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Min’s her star pupil and Mrs Wilson already thinks she is’ – her voice had dropped to a mock whisper – ‘ Oxbridge material .’
    ‘And what’s that?’ Gina had asked.
    ‘Clever enough to get into Oxford or Cambridge University.’
    ‘Oh yeah . . . right.’ Gina did know what that was all about. Her own mother had already been bandying the words Harvard and Yale about, although Gina was quite obviously not even one of the cleverest girls in her class. Far from it. That was a big part of why she was at St Jude’s, no doubt about it.
    They crossed the boarding-house gardens and followed a path past several large playing fields to the main school. The great square stone building loomed up out of the grass. Four storeys high, with the top attic floors set into an immense slate roof, it was, Gina thought, much more imposing than it had looked in the handbook.
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    ‘How old is the school?’ she asked Niffy, who was walking alongside her.
    ‘Erm . . . early nineteen hundreds, I think. The first St J’s girls wore hats, gloves, ankle-length pinafores and probably corsets. Can’t have been much fun playing lacrosse in a corset.’
    ‘I’m sure they didn’t play lacrosse,’ Min said. ‘Far too unladylike.’
    ‘Yeah,’ Niffy agreed. ‘They were too busy learning how to cook, sew and become perfect wives to Edinburgh doctors and lawyers.’
    ‘Yeah, then at some point in the fifties,’ Min went on, ‘the school dropped the cooking and sewing classes and started teaching the girls how to become Edinburgh doctors and lawyers themselves.’
    ‘My mum always said that one of the scientists who invented the Pill was from St J’s,’ Niffy added. ‘But it’s always been hushed up because it doesn’t fit with the school’s image. St J’s is very, very proper.’ She gave a roll of her eyes. ‘They’d still make us wear hats, gloves, pinafores and corsets if they could.’
    ‘What else should I know?’ Gina asked.
    But Min had a question: ‘Should we be telling Gina to steer clear of Penny and her gang?’
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    replied. ‘Let’s just put it this way. Every year has a set of poisonous bitches in it, and Penny, Piggy and Weasel are ours.’
    ‘Piggy and Weasel?’ Gina felt as if she needed some further clue to these girls than just the nicknames the dorm girls had given them.
    ‘Tiggy and Louisa. Tiggy must be short for something, but no one ever calls her anything else, so who knows? I don’t think you’ll want to hang around long enough to find out. Unless you like the company of snobby Edinburgh bitches,’ Amy added.
    ‘Oh, they probably aren’t that bad if you’re a friend of theirs,’ Niffy chipped in. ‘It’s just that Amy and Penny have never really got on. Penny once went out with someone Amy was considering chucking—’
    ‘Yeah, but I hadn’t!’ Amy reminded her. ‘He was still my boyfriend, that’s the point.’
    ‘And,’ Niffy went on, ignoring the outburst, ‘Penny has been at St J’s since she was three and she’d got used to being the cleverest girl in the class and the best at everything. So when Amy arrived at the age of ten and started doing better than her at maths and art, not to mention Min turning up two years ago and being brilliant at physics and chemistry, Penny just went in a huff . . .’
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    ‘Yeah, and she’s been in it ever since,’ Amy added.
    ‘Unfortunately 4C is quite small,’ Min said, ‘so it’s a little hard to distance yourself from the three of them.’
    Oh great , Gina was telling herself again. Didn’t matter where in the world you went to school, there were always gangs. Another thought crossing her mind was that when she got back home, back to her real school, she was going to be