The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #5)(71)

‘You are total freaks,’ Joanne spits. ‘Normal people shouldn’t have to be in the same school as you. If my hand’s scarred, I’m going to sue you.’ And she whirls back into her room in a nightie-flounce of gaping lip-prints.

Julia grabs Becca’s arm and runs for their door, feeling the others behind them silent and speedy as down the paths to the glade, Selena barely breaking stride to scoop up the key. In, door closed, Holly presses her ear to it; but the prefect can’t be arsed hauling herself out of bed, now that the sounds have stopped. They’re safe.

Selena and Becca are giggling, wild and breathless, into their sleeves. ‘Her face – ohmyGod, did you see her face, I almost died—’

‘Let me feel it,’ Becca whispers, ‘come here, let me feel—’

‘It’s not hot now,’ Selena says. ‘It’s fine.’

They find her, in the darkness, and sift among one another’s reaching fingers to touch the key in her open hand. It’s palm-warm; nothing more.

‘Did you see it jump?’ Becca says. She’s almost dizzy with delight. ‘Zooming down the corridor, away from that cow—’

‘Or it bounced,’ Julia says. ‘Because she dropped it.’

‘It jumped. Her face, that was beautiful, I’d give anything for a photo—’

‘Who even did that?’ Holly wants to know, switching on her reading light half-hidden under her pillow so they can change without knocking anything over. ‘Was that you, Becs?’

‘I think it was me,’ Selena says. She tosses Julia the key, its glint like a tiny meteor streaking between them. ‘It doesn’t actually matter, though. If I can do it, you guys can too.’

‘Ah, cool,’ Becca says, wriggling out of all her layers at once and kicking them under her bed. She throws on her pyjamas and bounces into bed, where she balances the cap off her water bottle on edge on her bedside locker and starts trying to knock it over without touching it.

Julia is stashing the key back inside her phone cover. She says, ‘Next time, could you save that stuff for when it’s not going to get us into huge amounts of shit? Like, please?’

‘I didn’t do it on purpose,’ Selena says, muffled in the hoodie she’s pulling over her head. ‘It just happened, because I was getting all wound up. And if it hadn’t, Joanne would’ve have taken the key.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s not like she’s going to forget the whole thing. We’ll have to deal with it tomorrow instead, is all. And now she’s raging with us.’

That cools the air. ‘Her hand’s fine,’ Selena says. ‘She’s just being a drama queen.’

‘Right. So she’s a total drama-queen bitch who’s raging with us. How is that better?’

‘What do we do?’ Becca asks, glancing up from her bottle cap.

‘What do you think we do?’ Holly says, tossing jumpers into the wardrobe. ‘We make her a copy of the key. Unless you actually want to get expelled.’

‘Why would we get expelled? She can’t prove we did anything.’

‘OK: unless you want to never go out again. Because if we do, Joanne can go running to Matron and be all, “Oo Matron I just happened to see them going downstairs and I’m so worried about them,” and then Matron waits and catches us coming back in and then we get expelled.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Julia says, kicking into her pyjama bottoms. ‘I’ll talk to her. I think the hardware place beside the Court does keys.’

‘She’s going to be a total bitch about it,’ Holly says.

‘Yeah, no shit. I’m going to have to apologise to her for what you said, smartarse.’ She means Becca. ‘You think I’m looking forward to grovelling for that ass-faced cow?’

‘You won’t have to,’ Becca says. ‘She’s scared of us now.’

‘For the next ten seconds, she is. Then she’ll turn the whole thing into some drama in her head, like she’s the heroine and we’re the evil witches who tried to burn her to death but she was just too special. And I’ll have to apologise for that, too. And convince her that the key just felt hot because Lenie’d been holding it and her hand was hot from running or whatever.’ Julia climbs into bed and throws herself hard onto her pillow. ‘Fun fun fun.’

Selena says, ‘At least this way we get to keep our key.’

‘We would’ve anyway. We’d have talked her out of it, or just robbed another one. You didn’t need to go all f*cking poltergeist on her.’

Becca says, and her voice is tightening up, ‘Better than going all Yes Joanne no Joanne three bags full Joanne, letting that stupid cow be the boss of us—’

The bottle cap hops on the bedside locker and tumbles over. ‘Look!’ Becca yelps, and claps a hand over her mouth as the others hiss ‘Shhh!’ at her. ‘No, look! I did it!’

‘Awesomesauce,’ Holly says. ‘I’m gonna try in the morning.’

‘What are we doing?’ Julia demands, suddenly and vehemently. ‘All this shit; this, and the lights. What are we getting into here?’

The others look at her. In that light she’s the unreadable silhouette from the glade again, propped on her elbows, a tense arc.