We’ve been best friends since I moved here and she took me under her wing. She wasn’t so pretty then, but she is now, which suits me because being friends with the most popular girl in school means that I am too, by default, without having to put up with all the bullshit, which is good. I don’t have time to deal with more idiots than I already do.
‘Speaking of Molly…’ Tilly points her out as she walks in. She’s also spotted Newboy and she’s doing her thing, walking slowly past him shaking her mane as she does, but he doesn’t pay her any attention at all, much to Molly’s disgust, as she walks over.
‘He’ll notice soon enough,’ she says, supremely confident in her ability to snare any boys in the vicinity. We fall about laughing.
‘Maybe he doesn’t go for year ten girls, like us,’ I tell her, with a comforting pat to her shoulder. ‘I wonder why he’s started at the sixth-form college at the end of the year.’
‘Because he’s a creepy old freak?’ suggests Serena, who has also sauntered in half-late, uncaring as always. ‘My sister says he’s a right weirdo who just sits at the back of the class and stares at everyone. Apparently he lives on his own in some scuzzy bedsit miles away. He’s here for some random mature-student course one of those crusty tutors in there offers, because he missed his A levels. He’s nearly nineteen already.’
‘I wish I lived on my own,’ I say, wondering how Serena always seems to know so much about everyone. ‘And anyway, I’m sure he’ll warm up once Molly gets her hands on him!’
‘I’m not going to some scuzzy bedsit, though,’ she replies, running her hands through her long hair before picking up her bag. ‘I don’t want fleas.’ This inspires more hysterical giggling and we walk into our class, arm in arm, a unit.
It takes me a long time to forget about Newboy and his disconcerting vampire-like eyelashes as we settle in to the day. We’ve got science to start with and, interestingly for once, we’re getting to watch a dissection. The lab tech has brought in a shallow dish covered with a blue paper towel. A couple of the girls refuse to watch.
Chloe sneers at our teacher. ‘I’m a vegan, sir.’
‘I’m not asking you to eat it, Chloe,’ he quips back, quick as always. ‘Just understand how its systems fit together. No one has to stay who doesn’t want to watch – that’s absolutely fine. You can sit in the corridor and read chapter seventeen of your textbooks quietly.’
Chloe flounces out with Becky, who is unable to do anything independently, reliant as she is on the other girl for any sort of social life.
Mr Forsyth whips off the blue paper with a flourish. There is a fat rat in the dish, splayed out, crucified. Its fur is stained yellow with what I think is formaldehyde, and it doesn’t look like it’s ever been alive. Matthew Grey takes one look at it and walks out of the classroom, grabbing a textbook as he goes.
‘Anyone else want to leave?’ asks Mr F, picking up a delightfully shiny scalpel. Molly and I are sitting directly in front of the operation but we can handle it. Scientific minds. He uses the scalpel to make a bloodless slit in the rat’s stomach and then picks up what looks like a pair of miniature scissors on long handles and uses them to cut through the small creature’s rib cage with a crunchy little snick sound that makes me shiver. Another one of the boys walks out looking a bit pale, but Molly and I are fascinated, leaning forward and watching intently as the rat’s skin and muscle is peeled away and its tiny bones bent back, revealing the lungs, liver, kidneys, stomach. It’s all so small. It’s all so dead. I’m aware of the buzzing bluebottle voice of Mr Forsyth as he talks through the pieces he’s exposing with deft thrusts of the scalpel, but all I see are the colours of the rat’s insides, like bruises but shiny and slippery. My skin feels tight. I think that I can smell the guts, meaty and thick. Raw.
‘Would you like to see the eye socket?’ he says suddenly, and before anyone can answer he slides the scalpel into the rat’s cheek and twists it. The perfectly round casing of the rat’s eyeball pops right out of its head and, next to me, Molly vomits.
‘I can’t believe I threw up,’ Molly says, as she makes me hold her mass of hair back so she can rinse her mouth in the bathroom. It feels heavy and hot in my hands, almost alive. I don’t know how she can bear it all over her in this weather. It’s revolting.
‘Have you got any chewing gum, Vivi?’
I let go of her hair with relief and scrabble around in my bag and find that I do have some – a scuffed and folded packet with one left in the bottom, the foil twisted and soft like the skin on an old lady’s fingers.
‘It might have gone off a bit,’ I say apologetically as I hand it over, but I doubt Molly cares beyond getting the taste of sick out of her mouth.
‘I can’t believe he just sat there and did that,’ she moans, resting her head against the cool mirror and staring into her own blue eyes. ‘Its eye socket just popped out. It looked like one of those chocolate bits you get in a corner yogurt.’
Now I feel sick, too.
Molly recovers quickly enough and is more embarrassed than anything – it goes around our
