Dream a Little Dream (The Silver Trilogy) (F) (23 page)

“No, not really.” Henry thoughtfully bit his lower lip. “German, then. Hence that dirndl.… Oh, hi, Florence, Emily. And Sam. Again.”

Oh no, I must get out of here.
Even if, at close quarters, Sam wasn’t quite as spotty as I’d thought.

Florence conjured up a smile on her face. I was amazed by her professional maneuvering. “Hello, Liv. Nice to see you here. Meet Sam and Emily.”

“I’m Sam’s sister,” Emily explained. “And Grayson’s girlfriend. Glad to meet you. We somehow never got around to it at the party last Saturday.”

Very true: First you were busy smooching like there was no tomorrow, then I was promising your boyfriend and
his
friends to help them liberate a demon from the underworld.

Sam didn’t say anything. He just looked uncomfortable. Henry, on the other hand, gave the impression of being extremely amused.

“Sam is sixteen. And very clever,” said Florence.

“Yes, his IQ is fifteen points above mine. And I’ve been ranked as highly gifted,” said Emily.

Oh, shit.

“He jumped two classes and will be doing his A levels next summer.” His mother couldn’t have sounded prouder than Florence. “And after that—where are you going to study, Sam?”

“Harvard,” said Sam, looking even more uncomfortable.

“Oh, what a coincidence!” cooed Florence. “You see, Liv is half American, and as far as I know her family comes from the Boston area, don’t they?”

“Well, yes. My grandparents and my aunt Gertrude live there.” I closed my locker door. “I’m afraid I’m in a hurry. I have to get up to the second floor.”

“Oh, that’s good—we’re on our way there too,” said Florence.

Bloody hell. I stood where I was as if rooted to the ground. My eyes went briefly to Henry, who was standing with his back to the locker, listening with interest. Should I try my luck with the toilets? Surely they wouldn’t follow me there. Or, at least, not all of them.

Florence took my arm. “On the way up, Sam can ask you something too. Go on, ask her, Sam.”

Oh no, this was all speeding up much too quickly for me. Maybe I ought to tear myself away and run for it? Spotty Sam might be clever, but he didn’t seem to be especially athletic. He’d never catch up with me.

On the other hand, I felt a little sorry for him. It must be awful to be bossed about by his sister and her best friend and made to ask a girl who was a perfect stranger to go to some rotten ball with him. The girls in his class were all older than him, and therefore presumably not so keen on being his dancing partner. And then there was the skin problem.… Poor Sam.

I tried a small smile at him. Maybe he just wanted to ask me something perfectly harmless, for instance whether I liked the school lunches, or if I enjoyed spelling bees, or what my favorite—

“Would you like to come to the ball with me?” asked Sam.

No! No, no, no, no, no.

Experimentally, I tried closing my eyes for a moment, but it didn’t help. The poor boy was still standing in front of me, looking as if he’d sink into the ground at any moment. What would he do if I said no? Cry? Run away? Get a rope? What on earth do you say in such a situation?

“Er. That is really very … nice of you.…” I stammered, desperately searching for more words, while Florence and Emily looked at me expectantly. I had no idea what Henry was doing, but I suspected he was grinning.

I
hated
Florence. This was all her fault. I mean, I’d made it perfectly clear what I thought of the ball. I’d sooner have a root canal without anesthetic. That’s what I’d said, hadn’t I?

“I know,” said Sam.

I know?
I beg your pardon? “What do you know?”

“I know it’s nice of me to ask you,” said Sam. “You’re in the middle school. I could ask any girl I liked in the middle school, but Florence thought the two of us would be a good idea, kind of a family thing. So will you come to the ball with me?”

I opened my mouth (or rather, I didn’t have to, because it was already wide open), but before I could say anything, Henry had intervened.

“Although that really was a wildly romantic and totally irresistible invitation, I’m afraid Liv will have to refuse it,” he said.

That was certainly more elegant than the abrupt “No!” that had been on the tip of my tongue.

“Henry!” Florence let go of me and darted a furious glance at him. “You keep out of this. Of course Liv is going to the ball with Sam. We’ve already fixed—”

“The whole thing. Yes, I’m sure you have.” Henry came over to me. “But Liv can’t go to the ball with Sam because she’s already going with me.” He winked at me. “Isn’t that right, Liv?”

All eyes were resting on me again.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s right.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Florence. “You two hardly know each other.”

“Well, Sam’s only this minute met Liv himself,” said Henry.

“You hate occasions like that, Henry. You didn’t go last year either.”

“Then it’s high time I did,” said Henry. “After all, this is my last year at the Frognal Academy. My last chance to wear the wonderful get-up of white tie and tails, and dance waltzes lifting my partner in the air—”

“But…” Florence turned to me. “Why didn’t you say anything about this yesterday evening, Liv?”

I tried to hold her gimlet glance. “I wasn’t to know you were making plans like that.… I’m very sorry.”

“Hmm.” Florence still seemed to be suspicious, but Emily looked as if she’d like to throttle someone. With her bare hands. Sam, on the other hand, appeared to be composed to the point of indifference. I wondered whether to recommend other partners for him, two really nice girls who certainly wouldn’t say no, but he probably wouldn’t get far with the names Itsy and Bitsy.

“We’re off,” said Emily, pulling Sam away by his sleeve. “I said right away this was a stupid idea.”

Florence followed the two of them, after giving us a last inquiring look. “No you didn’t!” we heard her say.

I breathed a sigh of relief. “That was a close thing,” I said, looking into Henry’s laughing gray eyes. “Thank you!”

“You’re welcome, cheese girl. Now will you tell me what’s not certain?”

“No! But you were so nice just now that I’ll give you another little hint,” I added, lowering my voice to a mysterious whisper. “It’s about someone called Hans.”

And then I had to run again so as not to be late for the geography lesson.

22

ON THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY
, we moved out of the Finchleys’ apartment and into the Spencers’ house. To be honest, it was no big deal. Ernest had originally set aside three days for the move. He had bought a new power screwdriver and a new drill, he had made sure that Mrs. Dimbleby would be available to provide meals and his brother Charles for “the heavy lifting,” he had hired a van and organized everything as if the general staff of an army would be involved. Only when Mom showed him our entire stored possessions did he realize that two trips back and forth in Charles’s station wagon would do the job and that we had no paintings or furniture calling for the power screwdriver or the drill to put them in place—indeed, nothing else that justified having a military general at work on the operation. I wondered what he’d expected. We’d always lived in furnished accommodations and had learned not to want things any larger than a book. (Apart from my guitar and a teddy bear called Mr. Twinkle.)

In addition, we were extremely experienced in moving house, and unpacking crates was mere routine. By lunchtime all our possessions were in their proper places, the house had been cleaned up after the move, and Mom said, as she always did after filling the bookshelves, “Home is where your books are.”

Rather confused, Ernest viewed it all from the laundry room. According to his military plan of action, after we had fortified ourselves at lunch with Mrs. Dimbleby’s shepherd’s pie, the real work of moving house was due to begin. Instead, everyone knocked off work for the day. Except for Grayson, who had to be in school because the Frognal Flames were defending their championship in the opening game of the season. Mom suggested that we might go to the sports hall and spend our free afternoon cheering Grayson and his team on. She’d been a cheerleader in her youth and would have loved Mia and me to follow in her footsteps. When she heard that there weren’t any cheerleaders at Frognal Academy, she was horrified, muttered something about “unemotional Brits,” and didn’t pursue her plan any further. Instead, she joined Mrs. Dimbleby in the kitchen to winkle the shepherd’s pie recipe out of her. Not that Mom was much good at cooking, but she liked to give the impression that she was. And the shepherd’s pie really had been good—so good that Mia let us know her vegetarian phase was now over.

Mrs. Dimbleby was around sixty, had hair tinted pale pink (a mistake at the hair salon, as she assured me), and was slightly overweight. I took her into my heart at once because of her hearty laugh and the way she fed Buttercup tender morsels of meat in the kitchen.

I was also very pleased with my new room. Yes, it was the smallest of the five bedrooms on the second floor, but it was about 175 square feet, making it bigger than many rooms that Mia and I had shared over the last few years, and I felt comfortable in it at once. I loved the wood floor, the built-in bookshelves, and the walls painted in a soft color. The best thing, however, was the broad, comfortably upholstered window seat with a view of the garden. The only disadvantage was that my room was right next to Ernest and Mom’s master bedroom. I could only hope the walls were thick enough for me to be able to forget that at night. I also hoped very much that Ernest wasn’t in the habit of going around the house in his underpants, because I didn’t know whether my nerves were strong enough for that. But of course the master bedroom had a bathroom of its own. Florence, Grayson, Mia, and I had to share the bathroom at the top of the stairs. Although it had two washbasins, a shower, and a tub, Florence wanted us to draw up a timetable so as to avoid traffic jams in the morning, as she put it. Since there were plenty of toilets in the house and Lottie had a bathroom to herself up in the attic, I wasn’t worried about traffic jams. I had enough worries already. Up to and including the fact that this evening I was going to conjure up a demon for the first time in my life.

I had told Mom that Grayson and a couple of his friends had organized a games evening and invited me to come. That wasn’t so far from the truth, and I didn’t even have to tell a lie, so long as Mom refrained from asking what kind of game we were going to play (“Oh, one of those with demons and buckets of blood”). Of course Mom had immediately given me permission to go. She never tired of saying how glad she was that my days as a social wallflower were over.

The week had passed incredibly quickly. On Tuesday the Tittle-Tattle blog had headlined the news that I was going to the ball with Henry. “What does she have that other girls don’t? Has Henry Harper really fallen victim to her charms, or did Grayson Spencer make him ask her?” There was no mention of Sam’s previous invitation to me. Another reason to suspect Emily of being behind Secrecy. Naturally she wasn’t about to write anything that showed her brother in a poor light.

The publicity given to the news was one thing; it was almost outweighed, however, by the fact that Florence had told Mom about it. As might have been expected, Mom could hardly contain her delight and immediately got Florence to give her the names of two shops that apparently sold enchantingly beautiful ball dresses. So now I had a double problem. On Thursday afternoon Mom managed to drag me off to one of those shops, and sure enough, the ball dresses really were enchanting. Particularly when you looked at the price tags. But Mom had shed tears of joy when I stood in front of her in a smoky blue tulle confection with a huge skirt, and I didn’t have the heart to explain that the invitation to the ball was a fake, because Henry had only wanted to rescue me from Spotty Sam. And now I couldn’t think how to tell Henry that my Mom had spent three hundred pounds on a ball dress for me.… How that could have happened I had no idea myself.

And another puzzle was how on earth I was going to keep any secrets at all, living under the same roof as Grayson and that tattletale Florence, with information flowing freely in both directions.

However, some good things had also happened that week: I’d joined the White Crane Kung Fu Club in West Hampstead, signing on for an advanced class. The first training session yesterday had been great fun. The instructor, Mr. Arden, wasn’t as good at kung fu itself as Mr. Wu, but he was generous with his praise and didn’t get on my nerves by quoting Chinese proverbs. Also, he thought more highly of the self-defense aspect of martial arts than the integration of mind and body that Mr. Wu was always going on about, and the self-defense aspect was exactly what I needed.

In spite of all these diversions, I’d begun feeling slightly more scared with every passing day—first and foremost because I didn’t know just what I’d be facing that evening. Remembering the cemetery dream, my main fear was that I wouldn’t be able to keep a straight face if I had to recite high-flown invocations or draw diagrams on the ground. I wasn’t sure whether it had really been such a good idea to agree to go along with acting as Anabel’s replacement. Not because by now I was genuinely scared of a demon, seeing that there were no such things, but because people who went in for such rituals weren’t the best of company to keep.

I had deliberately kept away from the dream corridor in my sleep. Since going to see
Hamlet
, I had certainly dreamed silly theatrical dreams every night, dreams in which Florence played the part of Ophelia. All the same, in the certain knowledge that no one could overcome my dream barriers and pay me a surprise visit, I had always slept very well.

When Grayson came home early in the evening and in a very good mood after his basketball game, Florence was out at a meeting of the ball committee, and Mom and Ernest were taking Buttercup for a walk in the park. Lottie, Mia, and I were taking advantage of Buttercup’s absence to make friends with Spot, the ginger cat. Following Mrs. Dimbleby’s example, we fed him tender morsels of meat, and we were very pleased when he let us stroke him, purring so loudly that the whole sofa seemed to vibrate.