The It Girl(21)

Now, thrown together by the simple fact of sharing a room, they seemed to be taken for granted. April and Hannah. Hannah and April. Friends. Roommates. Conspirators.

“She’s such a cow,” April complained. It was Friday night, and she was sprawled across the sofa eating dry Coco Pops from a bowl, wearing a hand-painted dressing gown in Japanese silk. She was watching The Breakfast Club on her laptop and scrolling through the brand-new Instagram app on her iPhone. “I swear she waits until I’m either maximum hungover or got a massive deadline to come and hoover.”

“Who?” Hannah adjusted the hood of her gown in the mirror. It was formal hall tonight, which meant if you wanted a cooked dinner, you had to dress the part—academic gown and smart clothes, although in practice “smart” tended to mean “no ripped jeans.” She glanced over April’s shoulder to check the time on her laptop: 7:25. Emily had promised to call past on her way over to the hall, but they were cutting it fine if they wanted to find seats together.

“I told you—Sue. Were you not listening?”

“She’s got to get through the rooms,” Hannah said mildly.

“She hates me ever since I pranked her with that bowl of glitter on top of the wardrobe,” April said. She put a spoonful of Coco Pops in her mouth and crunched them noisily. “Bitch.”

April was, Hannah had discovered, an inveterate practical joker. It was one of the more unnerving things about sharing a room with her—though not sharing a room didn’t lessen the risk much. She had gotten Ryan with a fake call summoning him to see the Master—who was not pleased to be interrupted at ten thirty on a Sunday night. Hannah’s own “gotcha” had been coming up the stairs one night after dinner to hear panicked screams coming from April’s bedroom. She had rushed into the room to see two pale hands scrabbling helplessly at the edge of the open window frame.

It was only when she had raced across the room, her heart in her mouth, and grabbed one of the hands by the wrist that she had looked down to see April standing safely on the projecting bay window below, laughing like a hyena.

Of course, with hindsight it was completely stupid. Why would April be hanging outside her own window? There was no way she could have gotten in such a position by accident. And so Hannah had forced herself to laugh too, and had recounted the incident over breakfast as a joke against herself. In truth, though, she hadn’t found it particularly funny. It struck her as pointless and a little unkind—even dangerous, to the extent that April could easily have fallen and broken her neck for real. Climbing out of the window had been fairly easy, according to April, but getting back up proved a lot harder. After Hannah had made two fruitless attempts to pull April back into the room, April had given up and clambered perilously down a very rusty drainpipe, losing a chunk of skin in the process. It would, Hannah reflected bitterly, have been considerably less funny if April had actually fallen to her death. But you weren’t allowed to say things like that if you were the butt of a practical joke, or you looked sour and humorless.

“Who’s a bitch?” The voice came from the doorway to the hall, and Hannah and April both turned sharply.

“Emily!” April said. She put a hand over her heart. “Jesus, don’t do that to me! You gave me a heart attack.”

“Sorry. Are you coming, Han? I was calling your mobile, but you weren’t picking up.”

“Oh, shoot, sorry. It didn’t ring. I must have run out of credit again. Are you sure you’re not coming?” she said to April, but more to show willing than anything else. April never came to formal hall. She claimed it was because she thought it was stuffy and pretentious—both of which were true, though Hannah had a weakness for the ceremony of it all, the Hogwarts theatricality of the rows of black-gowned students, the polished oak benches, the glimmering little lamps dotted all around, the Latin grace. But Hannah suspected it was something else. Something to do with April’s odd relationship with food—the way she would eat six McDonald’s cheeseburgers in a row while out in Oxford on a Saturday night, but then skip lunch every day for a week.

In formal hall there was no escape from the full, waiter-serviced three courses of it all. No possibility of taking a side salad, or scooping your still-laden plate into an anonymous pile at the hatch. You had to order a full meal and then sit there, waiting while everyone else finished, until the staff came to clear.

“I’d rather drink bin juice,” April said now, but amiably, and Hannah shrugged.

“Okay, suit yourself,” she said, and followed Emily from the room.

Ryan was waiting for them at the foot of the stairs, and together they made their way across the quad in the gloaming. It was November already, and the nights were drawing in. All around them were the crisp autumn air and the lights shining out through the chapel’s stained glass.

“So who was the bitch?” Emily asked again, and Hannah rolled her eyes.

“Oh, Sue. April thinks she’s holding a grudge. You know—over the glitter.”

“God, I’m not surprised. If she tries any of that shit with me, I will end her,” Emily said. She looked surprisingly furious. “It’s not funny, it’s actually pathetic. I heard about it from my scout, you know. They talk to each other. Sue spent hours hoovering up glitter and getting it out of her hair. If I was her, I’d have reported April to the Master.”