Falling Fast

Chapter 15 - If you tell anyone I will castrate you

It took about a month, but the video went viral which I told Dad about on Halloween morning as he and his bleary eyes ate a very healthy breakfast of fruit, granola and yoghurt. Just looking at it made me want to reach for a bowl of ice cream, but being the good girl that I was I had coco pops.

“Your old man made you famous. Eh. Look at that,” he said sounding as pleased as a man could when he was still half asleep and had a rough voice. “Have you found your other tie yet?”

“No.”

“Have you bought another?”

I snorted. “Are you kidding me? They’re, like, twenty quid. I got one the exact same colour, material and everything from TECSO and embroidered it.”

Dan thundered down the stairs and skidded into the kitchen because he was running behind me for the first time ever. He grabbed some breakfast and sat down at the table. “Zoey, why is there a beat up dress in our room?”

“It’s Lexie’s,” I shrugged.

“Even more of a reason for it to not be in our room.”

“It’s her costume for Luke’s party tonight.”

“I knew I was forgetting something,” he muttered.

“Your costume or the party?” I asked.

“Um… both.”

“Dude! It’s Halloween. How can you forget Halloween?”

“Murrph,” he shrugged.

“Are you ok?” Dad asked.

“Didn’t sleep. I forgot I had this huge assignment to hand in today so I was up late and when it got to six I didn’t see much point in going to bed.”

“But… you are coming to Luke’s party, right?” I asked just to make sure he had his priorities straight.

He yawned and nodded. “I’ll kip after school. When does it start?”

“Nine ish. But you’ve got that double free in the afternoon so you’ll still get a good six hours.”

“Thank god.”  

After that, the day dragged slowly. School plodded along, the wait between school and Russian class was painful and I was so busy keeping myself busy that I left five minutes late meaning that when I walked into the classroom I was in dressed down uniform. I’d shed my blazer and tie in the car, had unbuttoned my blouse a little and rolled the long sleeves up. Yup. Long sleeves. It was getting colder now and the radiators didn’t always penetrate the cold all the way leaving the corridors chilled so it was on with the long sleeve blouses and the knitted, dark green vest. This building ran pretty warm though so I’d taken the vest off as well, let my hair down from it’s high pony tail and the make up which I’d gone over about an hour ago still looked fresh. Oh yeah. I looked good.

For saying I was in school uniform which really meant I looked like a nerd who was trying to hard to look cool.           

And even though I was running late I still managed to get into the classroom before our teacher. A couple of people were talking across Harriet who was silent and looked pretty put out that she wasn’t the centre of attention (ha!) and one of the guys was passing sweets around. I sat down just as he was walking over to where Jill and I sat.

I hadn’t talked to him much. He was the quietest person in the class and always managed to sit in a shadow so I’d labelled him as ‘Shady’, but up close he had pleasant features, green eyes and light brown hair which was rebelliously going wavy. It looked good on him actually. He was about twenty.