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“Oh, come on! Surely I’m allowed to wind you up a bit! You were so sweet yesterday evening. Mr. George really thought you were totally exhausted when you went to sleep in the limousine.”
“For two minutes at the most,” I said, feeling embarrassed. I’d probably dribbled or done something else terrible.
“I hope you went straight to bed.”
“Hm,” I said. All I remembered, vaguely, was Mum taking all four hundred thousand hairpins out of my hair, and how I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. After all, he’d gone off to have a good time with Charlotte, Raphael, and the spaghetti.
Gideon stopped so suddenly that I collided with him and promptly forgot to breathe.
He turned to face me. “Listen,” he murmured. “I didn’t want to say this yesterday, because I thought you were too drunk, but now that you’re sober again and as prickly as ever…” His fingers carefully stroked my forehead, and I was about to hyperventilate. Instead of going on, he kissed me. I had closed my eyes before his lips touched mine. The kiss was more intoxicating than yesterday evening’s punch. It left me weak at the knees, and with a thousand butterflies in my stomach.
When Gideon let go of me again, he seemed to have forgotten what he wanted to say. He propped one arm on the wall beside my head and looked at me seriously. “We can’t go on like this.”
I tried to get my breath under control.
“Gwen…”
There were footsteps in the corridor behind us. Gideon quickly withdrew his arm and turned around. A moment later Mr. George was standing in front of us. “So there you are. We’ve been waiting for you. Why isn’t Gwyneth blindfolded?”
o;Yup,” said Lesley. “You look like a steward on a cruise ship. Never mind. You’ll get used to it.”
Raphael’s grin widened.
“You just have to take care the school tie doesn’t dip into your soup,” I said. “Happens to me all the time.”
Lesley nodded.
“And by the way, school lunches usually taste frightful. Apart from that, it’s not so bad here. I’m sure you’ll soon feel at home.”
“Never been in the south of France, have you?” asked Raphael, with a touch of bitterness.
“No,” said Lesley.
“I can tell. I’ll never feel at home in a country where it rains for twenty-four hours on end.”
“We Brits don’t really like it when people talk about our weather like that,” said Lesley. “Oh, look, here comes Mrs. Counter. You’re in luck—she’s a Francophile, and if you mix a few French words into your essays by mistake, she’ll love you.”
“Tu es mignonne,” said Raphael.
“I know,” said Lesley, “but I’m not a Francophile.”
“He fancies you,” I said, putting my books down on our table.
“Maybe,” said Lesley, “but I’m afraid he’s not my type.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “No, of course not!”
“Oh, come on, Gwenny. It’s bad enough for one of us to lose her mind. I know his sort. They just give you trouble. Anyway, he’s only interested because Charlotte told him I was a pushover.”
“And because you look like your dog, Bertie,” I said.
“Yes, exactly, because of that, too.” Lesley laughed. “Anyway, he’ll forget all about me the moment Cynthia throws herself at him. Look, she’s been to the hairdresser specially to have highlights done.”
But Lesley was wrong. Raphael obviously wasn’t interested in talking to Cynthia. When we were sitting on the bench under the chestnut tree at break and Lesley was studying the note with the Green Rider code on it yet again, Raphael came strolling over, sat down beside us uninvited, and said, “Oh, cool. Geocaching.”
“What?” Lesley looked at him with annoyance.
Raphael pointed to the note. “Don’t you know about geocaching? It’s a kind of modern treasure hunt using GPS navigational devices. Those numbers look like geographical coordinates.”
