‘That’s sweet of them.’ Then I thought, Well, maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe it would be all right. Maybe I wouldn’t be totally vilified by everyone in my year and be forced to hide in cupboards for the rest of term. Maybe I would go to the social, pull Freddie and be the envy of everyone. Maybe I would be accepted for who I was and judged by more important things than my accent.

‘Obviously, you still can’t go to the social, though, darling.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yaah. Also, darling, if you did go, Honey would so totally kill you.’

The fact that she’d called me darling didn’t dilute the poison in her words. ‘Oh?’

‘My advice is be sick and spend the night in the infirmary.’

Be sick or be dead is what she meant.

The next morning I woke up with a pounding head and it wasn’t just because Miss Cribbe had banged her wretched gong for ten minutes while I tried to hide under my duvet.

I always get the most horrendous headaches before my period’s due. Eventually Miss Cribbe decided I wasn’t faking it – or maybe her own head had started to ache from her gonging – so she sent me down to the infirmary where the much-hated Sister Dumpster (real name Sister Dempster) was no doubt waiting to torture me or poison me (depending on how sadistic she was feeling).

There are two sisters in charge of the infirmary: Sister Dumpster (not a nun, but an actual professional nurse who specialised in the demeaning and torturing of children) and dear little Sister Regina (an actual nun), who handed
out the Co-codamol like there was no tomorrow.

My mom says you shouldn’t take more than six pills in a twenty-four-hour period and that actually it’s not even an over-the-counter medication in the States. But Sister Regina says ‘pish’ to that and plies you with them until you feel better again.

Sister Dumpster says ‘pish’ to the six-a-day rule as well. In fact, she says ‘pish’ to Co-codamol altogether. She did her nursing training in an era when child cruelty and sadism were in their heyday: ‘A temperature of one hundred and fifty degrees? Why, that’s nothing. In my day we said “tish-tosh” to a temperature like that. These days, you girls want it all your own way,’ etc, etc,
ad nauseum
.

For some reason Sister Dumpster is
always
on duty when I am sent to the infirmary.

But miracles do happen (as Sister Constance is always reminding us) and it wasn’t Sister Dumpster that morning, it was sweet little Sister Regina.

‘Poor Miss Kelly, now you just lie down here, and I’ll get you a sanitary napkin and some Co-codamol.’

She tucked me up in one of the horrendously uncomfortable infirmary beds, which I’m convinced are all from World War II and still smell of sick soldiers. The springs in them are so ancient, and make so much noise that you can’t relax, let alone sleep.

Whenever you go to the infirmary for period pain, the sisters insist on handing out these pads that look like skis. The story is that the nuns were given shed-loads of them
in the last century, and they are still trying to get through them all. Seriously though, you could go white-water rafting on them they are so enormous.

In the Easter break I’d finally got the hang of tampons, but I wasn’t going to discuss such modern advances in personal hygiene with Sister Regina, who probably wasn’t even aware that they’d had been invented.

I said thank you and gave her a hug, because she was just trying to be sweet, and nun hugs are so lovely, smelling as nuns do of incense and flowers that they pick to decorate the chapel and the gazillion statues of Mary and Jesus that are dotted about the school.

After I’d knocked back my pills and my headache had subsided, Sister Regina gave me another one of her little hugs and said I may as well miss the morning classes and rest until lunch break. I think she was feeling a bit bored so together we read the copy of
Teen Vogue
that I’d brought back from LA, and she said how none of the models could touch me for looks and poise.

The nuns all love the word ‘poise.’ Maybe because it is one of the few things they were able to hang on to when they gave up everything – like make-up and cool shoes – when they took their vows. Still, it was very sweet of her to say (even if it wasn’t true).

She said she found it perplexing that any girl would want a job like that – standing about all day having her picture taken.

Actually, she’s probably right. I don’t suppose it would be nice being a model, apart from the money side of it, of course, although apparently lots of models make virtually nothing – just like actresses in LA. Also, I bet you’d always be worried about people saying mean things about your weight, or saying your nose was too big. Though according to Star they airbrush out all your nasty bits – and Kate Moss might be the size of a house, for all we knew.

I eventually left Sister Regina just before the bell rang for lunch, and took a detour via the pet shed so I could have a quick cuddle with Arabesque. I always felt a bit disloyal going to visit Arabesque, because I knew Star would rather my affections lay with Hilda and Brian. But the truth is, I much prefer cuddly rabbits to rats and snakes.

I did check on Hilda, though, who was running along on her little rat wheel in her usual demented fashion. But, honestly, how excited can you get about a rat? Star goes on and on about how intelligent rats are, and I’m sure she’s right, but I wasn’t really looking for witty repartee from a pet, so I moved swiftly on to the rabbit area where Arabesque was softly sleeping. See, that’s what so sweet about rabbits – they do everything so softly.