The Secret Place полностью

A breadth of darkness away in Kilda’s, snow brushes at the dorm-room window, small fitful flakes, not sticking. Winter has clamped down hard: early sunsets, petty sleet and the streaming cold that’s been going around mean it’s been a week since Julia and Holly and Selena and Becca felt daylight, and they’re jiggly with confinement and leftover sniffles. They’re arguing about the Valentine’s dance.

‘I’m not going,’ Becca says.

Holly is lying on her bed in her pyjamas, copying Julia’s maths as fast as she can, throwing in the odd minor mistake for authenticity. ‘Why not?’

‘Because I’d rather burn off my own fingernails with a lighter than wiggle myself into some stupid dress with a stupid micro-mini skirt and a stupid stuck-on low-cut top, even if I owned that kind of crap, which I don’t and I’m not going to ever. Is why.’

‘You have to go,’ Julia says, from her bed, where she’s face-down reading.

‘No I don’t.’

‘If you don’t, you’ll get sent to Sister Ignatius and she’ll ask if you don’t want to go because you were abused when you were little, and when you tell her you weren’t, she’ll say you need to learn self-esteem.’

Becca is sitting on her bed with her arms around her knees, clenched into a furious red knot. ‘I have self-esteem. I have enough self-esteem that I’m not going to wear something stupid just because everyone else is.’

‘Well, fuck you very much. My dress isn’t stupid.’ Julia has a shimmy of a dress, black with scarlet polka dots, that she spent months saving for and bought in the sales just a couple of weeks ago. It’s the tightest thing she’s ever owned, and she actually kind of likes the look of herself in it.

‘Your dress isn’t. Me in your dress would be. Because I’d hate it.’

Selena says, through the pyjama top she’s pulling over her head, ‘Why don’t you wear whatever you like best?’

‘I like jeans best.’

‘So wear jeans.’

‘Yeah, right. Are you going to?’

‘I’m wearing that blue dress that was my granny’s. The one I already showed you.’ It’s a sky-blue minidress that Selena’s granny wore back in the sixties, when she was a shopgirl in cool parts of London. It’s tight on Selena’s chest, but she’s wearing it anyway.

‘Exactly,’ Becca says. ‘Hol, are you wearing jeans?’

‘Ah, bugger,’ Holly says, scrubbing at a mistake that turned out bigger than she expected. ‘My mum bought me this purple dress for Christmas. It’s actually OK. I might wear that.’

‘So I’d be the only loser in jeans, or else I have to go buy some stupid dress I hate and be a total compromise coward liar. No thanks.’

‘Do the dress,’ says Julia, turning a page. ‘Give us all a laugh.’

Becca gives her the finger. Julia grins and gives it right back. She approves of the new feisty Becca.

‘It’s not funny. You’re going to let me sit here by myself that night doing Sister Ignatius’s stupid self-esteem exercises, while you’re all wiggling in stupid dresses for-’

‘So come, for fuck’s sake-’

‘I don’t want to!’

‘Then what do you want? You want the rest of us to stay home just because you don’t feel like wearing a dress?’ Julia has ditched her book and is sitting up. Holly and Selena have stopped what they’re doing at the snap in her voice. ‘Because yeah, no: fuck that.’

‘I thought the whole point was we don’t have to do stuff just because everyone else does-’

‘I’m not going because everyone else is, genius, I’m going because I actually want to. Because it’s fun, you’ve heard of that, right? If you’d rather sit here doing self-esteem exercises, knock yourself out. I’m going.’

‘Oh, thanks, thanks a lot – you’re supposed to be my friend-’

‘Right, which doesn’t mean being your bitch-’

Becca is up on her knees on the bed, fists clenched and hair crackling with fury. ‘I never fucking asked you to-’

The light bulb spits a furious sizzle, pops and goes out. They all scream.

‘Shut up!’ the second-floor prefects both yell from down the corridor. A breathless ‘Jesus-’ from Julia, a thump and ‘Ow!’ as Selena knocks her shin off something, and then the light flicks back on.

‘What the hell,’ Holly says. ‘What happened?’

The bulb is burning innocently, not a flicker.

‘It’s a sign, Becs,’ Julia says, with that breathless note almost under control. ‘The universe wants you to quit whinging and go to the dance.’

‘Ha ha, so very funny,’ Becca says. Her voice isn’t under control at all; it sounds like a kid’s, high and wobbly. ‘Or the universe doesn’t want you going, and it’s annoyed because you said you were.’

Selena says, to Becca, ‘Did you do that?’

‘You are shitting me,’ Julia says. ‘Right?’

‘Becsie?’

‘Oh, please,’ Julia says. ‘Come on. Don’t even go there.’

Selena is still looking at Becca. So is Holly. In the end Becca says, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh, God,’ Julia says. ‘I can’t even.’ She falls flat on her stomach on her bed and slams her pillow over her head.

Selena says, ‘Do it again.’

‘How?’

‘However you did it before.’

Becca is staring at the light bulb like it might leap at her. ‘I didn’t. I don’t think. I don’t know.’