By Any Other Name (4 page)

I don’t have to be asleep. The nightmares follow me into the daylight some days. I can sit on my bed and smell the wet earth like I’m lying face down in the forest
again, the scent of the trees like it’s all around me. They’re out there searching for me. The gun’s in his hand. And I wonder if it hurts, being shot in the head. Will I know or
will it be over too quickly to feel the agony? How will they explain to Katie that I’m dead? How will they get her to understand?

My breath comes in short pants like I’ve been running. My skin’s icy like I’m lying on cold winter ground, even though I’m curled up in a ball, face buried in my pillow.
I’m choking on tears and I just want it to stop.

W
ednesday morning, 8.30 a.m., and I’m walking down the road to Daneshill High School. There’s tons of people in front of me going the
same way in twos, threes and bigger groups. I trail behind on my own. That’s fine; walking along here alone is fine, as long as I don’t look as if I’m trying to latch on to the
others like some desperate case.

Ahead at the school building, all glass and steel front with shabby Portakabins tucked at the rear, the coaches pull up and bodies in uniform stream off. The bus bays turn into a sea of black
sweatshirts pooling out over the tarmac.

I don’t want this flutter of fear to be here inside me, but it is all the same.

I expected to have time to get ready for this day. Mum took me into the school on Monday to look around and somehow, an hour later, I was signed up to start immediately. They even sold us a
sweatshirt and polo shirt on the spot. No escape – a uniformed Holly, signed, sealed and ready for delivery. It was the Head’s fault. Because the exams are so close, she said I should
start straight away.

Lots of the girls appear to be wearing skirts. Really short skirts, some just a few centimetres below the hem of their sweatshirts. My last school would have sent me home for dressing like that.
Good thing Dad doesn’t know – he’s already been bitching about how low the exam results are here, even though Mum reminded him we don’t have much choice because of having to
be near a special school for Katie. He’s a total uniform fascist though, as if having a blazer and tie makes you better at exams. Fortunately Mum’s a bit more chilled, though she
won’t allow me to wear make-up for school. She did give me a manicure last night to cheer me up – soaked my hands, pushed my cuticles back and rubbed oil into them, buffed my nails
until they shone just as much as if I had clear varnish on them. Gave me a facial too, to make me feel better about her no make-up rule. I told her the other girls would be wearing it, but she
wouldn’t give way, except for letting me apply a tiny stroke of brown mascara. I hate my eyelashes – way too blonde – and she knows that.

There’s a white dot in the black ocean flowing across the coach park. It draws the eye like a seagull bobbing on the waves, only this white shape is static. I keep my eye on it as I get
closer until I’m near enough to recognise the freak boy from moving day by the sweep of hair over his face and the black Converses. He’s wearing just his white polo shirt again without
a sweatshirt and a teacher has stopped him. Is he crazy? It’s freezing this morning. What is wrong with the boy? The teacher stands over him with a pained expression while he fiddles first
with his ear and then his eyebrow. So piercings
aren’t
allowed. He bends over to pull the hem of his trousers over the top of the Converses and straighten the scrunched-up legs
out.

A passing girl slows down and takes a long, leisurely look at his bum. He’s facing the wrong way for me to judge if it’s worth the effort of her surreptitious ogle, but she clearly
thinks it is from the way her head turns so her eyes can linger on him for as long as possible. Either that or she has some weird thing for aggressive Emo freaks with abnormal body-temperature
regulation. I laugh as the teacher makes him take a sweatshirt out of his bag and put it on before she releases him. I can’t see why she’s so keen for him to cover his arms up when some
of those girls are almost showing their knickers, but maybe he irritates her and I
can
understand that.

I go to Reception. It takes fifteen minutes for a stressy-looking woman with frizzy hair to come and fetch me. She’s wearing a narky expression and the ugliest shoes I’ve ever seen
– black, clumpy things with a thick sole and wide, square toes.

‘Follow me. I need to arrange a timetable for you before you can go to classes,’ she says, flapping a tatty piece of paper at me. My name and details are scribbled on it. ‘I
have no information on what courses you’ve been doing, what your predicted grades are, no details at all from your last school.’ She looks expectantly at me, for me to fill in the
blanks, but she’s crotchety too as if it’s my fault. In a way I suppose it is.

I give her the pre-prepared lie. ‘I’ve been educated at home for the last three years. We moved a lot because of Dad’s job so it was more practical, but he’s settled here
now. I’ve brought all my coursework with me if you’d like to see it.’

She takes me to an office and logs on to a computer. ‘I’ll print a blank timetable. You can fill your classes in on that because it’ll take a while to have your details loaded
on to the system.’ She looks at my list and then calls someone. They talk for a while about sets and class codes and I wonder why they couldn’t have done this before I arrived because
we discussed all this on Monday.

A few people my age knock on the door over the next ten minutes but she waves them away and they wander off. The bell rings – five loud, shrill bursts – and the corridors fill with
bodies and noise. The teacher, who still hasn’t told me her name, scrolls down her computer screen, tutting occasionally and scribbling on her pad of paper.

‘OK,’ the teacher says, handing me a blank grid with days and lesson numbers printed on it. ‘Fill this in while I read out your class details.’

She drones through the days and periods and I copy the classes in. After that, I follow her again, this time to a room on the other side of the school. It’s an English lesson and
it’s already started. I want to cringe away when she opens the door, but I force myself to walk in, head held high.

Everyone stares, even the teacher.

I look at him because it’s easier than looking at the other faces. He’s around forty with sandy hair and a round face with little round glasses. It’s a look that
shouldn’t work, but it does in a preppy, older guy way.

‘Hi, Holly,’ he says when the woman introduces him as Mr Jenkins and I realise he’s the first person to say hello to me today. ‘We’re in the middle of something
right now, but take a seat. Don’t worry about keeping up, just get your bearings. We’re moving on to look at another poem next lesson so you can pick up with the rest of the class
then.’ He looks around the room. There’re two seats free, one next to . . . oh no, Emo Boy . . . and another table where no one is sitting. The Emo looks up at me. He deliberately
spreads his arms and legs, and pushes his books further across the table so there’s no room for me. Something between hurt and hate jabs me. Not that I want to sit with him, but does he
really have to make it so obvious he doesn’t want me there? How would he like it if someone did that to him on his first day?

Maybe the teacher sees my face fall or maybe he wouldn’t want to sit next to the weird boy either because he gestures to the empty table. It’s right at the front and I feel exposed,
but it’s much better than the alternative. I can feel everyone staring at me even though I can’t see them and the hair on the back of my neck stands up in paranoid prickles. I feel as
if I’ve just walked on to a set in
Mean Girls
. One mistake and the back-row crew will chew me up.

The girls will be scoring me against themselves and calculating my rank order. I know this because I’ve been one of those girls. The boys will be deciding how hot I am. So far I might be
doing OK on appearances alone, even if I am wearing a too-straight uniform. I’m aiming for the ‘natural because I don’t need make-up to look good’ effect, not the ‘my
mum won’t let me and I have to do as I’m told’ one. I may be getting away with it, but how I look is only half the battle. The rest hangs on how I act. If I mess up now, I’m
bitch-food forever.

The boys are an added complication that I’m not used to dealing with in school. If the wrong one looks at me in the right way, and one of those girls wants/owns him, then they’ll get
their claws out. Because of course, it will be my fault and not the boy’s.

The English teacher is right. I do need to get my bearings, though maybe not in the way he meant. The class is studying war poems, which could have been difficult except that I did this topic
already last year.

This should be so much easier than it feels. These people are bumpkins and I should be the last word in cool to them. But Holly’s not from a big cosmopolitan city, is she? Holly’s
unobtrusive. I’m not one of those back-row girls any more and I have to learn to live with that. I’m near-the-front girl now. Girl without a hot boyfriend. Head-down, work-hard,
never-get-noticed girl.

Sometimes the unfairness stops my breath. I didn’t ask for any of this.

The teacher finishes up the lesson and asks me if I know where I’m going, while the others pack up.

‘No. I have French next but I don’t know where that is.’

He raises his voice. ‘Anyone here able to take Holly to French?’

I don’t dare turn around to see if there are any volunteers, but I breathe out in relief when a girl’s voice replies. ‘Yes, sir. I’ll take her.’

I do turn then to mouth ‘Thanks’ at her. She’s sitting in the middle of the class and she’s prettyish with long brown hair. Not the kind of girl it’ll make me look
bad to be seen with, but not too noticeable either – that’s good.

When did I get so scheming? I don’t like myself this way, but it’s Darwinism in action – survival of the fittest. Prey has to stay one step ahead of the predators.

The girl comes over as the bell rings. ‘Hi, I’m Nicole. Are you ready?’

I don’t answer but I smile a little and pick my bag up. I probably look shy, nervous. Normally I would never allow that to show, but that is who I am now so that’s what Nicole needs
to see. She smiles back, warm but not too confident herself. When we go into the corridor, she says hesitantly, ‘It’s this way,’ and then she’s silent as we push along past
Year 7s staggering under schoolbags almost bigger than them. I don’t know if I find her silence reassuring or nerve-racking.

We skirt round the outside of the building towards some Portakabins and a group of girls wanders past. They’re the type Mum would describe as ‘slightly common’ with a certain
tone in her voice. There’s nothing about them that you could exactly put your finger on, except for a sort of hard look to their make-up and something in the way they walk that Mum would read
as ‘not quite our kind of people’. Tasha and I used to roll our eyes at her when she had one of her snobby moments, yet I find myself wanting to avoid these girls. Nicole walks a
discrete arc around them. I catch a bit of their conversation – bitching about someone in their Health and Social Care class. I’m not entirely sure what Health and Social Care is, but
from how they look and talk I guess it’s one of those subjects that would make Dad groan and say, ‘You see,
this
is why we sent you to a private school.’

‘What’s the French teacher like?’ I ask and Nicole’s face relaxes in relief as I break the ice. I decide she’s much shyer than I am . . . than I was, I mean.

‘She’s OK . . . ish. But you can’t talk in her lesson or have a laugh like you can with Mr Jenkins.’

I nod, half wondering from her face when she says the teacher’s name whether she might have offered to take me to French to make herself look good in front of him. Leetle bit of a crush
perhaps?

We enter a scratty Portakabin with rotten wood on the door frame. ‘It’s break after this lesson. I’ll show you around if you like,’ Nicole says tentatively.

‘Yeah, great. Thanks.’ I smile again. My mouth’s beginning to ache with the effort of trying to look genuine when I really don’t feel like smiling at all. When I really
feel like turning around and walking right out of this school. I don’t want to try to like it. It sucks and I . . .

I want to go back home.

But Holly Latham has no home to go back to. There is no other life.

I don’t want to be Holly Latham.

Nicole leads me to the French teacher’s desk. ‘Mme Carrière, this is Holly. She’s new. Can she sit with me and Ella?’

Mme Carrière’s eyebrows shoot up in an expression of such Gallic surprise that I would normally have giggled. ‘New? At this time? In Year 11?
Zut alors!
’

I nod and stare past her to a poster on the wall about Paris, for something to focus on.

‘I have not had information on you, Holly.’ She shuffles the papers on her desk and the sound they make signals her exasperation. ‘What is your predicted grade?’

I can feel the rest of the class listening intently as they get books out of their bags.