Thyla - Kate Gordon [22]
She said it without taking one single breath, and I felt as if my brain was going to explode from absorbing so many words in so little time.
‘Was your old school really small?’ asked Harriet. ‘I mean, this stuff is “clique 101”: “Don’t mess with the in-crowd or they will mess you back”. It’s the first thing you learn in high school. I’m guessing your old school was small, so you didn’t have cliques?’
‘Yes,’ I said, not trusting myself to elaborate more.
‘Right,’ said Sara, smiling. ‘I was wondering why you were so clueless.’
I turned around and looked at Charlotte again.
She was still staring at me and I felt cold all over.
Part of me wanted to walk straight over to her and say, ‘I’m sorry, Charlotte. I shouldn’t have sat with Harriet and Sara and Rhiannah. I will definitely sit with you from now on. Just please, stop glaring at me like that. It’s scary.’
A bigger part, though, thought of how Charlotte and her friends didn’t smile with their eyes, and how they only talked about boys and makeup and clothes, and how it bored me, and how sitting with Harriet and Sara and Rhiannah and eating waffles was much more fun.
If I had sat with Charlotte, I might not have been allowed to eat waffles. And that would have been a tragedy.
I also didn’t really think I wanted to be friends with someone who wouldn’t let me be friends with anyone except the people she told me I could be friends with.
And I definitely didn’t want to be friends with someone who wanted perfection. I thought of my scars, and the way my instincts sometimes told me to do strange things – to bay and howl. I thought of my lost memories. I thought of the memories I did have, about being discovered on a mountain looking like a cave-person. If Charlotte knew all that, I was certain she would not think me perfect.
I looked away from Charlotte’s table back towards Rhiannah and her friends, and I smiled at them. ‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind if she hates me. As long as I have waffles everything will be okay.’
Rhiannah snorted. ‘You’re hilarious!’ she said. She put a pale hand on my forearm. ‘Seriously, though, mate, you’ll have us as well, okay? You’re my roommate. I’ve got your back.’
‘My back?’ I blurted, feeling my heart quicken and my muscles tense.
‘Yeah, you know. We’ll look out for you,’ said Harriet.
My body melted with relief.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
Rhiannah put squeezed my arm. ‘We’ll protect you from the evil princess,’ she said. ‘We can be pretty tough, when we want to be.’
I didn’t take Rhiannah and her friends wholly seriously when they said I might need protecting from Charlotte. She was, after all, only a girl, and I hadn’t done anything really bad to offend her or make her dislike me.
At least, I didn’t think I had. I wasn’t rude or impolite. I was very courteous and grateful for all of her help.
And yet she seemed very quickly to go from friend to enemy. It was horrible, Connolly! One moment, she was hooking her arm through mine and showing me to her friends as though I was some sort of prize, and the next she had turned against me like a contrary wind.
I first got an inkling of it when I went down to breakfast the day after the Day of Waffles (as I will now always remember it). For the rest of the Day of Waffles I had floated around on a happy, sugary cloud, so perhaps Charlotte’s rejection of me had begun then and I had just simply ignored it. We’d shared no classes for the rest of the day, and at lunch time, I encountered