A Royal Mess (33 page)

‘What about Malcolm?’ I tested Indie.

‘Who’s Malcolm?’ she asked, blinking her chocolaty eyes with confusion – as if she wasn’t sick with love for him at all.

I looked around at my friends. They were all in this Dumping Freddie scheme together. It was a cabal of evil.

So I fainted.

EIGHT
In Defence of the Realm

‘I’m not dumping Freds,’ I told Star firmly after she’d put Brian on top of me to bring me round. She had even made him give me a little kiss with his flicky-out tongue.

‘It’s taken me all my life to pull a prince and I’m not about to throw him back now, just as things are going well.’ I passed Brian back.

‘We can still pull boys, though, can’t we?’ pleaded Clemmie again. Pulling boys was, after all, her favourite sport. The thing about Clemmie was, once she’d pulled them, she tossed them right back. And she never thought about them again.

Star ignored her. Placing her hands on my shoulders, she looked straight into my eyes. ‘You’ll be too busy for Freds, darling. Apart from your fencing and your GCSEs, you promised to help Indie and me with our lyrics, remember.’

Whoops. I had almost forgotten about agreeing to write lyrics for Star and Indie’s band. Their main interest was writing miserable minor chord compositions about the horrors of being rock royalty – or in Indie’s case, real
royalty – and going to the most exclusive boarding school in England. Love them though I do, their songs made me feel like attending my own funeral. Star knows that lyrics aren’t her strong point, so when Indie came to the school with her guitar last term, Star started harbouring a dream that the three of us would combine our talents for the greater good of music. She’d sing and play bass, Indie would play lead guitar – or ‘the six strings of the devil,’ as Father Conway calls it – and I’d write the words.

‘But I haven’t written anything yet,’ I admitted. ‘I mean, with Bob and Sarah here and –’

‘I know, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. We’ve all got soooo much going on. Boys will just be in the way. Besides, Freds is too freakishly normal for you.’

I wished she’d stop saying that.

‘Star’s right,’ Georgina said as she placed Dorothy on the snow-frosted grass for a hop.

‘Et tu, Georgina?’ I cried, shoving an imagined dagger into my heart.

She nudged me affectionately. ‘Pulling boys is fun, but the whole boyfriend saga has become très, très, très boring, darling. No offence, Calypso.’

‘But what about love?’ I asked, deeply offended.

‘Now
I
feel like fainting,’ Star groaned. ‘I dumped Kev, and he was low maintenance, darling.’ What she really meant was, he did anything she said. ‘Freddie is
far
too high maintenance.’

‘He’s not a GI diet,’ I said crossly. ‘He’s my boyfriend.
Whatever happened to “for better or worse”? It’s not as if we’re together twenty-four-seven or anything sad like that. I’m here at school all the time. Well, apart from exeats and weekends after Saturday classes.’

‘How many times a day do you txt him?’ Georgina asked me as she plaited her long, blonde, obedient hair.

‘I don’t know. A few.’ I shrugged, running a hand through my own rebellious blonde locks that never obeyed a single command.

‘Over twenty?’ Star asked, folding her arms and contorting her gorgeous features, taking on the expression of a menopausal matron.

I shrugged again. ‘Maybe. I don’t exactly chalk them up.’ I tried to flick my hair in a careless gesture of defiance, but it got stuck to my lip-gloss and I spent the next few minutes wiping it off. I picked up Dorothy, partly because I thought her little paws might be frozen but mostly for emotional comfort. She was all wiggly and eager to be put back down.

‘Okay, so, let’s say you txt him twenty times a day,’ Georgina suggested. ‘Then, for argument’s sake, let’s say he txts you back twenty times. That’s forty txts you’re reading and rereading.’

‘You’re scarily good at hard sums, darling,’ I told her sarcastically. Then to be horrible, I teased, ‘Maybe you should marry Mr Templeton?’ Mr Templeton was our horrible little maths teacher who would have put even dear old Einstein off his hard sums.

But all Georgina did was roll her eyes.

‘Plus, you agonise for ages and ages over your txts. And then you analyse whatever he txts you,’ Star added.

‘That is soooo untrue,’ I lied.

Star and the others all giggled. I suppose I have forwarded a lot of my txts to Star before sending them to Freds. But still, she shouldn’t have put the Doc Marten in like that.

‘I’ve had soooo many conversations with you, Calypso, agonising over the number of kisses you should send Freddie and analysing the significance of how many he sends to you. And then there are all those txts you forward me.’

Talk about betrayal. ‘Hah!’ was all I could say to my traitor of a friend. I looked to Clemmie and Indie for support, but their eyes remained fixed on Star. Star can be très, très persuasive.

‘I just think we should get the whole boy thing into perspective, Calypso.’

‘What does “into perspective” mean?’ I asked, rolling my eyes like a loon.

‘Spending less time focusing on boyfriends and more time focusing on the things we really want to do, like music and writing.’

‘I just like pulling boys, really,’ Clemmie piped up.

I loved Clemmie.

Star looked at our boy-mad friend and smiled. ‘Pulling them is fine, I’m not talking about that. It’s just once you start hanging out too much with one boy and daydreaming about him, it becomes a pain.’

I didn’t find daydreaming about Freds the least bit painful. But I didn’t say anything. He was the perfect boyfriend. He had the most lovely sticky-outy black hair and kissable lips and he always made me feel wonderful, apart from when he gave me disappointed looks. But that hadn’t happened for, well, since the other day. Which proved he must be getting used to my odd ways. Which meant now was not the time to dump him.

Star clicked her fingers in front of my face. ‘See! Look at yourself, Calypso. You’re drifting off into Freddieland right now. I can see it in your eyes. They’ve gone all moon-shaped.’

And so another circus of laughter ensued.

A snowflake landed on my nose. As more flakes followed, I put my hands out to catch them. I usually loved it when it snows, but all I felt then was a horrible sense of doom. My mother calls me the Queen of Doomsday Prophesies. But then again she also thinks boys will respect me more if I wear Wellies.

‘How did Kev take the dump?’ I asked Star, hoping to divert attention away from Freds and me.

‘Oh, he cried,’ Star replied. If it wasn’t Star, I would have sworn I detected a wobble in her voice. ‘And then I cried,’ she added. ‘It was quite the cry-fest, actually.’

‘That’s really sad,’ I told her, but all she did was shrug as we both watched the white snowflakes falling on her pink Doc Martens.

Yaah, but then I told myself: Indie, Calypso and I are
going to be flat out with Sloaney Trash, and I did a cartwheel.’

‘What’s Sloaney Trash?’ asked Clemmie.

‘That’s what we’re calling the band,’ Indie told her. ‘We only decided last night.’

‘Nice of you to tell
me.’
I sulked.

‘We did phone,’ Indie said. ‘And we can still change it. It’s just an idea, but we thought you’d like the ironic angle.’

‘We didn’t just call once either,’ Star added. ‘We called and called and called. Your mobile was engaged.’

Whoops-a-daisy. I was on the phone with Freds all night. They’d only left one voice mail and by the time I got it, it was really late.

‘I’m tucking Dorothy up in the pet shed before she freezes,’ Georgina said as she dashed off.

‘Indie’s got some fab ideas for lyrics,’ Star said as she scraped her foot through the thin veil of snow. ‘The music wing’s finished now and we’ve got the use of the studio. You’ve always wanted to be a proper writer. Aren’t you excited, Calypso?’

‘Yaah, of course,’ I replied hesitantly.

I should have known better. Star was always trying to push me towards my dreams. Last term, she had persuaded me to enter a national newspaper’s essay competition. The winner hadn’t been announced yet. Not that I would win or anything. At least I hoped not. The rules were to give an autobiographical account of suffering or trauma in a teenager’s life. I’d opted to write about the pain of my own
parents’ madder-than-mad, short-lived split, only I had to use a little artistic licence to spice it up.

I know it was
meant
to be autobiographical, but who wants to read about a boring old couple having a midlife crisis? No one, that’s who. And anyway, how was I to know that no sooner had I handed it in, than they’d go and reunite like love’s young dream? I would die a thousand deaths if I did actually win, because then it would be published in the national press, and Bob and Sarah would read it and kill me.

Star nudged me. ‘Are you okay, Calypso?’ she asked.

‘Yaah, I was just thinking about the essay. They’re judging it soon.’

‘Oh my God,’ she squealed, clamping her hand over her mouth.

‘Imagine if you win?’ Clemmie said.

Then Star said something truly horrifying ‘Think of it, the whole country reading your essay.’

‘Sarah and Bob are back together now and totally in love. They’d die if they read what I wrote – after they kill me first,’ I said.

‘I’m sure you’re just being paranoid,’ Star insisted, trying to wrap Brian around my neck again. It is a major strugglerama, trying to pretend I like Brian all the time. ‘You worry too much, darling. You overanalyse everything.’

‘I do not!’ I protested, even though it was true.

‘You always have. And since you’ve added a boy like Freds to your list of things to fret about, you’ve turned into
a lovesick puppy who can’t think of anything but him.’ Star grabbed me by the shoulders again and looked into my eyes as if about to hypnotise me. ‘You’re fifteen, Calypso. Life’s just beginning. You need to live a little! I mean, it’s not as if you’re going to marry him, is it?’

Isn’t it? Okay, so it probably isn’t, but I still couldn’t believe she was saying all this. Well, I could. She’s never been a Freddie fan, but more worrisome than that, she was also stubborn, and in all the time I’d known her, I’d never known her to let something drop. Take the essay thing. There was no way I would have written that essay if Star hadn’t made me.

‘Come on, my legs are blue,’ Georgina urged, having returned from putting Dorothy in the luxurious heated pet shed. ‘Quick, peasants, let’s leg it before we turn to snow statues.’

Back at the dorm, all had been transformed. The ‘rents had gone home, and Indie’s people had turned our bedroom into an interior design magazine spread. There were purple velvet cushions embroidered with gold crests strewn across the room, and our beds were draped in purple velvet splendour. The old oil paintings of saints and the bright red panic buttons by the beds were all that remained to remind us we were at school. The panic buttons had been installed recently, and as far as I knew, they’d never been used. But as I flopped on my bed, I had an overwhelming urge to press mine.

NINE
Enterprising Initiatives