Time for Jas (6 page)

Marek, who to this day has still barely addressed a word to anybody.

‘Thank you, Marek.’ Miss Foundry was practically crying.

He stopped. He looked dazed. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I just like that part.’

It could have gone either way. The moment when the weird foreign kid held up his hand and confessed to a love of miserable American literature, it could have been the kiss of social death. But like I said, we were astonished. He was so good maybe because he was just doing it for himself, and not trying to convince us the book was a masterpiece. And it was clear he was telling the truth. He wasn’t trying to show off – he really did like that part.

Tom started to clap first. Then little by little, the rest of the class joined in, until everyone was cheering and making as much noise as possible, and Marek Valenta was beetroot red with embarrassment and mortification, but also trying quite hard not to grin.

I think, underneath his poker face exterior, Marek Valenta is not as stiff and boring as he likes to pretend.

I think Marek Valenta might even be quite interesting.

Dodi skated over as Tom and I watched Marek disappear, and said Jake’s parents have invited her for dinner on Saturday, and she thought we should all go.

‘But they’re not invited,’ Jake objected.

Colin said he had a family party. Tom said he’d rather eat his skateboard, and anyway he was going to Bristol tomorrow to see his dad for the weekend. Dodi looked disappointed. I left before she actually suggested I go to Bristol with Tom.

I looked for Marek as I crossed the park, but I didn’t see him.

At home, Twig was ordering Jas to explain why she had missed yet another day of school, and Jas was still refusing to tell him.

‘I’m sick,’ she growled.

‘You’re lying!’

Pixie, who was mashing hardboiled eggs and avocado for Pumpkin’s tea, murmured something about lying being bad for people’s karma.

‘If you lie,’ she said, ‘bad things will happen to you in a future life.’

‘Bad things will happen to her now if she doesn’t tell me the truth,’ Twig said. ‘Blue knows what’s going on, don’t you Blue?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘LIAR!’

Pixie cried, ‘Karma, karma, karma!’ Pumpkin, encouraged by all the shouting, started hurling avocado egg around the kitchen. Twig folded his arms and glared at everybody, looking quite scary because his purple eye is turning green and yellow and he can’t really open it.

‘All right, I’ll tell you!’ Jas grumbled.

Afterwards, Twig said hadn’t he told her the whole wearing wings to school thing was a terrible idea, and what was she thinking putting those stupid leaflets in people’s lockers and she was even more of an idiot than he thought she was. Jas burst into tears.

‘I knew something was up!’ he shouted. ‘I knew it! Why didn’t you tell me? I would have sorted them out!’

‘Tell him, Blue,’ Jas sniffed.

‘She didn’t want a fuss,’ I said. ‘She thought it would make things worse.’

Twig started to punch his left hand with his right fist, which I think is something people do before rugby matches, and announced that he was going to kill Courtney and Megan and Chandra and Fran. Pixie murmured that violence was never a solution. Twig said sometimes it was. Jas said she would rather
Twig didn’t kill them, but that it was nice of him to offer. She stopped crying. They went outside to practise his catching (which is still hopeless), and I went up to my room and lay on my bed and thought about Marek, standing watching us from under the horse-chestnut tree.

‘Do you miss Prague, Marek
?’ I remembered Mum asking when he came for that drink.

‘Yes, I do. Very much,’
he had answered.

I wonder what it is like to leave your country and come somewhere that is completely new? His English is so good, sometimes I forget that he doesn’t come from here.

Did he have friends in Prague? When he waved at us, should I have gone over to talk to him?

Sometimes, like when he helped me in English or when he almost smiles at something, I think he likes me, but most of the time he looks at me like I am just weird.

Anyway, I couldn’t have spoken to him in the park. He was gone the minute I saw him.

If he’d wanted to talk to us, he would have hung around.

But maybe I should have tried harder, just the same.

I went for a walk with Zoran today, and he said that Gloria is going to Grandma’s tomorrow to start getting things ready for the horses.

‘There is a lot to organise,’ he said. ‘Moving twelve horses across the country … will you help?’

‘What,
ride to Devon
?’

Zoran laughed and said that charming though it was picturing the entire Gadsby family setting off on a giant pony trek from London to Dartmoor, the horses would actually be going by truck.

‘I meant, will you help us pack up in London, and unpack in Devon? Blue, what are you doing?’

‘Hmm?’

‘You keep staring at the pavement.’

With everything that has been happening with Jas, I haven’t thought about the drawings for a while, but it has become a habit, I guess. Gutters, alleys, walls – everywhere I go, I am looking for them.

‘No reason,’ I said. ‘Of course we’ll help.’

After Iris died, when our whole family was falling apart from being so sad, Zoran is the one who saved us. I’m not exaggerating. We had become these crushed, sad little people, but then he came to live with us, and even though he is quite chaotic and not always very
efficient, he managed to make us all feel better. I’m very happy that he’s going to live with Grandma, but I don’t like the idea of him going away. Not just because, along with Skye and Grandma, he is the only person who ever listens to me, but also because the way things feel at home right now, I think we need him here.

‘Jas is being bullied at school,’ I told him, and explained about the Cupcake Crew (I left out the bit about Jas’s poems and the wings).

‘Do your parents know?’ he asked.

‘She doesn’t want them to. Zoran, what should I do?’

‘She won’t let you get involved?’

‘She doesn’t think I can help.’

Zoran frowned as he thought. ‘I should talk to your parents.’

‘Please don’t!’ I begged.

Zoran said fine, but made me swear that if things got worse, I would call him. Then he said that all I could do was to try to make Jas feel better about herself.

‘How?’

‘I don’t know! Do something fun with her.’

We passed another alleyway, then turned onto the Avenue, just opposite the toy shop. Suddenly I had an idea.

‘Can you lend me some money?’ I asked.

There was a smell of burning in the house when I got home. I followed it upstairs. Jas was sitting on the floor of her bedroom, holding some old hair straighteners of Flora’s in one hand and a strand of smoking hair in the other.

‘Do you know how to use these?’ she demanded.

‘What are you
doing
?’

‘It’s for those girls.’ Twig wandered in from the bathroom, examining his greeny-yellow eye in a hand-mirror.

‘What girls?’ I asked.

‘Those cupcake creatures. She’s trying to look like them. She’s basically giving in.’

‘I’m not giving in!’ Jas glared at him. ‘I’m just following Dodi’s advice.’

‘What
was
Dodi’s advice?’ I asked.

‘To be more mainstream.’

Twig grunted that Jas couldn’t be mainstream if she tried. Jas threw the hair straighteners at him. He dodged. They landed on his desk instead, knocking a glass of water all over his maths homework.

‘I bought chalks,’ I said.

Twig stopped shouting. Jas frowned.

‘Let’s draw,’ I said.

And that is how we spent our Saturday evening.
We practised with chalk flowers on the paving outside the kitchen, then worked our way up the wall and on to the trellis before moving to the front of the house. Our drawings are nothing like the chalk artist’s. Those are art. Ours look like children’s scribbling, because the sad truth is none of us are any good at drawing, and we can only do flowers and birds and cats, but when you have lots and lots of them in different colours all squished together higgledy-piggledy, it doesn’t matter.

The final effect was like one of those cards where you have a picture of loads of jelly beans or M&Ms so close up you sort of lose sense of what they are, and just see a big jumble of shape and colour. Except more messy. Really,
really
messy. So messy that by the time we had finished, way after it got dark and we could only see what we had done by street light at the front and the garden light at the back, the three of us were covered head to toe in multi-coloured chalk.

‘You look like a butterfly,’ I told Jas. She’d used mainly pink and orange chalks for her cats, and rubbed her face a lot.

‘A butterfly!’ she scoffed.

‘And Twig looks like a sort of sci-fi warrior,’ I said, because his face was all blue and white.

‘But your face is clean …’ Twig exchanged a glance
with Jas. I started to back away but they were already pouncing on me.

I thought about what Pixie said, about clothes showing on the outside what you look like inside.
This is me,
I thought as I put away the chalks.
Messy and colourful and much more crazy than I look.

After we’d finished, I sat in the bath for ages, watching the water change colour as the chalk washed off me. I wonder what a chalk artist looks like when a drawing is finished. Is it like us, a multi-coloured bird or alien or butterfly? I don’t think that’s possible, because if someone like that was around surely people would notice. Maybe the opposite is true. Maybe, when the chalk artist draws, all the vivid colour and strange beauty flow right out and into the picture, so that in the end he or she isn’t multi-coloured and shining, but rather grey and tired.

I guess Zoran was right. Maybe it won’t last, but doing something fun
did
help. But I’d be lying if I said it was the only reason I did it. I want the chalk artist to see what we’ve done.

I want to see what the next drawing will be.

I pulled the plug. Sunset-coloured water swirled around the drain and disappeared.

Sometimes you only notice things when you see them through other people’s eyes. It was like that at lunchtime.

Ever since that English lesson when he read out loud, the boys have become obsessed with Marek Valenta.

‘Why?’ Dodi said, when they were talking about him at the end of Maths. ‘He’s just a secret swot, and he clearly doesn’t
like
any of us.’

‘Does that matter?’ Tom asked. ‘
We
like
him
. He’s so odd! Let’s ask him to eat with us.’

He bounced over to Marek, and carried on bouncing him all the way to the canteen. I don’t think anyone could resist Tom, once he’s decided something.

At lunch, the boys asked Marek who his favourite football team was (something Prague) and did he skateboard (he prefers roller-blading). Hattie asked why he loved Steinbeck so much and did he like acting (he just thinks it’s a great book, and no). There was an awkward silence, and then Tom changed the subject and asked me what I was doing for half-term.

Dodi beamed. ‘Blue’s going to Devon,’ she said. ‘To help Zoran and Gloria move the horses.’

Tom asked, what horses. Dodi explained. ‘I can’t believe you’ve never been to Gloria’s stables,’ she said. ‘They’re so cool. They’re right under the motorway. You should ask Blue to take you.’

I glanced up. Marek was frowning, looking from Dodi to me like he couldn’t believe I just let her talk instead of me. He looked away when he saw me looking, but I felt hot with embarrassment.

I hadn’t realised until then how much it actually annoys me that Dodi won’t let me speak.

‘I’m actually allergic to horses,’ Tom said. ‘Otherwise I’d go like a shot. What’s everyone else doing?’

Hattie is going to violin camp. Tom is going back to Bristol, and Colin is going with him. Dodi is repainting her bedroom.

‘And I’m helping her,’ Jake said.

Tom laughed and called Jake a sentimental idiot. Colin elbowed him in the ribs. Hattie said she wished she had a boyfriend as sweet as him. Jake went red.