The Fandom(3)

The walls seem to absorb my final words, and I somehow manage to swallow even though I have no saliva in my mouth. Another silence. I wish Alice were here, she would clap and cheer and shout ‘encore’ . . . and everyone else would join in.

I catch Katie’s eye for a moment. She winks. Not quite the public display of support I’d hoped for, but it makes me feel better all the same.

‘Thank you, Violet.’ Miss Thompson peers at me from over her glasses. ‘What a wonderful presentation.’

‘Thanks, I wanted to do the book justice.’

Miss Thompson smiles. ‘I can tell from the amount of colour you put into it. We’ll make a writer of you yet.’

I flush with pleasure. Writing has always been Alice’s thing – I’ve never dared touch it, until now. ‘Thanks, Miss Thompson.’

Kiss ass. Teacher’s pet. Hisses from the back of the class.

I slide back into my chair. Katie nudges me and whispers, ‘That went really well.’ But I can still hear Ryan and his accomplices sniggering, the edges of their words blurring together, and my cheeks begin to feel hot and itchy again and the bastard notes won’t stop sticking to my palms. Rose wouldn’t have fallen to pieces like this. I let my hair fall in front of my face, providing a dark, wavy shield.

‘So there we have it,’ Miss Thompson says. ‘We’ve heard the plots of three very different novels, yet seen how they all follow roughly the same structure.’

The bell rings, accompanied by the scrabbling of books and pens and rucksacks.

Katie helps peel the paper from my clammy hands. ‘God, you really love that bloody book.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You should have seen your face when you mentioned Willow.’

‘That’s just my face.’

She bats her eyelashes. ‘But Willow was kind and beautiful, and Violet – sorry, I mean Rose – soon realized that her greatest threat was the strength of her raging hormones.’ She puckers up her lips, making the freckles on her nose elongate.

‘Sod off.’ I laugh. Katie always makes me laugh. The tension drains from my body and I finally manage to stuff the disintegrating notes into my bag. Katie only moved from Liverpool to London last summer, so I haven’t known her long, but we had this instant connection. She’s got this dry sense of humour and she uses all these hilarious insults like ‘turdweasel’ and ‘dumbledick’, and she talks with a gentle Scouse accent which always makes her seem grounded – ‘Salt of the earth,’ my dad once called her. Yet she looks like something from a Jane Austen novel, with her doll-like features and light red hair . . . She actually plays the cello. The only thing I play is the Xbox.

‘Don’t worry about Bell, he just fancies you,’ she says.

‘Yeah, right. He’s embarrassed cos me and Alice caught him blubbing in the cinema last year.’

She shoves her chair back. ‘Come on, you know you’re hot.’

I laugh. ‘Yeah, I’m sweating like a pig after that car crash.’

‘Just because you’re not six foot and blonde like some people.’

She means Alice. I don’t reply. It’s hard when your best friend looks like Britain’s Next Top Model. A little kernel of envy lodges in my chest and I hate myself for it. We join the throng of students in the corridor, all hurrying to get home.

I change the subject. ‘I can’t believe you still haven’t read The Gallows Dance, it’s a rite of passage.’ The crowd snatches my voice away, and I’m left feeling very small once again.

‘Well I don’t need to now. You should come with a spoiler alert.’

‘You haven’t even seen the film.’

‘Again. Spoiler alert.’

We elbow through a group of Year Ten girls who don’t seem to know the unspoken rule of moving out of the way for sixth formers.

I accidently-on-purpose tread on a blonde girl’s toe. ‘Yeah, but Russell’s seriously fit.’ I’m talking about Russell Jones, the actor who plays Willow in the film.

‘Really? You’ve never mentioned it. Here comes Alice.’ The smile never leaves Katie’s mouth, but it slips completely from her eyes. Like me, she’s learnt to tell when Alice approaches by reading other people. Every male glances over his shoulder, every girl falls silent, brow knitted in a tight frown.

Sure enough, the crowd parts like the Red Sea, but this Moses has long, bronzed legs that swallow up the tiled floor as she strides towards us. A smile lights up her perfect, oval face. She’s always had that smile, ever since I met her on our first day at primary school – the kind of smile that makes you forgive her for being so beautiful.

She stops dead in the middle of the corridor, confident she won’t get jostled. ‘So how did it go?’

‘It was a bag of crap,’ I say.

Katie pats my back. ‘No it wasn’t, it was great.’

‘Yeah, a great big bag of crap,’ I reply.

Alice flips her pale hair over one shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, Vi, they clearly don’t get the beauty which is The Gallows Dance – philistines.’ She shoots a meaningful look at Katie.

‘It’s hardly Shakespeare,’ Katie mutters.

Alice sighs. ‘I wish I was in old Thompson’s class, you get loads better stuff to do than us. Plot structure, I could have really contributed to that.’ She loves reminding us she’s a rising fanfic star. She writes all this new material based on The Gallows Dance, messing with the plot, making the characters bend to her will. It’s ironic she feels the need to do this when she’s so accomplished at getting people to do what she wants in real life – perhaps writing is where she hones her art. I swallow down that little kernel of envy again.