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“Interesting,” said Veronica. “You’re saying it’s my own fault?”

  “Course not,” said Clemmie. “Stop being so sensitive.”

  I was intrigued. The two of them weren’t usually snappy with each other.

  “It won’t look good in a box frame,” said Veronica. She smoothed a piece of orange felt at the corner, as if it might be coming unstuck. “Maybe I should let it be interactive. Go ahead and use it, folks. Keep it anonymous, though. No more naming and shaming.”

  “But it’s literally prize-winning art,” said Flo.

  “I don’t care, not really,” said Veronica, stepping back and tilting her head. She straightened the frame. “As Monro pointed out yesterday, I’ve already got the prize money.”

  “It’s not like you even need the money,” said Clemmie.

  Veronica gave her a stare, and Clemmie turned away first.

  Veronica went to join Monro at his table. I noticed he didn’t make any move to hide what was on his laptop screen from her, but when Bernard, walking by on his way to the pool table, darted towards Monro to press a random key on the keyboard to annoy him, Monro snapped the lid shut, narrowly missing Bernard’s hand. Then he jumped up and went up close to Bernard’s face, yelling at him to keep away.

  “Calm down,” said Bernard. “You need to watch that temper of yours.”

  CHAPTER 12

  I woke early again a couple of days later, and when I pulled one of my curtains back, the pale-orange strip of the horizon almost matched curtain fabric. I lifted the window and stepped out. Immediately I went to the right-hand-side railings to see if Monro was there.

  He was, and I wondered for a moment if he’d been on that bench the last two mornings waiting for me or if it was coincidence. He must have heard the window opening because he was looking up at me. I waved, and he made a drinking motion, though I noticed he didn’t have a mug himself. Before I could answer, he moved an imaginary steering wheel, and pointed in the direction of the car park. He was suggesting a ride in his car.

  I made an exaggeratedly surprised face in case anything more subtle was hard to read, then lifted my hands up in a why-not gesture, and went back inside to pile on a few clothes and toothbrush away my morning breath.

  When I went through Pankhurst back gate, he was waiting.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Out for breakfast,” he said, and held up a red thermos.

  My parents would have loathed Monro’s car, which came to life on the third try, and made a grinding noise as it started to move. It was even more decrepit than Elsie Gran’s old Volvo. A faint smell of damp hung in the air, and it couldn’t have still been the lingering aroma of Bel’s wet trainers. I wound the window down (no electrics) and the smell dissipated a little.

  I hardly knew anywhere around Mount Norton beyond the village of Norton, and Ryemouth where we went to shop if we didn’t want to buy online. Monro said we were going to Thornley harbour, but I’d never heard of it.

  Once we were on the main road, it was almost too noisy to talk, especially with the window down, so after a shouted conversation about how fast the car could go (allegedly quite fast when it was warmed up), I didn’t bother. I let the wind mess my hair and take my breath away. The freedom of being away from Pankhurst and nobody knowing was exhilarating. And I was with the wild card who was Monro – which was just plain thrillingly weird.

  “Here we are,” he said, turning into what looked like a driveway between houses. Almost immediately I saw the sea, and a large empty car park and some green space where a few people were walking dogs. “There’s a neat place across from the mouth of the harbour. You’ll like it.”

  I kicked off my pale blue suede flip-flops and brought my knees up to the seat and clasped them. “This is so much nicer than the coast at Norton. Why haven’t I been here before?”

  “Because you only stick with Norton beach and Ryemouth?” suggested Monro as he parked up close to the water.

  “Or maybe because there’s no public transport here,” I said primly. I hadn’t seen a bus stop for a while.

  A line of narrow yachts were attached to moorings, and there was a stretch of land the other side of a small channel of water at the harbour mouth. Across there was a collection of oversized beach huts, pastel colours gleaming in the early morning light, far superior to the small, murky green ones on Norton beach.

  At the other end of the car park, two men were bent over fishing nets and baskets but otherwise there was nobody about. Two seagulls were fighting over something, and behind their squawks was the constant clanking from the yachts.

  “I love that sound,” I said.

  “The halyards against the mast?” said Monro as he untangled himself from his seat belt. “D’you sail?”

  “Not really,” I said. I’d been on various yachts with my parents, but crew members had done everything.

  “Sailing can be intense,” he said. “If you do it with my dad. He’s not the most patient of people.”

  Maybe the anger issues everyone talked about stemmed from his dad.

  We left the car and walked towards the small quay, Monro holding the thermos. There was a closed café, boarded-up fish stall and a lifeboat station. A blackboard sign announced that the first ferry across to the headland would be at nine a.m.

  “This way,” said Monro, bounding down the steps next to the sign. He stepped on to the small boat at the bottom. It creaked. The name on the side had been freshly painted: Tiger Lily. “Tiger Lily’s making a special early-morning crossing,” he called to me. “Leaving in one minute.”

  I watched him scramble towards the back of the boat as I went down the steps. What time was Monro planning to get back to school?

  “Are you allowed to start this?” I said, stepping cautiously on to it, and crouching down towards the wooden bench in the middle so I didn’t wobble it too much.

  Monro squatted next to the motor. “Very poor security. As long as we get it back here before the first official crossing at nine a.m., we’ll be fine.”

  The motor roared suddenly, and Tiger Lily jolted, causing me to sit down abruptly. I let go of my doubts and laughed. It felt so ridiculous to be doing this on a school morning, with a boy I barely knew. Monro laughed too as he sat down, his laughter spilling out unexpectedly, as if it had been squashed into a small tin and the lid had flown open. If I looked out towards the sea and not directly at Monro, I could almost imagine he was Hugo, and we were off on a romantic getaway.

  He turned the boat towards the headland before cutting the speed and his high spirits at the same time. “Life jackets. I didn’t think about them.” He searched with one hand under the bench where he was sitting, then quickly knelt to get a better look.

  “I can swim.” Had he never noticed me on Norton beach in the summer? I was an extremely competent swimmer.

  Monro pulled out a life jacket. “This water has a current.”

  “I’ll be OK,” I said.

  “Please,” he said. “Put it on. There’s only one and I want you to wear it.”

  It was damp and streaked with black grease. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Tiger Lily is about to accelerate.”

  I struggled into it, adjusting the clips so it fitted me more snugly. The boat roared, and reared up so I had to hold on to the bench I was on. Cold, dirty-looking water swilled over my flip-flops, and I wriggled them off, holding them in one hand, and hung on to the side of the boat with the other.

  Ahead was the beach-hut world, clean and fresh in the early sunshine, pastel-coloured calm.

  The crossing only took a few minutes. I imagined it took a lot longer when Tiger Lily was a working ferry. There was a wooden jetty the other side, and Monro parked alongside expertly, cutting the engine and letting the boat drift towards a metal ring. He reached down for some rope and tied a loose knot through it, then scrambled on to the jetty to hold the boat steady for me to disembark.

  I took off the life jacket, and left it with my
flip-flops on the bench. It seemed like a barefoot kind of place.

  “Follow me for the best breakfast spot,” Monro said, and set off in the opposite direction to what I was expecting, towards the headland, the rocky part where I couldn’t see the violence of the waves yet but I could hear it. It was OK for him, he was wearing Vans.

  I looked back at my flip-flops in the boat.

  “You’ll be OK,” said Monro. “I’ll help you.”

  He didn’t take my hand until we reached the first pile of boulders, and I slid on the first one and shrieked. I gripped with my toes after that, and we clambered towards the highest rock.

  At the top there was a smooth, flat surface, a seat above the rage of the water. It was small though. We sat close together, thighs touching, my breathing different because of the gusty, salty air. I had a feeling of letting go, of not caring about the fine sea spray that shot up now and again when a big wave hit the rocks below. I looked at the blurry white-blue line of the horizon, and thought how random it was that I was here instead of in bed. I was surprised he hadn’t tried to take a selfie of the two of us yet. It sounded vain but there were a lot of boys at Mount Norton who wanted to be seen with me.

  “What are you thinking about?” asked Monro. His hair was slightly flattened on one side where he must have slept on it. It was quite cute.

  “Nothing much,” I said. I watched him unscrew the lid of his thermos and pour tea into it. He offered it to me, and I took two sips before handing it back. “Thanks.”

  He drank from the other side of it and refilled it. “It has a metallic taste from being in here, but I quite like it.” He handed it to me again and pulled a bar of fruit and nut chocolate from his pocket. It was bent out of shape, snapped in various places already.

  He opened out the wrapper and laid it on the rock, and we ate it slowly.

  “I know I sound like my grandad, but I love this view,” said Monro, as he pulled a fat raisin out of his chunk of chocolate and chucked it into his mouth before eating the rest. “Not that my grandad has ever seen this view.”

  I acknowledged this by saying, “Hm.”

  “There are views that you know you’re going to miss as soon you look at them.” He turned to me. “Don’t you think?”

  I didn’t know how to respond, but I said, “Have you been to this place a lot?”

  He shook his head. “I came to the fish restaurant on the harbour with my parents one Saturday last year. Then I came here with Vee a couple of times – in a taxi. You should see how much Vee racks up on her taxi account for someone so interested in the environment. One time it was early, like now, before the ferry had started, and we came across on Tiger Lily.”

  “I feel bad for Veronica about her artwork,” I said. “I wouldn’t be taking it so well.”

  “No need to feel bad,” he said.

  I raised my eyes at him. “That’s kind of brutal.”

  He crumpled the chocolate wrapper and rammed it into his pocket without looking at it. “It’s not. Spoiler alert: she always planned for it to be interactive. She put Zeta’s prescription and the article about Flo up there herself. It’s part of her project.”

  “What? That’s mad,” I said. Was he spinning me a story here?

  “I know. She said she thought the prescription was for eczema. She saw it in the pigeonholes in Pankhurst when she was walking past after dinner. Even so.” Monro shook his head with what I took to be disapproval. “I wasn’t going to out her, but she shouldn’t have done it. She should have picked things that weren’t going to embarrass people. Or blanked out their names.”

  “Why did she do it?” It didn’t make any sense to me.

  “It’s the Things We Keep Hidden theme. She wanted to start it off and make it noticeable. It’s a whole long project.” He turned his hand over to show his palm in a don’t-ask-me-why gesture. “It had the desired effect. People loved it, didn’t they? Now she’s waiting for other people to join in.”

  He left a pause, and I thought there might be more to the project than he was saying.

  I picked up a small rock by my foot and threw it into the water. “Aren’t you worried I’m going to tell everyone about Vee’s artwork?” I said. It was the first time in my life I’d called her Vee out loud.

  “Not really.”

  “You think I can keep quiet about something like that?”

  “If you do tell, that’s part of the interactive process.” He brushed his palms together, and checked for chocolate crumbs. “How about keeping it quiet for a bit longer though?”

  “Hmmm. I’ll have to see.”

  We sat for a while, chucking rocks into the sea. We tried to skim the flatter ones so they’d bounce on the water before sinking, but we failed, and I said, “Let’s go round to the beach huts.” I clambered down far more easily than I had done going up.

  We walked the length of the huts. They had porches, curtains and running water – I could tell by the drains. They were more like mobile homes than beach huts. A young couple jogged along in the sand.

  I sighed. “It looks so nice.” I’d like to have said that out of all the beaches I’d been to, and I’d been to a lot, this had to be one of my favourites. But it would have sounded over the top, so I didn’t.

  We walked back to Tiger Lily and Monro untied it deftly. Water hit our faces as we bumped back over the waves. There were more people around when we reached the other side. A woman with a little white dog gave us a double-look as Monro secured the boat to the post he’d taken it from. I held my hand out for him to help me haul myself up on to land, and when he almost fell backwards, he gripped me tightly and our slightly hysterical laughter filled the still, morning air. I had to look away from him after a couple of seconds, because I had a thought in my head that with the sun beginning to burn through the clouds and the clanking of the masts, and the salty taste on my lips, this would be the ideal place to kiss someone. I nearly leaned in towards Monro, to see what it would be like. The lightness was there in my body and the sensation of arching towards something. I knew I liked him a whole lot more after this trip, but I steadied myself. I didn’t want to mess up my chances with Hugo.

  I wondered if Monro would mind if I brought Hugo here sometime.

  CHAPTER 13

  It was 6.55 a.m. when I slipped in through Pankhurst’s back gate. I thought I saw a shadowy face appear at a window, but when I looked again it was just the ripple effect of a curtain.

  I climbed through my window and found Meribel lying on my bed, swiping through her phone.

  “Out with Mad Monro?” she asked.

  I threw my salt-water-damaged flip-flops on to the floor and lay next to her. “Yep, but don’t call him that. We went to Thornley beach for breakfast. In his car.”

  She looked mildly impressed. “There was a café open?”

  As soon as she heard the word thermos she was less impressed. “Bet he’s quite the one for deep conversation. He knows he’s in the friend zone, right? ”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Keep him in the outer edge,” continued Meribel.

  “Really?”

  “He’s just odd, don’t you think? Not odd as in creative. Odd as in odd.”

  I frowned. “He’s not so odd when you get to know him.”

  Meribel waved her arms in the air. “Nooo! Get out while you can.”

  I laughed and said I needed a shower. She sat up and said I hadn’t told her anything interesting yet, so she wasn’t going to leave. I peeled off my top, and said, “Suit yourself, Bel.”

  I watched Calding stir two teaspoons of sugar into her black coffee at breakfast. There were dark rings round her eyes and she didn’t bother with notices. She called out several people for uniform violations, snapped at the Ghost for gliding in a couple of minutes late, and sat nursing her coffee rather than patrolling the dining hall. It was pleasing to think Calding was finding Pankhurst life tiring just a few days into the term. She was going to be disappointed to find Meribel,
Lo and I weren’t going to take on any of the duties she’d outlined in her talk.

  Meribel had secured us a table that was the next best thing to being empty. Other than three seats for us, it was completely taken by panicking fourth-formers, who had a science test and were caught up in shooting questions at each other and so weren’t interested in anything we had to say.

  “Tell us something juicy from your little outing, then,” said Lo, after Meribel had hurriedly filled her in on me absconding for a couple of hours with Monro, but only because I couldn’t sleep and had stepped out on to the fire escape. There’d been nothing prearranged, Meribel assured her, as if it might have been a betrayal if I had planned it without informing them.

  The first thing I thought of was Monro’s revelation about Veronica’s artwork. “Er… I don’t know.”

  “Come on!” said Meribel. “Is he really that boring?”

  “You’re a disappointment, Miss Jordan-Ferreira,” said Lo, lifting her auburn hair with both hands, then holding it with one hand to place it all down one side of her neck. “Haven’t you got anything decent to share with us?”

  I opened my mouth a fraction.

  Lo moved her upper body in time to imaginary music and pointed at me. “You have! I can tell!”

  Looking round the dining hall, I checked to see if Veronica was there. Davison sixth-formers were allowed to come to Pankhurst for breakfast if they wanted something other than toast or cereal, which they could make in their little kitchen area, but they rarely bothered. “There was something,” I said quietly, “But you have to keep it to yourselves. Promise?”

  “Oooh, promise,” said Meribel.

  Lo said, “Yeah, yeah, I promise on my brother’s life.”

  “Veronica’s collage is interactive,” I said quietly. “It’s part of the project. According to Monro, she pinned up the prescription and the article. She wants people to join in.”

  They looked puzzled as my words sank in.

  “Veronica wants everyone to post other people’s secrets on her collage?” said Meribel. “Is she for real?”