The Mag Hags (2 page)

Ms Marrow handed out the brief and directed all the groups to find a shady spot to have their initial discussion. Disparate groups of students wandered off, barely speaking a word. And the group that contained Wanda, Mand, Maggie, Belle and Cat was more morose than most.

They looked like an odd bunch. Strawberry blonde Belle with her delicate features, her green eyes firing and her downturned bow mouth set hard and angry, forged ahead. Maggie was head and shoulders above the rest of the gang, her gangly frame and elfin features lost beneath her fringe. She looked incongruous next to little Wanda Hong who, at five foot two, was struggling to keep up with Maggie's long-legged strides. Cat followed, scowling as she furiously texted her outrage to her friends, who were doing exactly the same thing elsewhere around the grounds. Meanwhile, Mand deliberately hung back, her trademark black jumper swamping her school uniform and her dyed jet-black hair, layered to within an inch of its life, flapping in the wind.

The girls found shade under the large oak tree near the front gate of the school and sprawled out, metres apart. A heavy silence hung in the air as they avoided even looking at each other. Wanda picked at a blade of grass before slitting it into three and creating a fine grass plait, Corabelle squeezed the in-grown hairs on her legs, while Cat checked her mobile phone, and Maggie stared off vacantly into the distance.

‘Well,' said Mand eventually, breaking the silence. ‘What are we going to do? Just sit here and ignore each other in the vain hope that a magazine will magically appear and save us from having to repeat Year 10?'

‘We could start by reading the brief,' said Maggie, blushing furiously as she spoke.

‘I know, let's read the brief,' said Belle, ignoring Maggie.

 

Commission

To: Year 10 English Class

From: Ms Marrow

Deadline: 10 December

Key message: Talk directly to your reader

The Brief

This is your opportunity to invent a magazine that your peers will want to read. Your job is to entertain, inspire and educate. Be as creative as possible – the judges are looking for an innovative magazine with bags of style,
and attitude. Remember, it has to talk directly to your readers, so they must be able to relate to the content, the photographs and the issues you address.

As a group, decide what you want your magazine to be about. Come up with some keywords that encapsulate your vision; for example, if you're doing an adventure magazine, it may be adrenaline, pleasure and excitement. Next you will need to form your team, so appoint an editor, art director, features editor, writer and any other positions you feel relevant. To have a shot at being the winning magazine you will need to discover each other's strengths and work together effectively to create the winning publication.

 

Good luck!

 

‘It's obvious I should be the editor,' said Cat after she had finished reading the brief. ‘I love magazines. I buy
Celeb Insider
religiously every week.'

‘What, so you know Vienna Regent's shoe size and the size and texture of her Labradoodle's poo and suddenly you're the expert?' said Mand. ‘Vienna Regent is as shallow as an empty Petri dish.'

‘Vienna Regent is a role model to a generation of women. She's a businesswoman in charge of her own image and she's making loads of cash in the process,' replied Cat, who liked to imitate Vienna's overbleached
blonde hair, blunt-cut fringe, barely-there clothes and constant pout. ‘As if you'd have any idea with your grungy outlook on life.'

‘Grungy?' said Mand. ‘What's that supposed to mean?'

‘Your tree-hugging, vegetarian, Jesus-sandal-wearing, save-the-planet nonsense, that's what it means,' said Cat. ‘Don't you see the irony? Handing out leaflets about global warming is cutting down more trees and making more pollution?'

‘You
are
pollution, Cat,' said Mand with undisguised venom. ‘Just because I care about the planet doesn't make me a freak.'

‘You do tend to be a little right-on, Mand,' said Belle, stirring the pot.

‘So that means we have to go for Cat's vacuous air-headed nonsense, does it?' said Mand defensively. ‘What do you two think?' She turned to Wanda and Maggie.

Maggie Jones had a million thoughts swirling around her head, but getting them out of her mouth was always a problem. She would plan her sentences in exquisite detail, but they'd never come out in the same way. She had big ideas about a magazine that would encompass everything about what it was like to be a fifteen-year-old girl living in the modern world. She wanted to explore the teenage girls ‘psyche' – a word for the human spirit or mind, which she'd recently read in
Philosophy: A Road Map for Teens
. Despite this, ‘I'm not bothered' was all she
could muster, which confirmed to the other girls that Maggie was well and truly a lost cause.

‘What about you, Wanda?' said Cat to the ever-quiet and studious Ms Hong. ‘A magazine on accounting and the finer details of mathematics?'

‘Just because I'm good at maths doesn't mean I'd want to do a magazine about it,' said Wanda, who last year topped the annual Maths Inn, a competition for all those boffins who thought Pythagoras theorem was sex-on-a-stick.

Wanda's parents ran Accent Accounting, Baywood's biggest accounting firm, and were grooming their only child to take over when she'd finished high school, been to university and then done a seven-year stint working for the firm. They'd had it all mapped out since they bought her first calculator at the age of one-and-a-half.

However, these days she found numbers increasingly tedious, but since she'd been hailed as a maths whiz, she found it impossible to escape them. The only upside was her advanced mathematics tutoring sessions with the brain-numbingly boring but bone-achingly beautiful Swedish university student Mattias Iberson, whose singsong accent and dreamy eyes could still her heart.

‘Actually, I love fashion,' she said. ‘I'm really into making clothes.'

The girls thought she was joking – they had never seen Wanda in anything other than her school uniform,
wearing no make-up, her thick black hair scraped back into a tight ponytail. She hardly came across as a doyenne of fashion.

‘What about a music magazine?' said Mand. ‘We could do it on all the bands we love.'

‘What, all that sad indie-boy rubbish you listen to?' Cat pretended to play a violin the size of a matchbox. ‘I'm so sad, depressed and angry because Daddy wouldn't buy me a pony. Please, someone get me a razor blade now, and spare me the agony of life.'

‘I'm really into Jason Jones,' said Wanda. ‘I voted for him hundreds of times when he won
Popstarz
. My parents hit the roof when they got the phone bill!'

‘Jason Jones is cute if you're into someone who is so bland, he makes cottage cheese on rice cakes seem interesting,' said Mand arching her eyebrows and rolling her eyes. ‘He's a marketing man's invention, Wanda. Don't you get it?'

‘Can't we just stop arguing for a second and get on with the magazine?' said Maggie, putting her hands over her ears.

‘All this too much for you, Maggie?' said Cat. ‘Reality bites, doesn't it? Perhaps you should go and talk to your nerd friends on the net because I'm quite sure I've never seen you with any friends in the real world.'

Maggie knew she should have kept her mouth shut. It was easier that way.

‘God, Cat, you're such a cow,' said Belle. ‘As if she'd want the kind of friends you have. I'd rather be in the library any day than be a part of the Us Crew'.

The rest of the period was spent arguing and sniping. They couldn't decide on anything – what the magazine would be about, what it would be called or who'd take what role.

‘This is not going to work,' said Cat eventually. ‘I'm going to tell Bone that it's impossible. We're too different.'

‘While it pains me to ever agree with Cat about anything, she's right,' said Mand. ‘A period with you lot is worse than having your period every day for a year!'

With that, Cat got up, dusted the grass off her grey-check school uniform with its bright yellow collar (obviously designed by a colourblind dag with the style sense of a donkey) and headed across the quadrangle towards Block E, the girls trailing in her wake.

The group passed the steps at the back of the school auditorium, where Cat would hang out with her gang of supposedly cool girlfriends at breaks, tossing stinging barbs at anyone brave enough to walk within ten metres of their territory.

Past the silver aluminum seats that would fry your bum in summer and stick to your legs in the winter, where Wanda would sit with her geeky smart mates.

Past the library, second home to ‘Maggie No Mates', where she went to read or surf the net every lunchtime.

Past the steps of block C where Mand would meet her friends, Greg Smith, Simon Albion and Gabrielle Jones, known collectively as the ‘Black Jumpers', because they would wear hairy black mohairs all year round, whatever the weather. Curiously, they never broke out in a sweat, which was the cause of the rumour that the Black Jumpers were either into black magic or were blood-sucking teenage vampires.

Past the steps of Block B, where Belle would sit with the revolving circle of kids in her group. Everybody in school wanted to be Belle's best mate, mainly due to the fact that her father, gaming millionaire Adrian Askew, was developing a brilliant new virtual-reality game where you could explore the universe in a spaceship, play football for the national team, surf monster waves in Hawaii or even attend the Oscars on the arm of a gorgeous Hollywood actor. It had been the talk of the schoolyard for months.

At Block E the girls traipsed up the stairs in sulky silence, the only noise coming from the heels of their school shoes scuffling against the lino, until they got to Classroom D 34. Ms Marrow sat at her desk, her head bowed, marking assignments with a bright red felt pen. Although she tried covering the paper with her arm, judging by the big fat red D, Elvis Martin hadn't comprehended last term's Shakespeare at all.

‘Miss, this just isn't going to work,' declared Cat, the
group's self-appointed spokeswoman. ‘There's not one of us in this group who can get along.'

‘And this project is too important to mess up,' said Wanda, who wouldn't dream of letting her parents down by failing Year 10 English.

‘Please, Miss,' said Mand, putting her palms together like she was praying. ‘It's not only my English mark, my sanity depends on it.'

‘You've only had to spend thirty minutes together. What's the problem?' replied Ms Marrow.

‘Where do I start?' said Belle. ‘We all have different tastes in everything: music, films, clothes, boys, food, friends, life. It's impossible to come together and create something good.'

‘Do you know the term polar opposites?' said Mand. ‘Chalk and cheese? Well, that's us!'

‘I'm sorry, girls,'Ms Marrow interjected. ‘I'd like to help, but the groups were chosen by a selection of teachers. You're the third group to come in and say the same thing. Looks like you're just going to have to get on with it, and I suggest that is exactly what you do, instead of wasting my time and yours.'

‘Awww, Miss,' said the girls in perfect harmony, as though they'd been practising for a choir of the whingeing. But despite repeated protests, Ms Marrow would not be swayed. They were stuck with each other for the next ten weeks.

The girls congregated in the hallway, unsure of what to do next. So they did what they were very good at: complained.

‘That Bone, she's a joke,' said Belle. ‘You can just imagine all the teachers sitting around in the staffroom laughing their heads off as they made up the groups.'

‘Yeah, you're right,' said Cat. ‘Put surfie Jakie Daven-port with the nerdy Neil Knowles, that would be a hoot. Oh, oh, and add mental metal kid George Seaman, and footy-playing Niles Ooperheiner to the mix. It'll just be the funniest thing ever. There should be a law against this stuff. Actually, I'm sure there is. It's called anti-discrimination or something.'

‘How is this discrimination?' said Mand, who often felt discriminated against because she refused to conform.

‘They're turning our lives into a misery for their own enjoyment,' said Cat. ‘The teachers have probably got a sweepstake on which group will crack first and have to repeat Year 10.'

‘Look, I'm not going to fail English because we can't agree on anything,' said Belle. ‘Let's get together at my place tomorrow after school and try to work something out.'

‘Ohhhh, an invite to the mansion,' said Mand. ‘Aren't we just
so
lucky? Going to have your daddy's chauffeur pick us up?'

Belle rolled her eyes. ‘Just be at the bus stop tomorrow after school. And girls,' she added, eyeballing Cat and Mand, ‘leave your attitude at home, okay?'