The Secret Place полностью

It means weeks months years of smiling meekly when Joanne flicks bits of bitchiness their way, of asking pretty-please with a cherry on top can we have our key now, of watching her cock her head and consider whether they deserve it and decide regretfully that they don’t. It means the end of these nights; the end of everything. They want to wrap the dark air around her neck and pull. Selena’s fingers open.

Joanne touches the key and her hand leaps. The key skids and whirls away from her down the floor of the corridor and she’s squawking like she doesn’t have enough breath for a shriek, ‘Ow! OhmyGod, it burned me, owowow it burned what did you do-’

Holly and Julia are in her face and hissing violently, ‘Shut up shut up!’ but not fast enough: at the end of the corridor one of the prefects calls, drowsy and annoyed, ‘What do you want?’

Joanne whips around to scream for her. ‘No!’ Julia whispers, grabbing her arm. ‘Go; get in your room. We’ll give you the key tomorrow. I swear.’

‘Get off me,’ Joanne snarls, terrified into pure fury. ‘You’re going to be so sorry for this. Look at my hand, look what you did-’

Her hand looks totally fine, not even a mark on it, but the light is streaky and Joanne is moving; they can’t tell for sure. Down the corridor, less drowsy and more annoyed: ‘If I have to come out there, I swear to God-’

Joanne’s mouth opens again. ‘Listen!’ Julia hisses, with all the force she can cram into it. ‘If we get caught, then nobody’ll have the key. Get it? Go to bed; we’ll sort it tomorrow. Just go.’

‘You are total freaks,’ Joanne spits. ‘Normal people shouldn’t have to be in the same school as you. If my hand’s scarred, I’m going to sue you.’ And she whirls back into her room in a nightie-flounce of gaping lip-prints.

Julia grabs Becca’s arm and runs for their door, feeling the others behind them silent and speedy as down the paths to the glade, Selena barely breaking stride to scoop up the key. In, door closed, Holly presses her ear to it; but the prefect can’t be arsed hauling herself out of bed, now that the sounds have stopped. They’re safe.

Selena and Becca are giggling, wild and breathless, into their sleeves. ‘Her face – ohmyGod, did you see her face, I almost died-’

‘Let me feel it,’ Becca whispers, ‘come here, let me feel-’

‘It’s not hot now,’ Selena says. ‘It’s fine.’

They find her, in the darkness, and sift among one another’s reaching fingers to touch the key in her open hand. It’s palm-warm; nothing more.

‘Did you see it jump?’ Becca says. She’s almost dizzy with delight. ‘Zooming down the corridor, away from that cow-’

‘Or it bounced,’ Julia says. ‘Because she dropped it.’

‘It jumped. Her face, that was beautiful, I’d give anything for a photo-’

‘Who even did that?’ Holly wants to know, switching on her reading light half-hidden under her pillow so they can change without knocking anything over. ‘Was that you, Becs?’

‘I think it was me,’ Selena says. She tosses Julia the key, its glint like a tiny meteor streaking between them. ‘It doesn’t actually matter, though. If I can do it, you guys can too.’

‘Ah, cool,’ Becca says, wriggling out of all her layers at once and kicking them under her bed. She throws on her pyjamas and bounces into bed, where she balances the cap off her water bottle on edge on her bedside locker and starts trying to knock it over without touching it.

Julia is stashing the key back inside her phone cover. She says, ‘Next time, could you save that stuff for when it’s not going to get us into huge amounts of shit? Like, please?’

‘I didn’t do it on purpose,’ Selena says, muffled in the hoodie she’s pulling over her head. ‘It just happened, because I was getting all wound up. And if it hadn’t, Joanne would’ve have taken the key.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s not like she’s going to forget the whole thing. We’ll have to deal with it tomorrow instead, is all. And now she’s raging with us.’

That cools the air. ‘Her hand’s fine,’ Selena says. ‘She’s just being a drama queen.’

‘Right. So she’s a total drama-queen bitch who’s raging with us. How is that better?’

‘What do we do?’ Becca asks, glancing up from her bottle cap.

‘What do you think we do?’ Holly says, tossing jumpers into the wardrobe. ‘We make her a copy of the key. Unless you actually want to get expelled.’

‘Why would we get expelled? She can’t prove we did anything.’

‘OK: unless you want to never go out again. Because if we do, Joanne can go running to Matron and be all, “Oo Matron I just happened to see them going downstairs and I’m so worried about them,” and then Matron waits and catches us coming back in and then we get expelled.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Julia says, kicking into her pyjama bottoms. ‘I’ll talk to her. I think the hardware place beside the Court does keys.’

‘She’s going to be a total bitch about it,’ Holly says.

‘Yeah, no shit. I’m going to have to apologise to her for what you said, smartarse.’ She means Becca. ‘You think I’m looking forward to grovelling for that ass-faced cow?’