Dead Popular Read online

  Lo didn’t say anything.

  “You can tell a lot from a kiss,” I said, hoping Meribel would take the bait and lead the conversation elsewhere. She did.

  “You’ve only ever kissed Bernard,” she said.

  “And I learned a lot,” I said. “I’m ready for Hugo now.”

  At precisely the same time, Meribel and I said, “You saw Janetta’s post?” then laughed at our synchronicity. Hugo was one-hundred-per-cent the best-looking guy in the whole of Mount Norton, and happened to be in the same year as us. He was also super-smart and sporty. He’d be going to an Ivy League American university one day; we all knew it. Meribel and I were following his girlfriend, Janetta, who went to another school, on social media, and she’d posted over the summer about their messy break-up.

  I absolutely knew a kiss with Hugo would be radically different to the one I’d had with Bernard at the beach café party.

  Bernard hadn’t even been someone on my list of would-like-tos. A group of us had been playing Never Have I Ever on the roof of the café, and Clemmie was challenging someone’s answer, accusing them of lying. Bernard, who was sitting cross-legged next to me, had told her it was only a stupid drinking game, but she wouldn’t let it go, and the rest of us had become bored. Bel, Lo and Sasha hadn’t been playing because they’d wanted to dance on the concrete walkway, which we called the promenade. I decided to join them, clambering down from the roof via the bin. I’d stood watching for a moment in the shadow of the porch, waiting for a better song to come on, and Bernard joined me. I felt desirable that night. I wanted to be kissed. I was Kate Lynette Jordan-Ferreira, nearly sixteen, and I’d never kissed anyone properly. It had to change, and Bernard was right there, murmuring that he’d fancied me hard since I joined the school. He was a bit of an idiot, and he wasn’t Hugo, but he was there and wanted to kiss me.

  He pressed his mouth on mine and his tongue was thick and insistent, and I couldn’t lose myself in the moment even though I tried. I filtered out the lyrics of the song which was playing, and the laughter and chatter. I couldn’t seem to cross into a different way of being. The only sensation I felt was of fleshiness in my mouth, and of his hand pressed hard against my back. It wasn’t what I thought it would be.

  Meribel’s voice cut into my thoughts. “Nearly time for the Ghost to go home,” she said, tapping me on my arm with her phone. “She was on the early shift. I’ll film if you like. My phone’s brand new. The camera’s incredible.”

  Most times, the Ghost left by the back gate and her husband picked her up in his car in the back lane. The gate had a PIN code on it which was changed every term. We’d learned, along with a few other people in Pankhurst, that it was possible to take a video of the Ghost leaving and zoom in later to read the code. The first few times the Ghost inputted the code in a new term, she did it slowly, which was helpful.

  We moved the chairs inside, and Meribel knelt by the open window. “Her husband better be picking her up this evening,” she said. “I don’t want her going out of the front door and taking the bus. Wait. Shhh. There she is.”

  Lo and I stood well back so we wouldn’t be seen gawping if the Ghost happened to look up, though I suspected her eyesight wasn’t that good even if she did.

  “Got it,” said Meribel. “I’m pretty sure it’s one nine eight four.” She stood up and we watched over her shoulder as she replayed the video. “Yep. Right, I’m deleting it now. Guard it closely, guys. What next? Davison common room?”

  It took us ten minutes to get ready, and just over five minutes to get from the third floor, out of the front door and across the road to swipe into Davison with our fifth-form cards. The common room was on the ground floor. We breezed in. It was huge and modern compared to the junior common room in Pankhurst, and was rammed with students, a mixture of fifth- and sixth-formers. There was a corner sofa with fluffy cushions, and some comfy chairs nearby. Naturally Clemmie had hogged a spot on the corner sofa. Her friends were bunched round her, trading gossip. There were lots of white tables and chairs in the centre of the room. A pool table was at one end, a kitchen area at the other.

  Davison was the common room to hang out in.

  “Hey!” Bernard appeared in a T-shirt that announced he’d done a 10k run for charity. “How are you lovely lot?”

  “We’re lovely, thanks,” said Meribel.

  I managed a half-smile, and wondered when I would stop feeling awkward around him. At least we’d sort of got back to being friendly. After our kiss last term, when I’d made it clear I didn’t want anything more, he hadn’t spoken to me for at least two weeks, but it had gradually become less uncomfortable. This new friendliness was going to take some getting used to though.

  Lo had ordered a picture book for me as a joke at the end of last term. It was called Not Now, Bernard. The book’s Bernard had parents who ignored him repeatedly, saying “Not now, Bernard”, and in the end a monster ate him.

  “Where did you summer?” Bernard asked. His use of summer as a verb made me want to throttle him. I let Meribel talk about Berlin, and he butted in to tell us about his incredible time in South-East Asia. As he unlocked his phone to show us a photo of a waterfall he’d trekked to, Lo mouthed, Not now, Bernard.

  I widened my eyes at her and she stifled a giggle. After Lo had left our villa in Italy, my mother had said, “What a quiet friend you have.” Meribel, on the other hand, was more the sort of person my mother would love if they ever met – loud, impulsive and very fashion-conscious, from a family who’d made a lot of money and weren’t afraid of what Elsie Gran called conspicuous spending. Lo was one of the cleverest people in our year, and amazing at dance. She spent a good proportion of her life on YouTube watching dance routines, which she absorbed as easily as her revision notes. She was outwardly more reserved than me and Meribel, and you had to know her well before she’d show you her fun side.

  Meribel swivelled around as Bernard was in full flow and muttered, “Hugo’s here.”

  I looked immediately and heard Meribel tut at my unsubtlety. He looked better than ever: tanned, relaxed and wearing perfect-fit jeans.

  “Hiya, Hugh!” called Clemmie from the sofa in a baby voice. “Come and sit with us on the sofa.” They lived near each other in the same part of Sussex. There was a whole clique at Mount Norton who’d been to the same prep school and whose parents all socialized together. Veronica and Monro, the ankle-breaker, were part of their home crowd too.

  Hugo spoke to the whole room as he said, in a spot-on impression of Wibbz, “Oh my darlings – how happy I am to see your faces!” in exactly the way she would have if she’d been there.

  Everyone laughed. I was determined to have him to myself for a few minutes before he reached Clemmie, so I stepped towards him and said, “I hope you’re looking forward to this year’s party challenge.” We were both House Prefects, although technically, as his house had a sixth form as part of it, his title was House Prefect of the Lower School.

  Hugo held my gaze. I felt a leap of excitement as I moved my head a fraction to show him my best side. I would do everything it took to impress him.

  “Bring it on,” he said. “May the best person win.”

  I smiled, and said, “Absolutely.”

  Clemmie called to him again, and he murmured, “Please excuse me,” and moved on.

  I didn’t turn to watch him go. It would have been unsubtle, and I didn’t want to see Clemmie embrace him.

  I’d already been here in Davison for a dare when I was new, two years ago. I’d heard that Clemmie thought I was too full of myself, so I decided I’d do the initiation test she set for eager new students. I’d do an enhanced version of it. Clemmie had persuaded first-formers to find a way into Davison and stay as many minutes as they could before being chucked out by a sixth-former or an angry member of staff.

  I decided I would pull an all-nighter.

  Apparently most of the first-formers barged their way in as a sixth-former swiped in with their school card and
so brought obvious attention to themselves. I strode in with some library books I’d nabbed from the main school library which needed to go across to the Davison one. They were easy to spot on the trolley as they had different coloured stickers. A passing teacher was only too happy to let a helpful library-loving third-former in. And then it was a matter of finding a hiding place, and keeping Wibbz from noticing I was missing. It was remarkably, disturbingly easy. Meribel had to spin some story about me being in the bathroom at one point but that was all.

  I posted footage of myself in a cleaning cupboard and then in the common room, expecting to be thrown out any moment, but left at six in the morning when the cleaners arrived.

  Clemmie said it had only worked because I was insignificant and nobody cared where I was. But she couldn’t ignore the fact that the photos and videos of my Davison sleepover had been liked and viewed by our classmates more than anything she had ever posted, despite the number of followers she had.

  I was aware of Lo beside me, saying something. She pointed and I saw a large, colourful collage of red, pink, purple and orange made from what looked like paper, fabric and paint: Veronica’s artwork. People must have been standing in front of it before because I don’t know how we’d have missed seeing it otherwise.

  “Is it a sunset?” asked Meribel.

  “Dunno,” I replied and walked over to take a closer look. There was a rectangle of something stitched on to red silk in the corner, a selfie that had been made to look like a Polaroid photo. It was of Veronica sitting next to Monro, her hand in her hair as if she’d been pushing it away from her face. The colours were bleached out and yellowy, but the two of them were laughing. A golden Mount Norton couple.

  “That was taken about ten minutes before he did his ankle in,” said Veronica. I hadn’t noticed her in the room before then. She was holding a mug of tea, her hair in a high ponytail, wearing baggy red linen dungarees and a stripy purple-and-red bralette top, which Calding most definitely wouldn’t approve of. In those colours, she could have walked into her own artwork and been camouflaged.

  “It was such a cool party,” said someone.

  Veronica nodded, and turned to where Monro was crouched by the sink, looking into a cupboard. I didn’t know if they were a proper couple, but they were tight.

  People were wary of Monro. He was quiet but he was known to have anger issues. He’d punched a window in Churchill and had an ugly raised scar on his arm to show for it.

  “M, you found any sugar yet?” Veronica called across the room at him.

  He stood up. He’d become even taller over the summer. “Nope.”

  “Wibbz would have made sure we were stocked properly,” Veronica said, and sighed. There was a separate housemistress for Davison but Wibbz had often done shifts to keep in touch with her former girls. “We should start a petition to get her back. We could crowdfund to send her off to Arizona or somewhere to dry out first?”

  “There’s no point,” said Flo, one of Veronica’s friends. “Nobody’s parents are going to let her come back now they know she has a problem.”

  Before I moved away from the collage, I read the printed label at the side of the artwork, black writing on white paper on grey board, the classy Mount Norton way. It said:

  Mixed Media by Veronica Steepleton

  Title: The Things We Keep Hidden

  CHAPTER 4

  There was quiet, seething resentment at dinner from both girls and kitchen staff due to the dessert situation. Squirrel stood by the whiteboard menu with her thick, meaty arms folded, muttering in Bulgarian. The main course options were Mediterranean chicken casserole and vegetarian stir-fry, but all casseroles were known as Squirrel stew and tended to taste the same. She was a big fan of black olives and tomato puree. The dessert options – lemon meringue pie, profiteroles and Eton mess – had been crossed through with a red marker instead of being erased.

  The walls of the dining hall were lined with dark wood panels. There were several portraits in ornate gilt frames. One of them was of Emmeline Pankhurst, the boarding house’s namesake, but the largest by far was of the boarding-house founder, a woman who looked humourless and grumpy. Calding and the Ghost patrolled the dining hall like prison wardens. We had to sit where we could. Apparently it was no longer allowed for me as House Prefect to reserve a table. When I asked why, Calding said it wasn’t on the designated list of privileges. It was only something her predecessor had allowed.

  “But Wibbz turned it into a tradition,” I said.

  “Pankhurst is going back to basics with rules,” said Calding. Her eyes didn’t flinch from mine. She didn’t care about being liked, that was certain.

  “I’m going to complain to Miss Sneller,” I said.

  “I’m sure the head has much more serious things to worry about at the start of the new term, don’t you?” Calding said.

  We ended up on a shared table with some third-formers and Zeta. Zeta listened to our conversation about plans for decorating our rooms, and didn’t say anything until Lo asked how she was, and her eyes welled up with tears, and she said, “I’m fine,” in her squeaky little voice. How could she get to the fifth form and still be so hopelessly homesick? She told us how she’d had a photo of her hamster printed on to a cushion so she could snuggle up with him in bed.

  “Disturbing,” murmured Meribel. I smiled politely at Zeta. She could do so much more to fit in at Pankhurst. It was hard not to be irritated by her.

  The rest of the evening was ahead of us – supposedly for board games, music practice, yoga in Davison or “screen time” (as if none of us had second phones, in addition to the ones that were ceremoniously brought out of the locked cupboard in the front office for screen time).

  First off, I called Elsie Gran with my earphones in so I could finish unpacking while I spoke to her.

  “Katelyn!” She was the only person who called me that, mashing my first name with my middle name, Lynnette.

  “Missing me?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” said Elsie Gran. She could be brutal like that, but I noted she’d picked up the phone on the first ring. “Everything OK?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. I lifted Blu Tack and some carefully selected photos from my bag of fragile items, which had been at the top of my trunk. “The new housemistress is mean, but hopefully she won’t be here long.”

  “Must be hard working in a school full of over-entitled kids,” said Elsie Gran.

  “We’re not all over-entitled,” I said.

  Elsie Gran snorted. She told me Maria next door had invited her round the next day to see the first couple of episodes of a new Netflix series, and did I want to know what happened in the end in the audiobook we’d been listening to on the way to Mount Norton.

  I listened to her deep voice more than her words. It always made me feel calmer. Her view of the world was so certain.

  Five minutes later, the evening began properly. Meribel, Lo and I lay on Meribel’s bed watching a new K-pop video, and then Lo made us get up and see if we could remember a dance routine she’d taught us last term. We got as far as a fast turn, which I overdid and sidestepped in the wrong direction, making the others laugh so much they stopped. We started again, turning up the music louder than we’d have got away with if we’d been on the floors below.

  Eventually we’d had enough, and I said, “We should go to the beach tonight.”

  Wibbz had rarely made it up the first flight of stairs to say goodnight to us. Calding would be different, but she couldn’t patrol all night. To repeatedly check on students in bed would be weird.

  Going out on the first night would show the rest of Pankhurst I wasn’t afraid of Calding. I was House Prefect. Veronica was a hard act to follow, so I had to be fearless. Clemmie would be out tonight, I was sure of that, so I would be there too, taking a few photos for evidence.

  “I don’t think I should go,” said Lo. “Calding’s genuinely strict. If I’m suspended it’s going to wreck my chance of a scholarship next year.”
She did the pushing-back-of-her-fingers thing, and let her springy copper hair fall forward to curtain half her face. In a quieter voice, she added, “Sorry.”

  I sighed heavily. “Oh, come on,” I said. “I’m sure loads of other people are going to be there; it’s not that big a deal if we get caught.” At this rate, she’d be refusing to come to my beach house party, which would be unthinkable.

  Lo pushed back her hair to look at me. “I’m not going.”

  I wanted us to be closer than we’d ever been, a force to be reckoned with. It wasn’t starting off well. “Suit yourself,” I said brusquely, and I caught the hurt in her eyes before she went towards the door.

  “I’m going to unpack,” she said, and left the room.

  Meribel shrugged at me. “She’ll loosen up as the term gets going.” She lifted her hands to redo her hair, twirling it up into a bun, expertly tucking the end in. “I’ve got a few work calls to make. There’s something in the pipeline, and I need to find out more.”

  “What sort of thing?” I asked.

  “A shoot in Japan,” said Meribel. She sashayed across the room like a model, then jazz-handed her excitement. “A. Mazing. Yeah?” One of the reasons she hated Clemmie so much was that Clemmie once said Meribel only got modelling work because she had “an unusual face” that ticked the diversity card. Clemmie was so full of it, the jealous wannabe.

  As Meribel struck ridiculous poses to make me laugh, I had the sensation of facing the wrong direction. It hadn’t occurred to me she’d contemplate going off so early in the school year, not now we had third-floor status and exams.

  “I’ll have to beg Sneller for time off if it happens,” said Meribel, draping herself across the bed. “That’s always tedious.”

  If she wasn’t given permission, she’d go anyway. The head usually gave it retrospectively.

  “But it’s the beginning of term,” I said, my voice sounding like a wail.

  She laughed – she thought I was being ironic.