The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) (5 page)

When all the groups had set up their apparatus, Mr Kell lit a Bunsen burner on the front bench. Dana lit a splint and carried the flame to her bench, and set fire to the peanut. She watched it turn black, but it kept burning for quite some time. While she was waiting, she started writing up the experiment. One of the other girls took one of Dana’s pens from her pencil case and held it over the peanut, melting the plastic.

“Stop it!” Dana shouted, snatching back the pen. “Now the heat from the peanut has gone into the pen instead of the water, and the result won’t be accurate!”

The girls tittered and jeered at her. Dana put her pencil case in her lap to stop it from being ransacked any further. When the peanut went out, she measured the temperature of the water and wrote the numbers in the equation to work out the joules of energy in the peanut. The other girls copied her calculation and kept on talking.

She was so engrossed in doing the calculation, she forgot about the time until Mr Kell called out, “Right, put the apparatus back! Your homework is to finish writing up the experiment and to do questions 1-6 on page 138 of the book!”

Then Dana remembered that she had PE next, and she still hadn’t sorted out some way of getting out of lunch break, when that boy or Abigail might be looking for her. She grabbed the still-warm conical flask and held it up. “Look, sir!” she shouted, and threw it on the floor, where it broke and splashed tepid water all up the glassware cupboards.

“Dana!” he shouted. “You’re on detention this lunchtime!” Mr Kell seized a dustpan and brush and thrust them into Dana’s hands. “Pick it up and wait after class.”

Dana swept up the conical flask and tipped it into the glass bin, while Mr Kell went round and round the class, shouting at them to get a move on. She waited at her desk after the lab was tidied. The bell went, and the other students filed out.

“What on Earth did you do that for, Dana?” Mr Kell’s arms were folded and his mouth was drawn. “I’ve never seen you be disruptive before. You seem like a bright enough kid, and you’re always polite and punctual, but sometimes,” he shook his head, “I can’t understand you at all.”

Dana hung her head. There wasn’t anything to say.

“Do you eat your lunch in the canteen, or do you bring your own?”

“I’ve got sandwiches,” Dana said.

“Very well. Report here at lunch and bring your sandwiches. You’ll have to help me muck out the axolotl.”

Dana was pleased that she was on detention with Mr Kell at lunch. Mucking out the axolotl would be much more interesting than being in the schoolyard trying to avoid being seen by Abigail or the fat boy. Also because Mr Kell had kept her behind to speak to her, most of the children were already in their classes. Instead of going to PE, Dana went to another part of the block to see if she could find an empty classroom. If she could find one with a wLAN, she could hide there for the lesson and then she wouldn’t have to do PE, which she hated. For one thing she hated having to get changed in front of other people, and she hated the teacher watching her and the other kids in the shower and having to see her own and other people’s revolting bodies, and for another thing Dana had never had a PE lesson in which she hadn’t been called names and thumped, kicked, or hit with the equipment under the premise of it being part of the subject.

“It’s because you’re turning into a woman,” Pauline had said when Dana had refused to go swimming with her any more. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

But I don’t want to become a woman
, Dana had thought.
I want to just stay being me
.

She didn’t know how Jananin Blake could stand up in front of an audience with her head held high and speak her mind when her body presumably did these same disgusting, embarrassing things that entailed being a
woman
.

Dana found an empty music classroom and went in. She was wondering whether she should try to get behind something when the door opened and a man entered. He was a stout, fat man she had seen before, and Dana had heard other children refer to him as a music teacher called Slugs. He didn’t see her at first, and when he did, he gave a yell and jumped back. “What are you doing in here? You nearly gave me a heart attack!”

“Er, I’m looking for my exercise book, I think I left it here this morning...” her voice trailed off.

Slugs went red in the face. “What rubbish!” he said, tossing his head so his chins wobbled and his forelock quivered. “Get to your class!”

“Sorry, Mr Slugs,” said Dana, making past him for the door.

The teacher’s face went even redder. “It’s
Suggs
, you impudent little... right, you’re on detention!”

“But I’ve already got detention this lunch break, with Mr Kell!” Dana objected.

“Then you’ll just have to do it after school! And you’ll have to do it with Mr Gordon’s lot because I’m busy. Get yourself to physics at last bell. You do know where physics is, don’t you?” He glared at Dana.

“Yes.”

“What’s your name?”

“Dana Provine.”

“Now get out!”

When Dana went to the PE rooms, the class had already got changed and gone out. Dana found them on the all-weather pitch. “Dana!” the teacher shouted. “Go back and get your kit on!”

Dana walked as slowly as she could manage back to the changing rooms. When she arrived, there was half an hour of the lesson left. She decided to stay sitting in the reeking sweaty changing rooms and that she would tell the teacher there wasn’t time.

When the class came back, the teacher was angry with Dana. She took her aside and spoke to her while the rest of the class used the showers and got changed.

“I’ve a good mind to put you on detention,” the teacher started.

“I’ve already got detentions off Mr Suggs and Mr Kell,” Dana countered.

“Sounds like your attitude is just as bad in your other subjects then. You’re consistently late, you’re always forgetting your kit, and when you do remember it and bother to turn up, you just stand there and refuse to participate.”

“I’m no good at it,” said Dana. “I can’t understand the instructions.”

“What are you, some sort of retard?” The teacher glared fiercely at Dana. “I’ve known people in comas what participate better than you.”

“That’s ungrammatical,” Dana retorted.

“Shut up, I’ve had enough of your lip. Get outside, now. I’m going to speak to your head of house.”

Dana waited for the bell in the damp, putrid corridor between the boys’ and girls’ changing rooms. Some of the lessons she could see a point to. Adults needed to understand maths and how to use English and computers properly, and science helped you understand how the whole world worked, and it was interesting too. But PE, what was the point of that, apart from to humiliate people? When in your life would the experience of being kicked and hit with sticks and balls be useful to anyone? They didn’t even teach you anything useful, like martial arts for self defence or the best technique for running away from rapists and murderers. Dana hated stupid, useless PE, and she really hated that stupid PE teacher.

Her eyes prickled and her vision blurred, and there was a sputtering noise and a signal in her mind disappeared. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, and looked at the wLAN B8G box on the wall. The lights on the front of it had gone out, and a thin stream of smoke drifted from it, pooling on the ceiling. Dana tried to pull herself together. It was no use letting herself get worked up, especially not if it broke the wLANs. After all, it wasn’t their fault. She tried to concentrate on something positive, and thought of the carnivorous plant catalogue she’d sent off an SAE for a few days ago. Assuming the seed mail order people sent off the catalogue on the same day they received the SAE, it should have arrived that day. Dana would think about the end of the day, after the detention, when she could go home and decide what
Sarracenia
seeds to order. There was a waterlogged area of ground at the bottom of Pauline and Graeme’s garden, and Graeme had said Dana could use it to make her own bog garden.

The bell went and, imagining a spectacular,
Sarracenia
-filled bog garden to rival the ones at the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, Dana headed off to biology to do her detention. As she pushed through the throng of people, the overwhelming majority of whom were trying to get out instead of in, someone in the crowd grabbed her and shoved her against the wall. It was Abigail. Her two cronies stood on either side of Dana, blocking her escape.

“I’m gunna get you, Provine!” said Abigail, forcing her greasy face into Dana’s. “I’m gunna do to you what you did to me, and then some.”

“Oi!” someone shouted. It was the teacher from the loos. Abigail and the others disappeared into the crowd. Dana hurried up the steps into the building.

She ate her lunch with Mr Kell and another teacher, trying not to think about Abigail’s threat. Then it was time to clean the axolotl tank. Dana first caught the axolotl in a beaker, and stood it to one side. Then she and Mr Kell and the other teacher had to scoop out the water and pour it down the sink, and Mr Kell added a blue solution to some clean water to make it the right pH and get rid of any chlorine and things in it, and they poured that into the tank and put the axolotl back.

The next lesson was Geography, and the class made so much noise the teacher kept all of them in over break, so she didn’t have to worry about finding somewhere to hide. The last lesson of the day was English, on the third floor of A-Block. Dana looked out the window while the teacher read two chapters of a boring novel.

When the bell went, she headed for Mr Gordon’s physics classroom.

“Mr Suggs sent me,” she told him.

Mr Gordon, sitting at his desk marking, waved a hand towards the other kids dotted about the classroom. “Siddown, find some homework to do or something to read.”

She ended up sitting behind a short-haired boy who’d shaved a swear word on the back of his head, but had got the
S
in it the wrong way round. She opened her bag, thinking she’d do her History homework, because it was boring and the wLAN at the school was faster than Pauline and Graeme’s. She opened her exercise book on the desk and picked up her biro. A wind band was practising somewhere in the building, and discordant snatches of music interfered with her concentration.

“Patrick Moore plays the xylophone,” someone sang in a forced basso voice. “Patrick Moore plays the xylophone!”

The teacher looked up from his desk. “Be quiet!”

Dana glanced in the direction the singing had come from. It was a fat boy on the desk in front, two seats to the left of the boy with the shaved head. His mop of brown hair looked the same shape as an unopened mushroom from behind, and the crumpled back of his shirt rode up over a broad back that was pale and spotty and trousers that didn’t come up far enough, giving the boy what Pauline used to call a Workman’s Cleavage.

She stared hard at the boy, scrutinising his bag and coat. It was the same boy who had followed her yesterday, she was sure of it.

“I don’t expect Patrick Moore did play the xylophone,” said the teacher.

“He did!” the boy had a thick Birmingham accent. “It’s on a website, sir!”

Dana bent over her work and leaned her head on her free hand, hoping it would hide her face.

Silence reigned for a few moments. Then, out of the corner of her eye, Dana saw the boy stretch and twist in his chair. He looked round and stopped, and she knew he must have seen her.

“Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta,
Epsilon
.”

“Will you be quiet!” the teacher snapped.

“I’m doing my maths homework, sir!”

“Well, do it in your head.”

“I can’t sir, ‘cause I’m
styowpid
.”

“I don’t care if you’re stupid, so long as you’re stupid quietly!”

Now Dana was starting to worry about how she would evade the boy while getting out of detention. Perhaps she could get out before him and run home, but which way should she go, the normal way or through the woods? If she went the normal way, the boy might be able to follow her, and then he would know where she lived. It might be better to hide somewhere until she was sure the boy had gone, and afterwards go home a completely different way. She put away any hopes she had of getting back in time to read her catalogue.

When the detention was over, she deliberately dawdled while putting her stuff away. The boy dawdled too until it was just the teacher and the two of them left, and after Dana had put all her things away in her pencil case, one by one, he was still there, picking up a heap of little paper circles that had come out of a hole punch. Dana crawled under her desk on her hands and knees as though looking for something.

“Oh, come on!” said Mr Gordon. “You, out!” he ordered the boy. “The cleaners will have to sort that mess out. Don’t be so careless in future! What have you lost?” he said to Dana as the boy left the room.

“My pencil sharpener. It’s all right, I’ve found it now.” Dana showed him the pencil sharpener in her hand. She got up and put it away.

“Hurry up! Don’t you have a home to go to?”

Dana ran out of the classroom. She went straight across the corridor and into the girls’ toilet. She waited for exactly ten minutes.

She pushed open the door and surveyed the corridor. It was empty. Dana went to the stairs and through the door. The stairwells had windows all the way down, and from here the yard appeared to be deserted. The building faced east, and the late afternoon sun cast a long shadow upon the yard. In the clear blue sky a distant bird soared, but it caught the sun, flashing like metal. Dana squinted at it. Perhaps it was a small aircraft and not a bird. She hurried down the stairs to the front entrance.

As soon as she was out the door, three girls appeared from behind a building on the northern side of the yard. It was Abigail. They came towards her with slow, determined strides, their faces grim, and Abigail punched the palm of her other hand.

Cornered in the toilets, Dana had not stood a chance, but here she could at least try. She jumped off the steps and ran across the yard as the three girls spread out and went for her.