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so, so much kinder to new girls. It had never occurred to her before how terrifying it was to join a new class, make new friends, new enemies, find out where everything was and how everything worked all over again.
    Because Min had been the first person to respond to her uniform crisis, because she seemed the nicest of the three and the geekiest and the one least likely to refuse, Gina – hating having to do this – turned to her and asked quietly, ‘You will . . . um . . . be around today, won’t you? Just to kind of show me where everything is? Won’t you?’
    Min smiled and nodded.
    The words, ‘I spy boarders,’ greeted them as they walked into the classroom. They came from a tall girl with a pale, narrow face, a mane of long, curly brown hair and cruelly short fringe. She might have been 46
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    pretty if she hadn’t had the fringe and such a sneer across her face. ‘Did you sleep well, girls, in your cosy little dorm? Ooh – and a new girl . . . She’s almost as tanned as you, Amy. Been to the Costas for a holiday, have you? Daddy got a little place in Benidorm?’
    ‘Go away, Penny,’ Amy growled.
    But Penny held out her hand to Gina and said,
    ‘Penelope Boswell-Hackett. How do you do?’
    ‘Gina Peterson.’ Gina shook the hand offered; she didn’t feel as if she had much choice, although this was obviously the Penny she’d been warned about.
    ‘So where are you from?’ came the abrupt question.
    ‘I’m just here for a term. I’m from the US . . .
    California.’
    ‘Oh dear,’ replied Penny. ‘Blonde and Californian
    . . . good luck. Let’s just hope you’re not stupid as well.
    And you’ve had to borrow a uniform, you poor old thing.’ And with that she turned on her heel and headed back to the far corner of the room, where a knot of girls giggled at her return.
    Gina felt her face burning. ‘Where do I sit?’ she hissed at Niffy.
    ‘Here, just take the desk beside mine.’
    Gina sat down at the cramped, old-fashioned desk.
    She watched as Niffy lifted up the lid and began to 47
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    unpack some belongings from her school bag into the belly of the wooden beast. This was like being at school in a different century. The room was pea-green with a scuffed wooden floor, a chipped iron monster of a radiator and two enormous windows, set high up in the wall. If a teacher in a long woollen dress carrying a cane had walked in, Gina would not have been surprised. She wondered if her mother had sat in this classroom once, and yet again she struggled to understand why her mother had wanted to send her to this place.
    When the school bell rang at 8.50, an almost normal-looking woman came into the room and took the register. Gina tried to put names to faces, but gave up halfway through. It would take some time.
    ‘Welcome back, girls . . . Welcome to our new girl, Gina Peterson . . . And off we trot to assembly,’ the class teacher, Mrs Redpath, instructed.
    Along with the rest of her class, Gina headed for the cavernous wood-panelled hall, already filling with hundreds of St Jude’s girls. She followed Niffy and Min into a row of seats somewhere in the middle of the hall and picked up the small red hymn book on her chair before sitting down.
    ‘You’re about to see the Banshee in action,’ Niffy 48
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    whispered. ‘Pick a word, girls: excellence , ambition , dedication or proud . Person with the lowest score buys the treats on Friday.’
    Gina had no idea what Niffy was talking about, but she heard Min choose proud and Amy excellence .
    ‘Still chasing Jasey-Wasey, are we?’ Penny, sitting in the row in front of them, turned round to direct this at Amy. ‘Shame, because guess who I saw in the Harvey Nichols café stroking the beautiful hair of Camille from Year Five? Oh yes – one Jason Hernandez. And’ –
    she paused