Chapter 3

Homework was no big deal that night – just some English, which nobody ever did anyway, according to Layne, and three Maths problems. Nothing I couldn't handle, I thought, arranging my pens and pencils around my sheet of file paper, but as I stared between the bluish lines I couldn't keep my mind off Massie and the others. It was like they had just stepped out of a film or something – I felt privileged, almost, to have such a group to hate at school. It meant that I had something to fight against, something that alleviated the mind-numbing boredom of the school routine.

At last, having chided myself into working, I printed in block capitals the title of this week's essay: "Discuss in detail the ways in which Othello is similar to Iago in Shakespeare's Othello."

"Easy enough," I said to myself under my breath, and picked up a pen. The work at OCD was more interesting than some places I'd been before, but still trivial compared to what I had encountered last year. It looked as though, once again, I would perform decently without any real motivation to try. "In Othello, Shakespeare uses the characters of Iago and Othello to illustrate the same concept: the idea of appearance being other than reality, sometimes deceptively so.

"The language of both characters, for instance, is full of direct contradictions…"

Before I could even exemplify my first point, my mobile – a black flip phone, nothing fancy – buzzed twice. My first day here and I have a text message? It's almost like I have an established group of friends already. I picked it up. Unsurprisingly, Layne's name flashed on screen.

LAYNE: HOW R U AFTER TODAY?

CHARLOTTE: COULD BE BETTER. HOW'D YOU GET MY NUMBER ANYWAY?

I was fastidious about correct grammar while texting. I guess it made me feel superior to other people my age – besides, the rules of English had always just "clicked" in my head. It naturally made more sense to me than text talk.

LAYNE: UR PARENTS GAVE IT 2 ME. LIST OF HOME #S FRM SKL EGG PROTEST WAS AWESOME. THREATENED TO EGG PRNCPL B'S CAR!

CHARLOTTE: SOUNDS PRETTY FUN. REGRET NOT GOING NOW.

LAYNE: N E WAY. MEET UP MALL SATURDAY? NEW SUPERMAN MOVIE OUT. THOUGHT U MIGHT LIKE

CHARLOTTE: SOUNDS GREAT! (Two whole exclamation marks – almost unheard of from me.) I'LL SEE YOU THERE AROUND 12.

At this point my chances of actually doing my homework were zero. Layne was the first girl from Octavian Country Day that I had wanted as a friend, and she appeared to return the sentiment. Even if I sabotaged myself with my own enthusiasm – somehow I always ended up behaving awkwardly whenever I tried to hang out with anyone I liked – I knew the movie would be worth seeing anyway.

My parents were still in the kitchen when I went downstairs.

"Done your homework already, Charlotte?" Dad raised an eyebrow, not looking up from his newspaper. By his side was a mug of tea (which I assumed he would soon declare as dishwater and leave unfinished).

"Yeah," I replied. I didn't look him in the eye but it wasn't as though he could tell. "It was dead easy. Just some English."

"There was a girl calling for you earlier. Said she wanted to see you Saturday?"

I nodded. "Layne. A nice girl from school."

"Nice to see you're making friends, Charlotte."

I shifted my weight from foot to foot. I could handle my parents pestering me over my grades, and had accepted it as a fact of life which followed naturally from higher-than-average school performance. Recently, however, they had taken an interest in my social life, insisting that I should make an effort to meet people. Layne was cool, but I wasn't expecting her to want to be best friends with me – and besides, she had a clique of her own already. I fully expected my life at OCD to be similar to what it was like back in England: after a couple of weeks I would quietly fade into the background, existing to the majority of the school population only when I put my hand up in class. The rest of the time I would walk the halls, silent and intangible. In my old school people used to bang their locker doors in my face, not on purpose, but because they didn't realise I was there.

"We're just going to see a movie. I should be back by 5."

The television played gentle string music in the living room next door; my mum had probably fallen asleep in front of one of her period dramas. All of a sudden I felt the age gap between myself and my parents become vast and uncloseable.

"Have fun. You deserve it." My dad looked up at me and smiled. The gap narrowed again.

Layne and I walked there in frustrating silence – I couldn't think of a word to say all the way from the mall entrance to the cinema, or the "movie theater" as she called it. Today her hair was up in a ponytail, and she wore purple jeans; in my grey corduroy skirt and tight librarian bun I felt painfully incongruous.

"Two for Superman, please," Layne said brightly to the shaggy-haired boy at the counter. He cheered up visibly – I imagined not many people around here said "please" or "thank you", from the experiences I'd had so far at OCD. I tried my best to flash a convincing smile at him before we went into the screening, but it probably looked more pitying than anything. To work in the retail sector in Westchester Mall, I decided, must be the worst job in the world; you get to watch while successful people treat you like dirt, trapped, as if in a magic mirror, as an echo of agreement.

"Sure." The boy (he couldn't be any older than sixteen, maybe seventeen, what with his unfortunately nasty case of acne) looked down obstinately at his shoes while printing out our tickets and handing them to us.

As soon as we got through the door, Layne dissolved into giggles. "He totally liked you."

"What?" I could feel the back of my neck heating up against my will. "He was three years older than me, maybe more. That's gross."

"You smiled at him." Layne fished around in her bag for a sour gummy snake and chewed off its head unceremoniously. "Not many people smile around here." After a moment of reflection, she added, "You know, you're like the Anti-Massie."

I studied her carefully. Her green eyes fizzed with mischief. "How?"

"You've both got brown hair," she said, finishing off her gummy snake and reaching for another. "You're both kind of serious, and you know you're pretty, right? Not, like, Alicia pretty, but pretty."

Coming from anyone else, that would have hurt, but Layne's quickfire delivery and chirp of a voice made it sound more like an observation than a deliberate insult. Besides, she was correct – I was uninteresting and dowdy, without a hope of matching the Pretty Committee, even Claire, in the looks department, but I was far from ugly. "Thanks," I replied, leaning back in my seat with a smirk.

Ten minutes into the film, my phone buzzed again. Crap. Should have turned that off. I flipped it open and was surprised at what I saw:

LAYNE: TXT UR DAD 2 TELL HIM UR COMING BCK TO MINE. I HAVE AN IDEA