Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (13 page)

Will put her hands over her ears. She could still hear them.

“Savage.”

“
Tramp
. Filthy little tramp.”

“Freak.”

“Midget. Midget freak. Dirty
savage.
”

She fell asleep with their voices jabbing at her heart, and dreamed of being chased through the bush by a pack of wolves, with sleek ponytails and rosebud pajamas.

E
VERY NIGHT WILL FELT SHE
couldn't face another day. Every day she felt she couldn't face another night. Inexplicably, her body refused to die of a broken heart.

It was unrelentingly bad. Daily, Will added to her collection of rebukes. In lessons the teachers sighed and smiled and looked pitying. The girls stared, giggled, stared again. Will realized she'd never been so watched before. Her days had been her most precious secret. But it was impossible here to be alone. And everything she did was wrong.

“Sit up straight, please, Wilhelmina!”

“Will! Second warning! Feet off your chair!”

“Don't chew your ruler, please, Will. That's better. Show some respect for school property.”

“This is a group exercise, Will.” Miss Blake, who took them for English once a week, smiled her kindest smile. “No thoughts at all to share with us?” Will's chest was full of hot humiliation and claws and crows' beaks on those days, and her face set into an awkward frown.

And then there was, “Don't doodle, Will. Just do the work, please,” though she had no idea where to start. She would, she thought, rather catch a water scorpion with her bare hands than struggle, blushing with shame, through double math. After a week, they began to lose patience. “
Do
try not to daydream, Will. Your desk is not your bed.” And once, sharply, “Keep your eyes on your own work, Wilhelmina! This is a test.” And Will flushed with shame—at being caught; at the hissing laughter from the back row; at the unhappy shock of the twin next to her, who shielded her paper with her arm and looked away; worst of all, at what her father would have said. She sat on her hands and whispered,
Penga
.
Penga
,
booraguma.
Wildcats do not cheat.

Worst were the classes with Mrs. Robinson. “Sit
down
, Will. You can't just walk out of the classroom when you feel like it.” Mrs. Robinson had the shortest temper of them all. “The toilet? Is it desperate? Go on, then.” Will got lost, and
had to climb out the window of an empty classroom and crouch behind a bush; and Samantha, who had followed, gleefully told the others. They slipped notes into her books, written in jabbing capitals that cut into Will's chest:
Stinking SAVAGE. Filthy tramp
.

It was no easier outside the classrooms. Worse, she thought.

Will didn't have a bright plastic pencil case, or money to buy one. She looped her pen and pencil and pencil sharpener together with an elastic band. Samantha ran her fingers over her glitter pens and smiled pityingly.

At break times, Will crouched in the triangular spaces behind doors with her books. They always found her. Samantha led them—tall, almost unbearably pretty, with pink lips and cheeks and the beginnings of breasts. Prettiness seemed the only criteria for success here. The other girls had little tubes of ink for their fountain pens, and they cut them open and smeared them into Will's workbooks, hands, clothes. “Now you'll
have
to wash!” The twins, Hannah and Zoe, hung back and looked miserable; Will didn't blame them. She suspected that they might be very clever. It was dangerous to be clever at school. And life with Samantha's girls against you was like drowning. Worse, in fact—slower, and more painful.

It was Samantha who showed the others how to widen their nostrils and sniff when Will ran past. They drew back against the walls, whispering and snorting behind curtains of hair, and the teachers called after her from classroom doors, “You!” Will would have to stop, cold and full of dread on one leg. “You! What are you doing? Go and put some shoes on please, now. We do
not
go barefoot in the corridors.”

There were the hall monitors, too, who wore badges on their blazers and shouted, “Slow down! I'm not going to tell you again, all right?” And, “You're late, Will,” with depressed sighs. And, “Mop that up, please, Wilhelmina.” And, “Where's your napkin, Will? No, your sleeve is not your napkin.”

At lunch Will took her tray to the toilet block and sat, balancing it on her knees, in the end cubicle. But she couldn't escape dinner, because Mrs. Robinson took a register. Rumors went round the Formica-topped dining tables: the new girl spat in your food when you weren't watching. She never changed her underwear. She couldn't read. She wiped her hands in her hair. Will, born with bush hearing, heard them all. But only the last one was true; everyone did, at home, when their hands were dusty. Except the captain, who was bald, and even he sometimes used his mustache. But the captain was too precious to talk about.

Instead, she said nothing, and she found, after the first
three days of the girls' curiosity and whispering, that she could easily go from the first bell at seven to lights-out at nine without speaking a word. Will quickly learned the value of silence. She did not cry; there was nowhere to go to cry.

At the end of the first week, Miss Blake caught her hiding on the roof of the sports hut. Instead of shouting, she clambered up next to her in her high-heeled shoes.

“Explain it to me, Will.”

“No.” Will shook her head. “I . . .
Sha
. I can't.”

“Try, Will.”

“Thank you,
ja
. But I can't.” She was struck by how beautiful Miss Blake was, with her large nose and blue eyes. Close up, they were the color of the African beetles. The climb had left muddy patches on Miss Blake's white shirt.

“Try,” said Miss Blake. “Sometimes things make more sense when you tell them to other people.”

Will scrubbed at her face with her palms, thereby making her own brand of cement—dust and gravel and tears. “It's just . . . The bells,
ja
. The lessons. I can't do the work. And the rules.”

“But we need rules, Will. Can you imagine two hundred girls and no rules? There'd be murders before fourth period.”

“But it's
them
. The other girls. It's like . . . It's defeat. It's like they've already lost.” She tried not to let her voice grow any louder, any more desperate and angry. “So they don't
try
,
ja
, to be good or kind or funny or honest.” Will closed her eyes in a miserable blink.

Miss Blake said nothing, but she sat with Will on the concrete roof, and together they ignored the bell for math.

W
ILL MANAGED TWO WEEKS WITHOUT
changing her clothes or washing her hair. She wanted to keep the smell of Africa as long as she could. But she didn't think it could last, and after lunch on her second Thursday, Mrs. Robinson stopped her in the corridor.

“Come with me.” She held out her hand, which Will did not take.

“Your uniform's arrived, at last.” Mrs. Robinson was holding a parcel. She looked at Will again—Will, whose head didn't come up to Mrs. Robinson's armpit—and frowned worriedly. “Your guardian didn't give us your height, only your age. You're very small, my dear; I think the skirt will be rather too long.”

Will didn't care. She smiled her secret smile into her chest. The captain wasn't the sort to know about waist measurements and pleated skirts. She was surprised, now she thought of it, that he even knew how old she was.

“I must say, though”—Mrs. Robinson smiled without using her cheek muscles—“it was a charming letter she wrote, your guardian. She told us all about you, Wilhelmina.”

“What?” Will's head came up with a snap.
“She?”

“That's right. Mrs. Browne. And you
have
had an exciting life, haven't you?”

Will stood silently. Any minute, and this woman would pat her on the head.

“Wilhelmina, my dear, you do have to answer when a teacher speaks to you. It's not optional.”

“Oh.” The thought of the captain made it hard to speak in a normal voice. She whispered, “Sorry.”

“And?”

“I— What?”

“I said, you must have had a wonderful life in Zimbabwe?” Mrs. Robinson patted Will on the head. “Didn't you?”

“Ja.”
Will shied away and gripped handfuls of hair, snuffing their still-African smell.

“What was it like, Wilhelmina?”

“Good.” Will bit her teeth together. “I loved it. It was good.”

The teacher tried to put an arm round Will's shoulders. They were as stiff and bony as the back of a chair. Mrs. Robinson sighed.

“Well. Here you are, then. Two skirts, four shirts. Try to keep them clean, Wilhelmina.”

Will climbed into the skirt, shirt, cotton tights. She'd never worn tights, though Cynthia Vincy had drawers full of silky nylon ones that she and Simon had borrowed to carry their stolen oranges. These itched, but they blunted the cold.

The skirt came down past her calves. Will tugged nervously at the too big waistband. If it fell down during class, and the girls laughed, she'd have no choice but to fight. And she couldn't bear to be kept in at break time, again.

“Try the blazer.”

It was the green of banana leaves, with the school coat of arms embroidered on the pocket. She'd never had anything so expensive-looking. She could see, in the mirror, that she looked ugly and strange; thin and pointy, and several sizes too small for her eyes. She tried not to think what her dad would have said. He used to laugh at the smartly dressed girls they passed on their shopping trips, and say,
Look at that hat! You'd look like a flower in a tea cozy, my wildcat.
And,
You can't dress fire in a frock
.

The collar scratched at her neck and made her face itch. That was why, Will told herself angrily, her eyes were watering. The shoes were far too wide and short. “Dancer's feet, you've got,” said Mrs. Robinson, and Will bit her lip.
Elf's feet,
her father used to say—so she put her boots on over the tights.

“Very nice,” said Mrs. Robinson. “Very pretty.” She ignored Will's look of incredulity. “You'll fit in very nicely.”

The girls in the line for dinner didn't agree.

“You look like you shrunk in the wash!”

“Except you can see she doesn't wash.”

“ ‘See?'
Smell
, you mean.”

Miss Boniface (whose name, Will thought, did not suit her; she was the science teacher, a stump of a woman with square glasses and large square feet) seemed to agree with that. She caught Will as she ran out of the cafeteria with her plate of food, headed for the toilet block. “How long have you been here, Will?”

“Two weeks,” Will said. It was Thursday. That made it two weeks exactly.

“And have you washed your hair since you came to Leewood, Will?”

Will looked down at Miss Boniface's feet. “No.”

“Don't look so sad, my dear! Nobody's going to shout
at you. But please ensure you have a bath tonight.” Miss Boniface walked on too soon to hear the laughing that followed Will out the door.

“Stinking little Silver!”

“Filthy savage.”

They were waiting for her when she reached the bathroom. Five of them: Samantha, Louisa and Joanna, Bex and Vicky. The bath was filled to the top with water. The room was icy cold.

Will tried to back out again, but Louisa had darted behind her, pulled the door shut, and locked it.

Samantha said, “We're here to make sure you wash properly.”

“Go away. Please,
ja
.”

“No. We're not having you stinking up our bedroom.”

“Filthy little savage.”