The Manifesto on How to be Interesting (36 page)

Therapy.

Bree tried not to make a face so as not to upset her mother. But she'd been successfully dodging making an appointment all holiday. She'd chosen to live, yes. Wasn't that enough? Did she really need to open up and let all the pain come flooding back and be pressured to tell her parents and make them hate her too? She was hardly holding herself together as it was. What else would unravel if someone prodded about in her brain? And would Dr Thomas and his mate make her stop writing the blog?

Timing her walk to school was a treacherous business. She didn't want to leave too early in case she bumped into Holdo, who always left early. But she also didn't want to leave too late because Jassmine always left late.

She hopped from one foot to another outside her security gate, trying to shake the jelly from her legs.

School – can't be that bad… It's just that everyone hates you and has seen you naked.

She shook her head. That was not the attitude of a warrior.

She didn't bump into anyone in the end. The urge to bunk off was intoxicating but her dad was right. She wasn't going to be a victim.

Not today, not any day.

Although it's hard not to feel like a victim when you walk down a corridor and absolutely every single person stops talking at exactly the same time.

“I can't believe she's come back.”

“I wouldn't, I'd be too ashamed.”

“Jass is going to go off her nut.”

“I heard she was transferring, what is she doing here?”

“Why is she wearing all grey?”

Despite the whispers, nobody spoke to her, nobody moved out of her way, she was socially invisible. She got to her form room early and sat in her old seat near the front, and waited.

The class filled around her. They circled her, gawping. When Seth came through the door, his mouth fell open, like in a cartoon. She could see him about to say “Breeeeee” in greeting, before he remembered. Instead, he just walked right past. Like everyone else.

Everyone but Hugo.

The temperature dropped before he even walked in. She was ready for him. She held her eyes to the door, ready to meet his, not willing to blink in case he saw it as a sign of weakness.

He swaggered in in his usual fashion, all relaxed, until he clocked Bree. Then his eyebrows pulled together, his face went red, and he pulled his sleeves up.

Everyone in the room went quiet.

Hugo marched over and slammed his bag on her desk. Bree, expecting hostility, didn't even jump.

You are not a victim. You are not a victim.

“How dare you?” he yelled. Yes, yelled. Right in the middle of school.

Bree pretended to look bored and examined a nail. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“You had the police come to my house and arrest me for being a PAEDOPHILE.”

Audible gasps escaped around them, like they were surrounded by a live studio audience.

“Oh,” Bree said dryly. “That.”

Hugo picked up his bag and slammed it down on her desk again. Everyone else in the room jerked back. Everyone but Bree.

“I'm not a paedo,” he said.

“Actually, Hugo, the law disagrees with you there,” she replied, smiling. “I am still seventeen, which meant I was under eighteen when you filmed me. In legal terms, that makes it a paedophiliac image. In legal terms, by turning on your webcam – without my permission, I might add, you utterly incomprehensible dickhead – you were effectively ‘making' a paedophiliac image. When you uploaded it onto your computer, that immediately counted as ‘possession' of a paedophiliac image.” She counted the charges on her fingers. “Oh? And showing the whole school? That counts as distribution.”

She leaned back in her chair, trying to look satisfied, even though inside every part of her was a jelly factory.

“You little bitch.”

“Careful now, Hugo… You don't have to say anything, but anything you do say will be held against you in a court of law.”

He clenched his fists and got right up in her face. “There's no way in hell this is going to court. My dad's getting the most expensive lawyer in the country to fight this. I don't even know how you managed to bring those charges, but they'll be dropped within days.”

“That's weird,” Bree said, stroking her chin. “Because my dad's best friend probably is the most expensive lawyer in the country…and, oddly enough, being my dad's best friend, he's kind of on my side.”

“This is ridiculous. I'm not a paedophile. I'm only eighteen.”

Spit flicked into her face and she resisted the urge to wipe it off.

“It's not ridiculous, Hugo. It's just not been tested in case law yet. This is a majorly topical legal issue – arseholes like you uploading images of underage girls onto the internet… They may well want to make an example of you. Hmmm, I wonder what Oxbridge will make of that?”

And then Hugo went for her. She was expecting this, so ducked and he missed.

“You ****************!”

Bree hadn't known it was possible to use so many expletives.

Seth dived across the room to hold Hugo back but he wasn't strong enough. More boys joined in to restrain him.

“You'll regret this,” Hugo yelled at her over the wall of bodies separating them. “You'll regret this, you slag. People don't mess with me.”

“Oh do shut up, Hugo.”

And, in disbelief – at her, at the charges, at her blasé attitude towards the most humiliating thing that could ever happen to anyone – he shut up and sat down. Just as Mr Phillips came in and asked what the hell was going on.

English was the next hurdle to jump over.

Stupid as it was, Bree couldn't help but fantasize that Logan would be sat at his desk, like always.

As she walked through the door, the teacher's chair was empty. Still hope then.

She got out her poetry anthology and pretended she couldn't hear all the whispers.

“Did you hear? Her dad's got Hugo charged with paedophilia.”

“No way.”

“Yep.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Is she not…scared of him?”

Bree smiled. She couldn't have played it better. Her dad was right. If you didn't act like a victim, people found it difficult to treat you like one. Everyone buzzed. For most of them, this was the first Bree-sighting since before Christmas – they were eager to analyse her every facial expression.

“Right, everybody settle down.”

Bree didn't even have to look up from her notepad to know it wasn't him.

She hated herself for how much her heart dropped.

“Sit down, class.”

Bree came up from her anthology to match a face to the voice. Their new English teacher was a fifty-something woman with alarmingly large nostrils and a matching pearl necklace and earring set. Nobody knew she was their new English teacher yet though, apart from Bree.

“Where's Mr Fellows?” Chuck asked.

“Mr Fellows no longer works at Queen's Hall, he's moved to a school in London. My name is Ms Masoon. I'll be teaching you from now on.”

You could feel the disappointment oozing out of everyone's pores.

“What?”

“But he was the only decent teacher here.”

“Is this because he let us spike the Christmas party punch?”

“Does this mean we're not doing Philip Larkin any more?”

“What about our coursework? He was halfway through marking our Shakespeare.”

Ms Masoon answered everyone's questions as best she could – apart from the one about the punch, which she became temporarily deaf for. Bree didn't listen to any of it.

She still couldn't believe he'd left.

Because of her.

“Now, if everyone will open their anthologies, I'd like us to pick a new Philip Larkin poem. I know you were doing
This Be The Verse,
but I'm afraid the headmistress isn't keen on you all reading vulgar language in the classroom.”

There were a few groans and then everyone got on with it.

Mr Fellows was forgotten by the end of the lesson. By everyone but Bree, of course.

The next hurdle – see Jassmine and the others again for the first time. She had her “I'm sorry I slept with your boyfriend” frown plastered across her face all day, just in case they bumped into each other.

She had spent a rather depressing lunchtime telling the creative-writing club that it was no more – unless they could find another teacher to do it. Their faces had drooped like melted chicken nuggets; one had actually started crying.

She'd forgotten how young eleven was.

“But where are we supposed to go at lunchtime?” one asked, her lip all wobbly-woo.

“I dunno. The canteen?”

The way they all jumped at the word, she might as well have said “Hades”.

“I can ask the librarian if she'll let us hide in there,” one whispered to another.

“Hide?” Bree repeated loudly. “What on earth is there to hide from?”

They all gave her a look like she was the stupidest person on this planet.

“From all the bad stuff that happens to everyone who ever goes to the canteen.”

“Yeah, like what happened to you.”

They were the first people besides Hugo to mention it directly to Bree's face. She was taken aback.

“Thanks for the reminder,” she said quietly.

“Sorry, Bree.” The girl who'd said it looked petrified. “Are you okay? You're not cross, are you?”

They were the first people to show her concern and she gathered them into a hug.

“Not cross, just sad. Sad you guys feel you need to hide in the library. I'll chat to the librarian, if you really want me too. But remember, you're all kind, lovely, intelligent people who are going to do just fine in life. You shouldn't be scared to go to the canteen.”

They beamed at her like she was Mother Teresa.

“In the meantime, go forth and read books that will make you feel better. May I suggest
The Catcher in the Rye, The Perks of Being A Wallflower
and
To Kill A Mockingbird
? Mr Fellows didn't feel you were ready, but I think differently.”

More beaming. They all hugged until Bree saw Jassmine walk past.

“Oh, guys, gotta go.”

She ducked out into the corridor just as the back of Jass's head bobbed away round the corner. She would be headed to the English block bathroom to apply lipgloss, like clockwork. When she hadn't been overhearing rumours about herself, Bree had heard Jassmine had got with some uni guy on New Year's Eve on a boat on the Thames.

Hope always dies far later than it should. Bree hoped that this romantic development might somehow defuse some of the situation bombs between her and Jass. What she couldn't work out was whether she wanted forgiveness because she needed Jass for her blog, or because she actually missed her as a friend.

She followed at a safe distance and – well, whatdoyaknow? – into the bathroom Jass went, digging her make-up out of her bag as she swung through the door.

Bree waited half a minute and then swung in herself.

Jass jerked when she caught sight of her in the mirror. Then she recomposed herself and continued reapplying lipgloss.

“Jassmine.”

No reply.

“Jassmine, I am so sorry.”

Jass smacked her lips together, chucked the gloss into her school bag and walked out. She didn't even look at Bree. If it wasn't for the initial flinch, Bree might have doubted her own existence.

When she saw the whole perfect posse together, before the end of school, she got the same treatment.

Bree had gone from social obscurity to a queen of the school, to most despised student, and back to social obscurity again.

Her mum picked her up in their giant jeep.

“So, how was it?” she asked, as Bree got into the car.

“It was…school.”

“That bad, eh?”

Her mum pulled out a bar of chocolate from her coat pocket. She gave Bree a warm yet watery smile and handed it over.

“How did you know?”

“School is school.”

Bree's dad came home halfway through dinner which, for him, was like coming home mid-afternoon. The grin on his face stretched from thinning patch to thinning patch. He clunked his briefcase on the dining room table and some of Bree's peas rolled off her plate.

“Guess who made Hugo d'Felance cry this evening?” He wiggled his eyebrows, looking a bit like Danny DeVito.

Bree stood up, knocking more peas off her plate. “Really?”

“Like a baby.”

“Does it make me a bad person that this information makes me happy?”

“No, love. It makes you my daughter.”

So Bree was a bit like her dad then. It was nice to finally have the time with him to figure this sort of thing out. “Nice” didn't really cut it as an adjective for how she felt about that really. If Bree and her dad did hugs, a hug would've been done there and then. Bree's mum did the honours instead, knocking his briefcase over.

“Oh, that's great news, Daniel.”

“That's not all.” He shrugged off his coat and sat down at the head of the table. “Hugo brought his computer in and I got my IT guy to run tests on it. The only copy of the video is there. He never uploaded it onto any sites – just showed his tablet to whoever wanted to see it. It was all just bravado and winding you up. Which makes you the luckiest girl in the world. I made him sign a legal document stating that this was the only copy and that if another one resurfaces we can basically take every single penny from every member of his family until the end of time.”

A lightness filled Bree, from her toes up to the tip of her head. “That's amazing. Thank you so much.”

Her mum started rubbing his shoulders. “That really is brilliant news, darling. What about the charges?”

He made a small face. “They're a bit harder. Basically, Bree, we can try. But it's a long shot and we've scared him enough, I reckon.”