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But just as I’m about to whip around and say something supremely cutting and outrageously witty to Luke, our teacher arrives. Another old man in tweed — is there some kind of discount on tweed at this school? — who shuffles in, his white hair frizzy like he once stuck his finger in an electric socket and left it there too long.
“Professor Hodgson.” He writes his name on the board, and for some reason Freya giggles beside me.
She leans over to me. “Hodgson, like a hedgehog, like his hair.”
Okay, so she might not stick up for me when it matters, but she’s too adorable to dislike completely.
It’s all completely new material in math — sorry,maths— but Hodgson explains it well. We’re learning to calculate the area of a parabola when I get knocked in the back of my head. A crumpled ball of paper lies at my feet. I pick it up, half-expecting a stone to fall out again, but it’s just a torn sheet of paper with several drawings of parabolas. Only, the parabolas have been turned into crude sketches of breasts, large nipples protruding from the top of each curve. Beneath the drawing is a smiley face and yet another snowflake.
I swallow.
Freya cocks her head in my direction, looking curious about what I’m holding.
But she’s not the only one.
Hodgson tears the piece of paper out my grasp and I cry out in surprise. “No, wait!”
“I’ll be waiting for no one, Miss Weir.” He glances down at the sketches, his white hair standing even more on end, his wrinkled face turning increasingly puce. “What’s the meaning of this?”
“They threw it—”
Hodgson’s eyes narrow. “Who threw it?”
Finally. Oh my God, a teacher actually willing to believe me for once?
I gesture to the back of the class. “I’d hazard a guess at Rory, sir. It’s his style.”
As I watch Hodgson up close, I’m able to see the minute changes shifting across his face, the slight alterations in his expression. A shuttering of his eyes, a softening of his mouth. He glances to where Rory’s sitting, and then his gaze slips off him entirely, as though Rory were completely invisible.
“I don’t like girls coming in here, upsetting class and disturbing the boys. These lessons are highly sought-after, incredibly valuable, and not to be filled with time-wasting filth such asthis.”
For some reason, I manage to be surprised.
But if he wanted to save time, he could have shortened his speech to the first four words. I got the gist after that.
He squeezes the sheet of paper into a tight ball. Part of my mind must have reached a new level of hysteria because it points out that it’s as though he’s squeezing a breast, and then my mind flashes back to Rory, his hands roaming Li’s body, cupping her breasts through a parted white school shirt.
“Detention, Miss Weir.”
And anyway, I don’t think that even happened. I’m justadding detailsto their tryst like an absolute perv.
Wait, what?
Detention?
Freya shoots me an astonished look but says nothing. No one stands up for me. No one says anything. I’m just left on my own, adrift and drowning.
In a quiet voice, I try to explain. “But I already have deten—”
“Then you’ll have another. And another. And as many as it takes to get this kind of depraved nonsense dislodged from your vulgar head. This may have gone down a treat at your old school, but I can assure you that standards and manners are far more robust at Lochkelvin.”
Standards and manners. Right.
Low standards and lower manners.
I can’t concentrate after that. I’m raging, furious. The way Hodgson’s eyes justslidover Rory like he didn’t exist, like he wasn’t even a part of this class… What’s so special about him? No, really, what? His dad’s the Prime Minister? Big deal. At this point, it feels like a thousand people have been Prime Minister in the last few years. There isnothing specialabout Rory Munro.
So why does he get special treatment while I get punished?
