Storm and Stone (2 page)

The door slammed open. ‘What is going on in here?’ Miss Peel, head of PE, had arrived and was standing, arms crossed, in the entrance.

The girls in the changing room suddenly all became very busy, like a flash mob melting back into the crowd.

‘Miss, Raven dropped her phone,’ said Toni spitefully.

‘That’s not fair! You all saw Hedda do it!’ protested Raven. No one spoke up in her defence, a slap that she’d have to absorb later when they wouldn’t see the hurt. ‘She dumped my stuff on the ground because she thinks I stole her bag.’

‘I’m not interested in bags or phones.’ Miss Peel folded her arms. ‘I was told there was a fight going on in here.’

Hedda passed Toni a tennis racket. ‘Not really. Just Raven making a fuss.’ She rolled her eyes indicating that this was a frequent occurrence.

Miss Peel glared down at Raven who was cradling the remains of her now defunct mobile. ‘You’ve been told hundreds of times that the school can take no responsibility for private property. I swear these phones are a plague and we’d all be far better off if they were banned. Hurry up and get outside, all of you.’

The girls filed out quickly, leaving Raven seething with wordless fury.

Raven’s hopes for an ally were dashed when Gina had still not arrived in time for supper. Of course, her friend might have texted to explain her delay, but with no working phone how was she to know? Raven put the pieces in her cosmetics bag and zipped it up, a police doctor sealing the victim in a body bag. What could she do to replace it? Granddad had just put down the deposit on his car and was stretched to the limit with the monthly payments; he had warned there was no spare cash for a while. He had promised to teach her to drive so she knew he had bought the new car for her benefit, thinking the old one too temperamental for a young driver. She really couldn’t go to him with this problem. She tucked the dead mobile in a drawer. Her handset didn’t have insurance for accidental damage. Life was almost unthinkable without a phone; she’d be out of the loop even more than she already was. Girls who got pushed to the edge of social circles at Westron soon transferred out; it wasn’t a place that was kind to outsiders.

OK. So she would have to find a way of earning the money to fix it if Hedda didn’t have a change of heart and own up to the vandalism. Yeah right: like that was going to happen. Raven swore and kicked the waste bin. It was so unfair. No good reporting it as the head teacher never took her scholarship pupils’ side against one of the paying students.

Breathe, Stone.
Raven let her head hang between her two arms as she leaned on the sill of the deep window embrasure. A bird—her namesake—cawed as it hopped and flapped untidily along the rooftop crenulations of the old castle that housed the school. The sound scraped against her hearing, a distraction from the maelstrom of hurt and anger that whirled inside her.
No biggie.
She would cope as she always did. This was peanuts compared to losing her mom to cancer and her dad to Afghanistan.

I’m sorry for your loss
, that was what people said, like she had misplaced her parents. They said it, of course, because all words were inadequate and these were the ones society had settled on, but there were times she wished someone had said ‘I’m sorry that your mom and dad died.’ Told it like it was. Horrible. Gut-wrenching. Not a loss but a huge hole dug out of her middle. Mom had gone first. After her dad died, Raven’s old life had been flushed away and an unspeakably grim transition period followed while the authorities fumbled her future. Granddad had been out of the picture—in hospital in England after a heart attack—so for a while the social worker dealing with her case had placed her with military friends of her parents, not realizing the couple was going through a stormy marriage breakdown. Emotionally there had been no room for a grief-stricken thirteen-year-old, leaving her prey to their bully of a fifteen-year-old son. Jimmy Bolton looked innocent, boy-next-door-charming, but his face hid a malicious nature. That was where she had learnt to run fast, and if she couldn’t run, how to fight back so she could get away. Her old self-defence lessons had become daily survival tactics. She couldn’t even escape him during the day as Jimmy had been in the senior department of her high school. The exact opposite of Westron, it had been underfunded, teachers overstretched and the students low on ambition. It was a place in which you endured rather than studied. When her granddad recovered enough to apply to be her guardian, Raven had thought that coming to Westron was a move to paradise—lawns, gardens, cool ancient building: it looked perfect. But then, even Eden had its snake, didn’t it?

Enough brooding. Dumping the robe, Raven changed into a summer dress she had picked up for a fiver from the Oxfam charity shop in the local town over Easter. She smoothed it down, enjoying the sensation of the soft cotton flirting just above her knees. She doubted any of her classmates ever bargain hunted like she did. Bright orange, the colour suited her deep bronze skin tone. She accessorized it with a string of green and orange beads, also picked up from the same store but from the Fairtrade Craft section. She tugged off the label telling her about the women’s cooperative in Bangladesh that made it, her mind briefly flitting round the world to a hot shed by the bank of a river that spent weeks in flood. It seemed really stupid to agonize over a smashed phone in contrast to that level of hardship.
Get a grip, Raven.

The dinner warning bell sounded outside. Just as Raven was on the point of leaving her room, she almost stepped on an envelope that had been shoved in the gap under the door. Expecting some leaflet about term time activities, she ripped it open. Her photo fell out, features defaced by marker pen, a dagger sticking in her neck, spurting out blood. So not funny. Angrily, she scrunched it up and chucked it in the bin in the bathroom, not wanting it in her room.

The picture left a horrid taste in her mouth and a shaky feeling in her stomach. Somewhere deep down she was always the terrified girl who had lost her foundations along with her parents, and she worked hard so that side of her didn’t come to the surface. Her old school had taught her not to show weakness—that was like blood in the water to the circling sharks. Only her granddad saw the true her and that was heavily edited so as not to worry him. Why had someone decided to single her out for such spite? Even though she didn’t expect a welcome downstairs, she wanted to be with other people to chase the image on the letter away.

Pushing through the heavy fire door in the corridor, she headed down the narrow stairs. The room she shared with Gina was up in what had once been servants’ quarters. The school had four storeys in the main building, divided into boys’ and girls’ wings: the rambling fourth floor in the attics housed the boarders, the second and third floors were given over to classrooms; and the fancy, high-ceilinged ground floor that had started life as a medieval manor and grown to castle status under the Tudors. All in all, the school was home to three hundred live-in pupils. Westron Castle was just the English branch of the exclusive Union of International Schools. If you counted the other twenty-five schools round the world, and the alumni association, the students of the Union numbered in the tens of thousands, forming a powerful and well networked elite. Her granddad had been chuffed she’d been accepted; he thought that graduating from this school would set her up for life. And look how well
that
was going.

The gong sounded in the entrance hall. She was late. Picking up speed, Raven charged through door after door, leaving them swinging. Jumping the last few steps she reached the foyer a second before the entrance to the dining room was closed. The rule was if you got there after that point without a good excuse you had to forego supper. Fortunately tonight it was her grandfather on door duty. He raised a bushy eyebrow at her but held it as she slipped in.

‘Thanks,’ she whispered.

He patted her shoulder and disappeared off to his office by the kitchens, his little hunched frame soon swallowed up behind yet another fire barrier. The old architecture of the place had been brutally beaten to take on fire safety precautions, swing doors and fire escapes. She wished he had elected to stay to keep her company, but as usual he avoided the rigmarole of eating with the students; the resident teachers were not so fortunate. Their attendance was obligatory.

Raven slipped into the hall and closed the door behind her, feeling exposed without Gina by her side. As anticipated, she was the last to arrive and most seats were taken. This was no baronial style dining room with heavy oak tables, as you might expect from the decor, but a restaurant setting of circular tables that could be folded away when the space was needed for other activities. The students were supposed to learn the art of dinner party conversation in their groupings of ten, teachers sprinkled strategically through the room to encourage manners and intelligent talk. At least that was what the syllabus promised parents; in reality, the tables were closely guarded spheres of influence, markers of who was in and who was out. Teachers preferred to sit together at their own table and gossip, leaving the students to fight out their social battles without referees.

Raven’s eyes swept the room. Though she was standing in the shadows, her late entrance had attracted attention from the girls. A number of them glanced her way then started whispering together. She could imagine what they were saying:
there’s the thief. We always knew it was her.

Which one had left the picture, she wondered? It was horrible to think someone had spent their afternoon working out how to upset her. Her money was on Hedda and her gang but, really, now she knew what the girls thought of her—the school’s trailer trash—she had begun to see enemies everywhere. No one had stood up for her: she would always remember that.

The boys, thankfully, seemed oblivious to the undercurrents in the room. When she caught the eye of Adewale, a friendly Nigerian boy in her year, he just grinned back and returned to his conversation. Shame there was no room at his table.

Not wanting another battle, she avoided taking a seat with any of the girls. Her normal place by the serving counter was occupied so she slid into a spare chair at the same table on the far right. It was a good place to watch the room and had the advantage that she didn’t recognize the two boys already there, so they at least should be ignorant of the undercurrents.

‘Hi. You new to Westron?’ she asked brightly, pretending she wasn’t worried by the atmosphere in the dining hall. She was attuned to danger, thanks to past experience in a rough school, and somehow the situation had subtlety changed. She was no longer so sure she was safe. It might not be drug-dealing seniors she had to worry about in the corridors here but something was … well …
off
about Westron post vacation. Worth thinking about later, but for now she turned to give the newcomers her attention.

The tousled-haired one on her right ignored her, apparently engrossed in a Sudoku puzzle.
Extreme level
. Great. She had put herself next to an Ultra-Geek—admittedly a handsome one. Hoping for rescue, she peered beyond him to the other stranger on Sudoku boy’s far side.

‘Hi, I’m Raven.’

This time her greeting did not fall on deaf ears.

‘Hey, Raven. I’m Joe Masters.’

Not only did Joe have a lovely deep voice, East Coast accented like hers, but he had a smile that felt like the sun coming out to brighten her overcast day. His hair was shaved close to the scalp and his skin tone was only a couple of shades darker than hers. Total effect? Gorgeous.

‘So, you … er … just joined us, Joe?’

‘Yeah. We started today.’

We?
Did that mean he came as a package deal with Sudoku? ‘Oh. Awesome. I hope you settle in OK. I mean, it’s a strange time to come, so late in the academic year.’

Joe tapped the fingers of his left hand lightly on the table, a pianist practising the bass line. ‘Couldn’t be helped, Raven. We got expelled from our old school.’

Raven wondered if he was joking; he seemed so cheerful about the fact. ‘What?’

‘The professor here blew up the labs. I was just an innocent bystander, your honour.’ Joe’s eyes were laughing at her expression.

‘Oh, er, yeah right. Of course, you were. Totally.’

His expression told her he appreciated the irony. ‘I always blame him. He never takes the trouble to defend himself. Do you, Kieran?’ He nudged his friend.

‘Hmm.’ The boy filled in the grid with lightning speed. Raven suspected that he had to be making up the answers but when she surreptitiously checked the first box she couldn’t fault it.

Waiting staff appeared with the first course, which entailed a dangerous ladling of hot soup over the shoulders of the students. As most of the servers were poorly trained locals drafted in for the meal, the older students knew to lean well back. The Sudoku boy did not take evasive action but impressed Raven by flicking up a napkin to intercept the drops with no seeming pause in his concentration.

‘Is he always like this?’ Raven asked.

Joe smiled indulgently. ‘Hard to believe but yes.’ He broke a roll into pieces.’ You think he hasn’t noticed you but you’re wrong.’

‘Yeah right.’

‘No, it’s true. Hey, Key, stop that and say “hi” to the nice girl sitting on your right.’

‘Pathetically easy. I don’t know why I bother.’ The boy dropped the paper onto the floor between their chairs.

‘You bother because if your poor brain doesn’t have something to work on it starts to cannibalize its own cells out of sheer boredom.’

‘Hmm. Not very scientific but you might have a point.’ Sudoku sat up straight, revealing he was exceptionally tall. He had an enviable crop of loose chestnut curls and a face of angles and planes like some sculptor’s exaggerated version of ‘bone structure: British aristocracy’. Raven was reminded of a thoroughbred horse, all restless energy and skittishness. These two made the rest of the boys in her year look plain. She predicted that they were either going to be wildly popular with the guys who wanted to hang out with them, hoping to be at the front of the line for the girlfriend surplus, or—and this struck her as more likely—envied for being so fit.