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Tests

Mrs Blackstone’s daughter was in year ten, it turned out, which made her fifteen, and a big girl at Deepdene to anyone in year seven, regardless of the size issue. My shadows did not like her much, but I was learning to ignore those remnants of the real Olivia, because they were not reliable. Not in my admittedly limited, and really rather impossibly muddled, experience. Kelly actually really valued her older friends at Redstone. I knew a couple of year tens who lived in my street, who I had known ever since I was a toddler, and one big girl in year eleven, and that helped a lot with problems, sometimes. But Felicity was obviously not the sort of girl who was going to just threaten Samantha Fitzgerald on my behalf, because she was not the type, although she certainly seemed genuinely concerned about the situation. Breaktime only lasted fifteen minutes and she acted quickly to calm things down with us, promising the twins that she would help, and asking them to let her talk to me on our own for a bit. She took hold of my hand, and got me walking around the edge of the playground where it was quieter, away from everyone else. Everyone seemed to hold Olivia’s hand, I had noticed, because I was such a little girl, and that seemed to really annoy the angry shadows. But I did not mind, not at that moment, because I needed some help, and some reassurance.

“I could tell mum…but I really don’t think it would help…do you?” She said, after we had been walking for a minute. Felicity was wearing the same uniform as me, with her dark brown hair arranged in a braid, with school ribbons. It made her look younger than fifteen, I thought to myself, but she seemed quite mature. Kelly could do mature, in normal circumstances, but I was not feeling that in Olivia’s body. I felt so little and out of my depth, so when she started to talk, I listened, trying to calm myself down, trying to cope. “I mean…you’ve said mean things to all of the girls in your class before…haven’t you?”

I did not know what to say to that, of course. I had no idea what Olivia had said to anyone at Deepdene. But I knew that she did not have any friends, so I could guess the landscape. In five terms, she had made no friends, which either meant she was not trying to get along with anyone or that the other girls were simply rejecting her. I mean, it was not that big a school. My class of twenty girls was year seven, all of it, right there. Redstone had six classes in each year, so well over one hundred and eighty pupils. But if your peer group was just twenty, and you were the new girl, I could see how hard that might be. Olivia had been transferred to the school the twins had been at since they were three years old, in the nursery. Most of the girls in her class had probably been together for eight years already. And Olivia did not want to be there. I could see how that might have played out for her, and I was suffering the consequences.

“I think you should tell Auntie Caroline…she will know what to do, without making things any worse…but if I tell my mum, she will have to do something about it here at school, because she is a teacher, and that might not help you in the long run?” Felicity suggested, which made sense. Every school says that it has a zero-tolerance attitude to bullying but that was nonsense in real terms, because the teachers could not be everywhere. No one liked a telltale. If things got really nasty, someone had to say something about it, but kids always picked on other kids and no adult could ever really stop it altogether. In the end, the best way to deal with it was to ignore it, and move on, which was exactly the advice Felicity gave me. “I know you had a really terrible day yesterday…but everyone also knows what you did…and the teachers can’t stop girls saying mean things…they can’t be everywhere…you just have to show bullies that it doesn’t bother you…and then they stop? And nothing ever seems to bother you that much usually, does it, Olivia? Until today?”

“I am making a fresh start,” I told her, pathetically. It was silly. Samantha had not said very much, even if it was nasty, and it was hardly a brutal murder threat. And I had messed my pull-up in a very public way, after messing up their big day out, so that was bound to attract some comments. Kelly would have struggled to laugh messing herself off at Redstone, even if it was a medical condition, so the other kids were bound to tease. But deep inside Olivia, I was on an emotional rollercoaster, still trying to work out what was actually happening to me and what I could do about it, if anything at all, and I felt so helpless. I just could not cope with it. My brain was just swirling over everything in a constant whirl of anxiety and naked terror.

“Okay…good for you…mum told me all about that…because Auntie Caroline told her…but if you want it to work, if you want things to get better here…telling on Samantha might not be the best idea…you need to get on with people, Olivia?” She suggested, giving my sweaty hand a reassuring little squeeze, and I nodded at that, because Kelly actually agreed with her. Olivia was a seriously messed up person, as far as I could tell, and really unhappy. She had no friends at all, she hated her stepmother and seemed to think that her stepsisters were annoying babies who just irritated her. She was ill, or underdeveloped, or whatever, and she was coping with a lot of stuff, including the death of her mother, but she was not doing anything to help herself as far as I could see. And that left me caught right in the middle of her many problems, before I could even start dealing with my own disaster. “You can always talk to me, if you want…and I’ll always help, if I can…you know I could be a friend…if you’d let me…but you have never been that keen…before?”

I had to go back in, of course. But I managed it, after another hug from the twins and a smile from Felicity, who walked me back up to the classroom door. I divested myself of my coat and hat, braving the silence of the other girls, and took my seat at my table. And then, finally, I had some good luck, with our first test, like a bolt from the blue, a gift. It was history, my favourite subject, and the whole test was based around the Tudors. That is a topic that most kids tackle several times, initially in primary school and then again in high school, because it has so much meat to it. I was no sort of star pupil at Redstone, but I was a reader, happily consuming three or four books a week, and for some reason, Henry VIII and his six wives had always fascinated me. I had read dozens of books, both fact and fiction, about the Tudors, and as soon as I opened the test worksheet Miss Cooper put in front of me, I just knew that I was going to ace it. I was writing in seconds, attacking the questions like a mad thing, trying not to laugh out loud at my good fortune. We had an hour to do the test and I was still writing furiously, adding details and extra information, when one of the teaching assistants appeared beside me to take the paper away from me. I was thrilled, because I knew I had done well, and that was illogically important to me. I was not Olivia, and obviously, I wanted to go back to being Kelly, which was what I had to really focus on, but as I had no idea how I was going to manage that, showing the world that I was just as clever as a bunch of prissy private school girls who hated me felt good, and if I did well at school, under the auspices of Caroline’s fresh start idea, I knew it would make things easier at home for everyone. Especially for me. And whilst I was wildly answering all of those questions, I was not thinking about anything else, other than possibly getting a better mark than Samantha Fitzgerald, of course. It simply distracted me. I left my problems at the door and lost myself in the world of Ann Boleyn and Jane Seymour.

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