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“Oh?” Her voice is all affected surprise. “How odd. Your sister was first in all her classes—perhaps her school works out academic rankings differently?”
I look across the table at Zahara. She’s two years younger than me, but that never stopped our parents from putting just as much pressure on her as they do on me.
If anything, they’ve engineered a clever system. In that system, I can never win, constantly blackmailed with the potential humiliation of my younger sister somehow outdoing me. And Zahara can never win either, always being made to compete with a brother two years her senior.
It’s a system designed to keep us forever competing but never victorious. But it’s not a system that’s clever enough to work on us.
Because in the cold hostility of our home life, Zahara and I have an alliance forged in marble and gold.
I have her back, and she has mine. This is something I know will never change—not now that I’m away at Spearcrest, not when she goes away to a private girls’ school in France, not when we’ll both be at university and not when, one day, we are both living our own lives wherever we are across the globe.
“Congratulations, Zaro,” I say. “That’s an amazing achievement—makes me proud to be your big brother.”
Zahara gives a little smile and looks down at her plate, which is what she always does when she’s trying not to laugh.
My mother frowns at me. “That’s not what I meant, Zachary.”
“I know, Mother.” I give her my most earnest look. “Don’t worry. I promise I’ll work harder next year. I’ll see some tutors over the summer as well.”
She nods, somewhat pacified, and glances at my father, a glance like the passing of a baton in a relay race.
“Don’t forget, son”—his voice is deep and gravelly like I hope mine will be one day—“being great is good, but being the best is better.”
“I won’t forget,” I say.
How could I? He’s been telling me this since I was old enough to walk.
The phrase is as good as engraved into my consciousness.
InYear8,Ido exactly what I told my parents I would do.
I study harder and longer. Every free moment I have is spent in the library or my room, poring over books. I read voraciously, on everything, even the things I’m not quite capable of wrapping my head around yet. My afternoons are spent on after-school clubs designed to develop my brain faster and broaden my range of skills, and my weekends are spent on extra homework.
During the holidays, I have my tutors on a rotation designed to imitate my school timetable, and I ask them all to set me homework.
During term time, I excel in all my classes.
Unfortunately, so does Theodora.
It’s difficult to tell how she does it. She could be doing the exact same thing as me: spending every minute of her time studying, working and reading. Or she could be one of those prodigies born with extraordinary minds. But somehow, in every assignment, every project and every examination across all our subjects, Theodora is always fighting me for top of the class.
Sometimes, she wins out: she gets a higher result than me on a poetry unit in English class, and she beats me in the biology and religious studies exams. I beat her several times in maths, physics and geography. We both tie pretty consistently on history and languages.
All of this happens, and as it happens, so does something else.
Theodora changes.
At first, I can’t quite tell how. Then, one day, all of a sudden, I realise it’s her appearance.
One day, completely randomly, we are both lining up outside our English classroom, waiting for the teacher. I stand by the door, she stands by the window, her eyes glazed over, fixed on a point that seems to be both far beyond the window and yet not quite penetrating the glass.
And that’s when I notice it.
Her hair is no longer in those two long braids she wore that day I first saw her outside Mr Ambrose’s office—the same way she wore her hair all through Year 7. Instead, the top of it is bound by a white ribbon tied into a bow, and the rest falls down her back like a river of pale gold. Her eyes have some pink eyeshadow on the lids, and her lips are glossy and the colour of raspberries.
There are tiny silver stars in her ears, and her bag is designer. I didn’t notice any of those things until today, and I don’t know how. Theodora, at some point during the year, started looking different—and I didn’t notice because the whole time, I was too busy trying to stop her from beating me in every subject.
I thought I’d been paying attention to her, but I was wrong.
