The Secret Place

Becca and Julia and Selena and Holly are on the opposite rim of the fountain, with four open packets of sweets in between them. Julia has one eye on the Colm’s guys and is talking fast and snappy, telling some possibly mostly true story about how this summer she and this English girl and a couple of French guys blagged their way into a super-fancy nightclub in Nice. Holly is eating Skittles and listening, with one eyebrow at an angle that says Yeah right; Selena is lying on the battered black-marble edge of the fountain with her chin propped on her hands, so that her hair drapes over her shoulder almost to the floor. Becca wants to lean over and cup it in her hands, before it touches the grime and the ground-in gum.

Becca despises the Court. Back at the start of first year, when the new boarders had to wait a month before they were allowed off school grounds – until they were too worn down to run away, she figures – that was all she ever heard about: oh the Court the Court the Court, everything’ll be so fab when we get to go to the Court. Glowing eyes, hands sketching pictures like it was shining castles and skating rinks and chocolate waterfalls. Older girls trailing back smug and sticky, wrapped with scents of cappuccino and tester lip gloss, one-finger-swinging bags packed with colours, still swaying to the dazing pump of glossy music. The magic place, the shimmering place to make you forget all about sour teachers, rows of dorm beds, bitchy comments you didn’t understand. Vanish it all away.

That was before Becca knew Julia and Selena and Holly. Back then she was so miserable it astonished her every morning. She used to ring her mother sobbing, huge disgusting gulps, not caring who heard, begging to come home. Her mother would sigh and tell her how much fun she’d be having any day now, once she made friends to chat with about boys and pop stars and fashion, and Becca would get off the phone stunned all over again by how much worse she felt. So the Court sounded like the one thing to look forward to in the whole horrible world.

And then she finally got there and it was a crap shopping centre. All the other first-years were practically drooling, and Becca looked up at this windowless nineties lump of grey concrete and wondered whether, if she just curled up on the ground right here and refused to move, they would send her home for being crazy.

Then the blond girl next to her, Serena or something – Becca had been too busy being wretched for much to stick in her mind – Selena took a long thoughtful look up at the top of the Court and said, ‘There actually is a window, see? I bet if you could find it, you could see half of Dublin.’

Which it turned out you could. And there it was, spread out below them: the magic world they’d been promised, neat and cosy as storybooks. There was washing billowing on lines and little kids playing swingball in a garden, there was a green park with the brightest red and yellow flowerbeds ever; an old man and an old lady had stopped to chat under a curly wrought-iron lamppost, while their perky-eared dogs wound their leads into a knot. The window was in between a parking pay-station and a huge bin, and adults paying their parking tickets kept giving Becca and Selena suspicious looks and in the end a security guard showed up and threw them out of the Court even though he didn’t seem sure exactly why, but it was a million kinds of worth it.

Two years on, though, Becca still hates the Court. She hates the way you’re watched every second from every angle, eyes swarming over you like bugs, digging and gnawing, always a clutch of girls checking out your top or a huddle of guys checking out your whatever. No one ever stays still, at the Court, everyone’s constantly twisting and head-flicking, watching for the watchers, trying for the coolest pose. No one ever stays quiet: you have to keep talking or you’ll look like losers, but you can’t have an actual conversation because everyone’s thinking about other stuff. Fifteen minutes at the Court and Becca feels like anyone who touched her would get electrocuted.