Chocolate Box Girls: Sweet Honey (5 page)

The minute I walk through the doors of
Willowbank School for Girls I have a bad feeling, a feeling of doom. The foyer is
crowded with girls in hideous, blue-checked school uniform. They gawp at me with
undisguised curiosity the way I have been gawping at parakeets in the park or surfie
boys on the beach; like I am something exotic and faintly scandalous.

Don’t get me wrong, I
like
being exotic and faintly scandalous. It is my trademark look, but
I think I may be an endangered species here at Willowbank.

This morning when I tried on my new
uniform for the first time, I almost cried.

I looked in the mirror and saw a
horrified girl in a polyester tent dress with a drooping yellow neckerchief. The
dress flared out into an alarming triangle shape; knee-length white socks and ugly
brown sandals completed the look. Luckily, I am an expert when it comes to adapting
and improving. I used the kitchen scissors to chop three inches off the hem, hoisted
it in with a belt and turned the yellow neckerchief into a hair accessory.

It wasn’t good, but it was an
improvement. I could tell by the way Emma’s jaw dropped when she saw me.

‘They’re strict about
uniform at Willowbank,’ she argued, but I pointed out that I was wearing the
uniform, every bit of it, so what was the problem?

I think I am about to find out.

The twitter of girly gossip fades into
silence and I hear the clip-clop sound of high-heeled shoes approach. A woman
strides towards me through the crowd, small and plump in a chiffon blouse and
tailored skirt, hair fluffed and sprayed into a feathery bouffant. She peers at me
over a pair of alarmingly winged glasses; she reminds me of a hen, anxious,
clucking, easily ruffled.

‘I am Miss Bird, the head
teacher,’ she tells me, and I swallow back my smirk. Miss Bird? Seriously?

‘I expect you’re the new
girl, from England. Honey Tanberry?’

‘Yes, Miss Bird,’ I choke
out.

She glares at me as if I just arrived
fresh from St Trinian’s with a
Danger
label tied to my wrist. I guess
that’s not too far from the truth, actually.

‘My office,’ she says.
‘Now.’

A bell shrills to signal the start of
class and Miss Bird ushers me into a darkly panelled room full of trophy cabinets
and portraits of stern headmistresses from years gone by.

‘So,’ she says.
‘Before we go any further – we do
not
go in for customized uniform at
Willowbank. You will wear your socks pulled up to knee-length, your neckerchief
round your neck. And you will let down that hem once more so it’s the correct
length.’

‘I can’t,’ I say
brightly, holding the jagged hemline between my thumb and forefinger. Should I go
for total honesty here, or just plead ignorance? It’s hard to know. Admitting
that I hacked my school dress to pieces on the very first day may not be a good
plan.

‘There’s no hem to let
down,’ I explain, trying for a helpless look. ‘I don’t know why –
it just came this way. Maybe the dress was a factory reject?’

‘Or maybe somebody took a pair of
scissors to it?’ she says crisply.

‘Who would
do
a thing
like that?’

Miss Bird grits her teeth.
‘Don’t get smart with me, Honey Tanberry,’ she says.
‘You’ll find you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. Let me be
straight here – your father was very keen for us to take you, even at this late
stage in the school year. He led me to believe that you were a bright, talented
pupil with a genuine drive for success. I must say, you are not at all what I
imagined.’

My eyes widen. It seems that Dad has
been a little sketchy with the truth – I know I’m meant to be turning over a
new leaf but I’m not sure I can live up to the saintly persona he’s
created for me. I take a deep breath in. I am not going to let a woman with fluffy
hair and winged spectacles wreck my chances of a fresh start. I will give Willowbank
a fair chance, even if it doesn’t give me one … and I will be
grateful that my murky past is finally behind me.

‘Sorry, Miss Bird,’ I say.
‘It won’t happen again. I will do my very best here, honestly I
will.’

‘See that you do,’ she says
curtly. ‘Pull your socks up and take the neckerchief out of your hair.
Tomorrow, I shall expect perfect uniform. Your father has asked me to let him know
if there is anything at all which concerns me, and believe me I will do that.
Willowbank prides itself on good manners, good uniform and the desire to excel in
all things, whether academic or sporting.’

‘Great,’ I mutter, untying
my neckerchief bow.

Miss Bird sighs. ‘Our coursework
will be quite different from what you’re used to,’ she continues.
‘Your father tells me he’s requested the records from your old school,
but they’re sending paper copies of the files, so they may not reach us until
the new school year. Meanwhile, I’ll expect you to work hard. I want to see
the determined, focused, career-driven girl your father described to me.
Yes?’

‘Yes, Miss Bird.’

Her eyes narrow. ‘Are you wearing
make-up?’ she asks.

‘No, Miss Bird.’ Eyeliner
and lipgloss don’t really count, do they?

The head teacher fixes me with a beaky,
speccy stare. ‘I’ll be watching you, Honey Tanberry,’ she says.
‘Remember that. Now run along – room 66, mathematics, Mr Piper.’

I dawdle along the corridor,
crestfallen. Whatever happened to the creative, caring school with support for
troubled students that I was promised? I might have stood a chance there. Instead
I’ve been thrown right back into the chaos of a regular school, only with a
crazed chicken-lady in charge, and minus the welcome distraction of boys. Great.

I find room 66 and take a moment
outside, quickly pushing my socks down again before knocking and going inside.
It’s not defiance exactly – more a matter of pride.

Mr Piper directs me to an empty seat
near the back. I hold my head high as my new classmates watch me slide into a seat
beside a girl with black-rimmed glasses, lank auburn hair and freckles. She smiles
politely, then turns back to her work.

It takes just minutes for my brain to
freeze over. Maths has never been my strong point. Let’s face it, my only
strong points seem to be breaking the rules and messing up, and already I am top of
the class in those.

‘I expect you’ve done
calculus back in England?’ Mr Piper asks, pausing beside my desk. ‘I
don’t need to explain?’

‘No, no,’ I bluff.
‘I’ll be fine.’

‘Anything you don’t manage
today, just finish up for homework,’ he says.

‘Right …’ I copy out
question one. It doesn’t even look like a maths problem, more like a
mysterious code that I don’t know how to crack.

I look around the classroom. Everyone
else is working, heads bent over their books, pens scratching away studiously. The
girl beside me is on question five already. I don’t even know where to start –
I was way behind in maths back home. When my classmate Anthony offered to help me
with informal after-school study sessions I jumped at the chance, but in spite of
his cleverness he was never any use at explaining stuff. It wasn’t long before
I got bored and started sabotaging the lessons, and Anthony didn’t do a thing
about it. He was hooked by then. I had him wrapped round my little finger.

It ended in tears, of course. Anthony
was the friend who hacked into the school computer system for me, altering my grades
and sending out a fake report card. We got found out, and both of us were expelled.
I am not proud of the way I treated him. I dragged him down with me, even if the
hacking thing was his idea. It doesn’t matter – I know he’d never have
even thought of it, if it hadn’t been for me.

Anyway, Anthony is history now, and if
he ever tried to teach me calculus, I definitely wasn’t listening. I begin to
sketch a plump, angry chicken with a bouffant hairdo in the margin of my exercise
book, and the girl beside me giggles.

‘Awesome,’ she whispers.
‘It’s Birdie, right?’

‘I just
thought … she’s like this kind of bad-tempered mother
hen.’

‘I know!’ the girl agrees.
‘One crazy chook …’

‘A tough old
Bird …’

Mr Piper looks up abruptly, eagle-eyed,
his teacher-radar on red alert. ‘Is there a problem, Miss Woods?’ he
enquires. ‘Miss Tanberry?’

‘No problem, Sir,’ we say
together.

I go back to doodling in the margins,
but this time I’m smiling.

At breaktime Tara Woods introduces me to
her friend, Beneditte Jones, whose hair cascades down around her face in an
avalanche of tiny braids. She has mocha-coffee skin, a curvy, cuddly shape and a
riotous laugh. I like her instantly.

‘Call me Bennie,’ she says.
‘Everybody does.’

‘OK,’ I say.
‘So … does nobody around here ever break the uniform rules?
Really?’

‘Not much,’ Tara admits.
‘Lots of schools here have strict uniform rules, it’s not just us.
Birdie says it takes the pressure off – we get to be ourselves.’

‘What if being myself involves
wearing this neckerchief in my hair?’ I frown, and Bennie rolls her eyes.

‘Oh boy!’ she says. ‘I
think I’m going to like you!’

‘I might be a bad
influence,’ I tease.

‘Definitely,’ Tara says.
‘It could get interesting!’

‘Very interesting, trust
me,’ I say. ‘Thing is, I need to stay on the straight and narrow.
It’s not a great time to transfer schools, and I don’t want to mess up.
I wasn’t always a grade A student back home, but I want to do better and I
have a feeling I’m going to be out of my depth. I didn’t understand one
single thing in maths.’

‘Maths is easy,’ Bennie
says. ‘It’s just practice.’

‘We can help you,’ Tara
offers. ‘Not just with maths, but … well, y’know. Getting used
to Sydney, used to Willowbank. If you want …’

I look at Tara and Bennie, two perfectly
nice Australian girls who seem willing to be my friends. Thing is, they are probably
too
nice for me. They will see my true colours and ditch me fast, or
else I will ruin them, bring them down to my level. Tara’s face is bright,
innocent, believing; all those things I used to see in the mirror before I buried
them deep beneath layers of bad-girl kudos. I know you can’t turn back the
clock, but sometimes I think I’d like to …

‘That would be brilliant,’ I
say to Tara. ‘Thank you.’