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  “Shit,” said Jinx, jabbing her finger at the timetable in front of her after avidly looking around at all the others. “We’ve all got Tuesday afternoons totally free!”

  “Lib too?” Charlie asked anxiously from the opposite side of the table, craning her neck as she tried to read the two sheets spread out in front of Jinx upside down and smirking happily when she saw it was true. “Shit, we are actually going to have the best term ever.”

  “Yep,” Jinx crowed, “we’ve all got it. From twelve o’clock every single week until the end of term. First one’s tomorrow. What are we going to do--”

  Jinx couldn’t finish her question since someone had come up silently behind her and covered her eyes with their hands in the silent “guess who” gesture the girls used whenever they managed to sneak up on each other unawares.

  Jinx inhaled. Breathing in the familiar smell of Aqua di Palma perfume mingled with top notes of tobacco, Juicy Fruit, leather, and denim, she felt like crying with happiness as she turned round and enveloped a gorgeously olive-tanned Liberty in the most almighty bear hug.

  “You little witch,” Jinx said, smiling widely as she released her best friend before quickly appraising her with a one-second once-over, “are those Miu Miu shoes?”

  “Yep,” replied Liberty, a definite smug twinkle in her eye as she pointed the toe of one stunning raw silk shoe in beautiful burnt orange with a golden wedge heel in front of her and waved her foot about in front of their faces. “They’re well nice, innit! And what are we going to do about what?”

  She collapsed onto the empty seat next to where Jinx had been sitting, grabbed Jinx’s hand and squeezed it really hard.

  “I can’t tell you how happy I am to be here,” Liberty said, not-so-surreptitiously wiping a tear from the corner of her eye with her free hand. “I’ve missed you guys so much and I couldn’t stand not knowing whether I’d be back this term or not.”

  “Tell me about it,” Jinx agreed. She shook her head in relief at the sight of Liberty sitting next to her like this and pulled her close in another massive hug and spoke softly into her ear. “I couldn’t believe it when Mum told me I’d missed you on the phone.”

  “I know,” said Liberty. “Your mum said you’d been really upset. I was worried about you, Jin. Did you have good hols?”

  “No,” Jinx replied with a shake of her head, “I was a total wreck for most of it. The last week wasn’t too bad, but I want to hear about you—I’ve been dying to know. What happened when you left here? What’s going on with your dad? How is it living with your mum and what the hell were you doing spending New Year’s Eve in a hippy commune?”

  “Bloody hell,” whistled Chastity, “that’s a lot of questions.”

  “Christ, Jinx,” said Liv, laughing, “we’ve only got ten minutes before the end of break! Why don’t we talk about all of that later and fill Lib in on what she’s missed so far this term?”

  “Okay, okay,” Jinx agreed before waving Liberty’s timetable dramatically in front of her face. “First things first. Check this out, Lib.”

  Liberty studied the sheet, a slow smile of realization spreading over her face.

  “Have you seen it!” yelled Chastity, bouncing up and down in her seat, so excited she couldn’t contain herself a single second longer. “We’ve all got them! All of us have got the same free periods every Tuesday from twelve o’clock onwards!”

  At this outburst all five girls jumped onto their chairs, linked hands across the table and danced up and down, screaming the whole time with exuberant and very loud overexcitement.

  Mrs. Frick, an assistant housemistress at Steinem House who was sitting at the head of a table of lower-school girls, shook her head in disgust at this childish display but decided against going over to remonstrate with them. She didn’t fancy being ridiculed in front of her young charges, most of whom were staring admiringly at the lower sixth, clearly highly impressed by such frankly devilish behaviour.

  “Miss, miss,” said Katie Green, an unattractively chubby new girl in the second year with big vacant eyes and a permanently wistful expression on her rather stupid-looking face, as she tugged on Mrs. Frick’s sleeve. “Did you look after any of those girls in Steinem?”

  “No, Katie,” snapped Mrs. Frick. “Thankfully I did not. And I am not ‘Miss.’ My name is ‘Mrs. Frick.’”

  “Sorry, Miss,” replied Katie, gazing longingly after the lower sixth as they danced and skipped their way through the wide swing doors of the lower school dining room to get to their favourite double art lesson. “I didn’t know. At my old school we called all the teachers ‘Miss.’”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Frick snidely, “at Stagmount we don’t.”

  Katie didn’t hear any of this last statement. She stared at the doors Chastity had kicked open with unnecessary force, which were still swinging on their hinges, and exhaled a shaky breath. She felt weakened by the five arrows Cupid had shot into her heart at once, and certainly had no time for any of Mrs. Frick’s inanities. She resolved there and then to find out all she could about her new heroines and to somehow, someday, make herself known to them.

  8 Everything the Way It Should Be

  “Come On then, Lib,” Jinx Said. The two of them lay snuggled together under the duvet of her single bed at ten o’clock that evening after they’d chilled out in the common room with the others since supper, talking about nothing much and watching MTV. “You’ve got to tell me. What the hell happened with your dad when you left here?”

  “Honestly Jinx,” said Liberty, “I don’t know what I would have done with myself if Dad had stuck to his original plan. I seriously don’t think I could have stood to live in Riyadh for the rest of my life. It’s a fucking hellhole and I hated every second of it.”

  “Dammit, Watson!” exclaimed Jinx, determined to get the full story before they went to sleep. “I want details!”

  “Watson?” said Liberty, scratching her head, obviously confused as hell by this unexpected reference. “What do you mean?”

  “You know,” sighed Jinx, exasperated, “Sherlock Holmes’s sidekick. Anyway, don’t stop. I’ve waited months—well okay it was only one, but it certainly seems like more than that—to hear this story!”

  “Okay, okay, give me a bloody chance,” Liberty said, stretching her arms above her head as if she were about to engage in a serious sporting activity.

  “Sorry, darling, you’re right,” said Jinx instantly, snuggling down further under the duvet in preparation for a big bout of listening. “Hit me with it and I promise not to interrupt again.”

  “Okay, so when we flew out of here in that fucking helicopter,” Liberty said carrying on in the small voice she always used when she was sad, “he turned to me and said that we were going to Heathrow and flying straight home to Riyadh and that he would never be speaking to me again.”

  “What about your passport?” Jinx asked, forgetting her earlier promise to keep quiet in her bid to get the whole gory story in one swoop. “How could you have gotten there without it?”

  “He can do anything he wants,” Liberty sniffed disdainfully. “He probably asked one of his fucking mates in the government to sort it out for him. Anyway, the point is he flew me straight back there and didn’t say one word to me throughout the entire flight, the car journey at the other end, and for the first two weeks of the holidays.”

  “Oh my God,” said Jinx, shocked even though she knew of old the type of emotional blackmail and bullying Amir Latiffe was capable of. “I can’t believe it, you poor angel.”

  “My bitch of a stepmother totally ignored me too,” Liberty continued, “not that I gave two shits about her. Although to be fair, having me around again was probably her worst freaking nightmare as well. The only person I had any human contact with was Maia, one of the cleaners. She gave me lots of hugs and snuck me in the odd packet of fags when she could. She even managed to get me a couple of Western magazines from God knows where. If Dad had found out she’d have lost her
job for sure, so I’ll be eternally grateful to her. In fact, the night before I left for Mum’s I gave her two hundred pounds—it was all I had on me but she seemed well pleased with it.”

  “Shit,” Jinx said, gripping Liberty even tighter, “I can’t even begin to imagine how terrified you must have been stuck on your own out there with no one to talk to and no idea what was going to happen next.”

  “Yeah, it wasn’t pleasant,” replied Liberty in the world’s biggest understatement. “Not at all. Anyway, I’d kind of resigned myself to the fact that I’d be trapped in Riyadh for the foreseeable future, but what I couldn’t resign myself to was the fact that I had no way of contacting you—or anyone, even Mum. He took my mobile as soon as we got to the airport, disconnected my computer and all the phones near my room. He’s also got one of those machines that record every call ever made, so he’d have known if I’d used one of his. I was desperate to talk to you, but I didn’t want to piss him off any more than he was already. So I decided the best thing to do was sit tight and wait his mood out.”

  “I can’t even begin to imagine it, sweetheart,” Jinx said, wiping a furious tear from the path it was wending down her cheek. “I mean, I obviously knew how cross he was and I had a fair idea he’d be making your life a misery as punishment, but I had no clue just how bad it was for you.”

  “It was completely horrendous,” agreed Liberty, privately thinking that right now there was no place on Earth she would rather be than lying in this small single bed with her best friend in the world at her beloved boarding school.

  “Jeepers,” whistled Jinx. “So what happened to make your dad change his mind?”

  “You know,” mused Liberty thoughtfully, “I’ve thought about this so much and I still don’t really have a clue. The only thought I’ve had that makes any sense at all is maybe my stepmother was so pissed off at having me mooching around the place all depressed that she insisted he send me away. I don’t know. All I do know for sure is that one evening Dad bursts into my room and very tersely tells me to pack my stuff up as I’m going to live with Mom. Tomorrow. And in freaking Washington, D.C. of all places.”

  “Bloody hell,” said Jinx, properly shocked by all of this. “I’m surprised you’re so normal still, Lib—I’d have gone stark raving mad by this point!”

  “Yes, well,” Liberty replied, “since I wanted to get the hell out of there as fast as possible in case he changed his mind or something, going mad wasn’t really an option.”

  “I suppose not,” murmured Jinx, thinking that Liberty had kind of changed. Not in any really obvious ways, but she seemed a hell of a lot more mature and sure of herself than she had last term.

  “So the next thing I know I’m on a plane out of there,” she continued, “and I still hadn’t spoken to anyone about anything, so I didn’t know for sure what to expect, but Mom was waiting at the airport to meet me.”

  “Phew,” whistled Jinx. “I bet you were glad as hell to see her.”

  “I was,” Liberty agreed. “The whole thing was pretty emotional, as you can imagine. She had no idea what had been going on; she’d just had a phone call that morning telling her what flight I’d be on and to make sure she was there to pick me up. She’s got no idea what’s going on with Dad either. So she drove me back to her place in Georgetown, where she’s living with her new husband, Chris. He’s a politician and quite quiet, but he’s a really nice guy and obviously madly in love with Mom.”

  “What’s it like out there?” asked Jinx, thinking that this was one of the maddest stories she’d ever heard. “Have they got a nice place?”

  “Yeah, it’s beautiful,” Liberty said, smiling in the dark as she thought about it. “A gorgeous colonial town house near the university. I’ll dig out some photographs for you tomorrow—you’ll totally love it.”

  “So then you went off to California for New Year?” asked Jinx. “What was that all about? Mum said the two of you had gone to some sort of hippy commune.”

  “Well,” Liberty said, laughing, “it was more like a spa, but there were loads of weird beards there. Cell phones were banned—not that I had mine anyway since Dad never gave it back, and there was no Internet. They had poetry readings and jazz nights and it’s supposed to be the most ‘relaxed’ place in the world. It was cool, you know, hanging out with Mom, catching up on everything and generally sorting my head out, but I’m so pleased to finally be back here. For most of the hols I honestly thought I’d never see you again.”

  “So are you going to live with your mom permanently now?” Jinx asked, still reeling somewhat from all this crazy information and trying to take everything in. “I can’t even tell you how happy I am it’s all worked out like this. Honestly Lib, I don’t know what I would have done with myself or how I would have coped if you’d been made to stay in Saudi.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Liberty, “I’ve been having the exact same thoughts—but in reverse, obviously. Anyway, that’s pretty much the long and short of it. Did you ever hear anything about what happened to Stella?”

  “No,” Jinx said shortly, “and I don’t care either. I never want to see that bitch again in my life. She nearly ruined yours, and I’ll never forgive her for it. The less we talk about her the better as far as I’m concerned.”

  “You’re right,” Liberty agreed solemnly. “I can’t believe I fell for all that shit and I can’t believe what she did to me. You’ll be pleased to know I’ve made a solemn vow to myself that I’ll never be sucked in like that again.”

  “I know you won’t,” said Jinx, yawning widely and switching off the lamp on her bedside table. “And don’t worry, neither will I. It was like torture not being able to pick up the phone and speak to you whenever I wanted, and I never want that to happen again.”

  “You’re exhausted,” said Liberty, “and so am I. Let’s hit the hay and talk more in the morning.”

  “You’re right,” Jinx agreed, “I am tired. Those triplets had us hitting it hard last night. You must be knackered too, what with all your traveling of late. Goodnight darling, sleep tight.”

  “You too,” whispered Liberty, “you too.”

  Settled and happy, Jinx and Liberty both fell asleep thinking that everything was finally back as it should be.

  9 Cutting Loose

  “Paul!” Chastity Screamed, leaning precariously out of the taxi window that she, Jinx, and Liberty had taken from Stagmount to Brighton’s seafront, and waving manically at her boyfriend. “Over here!”

  “Fucking hell,” Liberty muttered in an undertone to Jinx as Chastity threw open the cab’s back door and propelled herself into a stream of heavy, fast-moving traffic with no thought for either her personal safety or the taxi driver’s mental stability, and launched herself onto Paul, who was standing at the entrance to the pier, holding a bunch of roses. “Did you see that? Nice to see she’s still bloody crazy.”

  The three of them had dashed out of their English lesson on the subject of the Romantic Poets with Doctor Brown, the last of the day for them every Tuesday now, and quickly decided to make the absolute most of their first free weekday afternoon ever.

  “Shit!” Jinx exclaimed suddenly as two guys wearing thick black wetsuits and carrying surf boards under their arms ran past them down the steps to the beach before launching themselves into the darkly raging sea and paddling furiously. “What with all the excitement since we got back to school I still haven’t told you bitches about my New Year’s Eve!”

  “I knew there was something I was supposed to remind you about,” said Chastity, pulling Paul back down onto the stones next to her and a ready-rolled spliff out of her pocket. “Spill!”

  By the time Jinx had finished telling her friends every detail about Jamie and her unscheduled flying leap down Tarquin’s grand staircase into his arms, all three of them were staring at her, mouths agape. Even Paul had been hanging onto her every word.

  “So this Jamie then,” Paul said, looking—if this was possible—even more plea
sed by Jinx’s revelations than the girls did, “he surfs, does he?”

  “Yep,” said Jinx proudly with a toss of her head, delighted at the unprecedented opportunities for showing off this story was giving her. “He’s practically a pro.”

  “And he’s in a band now as well?” Liberty asked wistfully. “A proper band?”

  “Yes,” Jinx said, not quite so sure of herself this time, but still feeling smug as hell. Anyway, she was sure George had said something about the two of them being in a band at university. “He plays guitar.”

  “Wow,” said Chastity, grinning delightedly at all of them. “Well, we all thought he was great when we met him last term and we can’t wait to get to know him properly!”

  “Totally,” Paul agreed. “Much as I love hanging out with you girls it would be nice to have at least one other guy here, too. He sounds great. When can we all get together?”

  “He is great,” Jinx agreed, feeling slightly panicked at the realization that her friends seemed to think the two of them was a done deal when it was clearly anything but. “And I really, really fancy him, but he’s my brother’s friend. I can’t just go round inviting him to things…can I?”

  “Of course you can,” said Chastity, making a massive snorting noise. “If you don’t ever see him how the hell are you supposed to get him to ask you out?”

  “She’s right,” Liberty instantly agreed, “you’ve got to get him to come out with all of us one night.”

  “I can’t!” squealed Jinx. “I’m too embarrassed. What the hell would I say?”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake, Jinx,” Chastity said crossly, “stop being such a wimp. How do you think I would ever have got it together with Paul if I hadn’t sent him that note?”

  “Wasn’t it an anonymous letter, Chas?” giggled Liberty, digging Jinx in the ribs at the same time. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to recall it was Paul who asked YOU out and you confessed to the letter a month or so later.”