Have a Little Faith Read online

  ‘Yes, I know, you’re a big fan. Listen, Faith, we’re two individuals and we’re not always going to like the same people. And that’s fine. We can have our own friends, can’t we?’

  Which all sounded very sensible and mature, but to be honest I wanted to stamp my foot and say, ‘Like my friend!’ But I didn’t. I pouted and said, ‘I s’pose so.’

  Miss Pee asked us in assembly today if anyone knew anything about the fire alarm going off.

  I don’t think it’s surprising that we all looked at Icky.

  Our group at the rehearsal has expanded. Zoe and Becky have started sitting with us and so have a few more of Ethan’s mates. Some of the boys are a bit stupid. Especially Westy.

  I asked Ethan, ‘Is he really called Westy?’

  ‘Nah. His name is Scott West. Boys just like sticking an “o” or a “y” on the end of people’s names.’

  ‘He’s quite . . . full on, isn’t he?’

  ‘Westy’s all right.’

  Which is not how I would describe him. See, I think Zoe is all right. She’s chatty, she laughs at my jokes, she has an acceptable level of personal hygiene and I’m sure she would lend me her mascara in an emergency. Whereas, Westy is sweaty, farty and shouty. Every time he gets to the end of a sentence he whacks somebody over the head to celebrate managing to string so many words together.

  Fit Finn is not at all like Westy. Westy is constantly hyper, whereas Finn is super-laid-back. He was practising one of his solos today, so we all got to have a good stare. His skin is so brown and his hair is so golden, he looks like some sort of beach angel. I think I’d be a bit nervous about singing in front of a hall full of people, but Finn didn’t seem bothered. He just strolled up to the front and then this incredible voice powered out of him. Amazing.

  Later on Mr Millet asked Finn to hand out some new music. With a little elbowing and one swift poke in the eye to Icky, I managed to get to the end of the line, which meant that Finn handed me the sheets for our row. Our hands brushed and I said, ‘Thanks.’

  He said, ‘No problem.’

  I think we really connected.

  I’m not one to think only of myself, though. At the beginning of the rehearsal, by some subtle manoeuvring I managed to make sure that Angharad sat next to Elliot. (I said, ‘Westy, you great lump, don’t sit there, Angharad wants to be near her pocket prince.’) Angharad turned plum-coloured, which I think was a sign of joy. The happy couple didn’t say a word to each other until the very end, when Elliot looked at Ang’s shoes and said, ‘Are you going to be here next week?’

  Angharad gave the tiniest nod and her blushing reached nuclear levels.

  Ahh. I have brought them together.

  Wait a minute, not, ‘Ahh’. Why is no one checking that I will be there next week? Finn walked past me at the end as if our hands had never touched and Ethan only raised his eyebrows at me as he left.

  Mind you, Westy did have him in a headlock at the time so it must have been quite an effort.

  Megs has been dribbling on about Cameron since yesterday without drawing breath. I hung up the phone at half ten last night and when I called her this morning she was still gushing and sighing. I’m not sure she noticed I was gone in between. After three hours of talking we had drawn two conclusions: Cameron is quite nice and he doesn’t seem to dislike Megs.

  I said, ‘What are you going to do next? If you like him you should take it further.’

  ‘Don’t know. I could flirt with him.’

  ‘How will you do that?’

  ‘Flick my hair?’

  ‘You’ve done enough of that and you’ll find it hard to snog him if you’ve got whiplash. Why don’t you ask him out?’

  ‘Because, Faith, I’m not insane. I just need to spend some more time around him and work out if he likes me.’

  ‘You know the Radcliffe boys sometimes go into town at lunchtime. We could go.’

  ‘We’re not supposed to go out of school grounds during the day.’

  ‘Megs, we’re not supposed to make the supply teachers cry, but that’s never stopped us.’

  ‘OK, on Monday let’s go boy-spotting.’

  ‘Whoa, not Monday. Better make it Tuesday. I’ve got PE Monday morning. No boy is going to be attracted to me with a shiny red face. And if they are, then they’re a bit strange and I’m not really interested.’

  Finally, we got to talk about more important things, i.e. is Ethan helplessly attracted to me?

  Yesterday at the rehearsal when I went to drink from my sports bottle of water, someone had loosened the cap, so instead of sipping gracefully from the spout I sloshed water all down my front. Westy and Ethan laughed their heads off. Actually everyone laughed their heads off, but Westy punched Ethan in the back and said, ‘Nice one.’ So I’m assuming Ethan was the culprit.

  I asked Megs, ‘What do you think it means?’

  ‘I thought you liked Finn.’

  ‘My granny says it doesn’t hurt to have a spare. Tell me what you think Ethan mucking about with my water bottle means?’

  ‘Maybe he was trying to drown you.’

  ‘You know, Megan, I have just spent my entire morning thinking of reasons why everything Cameron does means he fancies you, it would be good manners if you did the same thing back.’

  ‘Sorry. Perhaps it means he fancies you?’

  ‘Why does it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m just saying it because you told me to say it.’

  At that point I told her to call me back after she’d been to sit on the stairs and thought about what she’d done.

  Eventually the phone rang.

  Megs said, ‘My mum says that when boys like you they tease you and pull your hair and stuff and that maybe pouring water over you is like that.’

  ‘Hmm. That’s interesting. What am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Mum said that you should tease him back.’

  ‘I should play a trick on him? That’s what flirting is all about? Why did nobody say so before? I think I’m a natural.’

  ‘Do you want to do something this afternoon?’ Megs asked.

  ‘That depends. Have you learnt from your poor behaviour? Or shall I ask your mum round to try on makeup instead of you?’

  I spent this morning thinking about tricks and practical jokes I could play on Ethan.

  I thought I’d have a little practice on Sam. But he failed to fall for my plastic biscuit or my water-squirting ring. I got a bit annoyed then.

  So I tripped him up.

  Sometimes the classics are the funniest.

  Lovely day. Mrs Macready showed us a pig’s heart in Biology. At the beginning of the lesson she asked if anyone felt uncomfortable with dissection. I didn’t have any objections. That old pig was already dead for sausages and I think it’s nice that we’re using his heart to learn about the wonder of Biology, especially when you think about what could have happened to it. For example, Miss Ramsbottom (or any other practising witch) could have bought it to suck the blood out of.

  Angharad obviously didn’t realise that the pig was fulfilling his higher purpose. She put up a limp hand and managed to get out the word, ‘vegetarian’.

  I said, ‘It’s all right, Ang, she doesn’t want you to eat it.’

  Angharad put her hand over her mouth, and that got me hoping that we might be in for some projectile vomiting so I added, ‘You’ve just got to slice it up into chunks.’

  At which point Mrs Mac said that Angharad could wait outside. Poor old Ang didn’t know what to do. She can’t bear to be away from her education. Once, Icky Blundell jammed a compass into the back of Ang’s wrist in the middle of a Maths test. Ang was too weak to pull it out, but she didn’t tell anyone till she’d finished her test. With her left hand.

  Clearly the idea of missing twenty minutes of Biology was too much to bear because she gritted her teeth and told Mrs Mac she would stay.

  So we gathered round the front desk, with me at the front, and the butchering began. I think it
’s probably for the best that Mrs Mac ended up wasting her life teaching, because if she’d made it as a doctor she would have been involved in endless court cases. The lady is not great with a knife. She sort of stabbed about saying things like, ‘Och, that’s a gristly bit’. She reminded me of Granny eating her dinner. She did try to show us some points of interest, but it’s not like in the book where everything is neatly labelled. I grabbed Angharad from the back of the crowd and pulled her forward.

  I said, ‘It’s hard to tell what’s what, isn’t it? Everything is the same bloodish colour.’ Angharad herself was looking a bit grey.

  The best part was when Mrs Mac let me stick my finger through the aorta. There was something quite amazing about my pinkie being where blood has pumped. Mrs Mac said, ‘It’s nice to see you so enthusiastic, Faith.’

  I said, ‘Well maybe if you brought body parts into the classroom every lesson there’d be less snoozing in the back row.’

  I haven’t even got to the best part yet. We all shuffled back to our seats and Mrs Mac started tidying up. She was carrying the remains of the heart on this tray thing to the back of the class where the prep room is and telling us about the heart strings. She was so busy she didn’t notice that she was holding the tray at an angle, which meant blood was trickling off the back corner, leaving a delightful red-brown trail on the floor. We were all transfixed.

  Then she stopped and shifted the tray on to one hand, up high like a waiter, so she could pull up her bra strap with the other hand. (I wish teachers wouldn’t draw attention to their underwear. It makes you start to think about what’s inside the underwear. And no one wants that.) Now the blood was dripping into a lovely puddle. Angharad was absolutely horrified. It took her two attempts to squeak out, ‘Mrs Macready!’

  Mrs Mac spun round to see what she wanted and flicked pig’s blood right across Angharad’s face. Angharad swayed forward and then fell off her stool in a dead faint.

  Absolutely brilliant.

  To be honest, if I died now, at least I’d know that I’ve seen something truly special.

  A truly monstrous injustice has been heaped upon me by the Priestess of the Heaping Shovel, old Ramsbottom herself.

  Let me start from the beginning.

  Yesterday when Angharad came round from her fainting fit, she had a little shriek and then started trying to claw her own face off.

  I said, ‘Bit of spit on a tissue would probably be more effective, Ang.’ But she didn’t seem to be listening, so I very kindly and thoughtfully dragged her over to the sink and stuck her head under the tap. Now, you know how powerful those taps are in science labs and how all the water bounces back up and all over the desk? Well, when you stick a head under you get some serious splash-back. But apart from drenching Megs (bonus!) and making Ang squeal, it was very effective in the blood removal stakes. Overall, Angharad was grateful, if a bit damp, so I had actually been both quick thinking and helpful.

  Although not according to Miss Ramsbottom, who it turns out had seen me through the window pulling about a blood-splattered girl and then thrusting her under a tap. So I was called into her office at lunchtime today (when I was supposed to be going on a boy-spotting funfest with Megs) to explain this ‘bullying’.

  What? What on earth . . .? Number one, does she really think she knows what was going on by looking through a window? And number two, why didn’t she sort this out yesterday? When I had time to waste. She probably needed to recharge her batteries by sleeping in a coffin overnight, so she’d be at the height of her evil powers while interrogating me.

  I protested my innocence firmly but politely. ‘That is the most utterly stupid and ridiculously insane thing I have ever heard, Miss Ramsbottom,’ I said, and then explained what had happened. For some reason, Miss Ramsbottom didn’t seem to believe me. Why not? Has she met Mrs Mac? If you put teenagers in a lab with pig corpses and a mad Scottish woman, anything could happen. So, Ramsbottom sent for Mrs Mac to come and tell her side of it. Meanwhile my lunchtime was slipping away. I was sure Megs wouldn’t go without me, but I needed to speed things up so I said, ‘Mrs Macready is probably eating her lunch. Why don’t I come back and sort this out later? Two thirty is good for me, I’ve got French then.’

  ‘You’ll wait, Faith.’

  ‘The thing about Mrs Macready is that her knife skills aren’t that hot. We could be waiting a long—’

  ‘Faith, you’re in enough trouble without making remarks about your teacher’s table manners.’

  After what felt like forever, Mrs Mac came in and tried to set Miss Ramsbottom straight. It took a long time. It was almost as if Ramsbottom didn’t want to believe that I am not at the bottom of everything bad that ever happens in the world ever. When Ramsbottom finally let me go (without so much as an apology or large compensation cheque) it was only five minutes to the bell.

  I caught up with Megs outside English. ‘Stupid Ramsbottom wouldn’t let me go. Sorry we missed town. Shall we go tomorrow?’

  ‘Erm . . .’

  ‘Because I know you won’t have gone without me, Megs. All through my ordeal with that woman the one thing that kept me going was the idea that my Megs would never abandon me, wouldn’t dream of having fun while I was suffering . . .’ I caught sight of her face. ‘You went without me, didn’t you?’

  ‘I thought that you’d want me to.’

  ‘Why would I want you to? Why would I want anyone to be having a nicer time than I am?’

  ‘Well, you are brave and giving, Faith. I was sort of imagining you like one of those soldiers that gets shot and says, “Forget me. Go on without me. Save yourself.” That sort of thing.’

  ‘Just for the record, Megs, if I do die in battle, then you are not to forget about me. In fact, I would like to be preserved and have each hand sewn to a foot to create straps, so you can carry me about like a rucksack for the rest of your days to remind you of how much you miss me.’

  Turns out they had a great time in town. There were loads of Year Ten and Elevens from our school and the boys’ school hanging around outside the chip shop. Ethan and Cameron were there too and something staggering happened. Cameron asked Megs to swap numbers! I could kill Miss Ramsbottom. Look what I have missed out on.

  Megs wasn’t suitably apologetic, she just said, ‘I thought you’d hang out with your other friend instead.’

  This is getting ridiculous; I know Lily is a bit odd, but Megs never had a problem with her before. Maybe they just need to spend more time together.

  Megs is driving me mad. It’s all very well swapping numbers with a boy, but what happens next? I think Megs thought they’d be chatting away all last night, but Cameron hasn’t rung. Not so much as a text. Not even a smiley. I had to listen to Megs squeaking on about this all through lunch. I was incredibly patient and only hit her over the head twice.

  I said, ‘Megs, here is a crazy notion. Why don’t you ring him?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Just because he has given me his number it doesn’t mean I can just go ringing him!’

  ‘I think that might be exactly what it means. You’ve clearly lost your mind, Megs. I’m just going to move these chocolate fingers out of your way, so you can’t do yourself an injury. Don’t worry; they’ll be safe in my mouth.’

  At that moment her mobile went off and she jumped about three metres in the air. She was all fingers and thumbs and could hardly press the buttons.

  I said, ‘And how is your mum?’

  ‘It’s him. Oh my goodness.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  She held out her phone. How R U?

  She said, ‘What do you think he means?’

  That was just the beginning of her dribbling. Fortunately Megs’s mum had packed her a variety of chocolaty treats for her lunch so I let her bang on while I munched.

  We spent the whole of Maths on her reply. In the end she wrote, Good. You?

  I can only hope that I never have to help her write a letter.

  I woke up this mor
ning feeling a bit off-colour. I was so weak that I was only able to consume two bowls of Coco Pops, a sherbet Dib Dab and a packet of prawn cocktail crisps before school. I said to Killer Bill in PE, ‘Don’t expect my usual athleticism, Miss Williams. I am suffering from malnutrition. If you could rustle me up a biscuit or three I might muster the energy for a game of dominoes. Otherwise you should just abandon me in this lonely warm changing room and all go and enjoy yourselves on the hockey field.’

  She said, ‘How nice of you to volunteer to go in goal, Faith.’

  She’d better hope that the day I learn to aim that stupid hockey ball is the day she’s wearing her gum shield.

  Hee hee. I played my trick on Ethan today at rehearsal. It was actually quite hard to think of a prank. Normally I am good at this, but then normally I am trying to upset a teacher. I don’t want to upset Ethan, I want him to think that I am a comedy genius (and love goddess) which rules out anything that causes ruined clothes and/or hair loss. Which doesn’t leave much.

  What I came up with was this: the chairs in the hall are bright orange plastic, so if you place one of those luminous orange Post-it notes on them it’s barely visible. This is how Ethan ended up with an orange heart-shaped Post-it on each bottom cheek reading I love my bum.

  That would have been funny all by itself, but as I was preparing things Westy came bounding up and said, ‘What’s so funny, Faith?’

  When he had finished wetting himself (truly, he said, ‘That is so brilliant a tiny bit of pee has come out,’ – he is gross) he had the genius idea of calling Ethan down to the front so that everyone would get to see my handiwork.

  So, Ethan and the rest of them came in. Cameron sat next to Megs and Elliot almost plonked himself down on the ‘special chair’, but I managed to shove him out the way. When Ethan sat down Angharad nearly gave the game away by getting the giggles, but then Westy stood at the front of the hall and called Ethan over. Just at that moment Mr M came in and told us all to settle down, so in the almost-silence Ethan walked up the aisle towards Westy, giving everyone a perfect view of his orange-hearted behind. People started laughing and whistling.