By Any Other Name Page 3

  There’s a white dot in the black ocean flowing across the coach park. It draws the eye like a seagull bobbing on the waves, only this white shape is static. I keep my eye on it as I get closer until I’m near enough to recognise the freak boy from moving day by the sweep of hair over his face and the black Converses. He’s wearing just his white polo shirt again without a sweatshirt and a teacher has stopped him. Is he crazy? It’s freezing this morning. What is wrong with the boy? The teacher stands over him with a pained expression while he fiddles first with his ear and then his eyebrow. So piercings aren’t allowed. He bends over to pull the hem of his trousers over the top of the Converses and straighten the scrunched-up legs out.

  A passing girl slows down and takes a long, leisurely look at his bum. He’s facing the wrong way for me to judge if it’s worth the effort of her surreptitious ogle, but she clearly thinks it is from the way her head turns so her eyes can linger on him for as long as possible. Either that or she has some weird thing for aggressive Emo freaks with abnormal body-temperature regulation. I laugh as the teacher makes him take a sweatshirt out of his bag and put it on before she releases him. I can’t see why she’s so keen for him to cover his arms up when some of those girls are almost showing their knickers, but maybe he irritates her and I can understand that.

  I go to Reception. It takes fifteen minutes for a stressy-looking woman with frizzy hair to come and fetch me. She’s wearing a narky expression and the ugliest shoes I’ve ever seen – black, clumpy things with a thick sole and wide, square toes.

  ‘Follow me. I need to arrange a timetable for you before you can go to classes,’ she says, flapping a tatty piece of paper at me. My name and details are scribbled on it. ‘I have no information on what courses you’ve been doing, what your predicted grades are, no details at all from your last school.’ She looks expectantly at me, for me to fill in the blanks, but she’s crotchety too as if it’s my fault. In a way I suppose it is.

  I give her the pre-prepared lie. ‘I’ve been educated at home for the last three years. We moved a lot because of Dad’s job so it was more practical, but he’s settled here now. I’ve brought all my coursework with me if you’d like to see it.’

  She takes me to an office and logs on to a computer. ‘I’ll print a blank timetable. You can fill your classes in on that because it’ll take a while to have your details loaded on to the system.’ She looks at my list and then calls someone. They talk for a while about sets and class codes and I wonder why they couldn’t have done this before I arrived because we discussed all this on Monday.

  A few people my age knock on the door over the next ten minutes but she waves them away and they wander off. The bell rings – five loud, shrill bursts – and the corridors fill with bodies and noise. The teacher, who still hasn’t told me her name, scrolls down her computer screen, tutting occasionally and scribbling on her pad of paper.

  ‘OK,’ the teacher says, handing me a blank grid with days and lesson numbers printed on it. ‘Fill this in while I read out your class details.’

  She drones through the days and periods and I copy the classes in. After that, I follow her again, this time to a room on the other side of the school. It’s an English lesson and it’s already started. I want to cringe away when she opens the door, but I force myself to walk in, head held high.

  Everyone stares, even the teacher.

  I look at him because it’s easier than looking at the other faces. He’s around forty with sandy hair and a round face with little round glasses. It’s a look that shouldn’t work, but it does in a preppy, older guy way.

  ‘Hi, Holly,’ he says when the woman introduces him as Mr Jenkins and I realise he’s the first person to say hello to me today. ‘We’re in the middle of something right now, but take a seat. Don’t worry about keeping up, just get your bearings. We’re moving on to look at another poem next lesson so you can pick up with the rest of the class then.’ He looks around the room. There’re two seats free, one next to . . . oh no, Emo Boy . . . and another table where no one is sitting. The Emo looks up at me. He deliberately spreads his arms and legs, and pushes his books further across the table so there’s no room for me. Something between hurt and hate jabs me. Not that I want to sit with him, but does he really have to make it so obvious he doesn’t want me there? How would he like it if someone did that to him on his first day?

  Maybe the teacher sees my face fall or maybe he wouldn’t want to sit next to the weird boy either because he gestures to the empty table. It’s right at the front and I feel exposed, but it’s much better than the alternative. I can feel everyone staring at me even though I can’t see them and the hair on the back of my neck stands up in paranoid prickles. I feel as if I’ve just walked on to a set in Mean Girls. One mistake and the back-row crew will chew me up.

  The girls will be scoring me against themselves and calculating my rank order. I know this because I’ve been one of those girls. The boys will be deciding how hot I am. So far I might be doing OK on appearances alone, even if I am wearing a too-straight uniform. I’m aiming for the ‘natural because I don’t need make-up to look good’ effect, not the ‘my mum won’t let me and I have to do as I’m told’ one. I may be getting away with it, but how I look is only half the battle. The rest hangs on how I act. If I mess up now, I’m bitch-food forever.

  The boys are an added complication that I’m not used to dealing with in school. If the wrong one looks at me in the right way, and one of those girls wants/owns him, then they’ll get their claws out. Because of course, it will be my fault and not the boy’s.

  The English teacher is right. I do need to get my bearings, though maybe not in the way he meant. The class is studying war poems, which could have been difficult except that I did this topic already last year.

  This should be so much easier than it feels. These people are bumpkins and I should be the last word in cool to them. But Holly’s not from a big cosmopolitan city, is she? Holly’s unobtrusive. I’m not one of those back-row girls any more and I have to learn to live with that. I’m near-the-front girl now. Girl without a hot boyfriend. Head-down, work-hard, never-get-noticed girl.

  Sometimes the unfairness stops my breath. I didn’t ask for any of this.

  The teacher finishes up the lesson and asks me if I know where I’m going, while the others pack up.

  ‘No. I have French next but I don’t know where that is.’

  He raises his voice. ‘Anyone here able to take Holly to French?’

  I don’t dare turn around to see if there are any volunteers, but I breathe out in relief when a girl’s voice replies. ‘Yes, sir. I’ll take her.’

  I do turn then to mouth ‘Thanks’ at her. She’s sitting in the middle of the class and she’s prettyish with long brown hair. Not the kind of girl it’ll make me look bad to be seen with, but not too noticeable either – that’s good.

  When did I get so scheming? I don’t like myself this way, but it’s Darwinism in action – survival of the fittest. Prey has to stay one step ahead of the predators.

  The girl comes over as the bell rings. ‘Hi, I’m Nicole. Are you ready?’

  I don’t answer but I smile a little and pick my bag up. I probably look shy, nervous. Normally I would never allow that to show, but that is who I am now so that’s what Nicole needs to see. She smiles back, warm but not too confident herself. When we go into the corridor, she says hesitantly, ‘It’s this way,’ and then she’s silent as we push along past Year 7s staggering under schoolbags almost bigger than them. I don’t know if I find her silence reassuring or nerve-racking.

  We skirt round the outside of the building towards some Portakabins and a group of girls wanders past. They’re the type Mum would describe as ‘slightly common’ with a certain tone in her voice. There’s nothing about them that you could exactly put your finger on, except for a sort of hard look to their make-up and something in the way they walk that Mum would read as ‘not quite our kind of people’. Tasha and I used to roll
our eyes at her when she had one of her snobby moments, yet I find myself wanting to avoid these girls. Nicole walks a discrete arc around them. I catch a bit of their conversation – bitching about someone in their Health and Social Care class. I’m not entirely sure what Health and Social Care is, but from how they look and talk I guess it’s one of those subjects that would make Dad groan and say, ‘You see, this is why we sent you to a private school.’

  ‘What’s the French teacher like?’ I ask and Nicole’s face relaxes in relief as I break the ice. I decide she’s much shyer than I am . . . than I was, I mean.

  ‘She’s OK . . . ish. But you can’t talk in her lesson or have a laugh like you can with Mr Jenkins.’

  I nod, half wondering from her face when she says the teacher’s name whether she might have offered to take me to French to make herself look good in front of him. Leetle bit of a crush perhaps?

  We enter a scratty Portakabin with rotten wood on the door frame. ‘It’s break after this lesson. I’ll show you around if you like,’ Nicole says tentatively.

  ‘Yeah, great. Thanks.’ I smile again. My mouth’s beginning to ache with the effort of trying to look genuine when I really don’t feel like smiling at all. When I really feel like turning around and walking right out of this school. I don’t want to try to like it. It sucks and I . . .

  I want to go back home.

  But Holly Latham has no home to go back to. There is no other life.

  I don’t want to be Holly Latham.

  Nicole leads me to the French teacher’s desk. ‘Mme Carrière, this is Holly. She’s new. Can she sit with me and Ella?’

  Mme Carrière’s eyebrows shoot up in an expression of such Gallic surprise that I would normally have giggled. ‘New? At this time? In Year 11? Zut alors!’

  I nod and stare past her to a poster on the wall about Paris, for something to focus on.

  ‘I have not had information on you, Holly.’ She shuffles the papers on her desk and the sound they make signals her exasperation. ‘What is your predicted grade?’

  I can feel the rest of the class listening intently as they get books out of their bags.

  ‘A-star,’ I say quietly.

  ‘Oh!’ She stops rustling the papers. ‘Oh! Hmm, très bien. Oui! It’s not easy to change schools at this point, but tant pis. We shall manage, non?’

  ‘Oui, madame.’

  ‘Perhaps you should sit with Nicole and Ella. Do you know anyone at Daneshill?’

  ‘Non, madame.’

  ‘Yes, with Nicole and Ella then.’ She nods to dismiss me and I slide into the chair next to Nicole. Opposite her is a girl with wavy, mouse-coloured hair who must be Ella.

  ‘Year 11, vocab lists from last lesson – read through. En Vacances, s’il vous plâit!’ Mme Carrière flicks through a range of books on the shelves behind her as she speaks, pulling several out with brisk efficiency and placing them on the table in front of me. ‘Voici, Holly, vos cahiers et manuels.’

  I’m glad Nicole warned me that we can’t talk in this lesson, and more than that I’m glad that we aren’t allowed to. Glad of the excuse to be quiet and reassess. Mme Carrière is OK. She’s not friendly but she’s businesslike. You’ll know where you stand with her, and that’s a relief to someone trying to work out how to fit in.

  The classroom door opens quietly and Emo Boy slopes in. Mme Carrière turns sharply and her mouth is open to scold, but when she sees him her face changes and she pulls back from the telling-off she was about to give him.

  ‘Joe, you’re late,’ is all she says.

  ‘Sorry,’ he mutters. He doesn’t offer any explanation, but she seems to accept that.

  He walks towards our table. I scan the room quickly, stiffening. Oh no! Only one seat left, opposite me. He takes it. Nicole and Ella don’t react so perhaps this is where he usually sits. Which means, yuck, he’ll be opposite me in every French lesson. Like I need someone scowling at me three times a week.

  He doesn’t speak to us, just gets his books out of his bag without even looking over. I take a peek at his bag – a scruffy rucksack with badges all over it. Badges with band names I’ve never heard of. I don’t need to wonder why he was late because the stench of cigarette smoke coming from him makes my nose wrinkle.

  As the lesson gets under way, Mme Carrière moves round the room, asking us in turn for five-sentence summaries of our holiday. ‘You need to add some less familiar vocabulary to shine in your oral exam. Throw in a few words or phrases that others won’t. Make sure you stand out.’

  The first few people she asks stumble their sentences out. I’m confident when it comes to my turn, bolstered by summer holidays in Brittany that Holly shouldn’t remember, though the language centre in her brain can’t forget them to order. I know my accent’s good and Mme Carrière’s eyebrows do their Gallic shrug again. Perhaps nobody around here goes on holiday to France to improve their language skills. Too busy milking cows or shearing sheep or having country fêtes with hog roasts, or whatever they do in villages that they think is living.

  The Emo goes next and it’s the turn of my eyebrows to shoot up. His speech is quick, like a native’s, and his accent is faultless. Clever Emo Freak? No, Emo Geek!

  I adjust his status from being the boy who thinks he’s too cool for life as we know it to being the geek no one likes. Maybe he stinks because he’s been bullied by smokers blowing it in his face until he gives up his lunch money. The boy who goes home and cuts himself because no one will talk to him. Who writes really bad poetry on a LiveJournal account nobody reads, about how no one understands him because he’s so deep.

  I’m being really silly, but somehow thinking all this bad stuff about him cheers me up.

  Nicole and Ella do their sentences and he writes in his exercise book, head down, fringe over his face. He chews his lips while he works and when his mouth isn’t screwed up because he’s scowling, it’s actually quite a nice shape. Noticeably. Better than most other boys I know. Oh well, everyone has something about them that’s attractive-ish, I guess. I feel mean for a second for thinking that nasty stuff a few moments ago, but after all he was the one who gave me evils when we moved in and he was mean in English so I shouldn’t really feel that bad. It isn’t as if he knows what I’m thinking.

  As I watch him covertly, a wave of dislike surges up as I remember how uncomfortable he made me feel outside my house that first day, and again today in English class. The sensation makes me feel better somehow, like the release you get when you’re angry and thump the pillow or throw a cushion at the wall.

  There are all these simmering feelings that normally hide inside me – the ones I can’t talk to friends about because I don’t have friends now and, even if I did, I couldn’t talk to them about that . . . I can’t talk to Mum and Dad about them either because they have their own worries to face in all of this mess, as well as dealing with Katie’s problems . . . All of the feelings that sometimes overwhelm – in that second, I channel them towards a focus. Him.

  Insanely crazy and totally wrong, it helps. For that moment, I have a target. One I can see, that doesn’t hide in shadows. One right here, right now. Tangible.

  I concentrate all my anger and confusion and fear on to him. On to hating him. My scapegoat. My own personal whipping boy.

  He looks up at me. His lip curls slightly, as if I’m too ugly to be near him. His dark eyes are just as confrontational as when I first saw him.

  He makes it easy for me to turn him into a villain.

  ‘How was your first day? Did you make any friends?’ Mum puts the salad bowl down in the middle of the table as we sit down to dinner and looks at me expectantly. The scrubbed farmhouse table from our old kitchen looks silly in this more modern kitchen-diner, but the big American oak table we had in the dining room wouldn’t have fitted in here. It seated twelve and when Mum and Dad had dinner parties –

  Don’t!

  But it’s so hard to stop. Memories creep up on me when I’m not expecting them, and
I’m plunged again into an icy-cold pool of the misery of missing home. It steals my breath and I feel the pain sharp and new every time it happens.

  I pick up a slice of pizza and pretend to nibble the crust. ‘I talked to a few people in my classes.’ Nicole had introduced me to some other girls at break. They were a lot like her: quietish, prettyish, niceish. Girls I’d never have noticed before. I couldn’t remember which name went with which face, they were so much the same.

  I hadn’t had any other lessons with Nicole for the rest of the day, but she and Ella met me at lunch and showed me the dining hall. Part of me would rather have been on my own than making the effort to talk to them, remembering my role and trying not to make any slips. But another part would have been crushed to have to sit alone in the cafeteria. It would be OK if I was invisible and I could sit there and watch people. Learn about this strange environment I’ve been dropped into. Even so, I couldn’t face people looking at me so I kept my head down while I ate lunch – some disgusting pasta and sauce served in a cardboard tub. Nicole and Ella probably think I’m shy. Maybe I am now. Maybe that’s what Holly Latham is.

  Nobody else in my classes spoke to me for the rest of the day. That was fine though. Most people seem too focused on the exams looming to pay attention to a newbie who gives every appearance of not wanting to talk to them either. Is this who Holly is? Holly the Geek? No, that’s a step too far. I rebel at that thought.