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with being gay, mainly because it rhymed with poof. In a way that was a measure of their status: they were fey and preening enough for ‘poof’ to be the more readily applicable description, but they had this disdainful maturity about them that meant even the hard cases seemed to regard slagging them as a self-defeating exercise.
    They had their female equivalents in Rebecca and Samantha, two more of the Beautiful People who had always managed to come across as more grown-up and sophisticated than some of the staff. They hung around out of school with the same crowd as Liam and Jase, but it wasn’t clear whether or who might be boyfriend-girlfriend among them. Even the ambiguity of their relationships was as much an indication of their status as their fevered speculation reflected how Deborah and her pals were still daft wee lassies.
    ‘I heard she’s had a Brazilian,’ says Gillian, indicating Rebecca. ‘My cousin works at a tanning place in Hamilton, and she says she’s been in and had it done.
    ‘A Brazilian?’ asks Yvonne. ‘I’ve heard she’s had an Argentinian, an Australian and two Poles.’
    ‘I bet she’s had more poles than that,’ Deborah says, seizing the chance to trump Yvonne’s joke.
    Deborah steals a look to make sure she hasn’t been overheard, feeling suddenly anxious, not to mention distantly guilty. She knows her remark was based on nothing but a kind of vicarious wishful thinking. She just made it up to sound bitchy but she feels like she’d actually be jealous if it was true.
    She is relieved to spot that Rebecca is oblivious. She is sitting on her own, neckband cans plugged into her iPhone, head bobbing to the music and the rhythm of the bus as she stares serenely out of the window. It would look like a carefully considered pose if it wasn’t that Rebecca probably looked perfectly composed even when she first woke up each day.
    Samantha also has a double seat to herself, as do Liam and Jase. It is a further demonstration of their aloof self-assurance. As far as the rules apply to everybody else, only complete sad-sacks end up sitting by themselves. Odd numbers unavoidably meant some folk would be sitting alone in the row behind or across from their mates, but if you weren’t situated adjacent to your pals, you would settle for sitting next to someone you weren’t that friendly with rather than end up conspicuously on your Jack.
    Apart from the Beautiful People, the only folk sitting in true isolation are the weirdo loner Matthew Wilson and that creepy English Goth, Marianne.
    Marianne’s only excuse is that she is the new girl, but she isn’t that new; otherwise why would she be on the trip? You hardly need grief counselling if you barely knew the person who’s dead, do you? She’d been here most of a term, joining after the summer holidays. Not just your Matalan bulk-issue Goth, either. Definitely weirder. Some of the ones you saw hanging about the town made you think there must be ‘emo look’ pages in the new Next Directory, whereas Marianne’s gear seemed to have come from a Victorian jumble sale. She looks like she’d smell of rickety houses and old ladies’ perfume, but nobody is venturing close enough to verify this.
    Then, of course, there is the music, some of which Debs can hear coming from further up the bus: probably courtesy of Cameron McNeill. He isn’t a Goth or an emo but he is definitely trying to make some kind of pathetic statement by playing that stuff. It’s a total pose. Nobody really likes listening to that depressing and tuneless racket; it’s like the Emperor’s New Clothes. They just think it makes them dead cool if they say they don’t like the X Factor , and then there is an ascending scale of alternativeness according to how weird the stuff they claim to like is.
    With this thought, Deborah climbs across Gillian and into the aisle so that she can reach to turn up her own music, drown out all that gloom. Soundtrack to a bloody horror movie.