Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [124]
Until now Ricky had been moving through a zone of the school in which everyone’s behaviour was affected by his presence. It had been like a powerful current all flowing in the same direction.
But now he was feeling a cool cross-current in his stream. He was feeling the influence of someone else on the crowd. The kids were responding to another dominant individual.
Ricky came around the corner and found himself face to face with Wolf Leemark and the entire Wolf Pack.
They were standing in the alcove outside the library. The alcove was a small brightly lit recess where new books were displayed in a glass case, to give the whole school a chance to inspect them; they were changed each week.
It had been a ritual Mr Pangbourne had insisted on. The old principal had always believed that books were wealth, and that his students should be given a chance to look at the new treasures as they arrived.
Wolf and the Pack weren’t looking at the books in the glass case. They were looking at the suntanned girl from the lunchroom standing under the hot alcove lights. Wally Saddler had dared her to take off her panties in front of the Pack.
The suntanned girl was some kind of slumming intellectual from a rich family. She said she was a nihilist —
whatever that was — and wore black all the time. She also read weird French poetry. She seemed to think that hanging out with the Wolf Pack was a cool thing to do.
They’d come out of assembly, the Pack and the suntanned girl, all a little shaken up by the big speech about Mr Pangbourne being dead.
And of course Wolf’s dad had been the one who killed him. So Wolf was liable to be touchy about the subject. So no one dared say anything for fear of awakening his rage. Wolf was very touchy lately and there was no telling exactly what he would do or how he would react. The only safe topic seemed to be talking about what a little prick that Ricky McIlveen was. The way he made it such a big deal about Pangbourne’s death. Talking about it in that impassioned speech that had put tears into the eyes of even the toughest boys.
When he was talking, Ricky seemed to be talking right to you. Right to your heart. Then when he stopped talking and got down off the stage you just sat there for a moment with your feelings all stirred up inside you. And then things gradually went back to normal, thank God.
And so the Wolf Pack had stumbled out of the assembly hall like men waking from a dream, and the suntanned girl had tagged along with them.
They were all feeling a little upset and dazed. It was a weird mood, and it wasn’t helped when Wolf insisted on stopping in the little alcove outside the library. The alcove was a funny place because it was sheltered and yet at the same time very public. The bright lights made it feel a little unreal. A separate little zone.
And maybe it was the sense of unreality that gave Wally Saddler the idea. It just popped into his head and he let it pop out of his mouth. He turned to the suntanned girl, standing there in the bright lights of the alcove, and he suggested that she take her panties off.
Wally Saddler thought she might think it was a nihilist sort of thing to do, whatever that meant. And indeed, the suntanned girl had seemed to take the challenge seriously.
She was wearing a skirt instead of jeans today, so the suggestion was perfectly feasible. You could see the thought run through her mind, see that she hadn’t decided yet, and that her decision could go either way. That was a very exciting thing to watch.
So the boys were all standing there under the bright alcove lights, staring like they were hypnotized, waiting to see what she would do.
The outcome was still very much in the balance at the moment when Ricky came striding past, irretrievably breaking the mood.
Everyone could see the suntanned girl had changed her mind. In fact she was staring after the McIlveen kid, suddenly looking more interested in him than the Wolf Pack.
The calamitous disappointment was simply too much for one member of the Pack. It was the same kid