Fury (6 page)

“My mum would never let me choose a degree like that.”

I meant for the words to come out cutting, but instead they make me sound weak and like I feel sorry for myself. I steer away from them.

“Where have you been?”

“For a walk,” Dr Fadden replies.

Inside the brown paper bag is a raspberry muffin, still warm. It even has pictures of little raspberries printed on the paper case. Sorta sweet, if you like kitsch.

“I am told by my female colleague that this is the best muffin in town. I’ve heard that it’s impossible just to eat one.” He points to the dusted top. “So that might not be just innocent icing sugar.”

At least he thinks the icing sugar is innocent,
I think to myself.
Good for you, Doc.

I take a bite of the muffin. Dr Fadden watches me.

“Your
friend
is right. This is a really good muffin.”

Dr Fadden nods encouragingly.

“So who is she? Is she on this taskforce too? I could probably guess which one; there aren’t too many females here. It’s pretty testosterone-heavy.”

“I ask the questions around here,” cautions Dr Fadden.

I try to look at his face, but he keeps his head down. He gathers up the pile of photos and slaps one in front of me.

“Tell me about her.”

It is Marianne. He stabs his finger on the photograph and gets her in the forehead.

In my mind I see the dusty ground, the hot sun, a girl’s scream … the blade of the knife breaking through skin and into flesh…

“That’s Marianne,” I reply.

Dr Fadden looks annoyed. I give him a fake smile.

“Good luck to whichever loser you have trying to break her.”

“What do you want Eliza?” The doctor suddenly appears to lose his cool. “For me to say congratulations? Or an apology from me for what you have done?”

Well Dr F, no one apologised when they took us and threw us into this hell-hole. My head hurts so much. Maybe I need an aspirin. Or ten.

“Eliza—Eliza eyes up here!”

“What now? My head hurts…”

“It’s because you haven’t eaten for twenty-four hours. Finish your muffin.”

I take another bite. The smell of vanilla and berries is divine, but in my mouth, it feels like dirt and tastes like nothing.

“Do you know what I regret?”

I can hear Dr Fadden breathing.

“That we never listened to Marianne in the first place. Marianne never wanted Ella to join our group. If we had listened to her, then none of this would have happened.”

Dr Fadden drops his shoulders; he looks almost disappointed. I know he’s waiting for me to show regret. Then maybe he might start to feel sorry for me.

“I think after all this I never want to make new friends ever again.”

“Good. Where you’re probably headed you won’t get a chance.”

“Fine,” I reply loudly. “Then I am glad that I tried to make it up to Marianne, and Lexi too, and put things right. So not only do I
not
regret it, I’m glad I did it.”

Neil said to me once that in the times of desperation, you have to force yourself to make a decision.

It’s your choice,
he said.
Us or them. So choose.

“Wait!” I shouted to Marianne as I ran to catch up with her.

“Don’t you have to be somewhere?” Marianne muttered. “Mrs Wally is going to be so mad when you rock up at the canteen, oh,
twenty minutes late,
for your first detention.”

“I know where I have to be,” I replied. “Where are
you
going?”

“Why are you interested? Why don’t you go back and play with Lexi and your new friend? I could tell you were having a good time. I’m just … going to Chem early.”

“What?”

Marianne patted the pile of papers in her arms. She beamed like a proud parent.

“I’ve had a go at the exam papers from the past ten years. Professor McFarlane has agreed to do some extra marking for me.”

“You’re crazy, you know,” I replied, trying to laugh it off.

Marianne stopped walking. “What is it now?”

“You know, to even take that class. I’m not surprised it only has two people in it. If this school weren’t so rich, they would fire Nazi-tastic old McFarlane. I can’t believe you and Neil are the only ones stupid enough to brave him.”

Marianne arms tightened on her stack of neatly stapled papers.

“It’s not his fault that the others couldn’t hack it. At least Neil and I are smart. And at least we are choosing subjects based on the quality of the teachers and not—” Marianne shot me a veiled look, “—because of their popularity.”

“I think Lexi likes Ella,” I said, changing the subject.

“That’s nice.”

I stared at Marianne’s side profile. I relished the fact that she couldn’t actually look me in the face right now. Her long blonde hair was coiled into an intricate bun at the back of her head with wispy bits around her face. She looked like an impossibly beautiful Greek marble carving.

“Can you believe she had the guts to take Jane Ayres’ record from the old biddies up in reception?”

Marianne shook her head. “When has stealing been a quality you look for in a friend?”

“Why can’t you just give her a chance, Mari?” I sighed.

“Trust me, if I wasn’t trying to give her a chance I would have banned her from hanging out with us from the very beginning.”

My mouth dropped open. I curled it back into a smile.

“What did you say?”

Marianne said nothing.

“Hang
on.
It’s not for you to say who this group associates with. You are
not,
Marianne, the leader of this group.”

Marianne’s hand shot up and touched her cheek. It glowed red like I had just slapped it. She pushed past me and hurried off again. This time I let her go.

“Say hi to Neil for me, won’t you?” I called out to her.

It’s harsh, but it’s true. Marianne is not the leader.
I am.
I say who stays and who goes. I am the one who holds this group together. I will not let Marianne think that she is the boss of me. She just needs a good kick once in a while as a reminder.

The lunch-hall was packed and smelt like feet and rancid cheese. Mrs Wally greeted me inside the kitchen with crossed arms and a face like the centre of Hell.

“Get out there and start working missy, you are twenty-five minutes late. And lunch is only forty minutes long.”

“Sorry. I forgot,” I replied, tying the disgusting, smelly apron around me.

“Don’t think that I’ll forget. I am noting this down for the
Principal. He will, I’m sure, see that you make this time up.”

Mrs Wally flashed a particularly nasty grin with her 400-watt chemically whitened teeth.

“Looks like you will be stuck with me well into next week, huh?”

I made a face, but I didn’t answer back. As much as I was tempted to say something smart, I valued not having to work here
forever
a lot more. I winced as Mrs Wally took the gum out of her mouth and stuck it under the kitchen counter.

“Excuse me. Are you sure this is chicken?”

I spun around to find Neil pointing to one of the steaming trays in the bainmarie. Thank God, I thought I’d never get away from that hag. I smiled and walked up to him. Neil smiled back. He had big brown eyes like Bambi. So there we were. Separated by steaming glass.

“I guess so, if that’s what the label says…”

I looked at the four dishes. They looked identical. I shrugged.

Neil gave it the benefit of doubt and ladled some onto his plate. It landed with a sickening plop.

“I’ve never seen you eat canteen food.”

“Neither have I,” replied Neil.

He leaned closer to the glass. I found myself doing the same thing.

“You see, I was going to make myself a sandwich this morning, but then I found we had no ham left. So I thought I would make a cheese sandwich. Except there was no cheese
either. I couldn’t even make a margarine sandwich ’cos the margarine tub was empty. Then I found we had no bread so I gave up.”

“Oh.”

“My dad said he was doing the groceries yesterday. And he must have because I found two bottles of Scotch in the pantry. I guess he must have forgotten to, like, buy food.”

“How is your dad?”

“Drunk, I think,” replied Neil.

I tried to change the subject.

“Nice tie. Very retro,” I said.

“Thanks.”

East Rivermoor is a vanity wonderland. Designer shoes, expensive haircuts, makeup, skin-tight clothes—and that’s just the boys.

The girls are expected to wear a white dress shirt with a grey skirt and the boys grey trousers and a tie. But we can pimp our outfits any which way we like. I’d gotten my mother’s tailor to shorten all my skirts because I have to admit it, I have a nice pair of legs. Lexi has white Chinese frog buttons sewn on her shirt cuffs, and Marianne slit her sleeves right up to the elbow and put rows of tiny silver buttons all along them. Behind Neil, a whole spectrum of different ties moved through the lunch-hall like a testosterone rainbow. Hollerings doesn’t care as long as you show some pretence of trying to fit in. They want us to all be the same, but individual. Independent, but controlled. It’s all very PC.

“Hey, you never told me what detention you ended up with.”

“I have to stay behind for a week and clean the cleaners’ cupboard,” replied Neil drolly. “Fitting, I suppose.”

“You are not here to chat up boys!” Mrs Wally’s sharp voice cut through the sound of sizzling oil from the kitchen. That cranky old cow was watching me like a hawk.

“That’s ten bucks, thanks.”

Neil passed me a crinkled note between his index and middle fingers.

“Enjoy your lunch.”

Neil shrugged and picked up his tray. My hand grew a mind of its own and went to touch my blazer pocket, where the postcard still was. I forced it back down.

“Well, well, well,” said the voice to my right that I knew only too well. It was the whiney voice of Jeremy Biggins.

“What do you want Biggins?”

“
Oooo.
Fiery, just like the hair. Is this the usual level of service?”

“No. This is the level of service I reserve especially for you, short-ass.”

Jeremy Biggins’ hair and face are usually the same colour: red. Right now though, that face was heading towards beetroot.

“Get me what I want nicely or I may ask to speak to your supervisor, Boans,” he scowled. “Take-away black tea, thanks. One sugar.”

In hindsight, it was a pretty lucky thing I made it a little cold. I smacked the cardboard cup down on the counter. Biggins paid for it with change. I threw the coins into the cash register and slammed it shut. Biggins took the lid off the cup. Then he threw the tea onto me.

“You little sh—
oww!”
I screamed.

The tea hit me right in the middle of my stomach and burned through the apron and onto the thin fabric of my shirt. I was lucky I had my trusty pair of thick high-waisted spanx underneath. I threw the apron off and grabbed a dirty cloth from the bench, dabbing furiously at my shirt.

“What the Heavens is happening out here!” echoed Mrs Wally as she approached from the kitchen. “Miss Eliza!”

“Crap!” I screamed again, jumping up and down. “I’m going to kill that—”

“Miss Eliza!” bellowed Mrs Wally. “You silly, clumsy girl!”

Silly? Clumsy? What the…?

It took me a while to comprehend that Mrs Wally thought I had done this to myself.

“No! Him!” I pointed toward Biggins, who at that moment was scurrying away through the crowd.

I turned to face Mrs Wally.

“Someone’s gotta stop him!”

Someone apparently did. We heard a huge crash. Mrs Wally and I both stared at each other. Then we bolted for the side door. I made it out first; I had the smaller ass.

I pushed past a large mob of students. In the middle stood Jeremy Biggins, a smashed plate on the ground next to him. There was chicken cacciatore dripping down his head. In front of him stood Neil, with his empty tray still in his hands.

“That is it!” Mrs Wally exclaimed and grabbed my wrist. She clamped the other hand onto Neil’s shoulder. I heard her mutter the word “children” under her breath, along with a few choice expletives.

“I will not have this. I am taking you both to the Principal’s office right now!”

Neil was still holding onto his plastic tray as Mrs Wally pulled us toward the lunch-hall entrance. He passed it to a random tenth-grader in the crowd who hooted loudly and held the tray up in the air like a trophy.

Principal Hollerings was not in his office. We had to wait ten minutes, me with a huge cooling tea stain in the middle of my shirt, and Neil next to me, looking like he’d just murdered a chicken cacciatore. Mrs Wally paced back and forth smoking a cigarette.

“Excuse me, ma’am, but there’s no smoking on school premises,” I said. “You might give us children cancer.”

“Butt out,” replied Mrs Wally.

Apt choice of words, but I kept quiet. I didn’t want to, like, blow Mrs Wally’s mind with the irony.

I looked sideways at Neil.

Neil looked back and raised a sauce-speckled eyebrow at me. Guess he didn’t know why it was us either.
Again.

Principal Hollerings hurried up the hallway on his ebony cane with the gold eagle’s head, the one that looks like a pimp’s walking stick. He looked decidedly unimpressed when he saw the both of us sitting on the bench outside his office.

“Miss Boans, Mr Fernandes. What is this? I only saw the two of you on Tuesday? Which, incidentally, was yesterday.”

“Principal Hollerings,” said Mrs Wally. “These two students were responsible for the shenanigans out there. I caught Miss Eliza red-handed and this student—”

Mrs Wally pointed a false fingernail at Neil.

“—must be somehow involved because I saw him having a long and meaningful chat with the girl only two minutes earlier!”

“Miss Boans, explain yourself please,” sighed the Principal.

“Jeremy Biggins threw a cup of tea at me.”

“Pardon me?”

“Threw a cup of tea on me. As in he bought a cup of tea from me—”

“You mean to say that the young gentleman purchased a cup of tea off you with his own money, only to throw it back at you?”