© Copyright Eleanor Kirk 2012. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this work, in part or in whole, is illegal.
Fran's first reaction to Darkwood's boys' boarding house was surprise. Her second was that it was going to be a pretty comfortable place to stay for as long as she was hiding out pretending to be a boy.
Admittedly, it wasn't a hotel, but the place was distinctly smarter than she might have expected – especially for a male boarding house – and the carpet was new enough for her to guess that it had been put in earlier that year. The wooden panelling on the corridor walls, though – that had to be expensive. She trailed one of her hands along the panels until she suddenly realised that she couldn't afford to leave fingerprints all over the place.
Maybe I ought to burn my fingerprints off with acid, she mused, trying to tune out the housemaster's voice as he explained that the laundry was in the door to the right and it was only in use during the lunch break and anybody who forgot to remove their clothes would have them confiscated and had to pay a fine to get them back. One could never be too careful, either with clothes or with fingerprints.
Then again, there were supposed to be ninety-odd boys knocking around the house, so her fingerprints would probably be hard to single out from anybody else's, and—
Mr Carson, the housemaster, knocked the next door open. "This is the kit— Isaac, what are you doing here? It's lesson time."
A lanky boy stacking cheese toasties onto a plate looked up. "I have a free, sir."
"You're not supposed to spend it in the kitchen. And who are the toasties for?"
Isaac swept his fringe to the side and considered the dozen or so there, absently catching the pile as the twelfth one threatened to topple it.
"Me. Why?"
Fran poked her head around Mr Carson and inhaled deeply. "Is that cheddar?" she asked eagerly.
One of Isaac's eyebrows rose and he held one out. "Sure. Have one. You're the newbie, right?"
Fran took it and bit in. It was the first decent thing she'd eaten for twenty-four hours.
"Mmhmm." She wiped melted cheese off the side of her face and gave him a thumbs-up as thanks.
"Welcome to Darkwood," Isaac said, grabbing another couple of slices of bread and heading back to the toastie machine.
"Fnkth."
"And you owe me a toastie," he added.
Fran immediately tried to hand back the remaining half. Isaac chuckled and leant on the toastie machine's lid to close it.
"Just kidding. What year are you in?"
"Eleven."
Melting cheese began to bubble out of the crack in the side of the toastie machine, but Isaac didn't appear to notice. Fran immediately made a mental note to make toasties as often as possible. The machine Isaac was using was the fastest she'd ever seen.
"Bit of an odd year to join."
Fran shrugged. "My parents are getting divorced and I thought it was best to be out of the way." And also because I'm being stalked by some random creeps and the police don't seem to be able to do anything about them.
"Ah." Isaac seemed to realise that the machine was beginning to smoke, but he did nothing about it. "Well, enjoy it here. GCSEs are a total pain."
"Thank you, Isaac," Mr Carson interrupted. "Francis, let me show you the rest of the boarding house."
It turned out that there wasn't really that much left to see. They'd already toured the rest of the ground floor, which included the house common room, the house games room, the boot room, the housemaster's office and a small medical cupboard next door to the matron's room, and the first, second and third floors were the rooms. The first years and half of the second years were in dorms of five on the first floor, with their own small common room (complete with a fifty-two inch flat-screen TV) at the end, whilst the remaining second years and the third years – which Fran knew as year eleven – were accommodated on the floor above, also in dorms of five. They too had their own common room.
"Wait a second," said Fran as the housemaster headed for the upward-leading flight of stairs by the lift. "If I'm going to be sleeping on this floor, why are we going up again? I need to leave my bag...." She gestured to the holdall slung over her shoulder.
"Oh, I forgot to tell you." Mr Carson clapped a hand to his head. "Unfortunately, all the dormitories are full, so you're sharing with one of the upper sixth boys. It's the only bed left in the house. They're double rooms, though, and only a little smaller than the dorms, so you're lucky. Come on."
Oh, yay, Fran thought with a sinking heart. First I arrive late, then I get ostracised. Even better, considering I'm pretending I'm a boy. Then she brightened. But on the other hand... if I'm only sharing with one person, I'm less likely to be found out.
On the third hand, she wondered if she'd ever be allowed to fit in. She didn't fancy being ignored by the top year and hated by her own year for the rest of her time at the school.
Really, though, I think this guy might be a bit irritated if he had a room to himself and half of it is suddenly taken over by some random guy two years below him. Fran started up the stairs behind Mr Carson. He knocked on the first door he came to, but there was no response.
"This is Enrico's room," Mr Carson explained, tapping the name label. "He's the head of house, so has the privilege of the only single room in the house. If you have any problems, just go and ask him. He's a nice kid."
There was a common room halfway along the corridor for the sixth formers, which had a kitchenette with a boiling water point as well as a recent model of TV. Fran wanted to dive-bomb the gigantic red sofa facing the TV, but decided it wasn't the best of ideas in front of a teacher and followed him along to the end of the corridor instead.
Mr Carson rapped on the door there right at the end, but didn't wait for a response. He pushed it open immediately.
Fran's instant reaction was to wrinkle her nose, raise an eyebrow, and stare at the posters plastered all over the wall.
Wow... I get to share with a major Bruno Merton fanboy. What an absolute joy.
Every single inch of the wall – and a fair amount of the ceiling, too – was covered in posters of the famous late-teenage movie star. Fran felt his myriad grey eyes following her as she reluctantly entered the room and put her holdall on the bed. A trunk – her trunk – was already sitting on the floor beside the bed.
"I'll leave you to unpack," Mr Carson said. "Lessons'll be over in forty-five minutes, so Brook'll be back then. He'll be your roommate. Bit of a busy guy, but he should help you around tonight if you need anything."
The busier the better. That way, he won't pay me any attention. Fran nodded and plonked herself on the bed as Mr Carson closed the door. For several moments, she fiddled with the catch on the lid of the trunk. A sigh of relief escaped her. So far, so good. She supposed she was lucky she was still young enough for it not to be considered weird that her voice hadn't fully 'broken', although she was pretty sure that chain smoking to deepen it would get her in trouble if she was caught, and people might find it weird if she started up her screaming exercises to keep her voice husky. Considering Carson and Isaac hadn't realised something was weird, her biggest problem at the moment would be if she ever had to go and see the school matron. I just won't get ill, then.
Still fiddling absently with the catch, Fran scanned the room again. Her roommate seemed to be a tidy person, which surprised her. Her little brother's room had always been such a tip that it was impossible to see the floor, and it had formed an image for what she supposed all boys' rooms to be like. Either her brother or this Brook person was an exception. And seeing all the Bruno Merton posters on the wall, Fran was guessing the exception was Brook. Most normal teenage boys would have covered their walls with posters of girls. There were only five non-Bruno Merton posters that Fran could see, but the boy in those ones still looked fairly similar.
Then Fran remembered: Merton had been rendered comatose by some kind of traffic accident just after they began filming Raise the Stakes, and one of the stunt actors had offered to take up the role instead. The name on the Raise the Stakes posters was Brookie Denvers, and from what Fran knew, Denvers' fan base was already almost as big as Merton's.
The layout of the room allowed for some privacy, which was a huge relief. A row of bookshelves separated their desks, whilst several cupboards formed a natural screen between their bed areas. I can get changed without too much worry, Fran realised, except for the fact that my bed can be seen the instant you open the door. I wonder... there must be an en suite here.... Stretching, Fran got off the bed and headed for the far wall. Based on what she'd seen in the other rooms, there ought to be a door somewhere leading through to the bathroom. She just couldn't see where this might be because of all the posters.
It turned out to be just opposite the bedroom door. Laughing at herself, Fran wrinkled her nose at Bruno Merton's hungry glare and opened the door. The bathroom was spotlessly clean. A thin, rectangular room, it boasted a shower cubical on the far left right next to a bath, beside which was a loo, and on the right wall, which was probably only a metre and a half across, there was a mirror overlooking a large sink. Opposite the bath, a towel rack had been fixed to the wall.
My roommate likes dark green towels, Fran noted absently as she played with the tumble lock. Oh, brilliant. This double-locks. I'm safe. Turning on her heel, Fran shut the bathroom door, but on seeing her roommate's half of the room properly, she couldn't help but chuckle. My roommate's also a fitness freak.
It was just proof of the size of the room that a fitness bike, a treadmill and a rowing machine had been hidden from view by the shelf space on the boy's side of the room. On the bottom row of one of the shelves, Fran saw several pairs of dumbbells.
I don't think I ever want this guy to find out his roommate's actually a girl. He's probably capable of killing me. With a longing glance at the fitness machines, Fran returned to her trunk and began unpacking.
It came as a total shock when the corridor suddenly became filled with shouts and slamming doors. Heart pounding in her mouth from the outbreak of noise, Fran looked up from the drawer she'd been filling with t-shirts and then quickly checked the time. It was quarter to five. Lessons must have finished, but she hadn't heard a bell. Perhaps they didn't have one at this school. The one at her previous school still did her head in just thinking about it. What a relief.
Fran shut the drawer and got to her feet. Her trunk was almost empty. Seizing the jeans left in the bottom of it, she was about to put them away in the cupboard when the bedroom door burst open and a lanky, fair-haired boy burst through.
"Hey, mate!" he yelled before spotting Fran. "Oh, sorry – looks like he's not back yet." The door slammed behind him.
Weird, Fran thought before tossing the jeans into the cupboard and shutting the door before they could fall out.
The bedroom door opened again. Another boy was leaning on it, earphones in one hand and books tucked under the other arm.
"You're so dead, Bernard!" he called down the passage. "Rainbow Road tonight – loser's buying drinks on Saturday."
The boy kicked the door fully open and crossed the room. There was a crash almost as loud as the doors all along the passage as he dropped his books onto his desk and collapsed into his office chair.
Fran caught the door and brought it gently to. From the other side of the room, there was a loud sigh, followed by the sound of somebody yawning. Out in the corridor, people could be heard running in and out of each other's rooms, laughing and shouting at each other. It sounded like total chaos. Fran crept up to the boy's side of the room and poked her head around the bookcase.
The boy was turning his chair slowly from side to side. There was no doubt that this was her roommate: even with his school uniform, it was easy to see that his body was well built. His head was tilted back into the headrest; he had his eyes closed and was listening to music. A long, wavy fringe skimmed his eyebrows and something about his features looked extremely familiar. Fran didn't bother trying to pinpoint why: the temptation to send him spinning around as fast as possible was almost too much, but she managed to content herself with poking him on the shoulder and snatching an earphone out of his ear.
"Hi."
The boy practically leapt out of his seat. The chair overbalanced and he landed back first on the armrest. "Holy— ow, that hurts!" He retrieved his iPod from where it had landed and glared up at Fran. "Who are you?"
"Your roommate." Fran stuck out a hand. The guy turned his head to the side and eyed her warily.
"Francis Grey," Fran clarified. "You know, the year eleven... third year... person...?"
The boy put his iPod on the desk and got to his feet.
"Brookie," he said, already losing interest as he briefly shook Fran's hand. "I hope you're not going to annoy me like that the whole time you're here."
Fran took an instant dislike to him. "Brookie who?"
Brookie smirked. "Have you been living in a cave for the past six months?"
"Sorry?"
Brookie shook his head, muttering something under his breath that Fran was sure was derogatory.
"You should probably go meet the people in your year, or you're never going to integrate with them," he said. "At the very least, please don't disturb me for the rest of the evening. I've got lots to do."
It hurt to be dismissed so quickly.
"What, like playing Mario Kart?" Fran demanded sarcastically. "Because that's such an important use of time."
Brookie considered her for a few seconds. "Well, looks like you haven't been in a cave for the past decade, at least."
It was like he was throwing dry wood on a fire. Fran gritted her teeth.
"You press all the wrong buttons."
Brookie merely raised his eyebrows, grey eyes laughing. "Judgemental much? Now can you leave me in peace for a bit?"
"With pleasure." Fran whirled around and stalked back over to her side of the room. For several minutes, she paced the length of her bed. Part of her was tempted to take up Brookie's advice, but she was also nervous about doing it by herself – she was used to doing things in a group of friends – and her pride was telling her that she didn't want to do anything because her roommate told her to do it. It'll give him power over me, said the voice at the back of her mind. And he's stuck up and rude. In any case, Fran doubted her chances of survival if she had to traverse the length of a corridor crammed with wild, testosterone-filled boys. The chaos hadn't let up for a second.
She started chewing on her nails. Almost immediately, her tongue encountered a slippery surface and she froze, fingers stuck in her mouth.
Darn. I forgot to take off the nail varnish and I don't have any remover with me here. Thank God it's matt skin colour.
Fran tried scratching it off with her teeth, but gave up after one hand because bits of hardened varnish were sticking to her teeth. With a groan, she flopped onto her bed.
The bathroom door closed. Not long after, Fran heard the shower come on. She closed her eyes. Well, this is where it all begins. Can you live in the same room as a boy without him discovering you're a girl? Your life depends on it.