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Still. It’s only one assignment, and if Arabella believes she can get us full credit, then why not? All I have to do is revise everything I don’t know — which seems, at this point, to be endless.
“Did you know Dr. Moncrieff before today?”
Just mentioning Dr. Moncrieff seems to jolt Arabella out of her furious note-taking. She looks at me in alarm and then searches the library to make sure no one can hear us.
“Keep your voice down,” she hisses. Everyone has left for lunch, including the chiefs and their totally inconspicuous bodyguard. Only blank sheets of paper remain at their desk.
Arabella stares down at her neat handwritten notes before taking a deep breath. “He was my sister’s fiancé.”
I blink at her. “Your what?”
She sighs. “My sister. They split up and… well, we were all really sad because they were so good together — they’d been together for years, but she wanted to leave for Australia after the riots started, and he wanted to continue his studies here. So I recommended him to be the new politics teacher. He’s studied at St. Camford — he was a politics professor there and Lochkelvin deserves the best teachers, after all.” There’s a wild brightness in Arabella’s eyes, and her voice is a lot more passionate than before. “Lochkelvin needs strong, progressive voices to combat the institutional rot. He’s one of the good ones, I’m sure of it. I find his politics very admirable and I know he can do so much good here.”
Her enthusiasm for Dr. Moncrieff makes it pretty damn obvious: Arabella has an undeniable crush on the man who would have been her brother-in-law.
She turns her wide eyes onto me. “You can’t tell anyone, though. I’m not like the others. I can’t get away with being imperfect and playing favorites the way they can. They have money to power them through life, and what do I have? Nothing. If they knew I was the one to recommend him, and then they connect the dots… I already get it in the neck for my aunt running the school, I don’t need this on top of it.” Her sigh is heavy and full. “You know I had to hide Dr. Moncrieff’s name from the damn Prime Minister? I wasn’t lying in politics. He vets every single person who teaches at Lochkelvin to make sure they’ll be good to little baby Rory. But auntie’s trying to put a stop to all that. It’s not a good look, running a school with bribery and blackmail.”
Arabella glances back down at her notes with unseeing eyes, her expression glum. “Let’s go down for lunch. It’s one of the things I actually like about Lochkelvin: we haveexcellentfood here.”
