Pep Squad (12 page)

As she opened the door from the bathroom to her dorm, Emily sprang at her, grabbing her by the forearm and bouncing up and down.

‘Guess what? Guess what? Guess what?' said Emily, more excited than Jess had ever seen her.

Matt and Ben were sitting on Jess's bed, grinning.

‘What?' asked Jess, pulling her robe more tightly around herself.

‘We've found out something very interesting about Svetlana and Krivan,' said Emily.

‘Listen to this!' said Ben, popping the earpiece from a ROACH into Jess's ear. Something high-pitched and discordant flooded her eardrum.

‘What is that noise?' she said, yanking the earpiece out of her ear and twisting Ben's wrist around so she could see the armband display.

Emily shoved the earpiece in her own ear enthusiastically, then screwed up her face.

‘I'm not sure but I think it's a balalaika,' she said.

‘Svetlana and Krivan have been making not-so-beautiful music together,' said Ben.

The tiny image on the monitor showed Krivan and Svetlana sitting cross-legged facing each other, two long-necked string instruments with triangular bodies on their laps. As Jess watched, Krivan and Svetlana began opening and closing their mouths at the same time.

‘What the …?'

‘Oh, you should hear this!' said Emily, pulling the earpiece out of her own ear and poking it back in Jess's.

Krivan and Svetlana were singing, or trying to. Jess yanked the earpiece out of her ear. ‘Glad you guys have been putting your time to good use.'

‘Where were you anyway?' asked Emily.

‘Trying out for the musical,' said Jess.

Emily and the twins looked at each other.

‘Why?' asked Matt.

‘Miss Ball insisted,' said Jess.

‘And?' asked Ben.

‘I'm lead monkey.'

‘Lead monkey?' laughed Matt.

‘The Wicked Witch of the West has monkey minions, and I'm the most important one. It's a pivotal role,' giggled Jess.

‘What sort of stuff will you be doing?'

‘Some acrobatics. With a tail and big ears.'

‘Neat,' said Ben, popping the ROACH earpiece back into his ear before yanking it out again. ‘It says a lot for the ROACH that it's able to withstand that sort of abusive treatment. I'm steering it home now before any permanent damage is done.'

‘What a shame it's too late to put that in your assignment,' said Jess. ‘Why do you still have a ROACH anyway?'

‘Herr Klug was quite impressed with my assignment, so he let me keep one to perform some further tests,' said Ben proudly.

‘You know, maybe it isn't transmitting properly and Svetlana really has a beautiful singing voice,' said Matt.

‘She doesn't,' said Jess. ‘You've heard her in Music.'

‘She's like one of those sirens from Greek mythology, whose beauty and song lures sailors onto the rocks …' said Matt dreamily.

‘That's it. Get out of my room,' said Jess. ‘I've had a tough afternoon and I'm hungry, and I can hardly go to dinner looking like this.'

‘OK. See you there,' said Ben, shepherding Matt out of the room.

‘How did they get the ROACH to find Svetlana anyway?' Jess said as she towel-dried her hair.

‘The way Matt follows Svetlana around, he could have easily slipped the ROACH into one of her pockets,' suggested Emily.

‘Not that easily,' countered Jess. ‘She never lets him get within touching distance.'

‘Snuck it into her bag?' said Emily.

‘Or maybe walked it under the door of her dorm,' said Jess, pulling her robe tightly around her as something scurried in under theirs.

Resisting the urge to step on it (mainly because she was barefoot), Jess picked up the ROACH with her thumb and forefinger and spoke directly to it.

‘If I see this thing anywhere near my dorm again, not only will I squish it, I'll report you to Signora Enigmistica.'

There was an immediate knock at the door.

‘Sorry. Don't know how that happened,' said Matt.

Jess dropped the ROACH into his outstretched hand and slammed the door.

‘Can you believe that?' she said to Emily.

‘I'd believe anything from Matt,' said Emily. ‘The thing I want to know is how many more ROACHes have scurried in here without us knowing while we're getting dressed or having a shower?'

‘I don't want to think about it,' said Jess shuddering, before rolling her towel up and shoving it against the bottom of the door frame.

When the alarm went off at 6:15 the following morning, Jess felt like she'd never left. The morning training session was brutal, especially after the audition the previous afternoon, but nowhere near as tough as double Chinese. In the period before lunch, Miss Kwan was holding up pictures of people and asking the class to describe them. When it came to Jess's turn, instead of saying ‘The girl is wearing a yellow skirt,' she accidentally said, ‘The city is eating a boat.'

The whole class burst out laughing. Even Emily, who tried to be as supportive of Jess in Chinese as possible, had a fit of the giggles.

‘This is too hard!' said Jess, exasperated, in English.

‘No English in this class,' said Miss Kwan in Chinese. ‘Please say it again.'

Jess racked her brain to come up with the translation.

‘My tooth is pregnant,' she said in Chinese.

The class, including Miss Kwan, convulsed with laughter.

‘What did I say?' an embarrassed Jess tried to say in Chinese, but it came out as ‘Horse soup.'

The sound of the bell was barely audible above the raucous laughter, but Jess had been listening out for it and was already on her way to the refectory.

She was halfway through her meal by the time Emily and the twins sat down beside her.

‘I'm so hungry I could eat a
horse
,' said Ben loudly.

Jess ignored him and kept on eating.

‘Mmmm.
Soup
. I wonder what flavour it is?' said Matt, scooping a chunk of meat out of his broth and examining it closely.

Jess pretended she couldn't hear.

‘Darn it!' said Emily. ‘I forgot condiments. Does anybody else want
horse
radish sauce with their roast beef?'

‘Hmph,' said Jess under her breath.

‘What was that?' said Ben, leaning towards Jess with his hand cupped around his ear. ‘I couldn't hear you properly. You're sounding a bit
hoarse
.'

‘Enough!' said Jess loudly, finally looking up at her grinning friends.

‘I've missed this,' said Matt.

‘Yeah, good times,' said Jess, trying to keep a grumpy face, but failing.

‘It could be worse,' said Emily. ‘We had a whole heap of monkey jokes ready, but they'll keep until next time. What've we got next?'

‘Drama,' said Ben, consulting his timetable.

‘I hope it's improv,' said Emily. ‘I've got a lot more horse material up here,' she said, tapping her head.

To Jess's disgust, the Drama lesson
was
all about improv.

‘Method acting,' began Signora Enigmistica, ‘uses techniques to take on the true persona of your character to create a lifelike performance. In the post-graduation world, of course, lifelike will not be good enough. You must create a watertight performance when you are undercover if you want to fulfil your mission and stay alive.

‘Most method actors draw on emotions and experiences from their past to identify with the role of their character. Since the average age in this classroom is sixteen – excluding myself from the calculation – that doesn't give you a lot of experience or emotion to draw on, so we need to circumvent the process.

‘What I want you to do now is close your eyes and think about the first time you were scared, truly scared, by another person.'

Jess thought about a bully from primary school who had grabbed the front of her school jumper and shoved her up against a wall when she was six. Ever since then Jess had hated anything touching her throat.

‘Now,' said Signora Enigmistica, ‘I want you to imagine the scene you have just remembered from your
counterpart's
perspective. That man, or woman, or boy, or girl who scared you so much. Think about why they scared you. What motivated them? Did they enjoy scaring you? What would possess an individual to do such a thing?'

Jess thought hard. She'd always thought of the bully from primary school as nothing more than that. A bully. Trying to put herself in his shoes was completely distasteful.

‘Think of everything you can remember about the person,' continued Signora Enigmistica. ‘Their age, occupation, family status. How they may have perceived
you
at the time of the incident.'

Jess recalled what she knew about the boy. Suddenly something clicked. The boy who Jess feared had been the eldest in a single-parent family. He had probably been under additional pressure from his mother to help raise the younger children when what he really needed was parenting himself. Watching Jess playing happy families with her primary-school friends was probably more than he could bear. But she still hated him for what he had done.

‘From the looks on your faces, I can see most of you have finished the exercise,' said Signora Enigmistica. ‘You may open your eyes and come and take one of these character cards. They will have some basics like age, occupation, nationality, key events in your character's past, greatest desire and so on. You are to
become
that person for the remainder of the lesson.'

Jess couldn't believe it when the card she drew described a Polish heiress who was fixing horse races.

Emily had a field day. She hardly uttered a sentence that didn't contain the word horse. The whole class was in convulsions. Eventually an exasperated Signora Enigmistica made the situation even worse by saying, ‘This is a serious exercise. That's enough horse play.'

Even the most diligent cadets fell out of character then, reverting to their fifteen- and sixteen-year-old selves.

The only thing that finally snapped Emily out of it was when Krivan galloped past them in the hall on the way to dinner, whinnying. After uttering some choice words to Krivan, Emily lowered her voice and grumbled, ‘Honestly, some people just don't know when a joke's gone too far.'

Once they'd all tucked into their food, Lieutenant Parry pulled up a chair beside them. ‘Mind if I eat with you guys?' he asked.

Jess and Ben shifted their chairs to make room for him.

‘How was the first day back?' asked Lieutenant Parry.

Emily got a cheeky grin on her face and opened her mouth to say something, but quickly shut it again when Jess shot her a death stare.

‘Great,' said Matt.

‘Got much homework?' asked the lieutenant.

‘Nothing we can't handle,' said Jess.

‘Even better,' said Lieutenant Parry, handing out some printouts.

‘What are these?' asked Ben.

‘Pre-reading for this week's Fieldwork Fundamentals.'

‘You mean,' said Emily, slamming down her paper, ‘if we read this, we'll know what we're doing on Saturday?'

‘Put it this way,' said Lieutenant Parry, ‘if you don't read it, there's no way you're getting behind the wheel of a five hundred-horsepower race car.'

Jess held her breath, but the others were too excited about the prospect of gunning it around a racetrack to bother making any horsey comments.

By Saturday morning all the transition-year cadets were buzzing with excitement as they gathered in the foyer.

‘I should be able to skip this one,' bragged Emily. ‘I bet I can out-drive anyone here, including the instructors.'

‘Why don't you go back to your dorm and skip it then, Miss Petrolhead, so we don't have to listen to you showing off?' said Ben.

‘Do you think they'll give us regular cars or start us off in Formula 1 machines?' asked Matt, having visions of himself as James Bond, driving through the Alps in an Aston Martin.

‘They've probably got their own P.E.P. Squad invisible spy cars,' said Jess.

A large bus with
Theruse Abbey
painted on the side drove up with Lieutenant Parry in the driver's seat. Herr Klug was seated at the front of the bus holding a microphone. During the twenty-minute drive to the speedway he kept firing questions at the cadets devised from the pre-reading material – from how internal combustion engines work to what gear the car should be in if you're travelling up a thirty-degree incline.

‘Well, it's not invisible,' said Emily as they piled out of the bus and clustered around the American stock car sitting on the track. It had an internal cage around the driver and passenger seats and a reinforced roof.

‘I doubt any of you will roll the car today,' said Lieutenant Parry, ‘but, like everything we do, it's safety first. Emily, how about you take my friend Herr Klug here for a test drive?'

Herr Klug put on a crash helmet and gave Emily one to wear.

‘Everyone else back behind this barricade,' said Lieutenant Parry, gesturing to the cadets to get off the track.

‘Fast as you like,' Herr Klug said to Emily.

Emily gunned the engine and took off with tyres squealing. She sped around the racetrack, taking the curves smoothly. She flew across the finish line then did a handbrake turn which spun the car back to face the line, leaving four concentric circles of thick tyre marks and stopping with the front bumper exactly on the line.

‘I've seen enough,' said Signora Enigmistica, stepping out of a black Ferrari which had drawn up next to the bus in the centre of the racetrack. ‘Emily, come with me.'

‘I get to drive
this
?' squealed Emily, making a beeline for the driver's side.

‘Hardly,' said Signora Enigmistica, jerking her thumb at the passenger side.

Emily hopped in and Signora Enigmistica roared out of the stadium.

‘OK, Jess. You're up,' said Lieutenant Parry.

Jess put her helmet on and slid into the driver's seat. Only then did she notice that the car had dual controls.

‘Just in case we get into a serious spot of bother,' explained Herr Klug.

Jess turned the ignition.

‘Now remember your theory lesson. Press in the clutch, put it into first gear, then let the clutch out slowly and ease down the accelerator – slowly!' said Herr Klug as the car bunny-hopped and stalled. ‘Let's try that again.'

Jess turned the key in the ignition and the car leapt forward as the engine died a second time.

‘Take the car out of gear first,' said Herr Klug.

‘Right,' said Jess.

She did everything a little more smoothly this time and the car took off slowly.

‘A little more pressure on the accelerator – I said a little,' said Herr Klug, as the engine roared in protest, ‘now ease off the accelerator and clutch in, change to second, then let the clutch out sloooowly and press the accelerator gently.'

The car jerked forward but didn't stall.

‘Better,' said Herr Klug. ‘Now let's go a little faster and change up to third.'

Jess started to feel like she was getting the hang of it.

‘Not bad,' said Herr Klug. ‘We're almost back to the start line, so brake gently.'

Jess pressed on the brake and the car shuddered to a stop.

‘Oops – forgot to remind you to put the clutch in when you're stopping. Keep that in mind next time.'

Jess got out of the car and passed the helmet to Matt.

Just then a helicopter soared over the speedway and Jess spotted two familiar-looking figures in the cockpit.

‘Is that Emily?' shouted Jess over the noise as it roared past.

‘She has car driving down pat, so we thought we'd give her a different sort of vehicle to try,' said Lieutenant Parry. ‘Now off the racetrack.'

Jess scurried behind the barricade as Matt turned on the ignition.

‘Was that Emily in the helicopter?' Ben asked as Jess joined the rest of the class.

‘Yep. She's going to be unbearable this evening,' said Jess.