Crushworthy Read online

  Jinx stood on the curved stone path outside Tanner House’s front door and watched Jamie razz it off down the drive towards Brighton and his flat—throbbing, unidentifiable music once again pumping out of the half-open windows. Her stomach was churning in the most disturbing ways and—if she’d been able to use her brain at all—she would have understood the true meaning of “dazed” for the first time in her life. Fuck, he was amazing.

  And fuck! What with all the excitement she realized she’d forgotten to give him her phone number. Well, stuff it, she decided, unaccountably finding it impossibly hard to think straight; if he wanted to speak to her it would be pretty freaking easy for him to get hold of her. The ball was most definitely in his court and, Jinx mused happily, that was no bad thing.

  10 In a Daze

  Chastity and Liberty did not stop talking to Jinx, and anyone else within earshot, about how amazing Jamie was. And Liv and Charlie—who had mysteriously sprained her wrist the other day, only minutes after she recovered from a badly twisted ankle, but seemed strangely reluctant to give the others any more details about it other than that she’d tripped over again—were also pestering her daily that they be allowed to meet him, too. Jinx was playing it cool, but inside she was both delighted and smug as hell that the guy she was obsessing about had been such a huge hit with her friends. And although Jinx hadn’t quite descended from cloud nine yet, she was beginning to wonder if Jamie would ever call to arrange the night out they’d all talked about.

  “Jinx is not with it at all,” Liberty complained to Chastity one night as the two of them trudged back to Tanner House from the Old Reference Library, heads lowered against a driving wind that seemed determined to blow them off their feet. “But I can totally see why.”

  “Me too,” sighed Chastity in agreement, “that guy is hot. Like total! I just wish he’d crack on with it and bloody well ask her out. Then she might return to the land of the living.”

  Jinx was blissfully unaware of any of these conversations taking place as she lay on her bed for hours at a time, staring unseeingly at the ceiling. Her eyes were usually open but she saw nothing in front of her as thoughts of Jamie played in a constant loop in her mind and Smiths records played nonstop on her iPod.

  She’d never experienced an all-consuming crush like this one before, and it hit her hard. Her eyes practically rolled round in the back of her head as she replayed the car-park scene over and over in her mind, occasionally adding in a few new scenes of her own just for the fun of it. In fact, she so often found those tiny kisses and that lightest tug on her hair accosting her mind at any unexpected moment they felt like it, that the whole business was beginning to get just a bit impractical. How the hell was she supposed to conjugate French verbs or talk intelligently about the importance of the growth of a poet’s mind with special reference to Wordsworth’s Prelude when all the time she never knew when to expect that kick to the stomach that heralded the instantaneous return of the most physical memory she’d ever experienced and the inevitable blanking of whatever it was she happened to be doing at the time?

  A week after their night out, Jinx was sitting in the library, supposedly poring over the English essay she was writing on the subject of “Is The Winter’s Tale a tragic comedy or a comic tragedy”—funnily enough Jinx couldn’t quite manage to work herself into a sweat about it—and which was due in like yesterday, and distractedly chewing her pen when the ear-splittingly loud peals of the fire alarm sounded, jump-starting all the girls into instant action.

  Joyous at the thought of anything remotely exciting happening—even a fire, hey: especially a fire!—to take their minds off the terrible weather and the mountains of homework they’d all been given, the whole school rushed outside as one, squealing and elbowing their way out through the double-height double doors, which were made of the strongest oak, had come from a castle in France and were reputedly at least three hundred years old. Once outside, they quickly started milling about in the courtyard in front of the main entrance, shrieking at the tops of their voices in the mistaken belief they could compete with the din the alarms were making, pushing and shoving each other into very ramshackle lines and generally behaving absolutely contrary to the strict health and safety rules and codes of conduct the school had in place for such an event.

  “Olivia Taylor.” Daisy Finnegan was closing in on Jinx’s little group, a determinedly self-important look etched onto her ugly face. “No one would ever guess you were in the lower sixth, carrying on like that and making a spectacle of yourself.”

  “What the--” Liv looked round in shock from where she had Charlie in a headlock and was attempting to throw her over her shoulder into the well-stocked flower bed in front of Mrs. Bennett’s big office window. “Oh. It’s you.”

  Liv turned back round when she saw who was addressing her. She completely ignored Daisy who was standing behind her still bleating inanely about something or other, and carried on her fight with Charlie. What had started out as a definite play fight was rapidly becoming a real-life brawl, each trying to prove she was stronger than the other.

  “Oi!” Jinx yelled when she realized what Daisy was talking about, grabbing Liv’s arm and yanking her away from Charlie. “What the fuck’s going on? Cut it out!”

  “Yeah,” agreed Liberty, who had wrapped her extra long Missoni scarf so many times around her neck it looked like she didn’t have one, pulling on her black leather Chanel gloves as she gave the pair of them a disbelieving look. “It’s, like, totally not a cool look to be rolling around in the fucking shrubbery in front of the whole school.”

  “Thank you, Liberty,” sniffed Daisy in the mistaken belief that Liberty had intervened to help her out. “It’s nice to see that at least some of us at Stagmount have manners.”

  “Fuck off, Daisy,” Liberty replied immediately, “why don’t you go and pick on some of the lower school, we’re not interested.”

  Katie Green had been loitering nearby throughout the entire skirmish, thrilled to witness her favourite senior-school girls in such exciting action at such close quarters like this. She was less than impressed when Daisy—completely ignored by her own year, she was trying to save what little face she had left—turned on her and in no uncertain terms told her to hurry up and join her house and form for the mandatory roll call of every girl in the school that always took place immediately following a fire alarm. Katie was even less happy when she heard the others giggling at Daisy’s no-nonsense tone. She was too dim-witted and self-obsessed to realize that the girls she was so enamored of were not laughing at her but at Daisy, and she felt a deep hatred for the head girl of the lower sixth, who had dared embarrass her like this in front of her heroines. True to form, not one of the lower sixth noticed the black expression plastered across her face as she stood in her line, scowling mutinously at Daisy and the Tanner House line to her left.

  Finally, and certainly not quickly enough for Mrs. Bennett’s liking, the entire school was split into the six houses the girls lived in. Despite having always studied together, the sixth form had been divided into four alphabetical groups amongst the four main-school houses for their first three years at Stagmount, and this was only the second term they’d all spent sleeping under the same roof in Tanner House.

  Mrs. B. looked around for the dratted bursar. He never seemed to be there when she needed him. She was making a superhuman effort to drown out the clanging bells she was sure were going to leave her with a bad case of tinnitus, but dimly registered that of late this absence had been very much the case where the damned bursar was concerned. As she stood at the top of the steps that led towards the drive and the front door, Mrs. Bennett pulled the jacket of her Jaeger skirt suit tighter around her, impatiently tapped her foot and made a mental note to have it out with the bloody man at the earliest opportunity.

  “Girls!” she yelled, waving her arms above her head, trying hard but failing dismally to divert her school’s attention away from the ear-splitting cacophony and towards
her. “GIRLS!”

  Whatever Mrs. Bennett might have said next was lost to the wind as most girls rushed forward out of their lines, the momentum of the stampede irresistibly dragging these three along with them. They found themselves propelled to the front of the quad just in front of an apoplectic Mrs. Bennett, where they joined the crowd in craning their necks to gawp at a very bedraggled figure rushing piteously along the drive towards the quad from the direction of the sports hall.

  “Look! It’s Dirk!” yelled Liv across the crowd to Jinx, jumping up and down and waving her arms above her head to attract the attention of her friend, whose curly blonde hair she’d spotted bobbing about in the midst of a particularly excitable group a few scrums along. “Watch him go! Run, Dirk, RUN!”

  What with all the excitement, none of the girls immediately noticed that the noise of the fire alarm had come to a sudden stop, leaving a series of eerie, echoing silences in its wake. The one hanging in the air above the girls’ heads was filled with expectation; conversely, the one above Mrs. Bennett’s was loaded with an almost palpable fury.

  Dirk seemed oblivious to all the tension as he ran, ever slowly, the final stretch to the stone steps, where Mrs. Bennett was standing. He shuddered to a stop and collapsed right in front of her feet. It was only then, his face hidden in the arms he had used to fling himself pathetically onto the lowest step, his upper torso twisted backwards to the crowd, that the girls saw the wet, dark stain that covered his hair-and which, they noted with a grim fascination, was rapidly flooding the expanse of his white aertex-covered back with a livid spread of red.

  Mrs. Bennett’s grim-set white face turned a chalky grey colour as she leant forward and surveyed the crumpled figure in front of her. The girls had been stunned into a shocked silence. The only noise for a couple of awe-filled seconds was that of the rain that had begun beating down against the wax proofing of the rain jackets worn by only a suck-up few. Two things then happened simultaneously. Dirk raised his head and moaned piteously. As he did this, what appeared to be a celery stick fell from his collar to the floor, where it bounced halfheartedly before coming to rest on the drive near his outstretched, trainer-clad foot. As a few surprised guffaws escaped the crowd, the bursar dashed through the door and skidded to a halt beside Mrs. Bennett, whose jaw was so low by this point that the crowd could see all the way to her tonsils at the back of her throat.

  The bursar, puce in the face and sweating profusely even standing in the cold rain, stared wildly around as if in a daze before dashing down the steps and dragging Dirk to a seated position, using the collar of his shirt for leverage. Everyone was too busy staring at the strange triptych occupying the front steps to notice intractable Igor slip through a side door that led to the basements below Steinem House, look around covertly, smooth his hair down and stroll nonchalantly to the back of what had been the Tanner House line but now resembled the crush in front of the main stage at Glastonbury.

  Everyone, that is, except Katie Green, whose solid bulk had allowed her to easily resist being swept forward alongside her classmates in the stampede.

  Katie watched with interest as Igor checked his mobile phone and smiled slightly before assuming his typical bodyguard stance of slightly parted straight legs finished off with a direct stare and sharply folded arms. She knew it was of note, but she just didn’t know why. Never mind, she thought to herself smugly, it would come in useful one day. The mental dossier she was building up on the likes, dislikes, movements, alliances, clothing, general ambience, and overheard conversations of the lower sixth was becoming so huge there was barely room for a single other thought inside that tiny brain of hers. One thing was certain anyway—somehow she was going to make the lower sixth be friends with her. As far as she was concerned it was only a matter of time. Katie was as sure of this as she was utterly convinced—rightly, as it happens—that Mrs. Frick hated her more than she hated all the other girls in her year.

  Katie’s vaguely moronic musings were interrupted when the school matron in chief, Sister Minton, fondly nicknamed Mister Sinton by the girls since time immemorial in honour of the bristly moustache that grew unchecked between her prominent nose and surprisingly full lips, bustled onto the scene. Her starched blue uniform with its prim white edges creaked stiffly as she walked, and the school fell silent as one.

  “Good God, man,” she said, her words landing crisply into the stark silence as she inspected Dirk, reached out a finger to his shirt, licked it and shook her head, a derisory smile playing about her lips. “Do pull yourself together. It’s tomato juice.” She paused and ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth. “Albeit mixed with a lot of vodka, I’d say!”

  “But I…” Dirk stammered as he came to, looked round with a dazed expression on his silly tanned face, and realized the intensely, excruciatingly, unbelievably embarrassing fact of where he was and what he was doing. “I thought….”

  “Yes,” cut in Mrs. Bennett in icy tones, “I would very much like to know what you thought. And,” she finished on a high note, “exactly what the bloody hell is going on here!”

  “I was in the gym, having a shower,” Dirk mumbled, “when I heard voices coming through the air vent that links to the gym. I thought,” he continued, louder and more confident as he progressed, “it was nothing more than people working out. Then I smelt smoke so I decided to investigate.” He looked around in disbelief, as if he could hardly trust the words that were about to come out of his own mouth. “I mean, smoking? In the gym?”

  “And?” Mrs. Bennett only needed to slightly raise her right eyebrow as she said this in her coldest voice to rapidly drag Dirk’s attention back to the much more pressing matter at hand. The school had never been as quiet as they all were now. Muffling coughs, stopping sneezes, leaving the gum in their mouths unchewed, the girls knew instinctively that as soon as Mrs. Bennett remembered their presence right here on the front line they’d be sent back to their various houses without so much as a by-your-leave and never know what had caused Dirk to be doused in Bloody Marys yet obviously believe it to be his own blood. And since that, obviously, would be total misery, they were all very much united in their telepathically arranged silence.

  “Well,” the coach bristled self-righteously, “I don’t know about you, Mrs. Bennett, but I for one will not tolerate the use of tobacco, and certainly not in the sports hall! Anyway,” he carried on swiftly, with an audible gulp when he registered the blackest look he’d ever seen pass across his boss’s terrifying face, “I threw on my clothes and jogged over to the basketball court so I could catch the law-breakers in the act—whoever was up there was definitely smoking. Unfortunately,” he said with a sad downwards glance at the feet that so rarely let him down, “I skidded on the new flooring surface as I was running over and my trainer squeaked really loudly.”

  Jinx had to suppress a snort of laughter at this point, and Liberty clutched her hand in sympathy. Dirk really did cut the stupidest, most pathetic figure they’d ever seen, lying practically supine on the floor before the head’s feet like this—especially with that stupid celery stick lying next to him like a discarded relay baton in the special vegetable race.

  “Yes,” he continued, blissfully unaware of the very quiet hilarity this was causing amongst the watching girls, “that was definitely what gave me away.”

  “Mr. Hanson!” Mrs. Bennett’s words cracked as if she’d fired them out of machine gun and once again woke Dirk to the reality of whom exactly he was dealing with here.

  “Yes, anyway,” he mumbled rather petulantly in response, “so the next thing I know there’s a sound like the crack of a shotgun and I’m covered in blood. Well,” he said, “tomato juice or whatever it was. So, thinking I’m under siege and my life is in danger, I run out of there as fast as possible, trying to reach the cover of the main entrance, only to find all of you lot out here waiting for me like a welcoming party at the end of a marathon. What’s that all about?”

  “Girls,” Mrs. Bennett said, bel
atedly realizing that the girls had heard every word of this bizarre exchange on the front steps, “you’ve been outside in the wet and the cold for quite long enough. Before you go, I want to see every single member of the school in the theatre tomorrow morning before breakfast. Seven-thirty A.M., and not a second later. What happened here today was an absolute disgrace, and had there been a real fire…” Mrs. Bennett shuddered in an uncharacteristically theatrical fashion. “Well, I don’t like to think what the consequences might have been. But I am going to get to the bottom of all of this, mark my words.”

  Not particularly cowed at all by these dire, veiled threats of retribution and punishment, the girls shuffled off much more slowly than they’d arrived and with only about a third of the volume. As soon as the lower sixth had passed the corner of Friedan House that made up the last end and side of the very scuffed-up and far-less-verdant-after-its-trampling quad, and turned the corner to Tanner and thus away from Mrs. Bennett’s all-seeing eyes, if not her ears, the volume rocketed right back up to what was standard when they were all together. That is to say, very loud indeed. Hot topic number one, obviously, was who the hell had seen fit to throw a fully loaded Bloody Mary cocktail at Dirk’s head from the mezzanine balcony of the gym that looked over the indoor tennis courts!

  From where she was dawdling near the end of her house line, patiently waiting for all the older girls to scramble through the double doors first, Katie Green’s ears pricked up like a loyal dog’s when she heard the unmistakable sounds of the lower sixth’s shouts of raucous laughter. She noticed Mrs. Bennett roll her eyes in exasperation at the exact same time. She also saw Mrs. Bennett dismiss Dirk with a wave of her hand and turn to harangue the bursar about his tardiness to the scene, his tardiness generally, his downright infuriating unavailability and above all the lack of support she felt she was receiving from him this term.