Undone(9)

Lucas Mahoney was the easiest to categorize. He was obviously a lion. He even had the mane to prove it – possibly with slightly more hair product than the average lion would go for. Blond and chiselled, strutting about the place like the king of the f*cking jungle. It was a well-known fact that every girl had to have a crush on Lucas at one time or another. Except me. And any secret lesbians among the student body.

Kai reckoned that Sasha Evans had to be a lioness – she was Lucas’s girlfriend, after all. But it was my game, so I had the deciding vote. To me, she was more like a leopard – all slinky and sexy. Chestnut-coloured hair, perfect body. I hated her.

Stu Hicks was Allander Park’s officially designated joker. He liked to play with his food. Yes, he was that boy – the one who put chips up his nose to make the girls laugh. And they did laugh like they found him genuinely hilarious. He was shorter than the other boys, but wiry and strong with it – majorly into martial arts apparently. I went for a chimpanzee in the end – harmless enough on the outside, but just wait till he bares his teeth. I’ve never quite trusted chimpanzees . . . there’s something sinister about them.

Bugs was the odd man out in Team Popular. Huge and ginger, he was a big slab of meat with orange mould on top. Apparently he was some kind of big deal on the rugby team, but that wasn’t usually enough to make you popular. Perhaps he was the exception that proved the rule? You’d often see the girls cuddling up to him, and the other lads never seemed to mind. They knew he was no competition – not really. I had Bugs pegged as some kind of bear. A pretty useless bear who was long overdue for extinction.

Amber Sheldon – dyed red hair, massive boobs and an idiotic high-pitched laugh that made me think violent thoughts. A brightly plumed, noisy parrot. One that would start pulling out its own feathers if it didn’t get enough attention.

I’d secretly decided that Louise was a snake, but I didn’t say anything to Kai. I had no good reason for my choice, other than the fact that I really, really don’t like snakes. And it would at least go some way to explain how she’d managed to slither her way into the Year 11 in-crowd despite being in the year below.

So that was Team Popular. As far as I was concerned, they were an alien race intent on taking over the world with their shiny hair and in-jokes.

Within a couple of weeks Max and Louise were going out. This was something new; Louise had never had a proper boyfriend before, unless you counted that brief dalliance with Stu last year. Why bother having a boyfriend when you could have someone new every day of the week? Why choose one flavour of ice cream when you can alternate between vanilla, coffee and chocolate (or even go for a couple of different flavours in the same bowl . . . Gross, I know, but if the rumours about Louise were true then she’d been there, done that). Kai hated the fact that everyone thought his sister was a slag, but there was nothing he could do about it because it happened to be true.

Max and Louise specialized in public displays of affection that even put Lucas and Sasha to shame. It was vomit-inducing. I accidentally saw them in an empty classroom one day, and all I’m going to say about that little scene is it would definitely not have made it into a PG movie. And I probably watched for a few seconds longer than was strictly necessary. Not because I’m a perv or anything. It’s like when you’re driving down the motorway and there’s been an accident and there’s police and ambulances everywhere. You know you shouldn’t look at the person on the stretcher. Nothing good is going to come of it, but you’re curious. What kind of person wouldn’t be curious?

Anyway, I didn’t tell Kai about the little performance I’d witnessed. There are some things a brother doesn’t need to know about his baby sister, and this was definitely one of them. Besides, he heard that kind of talk from everyone else. According to Kai, Louise was really falling for Max. She talked about him non-stop at home. Kai seemed happy about it; he thought Max was good for Louise. I translated this as: ‘Thank God she’s not shagging everything that moves any more.’

So that was how things stood. The ranks of the chosen ones had swollen by one, Kai’s sister was no longer the school bike, and the rest of us were just going about our boring little lives as normal. And yes, I’m well aware that it sounds like I was more than a little bit obsessed with the lives of people I never even talked to. I was kind of obsessed. But what else was there to do? School was boring; Kai was my only friend. It was like my hobby or something. A very weird, very sad sort of hobby that was made so much easier by the new addition of a Year 11 common room to Allander Park. The common room’s a crucial part of the head’s strategy to try to make us act like grownups. I mean, he didn’t use those exact words at the grand opening ceremony at the start of the year, but that was pretty much the gist of it.

There was one tiny change I haven’t mentioned, but in the interests of full disclosure I probably should. There had been a subtle shift in my friendship with Kai. We still talked on the phone almost every night after school, just in case we might have missed something crucial in each other’s lives in the few hours we hadn’t spent together that day, but for the first time in our friendship there were times when I couldn’t get hold of him. Sometimes he didn’t answer his phone, and sometimes it took him an hour or more to reply to my texts. This might sound normal (healthy, even), but it wasn’t the way things worked between Kai and me.