The thing about close-knit communities was that news travelled fast, especially news that concerned its more 'esteemed' individuals. Atlantic High was comprised of just four hundred students, so when Carmen Vespin didn't turn up to school the next day, almost everybody knew about it by ten o' clock in the morning.
Watching Holly Ryeland and the rest of her camaraderie wander around like sheep without a shepherd made me nervous. Carmen rarely missed school, unless if something was seriously wrong - like being seemingly being pushed into a thrashing river.
This was no coincidence, I thought. I kept looking around for some sign of Mona; I was sure she'd know what had happened to Carmen.
I'll make them pay for this, she'd said. It had only been a couple of days, but we were running out of time. There was only a week and a half left until the Halloween Ball, until Mona and I put our real plan into action. If Mona was going to get some form of miniature redemption before then, then it was highly likely that this was it.
Carmen was paying. The thought made me feel as though there were insects running up and down my body, centipedes coursing up my spine.
*
Carmen wasn't in the next day, either. Something was definitely wrong, and I hadn't seen Mona to ask her about it. Was she purposefully avoiding me, or busy prolonging whatever punishment she'd decided to subject Carmen to?
On Thursday morning, Carmen wasn't on any of the school buses. When I passed Mrs Vanderbilt's office on my way to class, however, what I saw sitting outside made me double-back in bewilderment.
It was Carmen, but sitting next to her was Edith Vespin herself. I had just enough time to notice that Carmen was wearing a tilted beret-style hat that matched the steely grey of the Atlantic uniform, before they both looked over in my direction and I ducked down the corridor.
Odd, I thought. Hats were strictly forbidden in Atlantic High, as were all other forms of accessorising or stamps of individuality. It was the reason that Debbie had spent more time in detention than in the classroom. And why was Edith waiting with Carmen outside the headmistress's office?
Throughout the course of the day, I slowly found out. I didn't share many classes with Carmen, but in those that I did, she sat there with the hat on her head and a look of smug self-assurance on her face. I stared at the teachers, waiting for them to tell her to take it off, but they said nothing.
That was when I realized Edith's involvement in the whole thing, the reason that none of the teachers dared to intervene and assert school policy. They'd been told that Carmen could keep her hat on, for whatever reason. Edith Vespin had Mrs Vanderbilt wrapped around her little finger like a string of limp spaghetti, and that made me nervous.
At lunchtime, I sat with Debbie in the canteen. We were still friends, but the bridge that we'd erected between us was built of flimsy wood and rope. Jet and Wesley were outside on the football field, which suited me just fine. I was trying to spend as little time around him as possible now that I was convinced of his true alignment.
I sat there with my untouched turkey burger, bitterly devising scenes in my head that involved Jet surrounded by a circle of grassy-kneed boys, all of them sniggering as he told them about the big girl he was chatting up. They probably put him up to this in the first place, I thought to myself.
"How come she gets to wear that stupid hat around the school when I'm not even allowed to wear my lip piercing?" Debbie grumbled. It was true; Mr Carmody always threatened to have a metal detector installed into the doorframe of his classroom, like the ones they had in airports.
I glanced around. Carmen was sat just a couple of tables away, with her entourage ringing her. She was laughing and tapping away at her phone.
"That's it," Debbie declared. "Tomorrow, I'm gonna wear my choker to school. If she gets to wear whatever she wants, then so do I."
I was about to commend her, when a scream sliced through the air. I saw Debbie's eyes widen, and I jolted around in my seat.
To the ordinary eye, the scene that was unfolding was a result of unfortunate coincidence. Carmen's hat slid off her head and fell to the ground, unveiling the shock of scalp that was underneath. There were patches where her blond hair was sheared off almost down to the bare skin, leaving nothing but a light fuzz over her skull. The most noticeable was a large circle just behind her ear, where her head was shaved almost completely bald.
But I saw the truth, right down to the ember-coloured irises.
Mona was standing over Carmen, the hat bunched in her fingers as she dragged it from her head and flung it to the ground. She began to laugh, and Carmen started to cry as she snatched her hat up off the ground and pulled it back onto her head and across her face. It was too late; almost every head in the room was angled towards her. A unified snicker was beginning to ripple its way through the room.
"I told you I'd make you pay!" Mona laughed. It was an ugly sound. It made me want to claw at my own ears.
Holly and the rest of the entourage clambered to form a protective shell around their queen, blocking her off from view. I could hear them trying to soothe her, their squawks rising into a chaotic chorale as they rose and began to shuffle out of the canteen with Carmen as their nucleus. It was all very well executed, I thought, like a piece of meticulously rehearsed choreography.
A couple of seconds passed, and they were gone. The only remembrance of them was the conspiratorial laughter that continued to ricochet around the room long after their exit. Clamours of glee and gossip, all scrambling to reach the top of the pile. Mona was clapping her hands and yodelling like a warrior queen leading her tribe to war.
I turned back to the table and stared down into my plate. My turkey burger was cold. My brain was telling me to get up and run, but my legs remained rooted to the spot. I felt dazed, like I was hurtling through space.
Five pink blurs appeared before my eyes, but then they started moving and they all became one. I winced. Debbie was waving her hand in front of my face.
"Hello? Anybody home?" she was saying. Her words sounded distant in my brain, like she was shouting to me from across a ravine. My thoughts were otherwise engaged. I was thinking about those bald patches, where the hair was cut so short that you could almost see the veins in her scalp.
"Uh, yeah, sorry," I muttered. I started to tear the bun from my burger into little shreds. "I just zoned out a bit."
Debbie eyed me cautiously. "Yeah, I noticed," she said. "It's good to know that you're still weird. Anyway, why aren't you happy right now? Didn't you just see what happened?"
"Yeah."
"Carmen's lost her hair!" She threaded her hands together and looked skyward. "There is divine justice! Did you see it? It was brilliant! God, I wish I'd taken a video on my phone."
I nodded.
"I mean, I'm not that surprised her hair is falling out," Debbie continued, "not with the amount of bleach she must pour onto her scalp to get it that blonde. Saffy?"
I looked up. "Yeah?"
"You don't look so happy, considering the person you hate the most is as bald as a vulture," Debbie mused. "What's up?"
She was right; I should have found this hilarious. I should have been clenching my legs together to stop myself from peeing because I was laughing so hard. But the place where delight and cruelty unified felt as though it had been wrenched out by the roots and left to shrivel. I felt empty, as carved out and vacuous as a coffin.
"Nothing," I replied. I tried to sound perky about the whole thing, but I wasn't sure how convincing it sounded. "It's fantastic. I'm really glad she's losing her hair."
"Not taking drama is probably the best decision you ever made," Debbie said, and then she shrugged. "Whatever. You carry on basking in your weirdness and I'll enjoy this blessing from above."
We fell silent. Debbie's ears were peeled, poised to intercept any whispered theories that piqued her interest. There was still an undercurrent of excitement reverberating around the room, and Mona's laughter was weaved through it all, the invisible thread that stitched the whole garment together.
I started to arrange the shredded ribbons of my burger bun into neat, parallel lines. Mona was ruling the roost from beyond the grave. She had singlehandedly managed to upset the natural balance of things and capsize the hierarchy, and nobody in this school had ever even heard her name or seen her face.
What had she done to Carmen to get her hair like that? I wondered. Had she hacked at it with a scissors as she slept at night? Or had she done something altogether more violent and sinister?
I jumped to my feet. I had to get rid of these thoughts before they started to multiply. That was what bad thoughts did. Whereas good thoughts were hesitant to manifest, almost shy in their refusal to take centre stage, bad thoughts blundered forth with their chests puffed out. I needed to kill them with negligence.
"Hey, where are you going?" Debbie looked befuddled.
"I need to take a walk," I muttered. I scooped up my bag and made a beeline for the exit, ignoring Mona as she hopped from table to table.
"Off with her head!" she was shouting, over and over again. She towered over the crowd, but nobody was paying any notice to her. Nobody could.
Except for me.
Off with her head.
*
I couldn't remember the last time I'd stepped outside during lunch-break. Debbie and I were more canteen-dwellers. Sometimes we migrated to the drama hall, where students were allowed to pass the time in huddled groups, or if we felt particularly anti-social we'd find a quiet corner of the library to hole up in.
But never outside, where there were stray footballs and group games and shouting and general acts of gregariousness. Not to mention the weather.
I'd been outside for less than ten seconds before the wind rearranged my hair and a young boy skidded to the ground at my feet, a mucky rugby ball hugged into his stomach. I stepped around him and then stopped to survey the minefield that stood before me. I should have just walked around the edges, where the activity was thinner, rather than try and cut through the middle. I was bound to get barraged-
"Where do you think you're going?" A familiar voice spoke up behind me. I turned, my cheeks veining through with red hot crimson. I'd been so close to slipping by unnoticed!
Jet was standing there with his hair in a state of adorable disarray, his iron grey blazer discarded and his sleeves rolled up to the elbows. There was a streak of mud across his cheek that made my fingers curl in on themselves. I wanted to clamp my eyes shut and float away with the wind.
"I was just getting some fresh air," I said, perhaps too hastily.
Jet raised an eyebrow. "Outside? Where there's nature and stuff?"
"Yes," I replied. "I love nature."
"The only time I see you step a toe outside is to make the run from school to the bus bays," he laughed, and I shuffled guiltily. How did he know me so well already?
"It's not my fault that I'm not outdoorsy," I protested.
"It's alright, Saffy, I like you just the way you are," he said, and then his face lit up. "So are you ready for our little dinner tomorrow night?"
This was it. The moment that I'd been trying to avoid all week, and rightfully so: my tongue felt as though it had been demoted to a flaccid stump in my mouth. "Uh, actually..."
Immediately, Jet's expression slid downwards. The disappointment scrawled itself in hasty lines across his face. "What's wrong? You're still gonna come over, right?"
I hesitated. Just say it, I willed myself. Stop toying with him and just say it. "Well, here's the thing," I started. "I, uh, don't think now's the best time to have dinner."
Jet frowned. "You don't think now is the best time to eat dinner? You know, sustenance is imperative to our survival, Saffy."
"You know what I mean." I wasn't going to let myself fold, as much as I wanted to shrug the whole thing off and start discussing what dessert would be.
"Well, not really."
"It's just that, well, I don't, I think maybe-" The stuttering went on like a broken string of Morse cord, until Jet's hand closed around my wrist and cut off the transmission. I looked up, caught completely unaware.
"Saffy, what's all this about?" A straight, unaltered line could have been drawn between our pupils. "Just talk to me."
"I don't think we should have dinner together," I said. I couldn't feel my lips move; the words might as well have come from somebody else's mouth. "I don't think we're compatible and I don't want us to get invested in something that won't work."
Jet's wounded expression vanished, replaced instead with something synonymous with anger. "Not compatible? Why do you suddenly think you're Mystic Meg?"
I winced. "No, I just don't think we're suited."
"And why not?"
"W-well, because you're you and I'm... me." The silence that hung between us turned stale. Jet looked as though he wanted to throttle me. I wouldn't have stopped him. I wanted to throttle myself.
"You're still not making sense."
"We don't match!" I blurted out. "You're a solid ten and I'm a four at best. I have at least five levels to climb before we can even consider having dinner together."
"That's what this is about? You think you're not good enough for me?"
"It's not subjective," I replied. "It's a fact. People would look at us together and either think 'wow, she's punching above her weight', or 'blimey, his mates must have put him up to that'."
Jet shook his head. "Man, I'm so disappointed."
"What do you mean?"
"I thought you were better than this!" He waved his hands furiously at me. "I didn't realize you cared so much about all these stupid playground rules. That was part of the reason I liked you, because you disregarded the rules completely and did your own thing. I liked you for you, or who I thought you were, at least. And your smile, Saffy - God your smile. It's like static against my skin."
I was speechless. My tongue was as useless as an old weed.
"You can question it as much as you want, Saffy," Jet went on, "but I like you regardless. Nobody can tell me who I'm allowed to like or who I'm allowed to find attractive. That is down to the individual. There's no code or pattern to follow. There's only gut instinct and what you feel inside and nobody, and I mean nobody, can take that away from me. Do you understand?"
The world tilted up and down, so I must have nodded. I was slowly losing my perception, as though reality was depicted in paint and somebody had smeared a hand right through it. I felt like I'd flitted back centuries, to when people believed the world was flat. This was what it felt like to be hanging off the edge with your fingertips slipping one by one and your toes dipping into the void.
Jet let his arms drop, a gesture of thwarted defeat. "Maybe I was wrong. Maybe that's the difference between you and me."
"What do you mean?" My vision was blurred; whether with tears or stupor, I couldn't tell.
"I think with my heart and with my gut," Jet said, simply. "I liked you because I thought you did the same. But I was wrong. You start thinking with your heart and then your head comes along to turn you in the opposite direction."
He turned. There was a grass stain on his shirt, a diagonal green slash across his back. I wanted to call him back, but my tongue cut through his name like smoke. It was weightless, the ghost of something real. I watched as he dissolved into the crowd.
The sadness snaked through my veins like an icy anaesthetic.
Go, run, my heart screamed at me. Run home and hide.
Stay, my head urged. You don't want to make things worse.
My mind was a warzone, and seclusion was the sergeant that trained up yet more soldiers for the front line. I sighed and began to trudge my way back to the building.