Girl Next Door - Alyssa Brugman [7]
The deputy principal came to the door of the classroom with the roll in his hand and asked to see me. He didn't even shut the door, so when he told me off in the corridor everyone could hear. He said, 'I understand the bursar made it quite clear to you that you must pay in order to attend this school.'
I didn't say anything.
'Now get your bag, I'm calling your mother to come and collect you.'
When I went in to collect my stuff from my desk I didn't look up, I just let my hair swing over my face, but I could feel them all watching. They may as well have been chanting, Vintage! Vintage! Vintage!
My mother still wasn't taking any calls from the school, so they rang the house and someone agreed to collect me. I assumed it would be Annie from the granny flat, who's listed as an alternative responsible adult on my file, but it wasn't, it was Bryce Cole. You know, the guy who moved in ten minutes ago.
I would have rung my mum from the payphone at school, but I didn't have any money and I was scared to ask the bursar or the deputy for change. It would be a tad indelicate.
The choice was possibly being murdered and dismembered by Bryce Cole, or staying at school and certainly being frowned upon by the bursar, the deputy and all the ladies in the front office for the whole day until the bus came, because they weren't going to let me back into class. No learning for free at The Finsbury School. They probably wouldn't let me catch the bus either. Not that I wanted to anyway. Pretty much all the girls at Finsbury are bitchy brats like Tanner and Jasmina.
So I picked potential dismemberment. Besides, if Bryce Cole really wanted to murder me, he could do that at home. I hopped in the car with Bryce Cole, and instead of taking me home he took me to the racetrack.
3
PUNTING
The guy at the gate tells me that I have to stay in the immediate vicinity of my guardian, and then we enter a den of vice and iniquity.
You see ads for the races with all the women wearing chic designer dresses and big hats, waving around glasses of champagne and smiling through the most bleached teeth imaginable, but then in the movies the races are always really dodgy and run by gangsters and tax cheats, kind of like one of the balls at the Fitzgibbons'. So I was expecting it to be more evil and foreboding. I thought there would be swaggering blokes in suits spouting double entendres, or just single entendres – like on The Sopranos. And maybe pole dancers. There are always pole dancers in the cop shows.
It's not like that, though.
Running along one wall is a bar. Behind it is a barmaid, but she's very much dressed, in a white shirt, waistcoat and bow tie. She stacks beer glasses on a tray.
In the middle of the room there are high, round tables surrounded by stools. Four blokes, each sitting at his own table, rustle through newspapers, or consult slips of paper. Two of them nod to Bryce Cole as he saunters across the room, but nobody says anything.
Tanner Hamrick-Gough talks about her parents' yacht club all the time. She goes on as though it's really cool to be in a bar, and that all these guys hit on her all the time, but I wouldn't want any of these guys to hit on me.
It's not like I haven't been in a bar before. We go overseas and stay in a resort at least once a year, and they always have cocktail bars, but they do lame stuff like the macarena, or have talent quests, or play bingo. They pretty much do the same stuff in the bar as they do in the kids' club.
Along the opposite wall there's a bank of televisions each showing races – mostly horses, a few dogs, and highlights from a boxing match.
In the far corner there's a betting booth. Another older woman sits inside it, staring into space. There's a board above her with red pixelated text and numbers scrolling across it, like the session