Girl Next Door - Alyssa Brugman [5]
Jasmina is always spoiling good jokes because she can't suspend her disbelief. That could be because her life is like bad reality TV.
I said, 'Yes, they can.'
Then she said, 'How do you know?'
I opened my mouth and shut it again.
Penelope Sullivan was only at our place for about three weeks and yet I know that she has hairy nipples, because one time I was waiting outside the bathroom, as per usual, and she was wrapping her towel around herself as she opened the door, and I got a glimpse of fuzz. Another time she was getting changed in her room with the door open. She swung the mirrored door of her wardrobe as I was coming down the hallway, and for a second she was reflected – all naked, pallid and podgy with unfortunate hairy parts.
Accidentally seeing people naked is part of sharing a house with them, but I couldn't say the word 'accidentally' because I had discovered that 'accidentally' at this school was short for 'accidentally on purpose'. As in, I 'accidentally' bought these chips while I was at the canteen (because, of course, nobody at Finsbury eats carbs).
I couldn't say, 'I accidentally saw Penelope Sullivan's hairy nipples,' so in the space where I was searching for a word that actually meant accidentally in this company, Jasmina Fitzgibbon raised her eyebrow.
I was all ready to say, 'Oh no, it's not me! I don't have hairy nipples,' but that reeks of the old 'the lady protests too much, methinks', so I let it go. We all sat there staring out into the quad until eventually the conversation moved on to other things.
I thought I'd got away with it, but then two days later I walked into French class and someone had written on the board:
Jenna-Belle a les mamelons velus.
Classy. I had to admire it.
By chance. Unexpectedly. Unintentionally. These are all words that would have prevented this extremely embarrassing incident.
Number one . . . Actually I'm not ready to talk about that yet. It's still a bit raw.
At school I was called into the bursar's office. He said that he'd sent letters home and had been trying to phone my mother. He'd asked her to come in today, but she hadn't returned any of his calls. He really wanted her to attend this meeting because – unfortunately, regretfully – he was sad to have to tell me that they hadn't received any payment for my tuition, even after they had been generous enough to negotiate a payment plan.
'You're going to have to talk to my mum about that,' I mumbled. What exactly was he expecting me to do about it? I didn't even get pocket money any more.
The bursar folded his hands on his desk and nodded. Outside in the office I could hear fingers tapping on keyboards, cheery receptionists taking telephone calls and a photocopy machine going ker-chunk, ker-chunk, ker-chunk. I hoped he was going to say something soon because he was freaking me out.
I was going red, and then I was embarrassed because I was red. It wasn't up there with being mistaken for a boy, or the hairy nipples business, but at the same time I was mad that he was making me suffer. This was something I didn't have any control over, and frankly, if I had a choice between meals and tuition at The Finsbury School, I'd pick meals.
Eventually he spoke and I watched my folded hands in my lap. The bursar really hoped that my parents could come up with some way to resolve this soon, because I was a valuable member of the school community, and he was worried that too much time away would mean that I would lose touch with the social circles in which I was moving – such a nice group of girls. Nice group of girls? He should ask Sapph how nice they are. She's developed a rather nasty stress-related case of eczema, which can't be good for her career in hospitality. Social cohesion, the bursar reckoned, contributed positively to academic success – an area in which I could use some help.
Okay, so now I'm povvo and dumb.
See, this was why my mum needed to be there. She would have buffered