from Chapter 2: Standing up to Elspeth
Even when the second form was not in the Miss Goody’s history class, they knew where she was. The sound of her shrieking furiously at some other unfortunate Oodles girl would often cause them to shudder. Miranda reflected that it seemed every school must have at least one utterly horrid, nasty and spiteful teacher. Oodles had Miss Goody. When second form played sports on the school common, her distant screeching was like the whiff of a sewage plant on the wind.
When they were in the same classroom, Miranda watched Miss Goody with fearful admiration. She thought the way Miss Goody shouted at pupils was almost artistic. Miranda had seen even the most poised sixth formers shrink before Miss Goody’s rants. She never ceased to be amazed at the enormous amount of volume Miss Goody managed to force out of her tiny, lipsticked mouth.
On one dismal Thursday morning it was Katie, as usual, over whom Miss Goody was exercising her lungs.
“That’s just the kind of smarty-pants answer I’m starting to expect from you, young lady!” she bellowed. “It’s pupils like you that make the teaching profession a misery! You haven’t listened to a word I’ve said since you started in this class, Miss Pickerwick – nor have you, to my knowledge, opened any of the books I set you for this subject. Do you want to be a dunce? Do you? Don’t speak!” she snapped when Katie opened her mouth to reply. “Because if you continue this way, my girl, you will find yourself a dunce. You will have no knowledge of history. You will shock people with your ignorance. You will amuse people with your ridiculous blunders. But let me assure you, missy, they won’t be laughing with you! Oh, no, Miss Pickerwick, they will be laughing at you! But you seem to be just the sort of fool that doesn’t mind when people are laughing at her. Yes, I can see that you are of the kind that will do anything for a cheap laugh.” She took a deep breath and patted her poodle-curled perm for a moment. “So. Now we’ve established that time travel is not a good way to learn about history, I would appreciate a sensible answer to the question.”
Miranda put her hand into the air, partly to answer the question, and partly to rescue Katie.
“Looking at old photographs,” she suggested when Miss Goody finally called on her. Miranda was generally one of her last choices, but no one else looked willing to venture an answer after the latest bout of wrath.
Miss Goody hesitated as though she would dearly have loved for Miranda to be wrong. But eventually she had to admit that Miranda had given a correct reply. She turned to write the words ‘photographic records’ begrudgingly on the chalkboard after a resentful, “Looking at photographs, Miss.”
“Photographs, Miss,” Miranda echoed obediently.
Miranda wished she didn’t always feel the urge to rescue Katie. Secretly, she was beginning to think that Katie didn’t deserve a scholarship to attend Upper Drivell Young Ladies’ School. That Katie had only been given one because Miranda herself attended. Perhaps the Headmistress had felt sorry for Katie. Katie was doing so badly in almost all of her classes, that Miranda expected Ms Lycaon to call her parents up to the school any day. Miranda herself was doing well – at least in her schoolwork. She had now given up hope of becoming good mates with Ellie Manjuli and Felicity Van Hoeven. She knew that Elspeth made it unpleasant for anyone to spend much time with Miranda these days. In fact, as a result of Miranda’s good marks, Elspeth hated her more than ever. She was making quite a hobby out of subtly bullying Miranda with Star and Mishka. Miranda was unwilling to suffer the mortification of being abandoned by Ellie and Felicity. So she’d abandoned them first.
When the bell rang at the end of Miss Goody’s class, Miranda gathered her books. Elspeth pushed past with Star and Mishka. Deliberately bumping hard into Miranda’s desk, Star apologized mockingly when Miranda’s notes fell to the floor in a scattered mess.
“Never mind it, Star,” advised Elspeth. “Katie and Miranda can simply pop back in time to just before it happened. Right, Katie?”
That was Star and Mishka’s cue to laugh as though they had never heard anything so funny. Miranda glowered at all three of them as Katie appeared by her side.
“You couldn’t travel back in time to stop an accident from happening,” Katie told Elspeth earnestly. “You could watch it happen over again. You could even check who the clumsy person was who knocked the books off, if there was any doubt that it was Star. But you couldn’t do anything to change it. Once it’s done, it’s done.”
Elspeth rolled her eyes at Katie.
“Weirdo,” she muttered. She stalked away with Star and Mishka in tow, sniggering as usual.
Katie stooped to help collect the papers. She stuffed them into Miranda’s satchel with a cheerful lack of care.
“Well!” she said with a grin. “That was an interesting lesson, wasn’t it? Poor old Goody got herself into quite a state again, but then she does seem to do that a lot, I always think.”
“She does when you’re in the room,” remarked Miranda, leading the way to the lower school Common Room. “And Katie, you ought to be careful what you say to Elspeth. She is a powerful force in this school,” she reminded Katie darkly as they turned into the Common Room. “If you cross her, you’ll regret it.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Katie said firmly. “How can one girl be a powerful force in a school? She’s not even very bright. Look at what she said just then about changing the past. I mean, what sort of an imbecile would seriously believe that you could go back in time and change things? Once something has happened, it’s happened, for goodness’ sake!” Katie laughed heartily at Elspeth’s ignorance.
Miranda watched Katie with puzzlement. Sometimes when she talked about these crazy things it sounded as though Katie really believed what she was saying. Miranda suspected for the umpteenth time that Katie wasn’t quite right in the head.
“Katie, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but listen here. The more odd things you say in history, the more Miss Goody will shout at you. Perhaps you are just imaginative or whatever, but it sounds like you’re trying to make her cross. Do you want to get kicked out of Oodles? As for Elspeth, she’ll jump on anything silly anyone does or says and tease them about it for weeks on end. She’s just like her mother, that Cynthia Richman-Snood. Mrs Richman-Snood’s a fancy lawyer. Mum’s always coming up against her in court. She says Mrs Richman-Snood is like a terrier after a rat – she just won’t let anything go. That’s what Elspeth does. She obviously doesn’t have the imagination to think up her own insults, so she just latches onto anything you do that’s a bit odd. And, well, let’s face it Katie, you do odd things quite a bit.”
Miranda caught a muttered comment behind her about “leeches.” She glanced around to see Elspeth glaring at her from across the Common Room. Obviously, she’d overheard Miranda saying her name, but didn’t have quite enough evidence to cause a scene. Katie waved at Elspeth cheerfully.
“She’s all right,” she said to Miranda. “She’s just a little moody from time to time.”
“Well, you ought to watch yourself, that’s all,” Miranda told Katie somewhat helplessly. “Elspeth can make your life a misery.”
“Oh, it’ll take more than knocking a few notes off a desk to make me miserable,” Katie grinned carelessly.
“They weren’t your notes,” muttered Miranda.
Finally it was the last lesson of the day. It seemed unfair that the class Miranda most enjoyed – science – should be ruined by Elspeth’s presence. Miranda liked the science master, Mr Dirger. He was extremely keen on animal biology and often lent Miranda slides of liver flukes and other unpleasant parasites for her microscope. He had a bristly beard and occasionally, when he was particularly excited about the study of some animal or another, his eyes would cross. Elspeth loathed him, and made no secret of it, but Mr Dirger was too deeply in love with teaching his subject to notice.
Miranda found this lesson engrossing. She was listening to Mr Dirger happily, and had almost forgotten Elspeth was even in the room.
“The survival of the fittest,” he was saying, “means that the best equipped animals survive and breed, and so build up the strength of the species. Just say you have a pride of lions. Lions use their size, strength and speed to hunt successfully. If two lions are born – one large, strong lion, and one small lion, then the smaller, weaker lion is not as likely to get enough food, is it? So, one might expect it to die before it gets a chance to breed. On the other hand, the bigger lion will hunt well, prosper and breed. It might work in the opposite way with an animal like a squirrel. Squirrels depend on being small and agile to escape from their predators. So a bigger, fatter squirrel has got a lower chance of surviving. Yes, Elspeth?”
Elspeth had raised her hand to ask a question. She smoothed her long, blonde hair composedly.
“I was just wondering, Mr Dirger,” she said sweetly. “Does it work the same way with people? I mean, are the small, runty, inferior humans less likely to survive?” She shot a nasty look at Miranda as she spoke, and Miranda reddened. “And what about the big fat ones?” Elspeth added, glancing over at Katie.
Mr Dirger answered the question unsuspectingly. Star and Mishka smirked at Miranda while she stared furiously down at her textbook. She longed to raise her hand and ask Mr Dirger if the pampered, soft humans were not the ones who were more likely to die out. But she didn’t dare. She knew that if she were to provoke Elspeth, the taunts and teasing would become much, much worse.
The lesson wore on and Miranda tried to put Elspeth and her friends out of her mind while she did her work. She was writing answers on a worksheet thoughtfully when a piece of folded paper arrived at her elbow. She glanced around to see who had thrown it, but all heads were bent over their work. Miranda unfolded the paper.
“Dear Miranda,” said the note. “Do you want to go for an ice cream at Lizzie’s Lunches after school? From Ellie.”
Miranda’s spirits rose. Ellie was good fun, after all. Maybe it was better to keep what friends she could while Elspeth was being so nasty. Ellie had shown over and over that she wasn’t scared of Elspeth. She looked at Ellie now, but the girl was frowning down at her worksheet. Miranda went back to her own work feeling rather better, and quite able to forget Elspeth’s unpleasantness.
At the end of the lesson, the girls all crowded through the classroom door. Miranda hung back a little, waiting for Ellie. When she appeared, Miranda grinned at her.
“I’ll just need to let my brother know,” she told Ellie.
“Huh?” Ellie looked blank.
“That we’re going for ice cream,” prompted Miranda.
Ellie stared. “Huh?” she said again.
At that moment, Miranda heard an explosion of giggles behind her. Without even turning around, she knew who it was. She also knew, in that instant, exactly what had happened. Ellie had not invited her for ice cream. Elspeth had written the note. She and her friends were by now howling with laughter at Miranda’s expense.
“What’s going on?” demanded Ellie in utter bewilderment.
Miranda didn’t answer. Her cheeks burning, she dropped the note and pushed past Ellie, refusing to look at Elspeth and her cronies. She scolded herself silently for being stupid enough to think anyone would want to be friends with her while she was Elspeth Richman-Snood’s chosen prey. Better to keep quiet, go it alone, and hope that Elspeth would eventually decide she wasn’t worth picking on.
David was made to walk the girls home every day upon their mother’s insistence. Today he was eating a sausage roll from the local lunchbar. David spent his entire pocket money allowance on food from Lizzie’s Lunches each week. When he wasn’t eating, he was hungry, and the only time he wasn’t hungry was when he was eating. Despite his constant eating, he was a beanpole. Miranda found it quite incredible. Once, she had secretly recorded everything David had eaten in one day. It had started before breakfast with a snack of two apples and half a bag of crisps (only half because their mother had confiscated the crisps as soon as she had seen them). Breakfast itself, being on a weekend, had consisted of three fried eggs, several pieces of bacon, four of Mr Crundle’s coconut-tofu pancakes (and it would have been five except that Katie had stuffed the last one into her jacket pocket as he reached for it). Not to mention three pieces of toast, a glass of milk and a glass of orange juice. Almost immediately afterwards, he set to work on morning tea, which had been six scones with jam and two cups of sweet tea. His pre-lunch snack had been a muesli bar, an orange, several chocolate biscuits and a thick slice of cheese. And so it had gone on all day. Miranda was left quite in awe of David’s powers of digestion. After watching him eat like that for a full day, she hadn’t felt quite able to stomach her dinner.
He grunted a greeting to them and shouldered his school satchel. All three turned for home.
“Old Goody gave us a ton of homework, didn’t she?” remarked Katie.
Miranda hmm’ed her agreement but she didn’t feel like chatting with Katie. David swallowed the last of his sausage roll and countered that she couldn’t possibly have as much homework as he did. He and Katie argued good-naturedly for the rest of the walk home.
Miranda kept her eyes on the footpath. Today, she felt irked by the friendship between David and Katie. It seemed very unfair. Katie had sent all her new school friends scurrying – and now she was even taking over Miranda’s privileged position as most-teased little sister at home. Indulging herself in a comforting wallow, Miranda tried to think of other ways Katie had made her life hard. She wondered if even her parents were favouring Katie over herself. Unfortunately, she couldn’t thinking of any such instances. She had to be satisfied with only David playing favourites. As they went through the front door, Katie bumped her leather satchel roughly into Miranda’s shin. Then she climbed the stairs obliviously, still yelling parting toppers to David as she went. Miranda scowled, rubbing her injured leg, and clumped up the stairs behind her.
Even when the second form was not in the Miss Goody’s history class, they knew where she was. The sound of her shrieking furiously at some other unfortunate Oodles girl would often cause them to shudder. Miranda reflected that it seemed every school must have at least one utterly horrid, nasty and spiteful teacher. Oodles had Miss Goody. When second form played sports on the school common, her distant screeching was like the whiff of a sewage plant on the wind.
When they were in the same classroom, Miranda watched Miss Goody with fearful admiration. She thought the way Miss Goody shouted at pupils was almost artistic. Miranda had seen even the most poised sixth formers shrink before Miss Goody’s rants. She never ceased to be amazed at the enormous amount of volume Miss Goody managed to force out of her tiny, lipsticked mouth.
On one dismal Thursday morning it was Katie, as usual, over whom Miss Goody was exercising her lungs.
“That’s just the kind of smarty-pants answer I’m starting to expect from you, young lady!” she bellowed. “It’s pupils like you that make the teaching profession a misery! You haven’t listened to a word I’ve said since you started in this class, Miss Pickerwick – nor have you, to my knowledge, opened any of the books I set you for this subject. Do you want to be a dunce? Do you? Don’t speak!” she snapped when Katie opened her mouth to reply. “Because if you continue this way, my girl, you will find yourself a dunce. You will have no knowledge of history. You will shock people with your ignorance. You will amuse people with your ridiculous blunders. But let me assure you, missy, they won’t be laughing with you! Oh, no, Miss Pickerwick, they will be laughing at you! But you seem to be just the sort of fool that doesn’t mind when people are laughing at her. Yes, I can see that you are of the kind that will do anything for a cheap laugh.” She took a deep breath and patted her poodle-curled perm for a moment. “So. Now we’ve established that time travel is not a good way to learn about history, I would appreciate a sensible answer to the question.”
Miranda put her hand into the air, partly to answer the question, and partly to rescue Katie.
“Looking at old photographs,” she suggested when Miss Goody finally called on her. Miranda was generally one of her last choices, but no one else looked willing to venture an answer after the latest bout of wrath.
Miss Goody hesitated as though she would dearly have loved for Miranda to be wrong. But eventually she had to admit that Miranda had given a correct reply. She turned to write the words ‘photographic records’ begrudgingly on the chalkboard after a resentful, “Looking at photographs, Miss.”
“Photographs, Miss,” Miranda echoed obediently.
Miranda wished she didn’t always feel the urge to rescue Katie. Secretly, she was beginning to think that Katie didn’t deserve a scholarship to attend Upper Drivell Young Ladies’ School. That Katie had only been given one because Miranda herself attended. Perhaps the Headmistress had felt sorry for Katie. Katie was doing so badly in almost all of her classes, that Miranda expected Ms Lycaon to call her parents up to the school any day. Miranda herself was doing well – at least in her schoolwork. She had now given up hope of becoming good mates with Ellie Manjuli and Felicity Van Hoeven. She knew that Elspeth made it unpleasant for anyone to spend much time with Miranda these days. In fact, as a result of Miranda’s good marks, Elspeth hated her more than ever. She was making quite a hobby out of subtly bullying Miranda with Star and Mishka. Miranda was unwilling to suffer the mortification of being abandoned by Ellie and Felicity. So she’d abandoned them first.
When the bell rang at the end of Miss Goody’s class, Miranda gathered her books. Elspeth pushed past with Star and Mishka. Deliberately bumping hard into Miranda’s desk, Star apologized mockingly when Miranda’s notes fell to the floor in a scattered mess.
“Never mind it, Star,” advised Elspeth. “Katie and Miranda can simply pop back in time to just before it happened. Right, Katie?”
That was Star and Mishka’s cue to laugh as though they had never heard anything so funny. Miranda glowered at all three of them as Katie appeared by her side.
“You couldn’t travel back in time to stop an accident from happening,” Katie told Elspeth earnestly. “You could watch it happen over again. You could even check who the clumsy person was who knocked the books off, if there was any doubt that it was Star. But you couldn’t do anything to change it. Once it’s done, it’s done.”
Elspeth rolled her eyes at Katie.
“Weirdo,” she muttered. She stalked away with Star and Mishka in tow, sniggering as usual.
Katie stooped to help collect the papers. She stuffed them into Miranda’s satchel with a cheerful lack of care.
“Well!” she said with a grin. “That was an interesting lesson, wasn’t it? Poor old Goody got herself into quite a state again, but then she does seem to do that a lot, I always think.”
“She does when you’re in the room,” remarked Miranda, leading the way to the lower school Common Room. “And Katie, you ought to be careful what you say to Elspeth. She is a powerful force in this school,” she reminded Katie darkly as they turned into the Common Room. “If you cross her, you’ll regret it.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Katie said firmly. “How can one girl be a powerful force in a school? She’s not even very bright. Look at what she said just then about changing the past. I mean, what sort of an imbecile would seriously believe that you could go back in time and change things? Once something has happened, it’s happened, for goodness’ sake!” Katie laughed heartily at Elspeth’s ignorance.
Miranda watched Katie with puzzlement. Sometimes when she talked about these crazy things it sounded as though Katie really believed what she was saying. Miranda suspected for the umpteenth time that Katie wasn’t quite right in the head.
“Katie, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but listen here. The more odd things you say in history, the more Miss Goody will shout at you. Perhaps you are just imaginative or whatever, but it sounds like you’re trying to make her cross. Do you want to get kicked out of Oodles? As for Elspeth, she’ll jump on anything silly anyone does or says and tease them about it for weeks on end. She’s just like her mother, that Cynthia Richman-Snood. Mrs Richman-Snood’s a fancy lawyer. Mum’s always coming up against her in court. She says Mrs Richman-Snood is like a terrier after a rat – she just won’t let anything go. That’s what Elspeth does. She obviously doesn’t have the imagination to think up her own insults, so she just latches onto anything you do that’s a bit odd. And, well, let’s face it Katie, you do odd things quite a bit.”
Miranda caught a muttered comment behind her about “leeches.” She glanced around to see Elspeth glaring at her from across the Common Room. Obviously, she’d overheard Miranda saying her name, but didn’t have quite enough evidence to cause a scene. Katie waved at Elspeth cheerfully.
“She’s all right,” she said to Miranda. “She’s just a little moody from time to time.”
“Well, you ought to watch yourself, that’s all,” Miranda told Katie somewhat helplessly. “Elspeth can make your life a misery.”
“Oh, it’ll take more than knocking a few notes off a desk to make me miserable,” Katie grinned carelessly.
“They weren’t your notes,” muttered Miranda.
Finally it was the last lesson of the day. It seemed unfair that the class Miranda most enjoyed – science – should be ruined by Elspeth’s presence. Miranda liked the science master, Mr Dirger. He was extremely keen on animal biology and often lent Miranda slides of liver flukes and other unpleasant parasites for her microscope. He had a bristly beard and occasionally, when he was particularly excited about the study of some animal or another, his eyes would cross. Elspeth loathed him, and made no secret of it, but Mr Dirger was too deeply in love with teaching his subject to notice.
Miranda found this lesson engrossing. She was listening to Mr Dirger happily, and had almost forgotten Elspeth was even in the room.
“The survival of the fittest,” he was saying, “means that the best equipped animals survive and breed, and so build up the strength of the species. Just say you have a pride of lions. Lions use their size, strength and speed to hunt successfully. If two lions are born – one large, strong lion, and one small lion, then the smaller, weaker lion is not as likely to get enough food, is it? So, one might expect it to die before it gets a chance to breed. On the other hand, the bigger lion will hunt well, prosper and breed. It might work in the opposite way with an animal like a squirrel. Squirrels depend on being small and agile to escape from their predators. So a bigger, fatter squirrel has got a lower chance of surviving. Yes, Elspeth?”
Elspeth had raised her hand to ask a question. She smoothed her long, blonde hair composedly.
“I was just wondering, Mr Dirger,” she said sweetly. “Does it work the same way with people? I mean, are the small, runty, inferior humans less likely to survive?” She shot a nasty look at Miranda as she spoke, and Miranda reddened. “And what about the big fat ones?” Elspeth added, glancing over at Katie.
Mr Dirger answered the question unsuspectingly. Star and Mishka smirked at Miranda while she stared furiously down at her textbook. She longed to raise her hand and ask Mr Dirger if the pampered, soft humans were not the ones who were more likely to die out. But she didn’t dare. She knew that if she were to provoke Elspeth, the taunts and teasing would become much, much worse.
The lesson wore on and Miranda tried to put Elspeth and her friends out of her mind while she did her work. She was writing answers on a worksheet thoughtfully when a piece of folded paper arrived at her elbow. She glanced around to see who had thrown it, but all heads were bent over their work. Miranda unfolded the paper.
“Dear Miranda,” said the note. “Do you want to go for an ice cream at Lizzie’s Lunches after school? From Ellie.”
Miranda’s spirits rose. Ellie was good fun, after all. Maybe it was better to keep what friends she could while Elspeth was being so nasty. Ellie had shown over and over that she wasn’t scared of Elspeth. She looked at Ellie now, but the girl was frowning down at her worksheet. Miranda went back to her own work feeling rather better, and quite able to forget Elspeth’s unpleasantness.
At the end of the lesson, the girls all crowded through the classroom door. Miranda hung back a little, waiting for Ellie. When she appeared, Miranda grinned at her.
“I’ll just need to let my brother know,” she told Ellie.
“Huh?” Ellie looked blank.
“That we’re going for ice cream,” prompted Miranda.
Ellie stared. “Huh?” she said again.
At that moment, Miranda heard an explosion of giggles behind her. Without even turning around, she knew who it was. She also knew, in that instant, exactly what had happened. Ellie had not invited her for ice cream. Elspeth had written the note. She and her friends were by now howling with laughter at Miranda’s expense.
“What’s going on?” demanded Ellie in utter bewilderment.
Miranda didn’t answer. Her cheeks burning, she dropped the note and pushed past Ellie, refusing to look at Elspeth and her cronies. She scolded herself silently for being stupid enough to think anyone would want to be friends with her while she was Elspeth Richman-Snood’s chosen prey. Better to keep quiet, go it alone, and hope that Elspeth would eventually decide she wasn’t worth picking on.
David was made to walk the girls home every day upon their mother’s insistence. Today he was eating a sausage roll from the local lunchbar. David spent his entire pocket money allowance on food from Lizzie’s Lunches each week. When he wasn’t eating, he was hungry, and the only time he wasn’t hungry was when he was eating. Despite his constant eating, he was a beanpole. Miranda found it quite incredible. Once, she had secretly recorded everything David had eaten in one day. It had started before breakfast with a snack of two apples and half a bag of crisps (only half because their mother had confiscated the crisps as soon as she had seen them). Breakfast itself, being on a weekend, had consisted of three fried eggs, several pieces of bacon, four of Mr Crundle’s coconut-tofu pancakes (and it would have been five except that Katie had stuffed the last one into her jacket pocket as he reached for it). Not to mention three pieces of toast, a glass of milk and a glass of orange juice. Almost immediately afterwards, he set to work on morning tea, which had been six scones with jam and two cups of sweet tea. His pre-lunch snack had been a muesli bar, an orange, several chocolate biscuits and a thick slice of cheese. And so it had gone on all day. Miranda was left quite in awe of David’s powers of digestion. After watching him eat like that for a full day, she hadn’t felt quite able to stomach her dinner.
He grunted a greeting to them and shouldered his school satchel. All three turned for home.
“Old Goody gave us a ton of homework, didn’t she?” remarked Katie.
Miranda hmm’ed her agreement but she didn’t feel like chatting with Katie. David swallowed the last of his sausage roll and countered that she couldn’t possibly have as much homework as he did. He and Katie argued good-naturedly for the rest of the walk home.
Miranda kept her eyes on the footpath. Today, she felt irked by the friendship between David and Katie. It seemed very unfair. Katie had sent all her new school friends scurrying – and now she was even taking over Miranda’s privileged position as most-teased little sister at home. Indulging herself in a comforting wallow, Miranda tried to think of other ways Katie had made her life hard. She wondered if even her parents were favouring Katie over herself. Unfortunately, she couldn’t thinking of any such instances. She had to be satisfied with only David playing favourites. As they went through the front door, Katie bumped her leather satchel roughly into Miranda’s shin. Then she climbed the stairs obliviously, still yelling parting toppers to David as she went. Miranda scowled, rubbing her injured leg, and clumped up the stairs behind her.
* * *
The next morning, Miranda knew it was going to be another bad day. She woke up and dressed, still feeling grumpy from the memories of the day before. Her mood did not improve when she walked into a patch of pointy landmines – including dissected toy cars, fishtank stones, and burrs – that Katie had placed in the hallway outside her barricaded bedroom door.
“Owww!” screamed Miranda. “You’re a menace to society!” she yelled through the crack in Katie’s door.
As soon as her nose touched the door an alarm started screeching. Something that smelt suspiciously like Worcestershire sauce began squirting out of the keyhole. Before Miranda could jump out of the way, her school uniform was covered in splatters of brown. Katie had obviously run out of Mr Crundle’s shaving foam. As she gazed down at her Oodles pinafore in dismay, Katie appeared in the hallway behind her.
“Are you trying to get into my room?” Katie demanded with deep suspicion.
Miranda turned on her. “Get in? Get in? I was trying to walk past it! You know, to get to the lavatory? Where normal people go? I do have to walk past your room to get there, unfortunately!” she hollered.
“So you weren’t trying to get in?” Katie said doubtfully.
“Why would I want to get into your stupid room? What have you got in there – a nuclear weapon? Mum!”
Miranda stormed past Katie to her parents’ room. Mrs Crundle appeared from her wardrobe with a look of surprise.
“What on earth have you done to your uniform?” she asked Miranda sharply.
“Mum, she’s booby trapped that blimmin’ door again. Worcester sauce! And this is my last clean school shirt!”
“Just give it a wipe,” Mrs Crundle told Miranda tiredly.
“Aren’t you going to talk to her?”
“Well, you’re both big girls, darling.” Mrs Crundle disappeared back into her wardrobe, and emerged a moment later wearing an aged but neat jacket and skirt. “Can’t you talk to her yourself? I have to get to work – I’m in court this morning.”
“Mum, I smell like a roast beef dinner,” wailed Miranda. To her horror, her eyes were filling with tears. “I can’t stand this,” she shouted, to cover her embarrassment. “She gets away with murder!”
Mrs Crundle was surprised to see the typically wooden Miranda in tears. She immediately put her arm around her daughter.
“All right, Miranda, calm down. I get the message. I’ll talk to Katie tonight. You go and see what you can do about that shirt. The pinafore doesn’t matter – it’s dark enough to hide the stain, but you’ll need to give that blouse a really good mop. I’m sure you can clean it up beautifully, darling,” she added as Miranda stomped away.
Miranda felt like a storm was brewing all that day. First she received a poor mark in Miss Goody’s class. Then she dropped a library book into the puddle beneath the water fountain while she was taking a drink. And the Worcestershire sauce had not cleaned up beautifully. It had cleaned up just as Miranda had expected, which was not at all well. After catching sight of Miranda’s blouse, Elspeth commented that, “some of the leeches obviously need lessons in hygiene if they can’t wear clean clothes to school.” A steady stream of similar snide remarks had kept up all morning. Elspeth’s jokes, of course, kept the ever-present Star and Mishka in stitches. Miranda tried to ignore them, her face flushed with resentment and shame. Katie made matters a hundred times worse by assuring Elspeth that Miranda was, in fact, very hygienic, and explaining how thoroughly Miranda washed her hands after dissecting earthworms to view under her microscope. Elspeth had never heard anything so hideous, so revolting, or so vulgar, and she made no attempt to hide her feelings. But all of this was nothing compared to the events of the pre-lunch period. It happened in Mrs Huffington’s English class, as the teacher handed back marked written reports.
“These are the essays I asked you to do on real life situations in which you have used listening skills,” she told the class.
Mrs Huffington was very enthusiastic about teaching the Oodles girls to communicate well. She was always asking the girls to make up plays or write stories about listening skills. She also talked a lot about being assertive, reading body language and showing respect for others. Miranda didn’t mind Mrs Huffington, although she sometimes felt that she expected rather too much from a group of twelve and thirteen year olds in the way of being civilized.
As the teacher placed Katie’s paper on her desk, she commented, “Lovely work, Katie, and you seem to understand what listening skills are, but I asked for a situation from real life.”
“It was from real life, Mrs Huffington,” Katie replied, and Miranda groaned inwardly, waiting for Katie to dig herself into a hole again.
“Really, Katie, have you forgotten what you wrote? It was a fascinating composition about an argument with a cousin over a practical joke he played on you.”
“I remember it perfectly well, Mrs Huffington. It did happen, I promise.”
“Miss Pickerwick, are you trying to tell me your cousin somehow used magic to make your ears grow to the size of an elephant’s?”
Katie seemed suddenly at a loss for words.
“Er…” she started, reddening, and then fell silent, looking quite panicky.
“I think what Katie meant, Miss,” Miranda broke in, her sympathy getting the better of her, “was that …er, her cousin really does play practical jokes on her – and that she was using real life as inspiration for a fictional story. Maybe.”
“Maybe her cousin did play a magical joke on her – and made her body the size of an elephant’s!” muttered Elspeth, upon which Mishka and Star both sputtered and coughed to hide their cackles.
Katie, who hadn’t heard the comment, glanced around at the sound of the three girls’ giggles and smiled brightly at them all. At that moment, something inside Miranda snapped. She was sick of Elspeth’s comments. Sick of her false smiles and sham kindness in front of their teachers. Sick of her digs about being poor, and her sly jokes about Katie’s size, hair, and weird ways. She was sick of everything, but mostly sick of Elspeth. Before she could stop herself, she had turned around and was saying sweetly, “If you had a magical cousin, Elspeth, I would say that he had played a practical joke that had turned you into a scheming, snotty teacher’s pet. But since you don’t, I have to assume that you were just born that way.”
The rest of the class fell silent in disbelief. After what seemed like a dreadfully long pause, a couple of the other girls in the class, including Ellie and Felicity, started to snort and squeak as they attempted to stifle their giggles. Elspeth turned white with fury.
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