Jenna pulled the zip round her suitcase and hoisted it on to its feet. It weighed a ton: make-up brushes and hairbrushes and palettes of petrol-hued shadows and bottles of fixers and primers and toners. Barely any clothes really. Just make-up.
Year eleven were going on a four-night trip to Seville. The coach to the airport was due outside the Academy at 5.45 a.m. It was now just after five and the sky was still lit with night stars and the pearlescent sheen of the moon. Jenna peered into her mother’s bedroom and caught the outline of her sleeping body and the whisper of her night-time breath. She would not wake her. Her mother was like a child – much easier to manage when she was sleeping. She tucked a packet of Nature Valley cereal bars into her rucksack, double checked inside the front pocket for the solid edges of her passport, took it out, double-checked that it was hers, slid it back in, smeared on some lip balm and silently left the house.
Bess stood on the corner with a battered metal suitcase at her feet, her hands tucked inside the sleeves of her blue Melville Academy hoodie, her bare legs glowing blue white in the early dawn. She yawned widely as Jenna approached.
‘Morning,’ said Jenna.
Bess groaned and lifted her case. It had no wheels and she had to carry it with both hands. It banged up against her shins as she walked. ‘International travel sucks,’ she said.
‘We haven’t even got on the coach yet.’
‘Yeah. Exactly.’
‘Would you rather be going to school today?’
‘Yes,’ said Bess. ‘Actually. I really would.’
Jenna smiled wryly. She knew that Bess would be the one at the back of the coach waving at lorry drivers in a few minutes.
Outside school, the coach rumbled and the pavement filled slowly with sleep-glazed teenagers. Bess kicked her in the shin and said, ‘Oh God. Look!’
When she turned she saw Mr Fitzwilliam striding towards them, a rucksack slung over his shoulder. He was wearing a dark hooded jacket and jeans.
‘Buenos días, everyone,’ he called. ‘Señor Delgado’s wife has gone into early labour and I’m the only other fluent Spanish speaker in the school so I’ve been dragged from my lovely warm cosy bed to accompany you all to Seville – you’ll no doubt be delighted to hear.’
Jenna felt Bess’s bony elbow between her ribs and slapped her away. She felt Bess’s hot breath in her ear. ‘Oh. My Fucking. God.’
Jenna sighed.
‘Oh my fucking God,’ Bess repeated. ‘I’m going to die. I swear. I’m dying right now. Literally. I’m dead.’
‘Shush,’ said Jenna. ‘He’s only over there.’
‘Don’t care. Just … I just …’
‘Please don’t make a twat of yourself,’ said Jenna. ‘Promise me.’
Bess looked at her aghast. ‘God, Jen – what do you take me for?’
Jenna turned towards the village, the soft glow of the street lights just visible from where they stood. She thought of her mother, folded warm within her duvet. She imagined her awaking and remembering that Jenna had gone. She pictured her rising from her warm bed and forgetting to eat breakfast in her compulsion to check the house for signs of them, the unknown, unwieldy gang who made it their lives’ work to stalk, harass and torment her, who came into her home nightly to displace her ornaments, untwist her lightbulbs, drill small holes into her walls and scratch tiny hieroglyphics into her work surfaces. She would then retire to her computer to log all the nightly modifications before signing in to one of the many chat rooms she frequented with other ‘victims’ of so-called gang-stalking to give credibility to each other’s madness.
Jenna had not left her mother alone since she got properly ill, not for longer than the occasional sleepover. Her dad had persuaded her to go on the trip; he’d paid for it and said he’d check in on her mum daily, that she must go and enjoy herself and not look back. Jenna strongly suspected that her dad would not check in on her every day; it was a ninety-minute round trip from his house in Weston-super-Mare where he ran a very busy ironmongery virtually single-handedly as well as looking after Jenna’s little brother, Ethan. But now as she stowed her suitcase in the belly of the coach and took her seat next to Bess, it was far too late to worry about it all.
The coach pulled away and Melville faded to a tiny blurred point on the horizon and Jenna allowed herself a moment of excitement at the prospect of five days of sanity. Then she turned to share a smile with Bess and saw her staring dementedly at the back of Mr Fitzwilliam’s head.
