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  The triplets raised their hands in front of their faces at the exact same time and in the exact same way as they emitted the exact same sarcastic “ooo, scared” impression.

  Jinx looked at Chastity, Liv looked at Charlie and the four of them settled happily into the nearest sofa, no further overtures required.

  When Mr. Morris tried to pop his head round the door a couple of hours later to enquire about the high noise levels coming from the common room, he found his path blocked by an intractable Igor. Despite Mr. Morris’s anger with the stubborn bodyguard, Igor refused to stand aside and let the housemaster though the door, thus giving the girls a few precious minutes to stow the vodka bottles in the games cupboard, open the windows and spray a load of Irina’s uber-expensive, limited edition Solange Agazury-Partridge’s Stoned perfume around the room to mask the smell of the black cigarettes. Mr. Morris probably wouldn’t have cared anyway. He was renowned for his easygoing attitude towards the girls under his care, whom he regarded as young adults and treated accordingly—letting them smoke in the garage outside reception so long as they cleaned up the butts on a regular basis and keep alcohol in moderation in their rooms. All the girls loved him, but Igor clearly didn’t know—or give a shit about—any of that.

  Although she was pretty trashed by now, Jinx nudged Chastity, pointed at the inflexible Igor and gave her the thumbs up sign. “S’brilliant,” she slurred.

  Mr. Morris frowned as he switched off the common room lights and made his way to his small flat at the side of the main house.

  5 First Assembly

  “SO,” Mrs. Bennett Said. She gripped the edge of the eagle-shaped, maple-carved lectern on the dais in front of her, vastly enjoying the sound of her own sonorous voice as it echoed pleasingly around the cavernous, wood-paneled assembly hall, where Stagmount’s entire student body and staff had gathered to hear her first day of term speech. “In summation, I am going to announce the head girl of each year.”

  “Oh God,” whispered Jinx, nudging Chastity and pointing at dreaded Daisy Finnegan, who’d positively reveled in her role as chief lower-sixth pen pusher and suck-up throughout last term. “I just know she’s going to be it again. Look at her—I can’t bear it!”

  They had woken up with terrible headaches at seven o’clock and lain around giggling raucously at absolutely nothing whilst they waited to give Liberty a heroine’s welcome back to Stagmount. They had killed—or rather, toasted—a few croissants and brewed a carafe of Jamaican ground coffee beans they’d found in the back of a store cupboard in her honour. Unfortunately, and as Mr. Morris told them when he and Myrtle the dog emerged, yawning, at ten to eight, Liberty’s plane was delayed on the ground at Heathrow, so she wouldn’t be back at school until at least morning break time.

  “Look,” hissed Chastity in Jinx’s ear as the two of them leaned over to the left to peer at Daisy, who was sitting a few rows in front and to the side of them. “She’s pretending to be all casual about it, but check out how white her knuckles have gone clenching the front of that pew.”

  “Puke indeed,” giggled Jinx, deliberately mishearing and flicking a deeply satisfying V sign at Daisy when she turned round to glare self-importantly in the general direction of the muffled noise they were making. “I’d like to blow chunks all over her. And maybe,” she continued with a most undignified snort, “I’ll do just that when we get out of here. My tummy feels like it needs a good old clean-out.”

  “To be fair,” Chastity whispered back, “you could probably easily do it if you just got a whiff of her death breath. In fact, you could probably do it right here right now just thinking about it.”

  Jinx wrinkled her nose in disgust but had no chance to respond, for Mrs. Bennett chose that very second to loudly announce, “And our penultimate head girl, for the lower sixth form and for the second term in a row, is Daisy Finnegan.”

  Daisy stood up and smirked smugly around the room as her appointment was acknowledged by the sounds of some very forced and feeble clapping. She looked on the brink of saying a few no-doubt exceedingly well-prepared words, but closed her mouth again as Mrs. Bennett fixed her with an icy stare. Daisy smoothed a lock of greasy ginger hair from where it had escaped the straggly ponytail she usually wore high on her head before sitting back down, the infuriatingly smug expression still plastered across her greasy face.

  “Who is that?” Irina asked Jinx, leaning over to whisper in her ear from the row behind. “We’ve never seen her before. Is she in our year?”

  “Yep,” muttered Jinx. She had no idea which of the sisters had addressed her, and kept a beady eye on the teachers, who were lined up in diagonal rows on either side of Mrs. Bennett and were beginning to crane their necks and shoot pointed glares in their general direction. “Unfortunately she is. We’ll fill you in later.”

  “Quod Denique.” Mrs. Bennett permitted herself a small titter at the vast sea of faces staring blankly back at her—she just loved to throw Latin words and phrases into ordinary conversation. “Or, for those of you who haven’t been paying quite as much attention to your homework as you should be, and--”

  “Get on with it, for fuck’s sake!” whispered Liv to Charlie, who tittered nervously as she noticed Miss Strimmer and Miss Golly, Stagmount’s much-hated sports staff turning the twin laser beams of their furious eyes towards her.

  “--last but not least,” continued Mrs. Bennett, sending a silent prayer heavenwards that this was indeed the case, for she had left this appointment to the bursar, “I would like to introduce Mr. Dirk Hanson, Stagmount’s first-ever football and cricket teacher. Where are you, Mr. Hanson?”

  Mrs. B. didn’t need to look around for long. Within seconds, an impressively stacked man of about thirty-five was racing from the back of the hall to the front, a streak of lime green in a heavily branded Adidas tracksuit with white stripes down each leg. The girls were too busy staring in wonder at him to say anything, and Mrs. Bennett stood stock still behind her lectern, staring just as hard.

  At the very last moment before he reached the stage, and just when it looked like he was going to crash into the front of it, Mr. Dirk Hanson threw himself into the air and performed a backwards-forwards roll in mid-flight. He jackknifed before landing on his hands next to the very shocked headmistress. He flick-flacked himself into normal standing position and, as he did so, every single person in the room got an eyeful of the exact outline of his package through the thin fabric of his sportswear trousers.

  “Fucking hell,” guffawed Jinx, whose jaw was nearly on the floor, “did you see that? I think he did it on purpose. He is hilarious!”

  “Don’t you mean did I see those?” replied Chastity, laughing just as hard. “He looks like a total prick but imagine the fun we’re going to have with him.”

  “Where do we sign up?” agreed Liv. “I don’t think spring term has ever looked like this much fun before.”

  “Hello girls,” drawled Mr. Hanson, smoothing his gelled hair back into place, smug in his belief that he was cutting something of a dash up there onstage in front of all these little ladies, his tracksuit perfectly complementing his St. Tropez-tanned face and torso. “I’d prefer to be called Coach—if, of course, that is agreeable to Mrs. Bennett?” Any doubts that his question was anything other than rhetorical were proved false when he carried on without waiting for an answer, flashing the headmistress his most blinding smile in consolation. “Coach D. Hanson.”

  Although Mrs. Bennett was seething inside, apart from a small shake of the head she regained her outer poise remarkably quickly. “Well, if that’s what you are used to, then that is what the girls must call you. Coach D. Hanson everybody,” she said, sounding for all the world as if she was introducing a new act at a cabaret night. “I’m sure you will find lists of his various training sessions on the sports board. That’s it. Here’s to a great term; school dismissed!”

  The entire school filed out of the room in Mrs. Bennett’s wake but at a much slower pace than her breezy exit, and wit
h about a trillion decibels more noise as they avidly discussed the newcomer.

  “I have never,” said Olga to her sisters as they traipsed towards the door, followed by a dark-suited Igor, “seen anything like him in my life.”

  “I know,” said Masha with a giggle, waving as they passed a few girls from the upper sixth before they caught up with the girls from their new class. “It is most odd, but I have suddenly acquired a strong desire to learn to play cricket and football.”

  “Me too,” smirked Charlie. “It’s funny, that. Come on dudettes, let’s hit the notice boards before they get swamped!”

  6 Mrs. C. Has the Hots

  Stagmount’s corridor, Which had the dubious claim to fame of being the longest in any building in England, was filled to bursting point with girls of all shapes, sizes, ages, and hairstyles clustered around the sports area of the notice boards. Seeing the glamorous lower sixth make their approach, a gaggle of younger girls instantly melted away from the team lists and training schedules they had been busily rifling through and stood respectfully aside.

  The girls giggled as they noticed that some joker had already crossed out the coach’s name at the top of the list and written “DIRK DIGGLER” in thick black marker in its place. The three pay phones opposite all had long lines of junior girls who were not permitted to have cellphones, waiting impatiently to speak to their parents and beg them to sign the permission slips needed for any extra lessons in the lower school.

  To the casual observer, the mud-stained brown carpet and newly painted pale-lemon walls belied nothing more unusual than a walkway to math. To the girls, though, the corridor was the site on which feuds and promises were hung, drawn, and quartered before being squeezed dry of every last shred of gossip. It was used by all years at all times and was thus an emotional hotbed of various jealousies, hatreds, admiration, and crushes. The latter were always, always, directed from younger girls to older ones.

  Queenbees of all ages and their cliques reigned supreme and side-by-side, but were always careful not to tread on the toes of anyone older than they. Protocol simply insisted upon it.

  A first year, for example, would rather walk on hot coals than have to pass a big group of six formers, who would be far too wrapped up in their friends or whatever it was they were looking at to even notice the junior’s passing. The junior, conversely, would think of “the encounter”—as it invariably became in her mind—for weeks.

  So Jinx and the rest paid no attention to the younger girls, who had all removed themselves to a respectful distance as the lower sixth made a beeline for the training lists. They had been in awe of the sixth-formers when they’d been in the lower school, and it was simply the natural order of life that the lower years should now be in awe of them. The unquestioning adoration directed at the girls of the sixth was helped by the fact that as soon as they reached the sixth form, school rules exempted the girls from wearing the school’s dreary uniform. The more fashionable amongst the sixth had even earned a slavish following amongst a group of third-years who actually kept notes on who wore what when. The Russians, Liberty, and Chastity all featured in this list, but the rest of them wore their skinny jeans and leopard-print ballet pumps too often to be counted. Needless to say, and hilarious as they would have found it, none of them had any idea of its existence.

  True to form, the lower sixth hardly even registered the younger girls’ existence as they shrieked and laughed and clutched each other whilst reminiscing about their new football teacher’s antics that morning in assembly. He’d only been at the school for about five minutes but was already approaching mythical status.

  “Bloody hell,” snorted Liv with sarcastically exaggerated disbelief as she eyed the A4 pages lining the cork board. “Look at this. Not one of Coach D. Hanson’s junior training sessions has a single space left in it.”

  “God,” Jinx replied, looking over the same lists with a knowing smirk. “It’s amazing what a quick flash can do for a Stagmountian’s sporting ambitions.”

  “All the little ones will be growing crushes on that terrible man as fast as you can say ‘prick,’” agreed Chastity, not noticing the large number of red faces this remark caused amongst the girls still waiting for them to finish with the board.

  “We are signing, aren’t we?” asked Irina, confused.

  “Of course we’re signing, um, love,” Jinx said, having privately decided last night that she was never going to refer to the triplets by name again, patting who she thought was Masha on the shoulder. “None of us is going to miss getting down and dirky for anything. Ooo,” she said suddenly to Chastity, who was writing her name at the top of the sixth-form list with a flourish. “Make sure you put Lib down, too; she’ll kill us if we forget her!”

  All signed up, the girls linked arms and trailed off in the direction of classroom 4B, where they had to meet their tutor, eccentric Mrs. Carpenter, to get their timetables for the term, giggling nonstop about Coach D. Hanson and his acrobatics show that morning.

  “Hey,” Liv said as they pushed open the door, “do you think he’d been practicing all night? We should call him Coach V. Handsome from now on. He obviously fancies himself enough.”

  Roaring with laughter, the girls settled into their usual seats. Chastity and Jinx sat next to each other in the very centre of the back row, leaving the seat on Jinx’s right-hand side free for Liberty to claim when she got back. Liv sat next to Chastity and Charlie sat on the other side of Liberty, closest to the big picture window that looked out over the playing fields towards the sea. The five of them had shared every back-row opportunity they could for the last three and a half years and—apart from when Charlie had been forced into giving up her seat to the dreaded Stella Fox for most of last term—had no intention of changing anything just because they were now in the sixth form.

  Mrs. C. wafted into the room in an overpowering cloud of Bulgari perfume, clutching her mug of strong coffee and dressed in one of her customary all black and very stylish outfits accessorized with various pieces of chunky silver jewelry. She beamed around the room as she swung herself into her ergonomic chair and shuffled a bunch of papers on her desk.

  “Well girls,” she said, leaning forward conspiratorially and smiling around the room, a sure sign to her class that she remained as gloriously indiscreet as ever, “I’m sure I hardly need to ask what you thought of that little display.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, Mrs. C.,” Liv piped up, “we’re all signed up and ready to learn the offside rule or whatever it’s called. We’ll keep you posted, for sure.”

  “Excellent work, Olivia,” replied Mrs. C., using the exact same tone of voice she would have employed if Liv had just turned in a perfectly written composition or scored straight A’s in a series of tests. She was clearly in one of her extremely good moods. “Please make sure that you do. Now then.” She took a great gulp of her coffee and looked round the room again, more purposefully this time. “Am I right in understanding we have three new friends joining us this term?”

  Irina, Olga, and Masha waved prettily at Mrs. C. from where they were sitting in a huddle underneath the window. She stood up to welcome them before suddenly spotting Igor, who was being his usual intractable self and sitting silently in the middle of the empty row behind them.

  “Oh,” she murmured, patting her hair and sitting back down rather suddenly. “Hello.”

  The barest ghost of a smile seemed to flicker about Igor’s mouth before disappearing entirely.

  “I don’t believe it,” hissed Jinx at Chastity. “Look at her! She fancies him! What the bloody hell is going on round here? Is there something in the water, do you reckon?”

  “This,” replied Chastity, an expression of sheer delight etched across her face, “is going to be a very interesting term indeed. What with one thing and another I reckon we’re in for a bit of a rollercoaster ride.”

  7 The Discovery

  Jinx, Chastity, Liv, and Charlie sat clustered around the end of one of the long t
ables in the lower dining rooms where the whole school rushed at half past ten every morning to gorge themselves with hot teas and sugar-coated carbs to ward off hunger pangs in the notoriously tricky hours between break and lunch. Heads bent close together and brows furrowed with concentration; they were poring over the timetables Mrs. Carpenter had handed out in a rush at the end of tutor group that morning and stuffing themselves with biscuits from a loaded plate in the middle of their space. Jinx was on her fifth cup of tea and ninth ginger nut—although none of them were counting—when Liv screamed, jumped onto her chair and started doing a war dance.

  “Fucking hell, Liv,” grumbled Chastity, who had sloshed a load of tea over the front of her Smythson diary, covered in the softest leather in the palest pink. “I wish you wouldn’t make these sudden movements.”

  “I don’t believe it!” Liv yelled, completely ignoring Chastity and waving her timetable above her head and making such a spectacle of herself that the attention of every single person in the crowded dining room was absolutely riveted on her. “I don’t fucking believe it!”

  “What?” said Jinx, giggling both at Chastity’s extremely cross expression and Liv’s mad dancing. “What don’t you believe?”

  “Have none of you retards,” said Liv, clambering down and giving one of the assistant junior housemistresses—who had been foolish enough to glare and shake her head at Liv whilst she’d been dancing on her chair—the finger, “spotted the glimmering sign of freedom we’ve ALL been given this term?”

  “O.M. fucking G.,” screamed Charlie, excitedly banging one fist on the table as she enunciated each syllable and offering up her other hand to Liv for the obligatory high five they always shared when they had good news. “I’ve just spotted it. I can’t believe it either!”