Zero

ZERO

  Claire Stevens

 

  Text copyright © 2014 Claire Stevens

  All rights reserved.

  Image copyright © 2014 Matthew Robinson

  All rights reserved.

  To Baz. For being ace.

  Chapter One

  Rain battered the windscreen of the car. The sun had been up since before five but it hadn’t managed to break through the clouds yet. ‘You don’t have to come in with me if you don’t want to,’ I said, running the back of my fingernail through the patch of steam where our breath had fogged the car windows.

  I already knew what the answer would be but my stomach still sank when my mum pulled the handbrake with rather more force than necessary before she answered me. ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘It’s only over there.’ I pointed across the road to the staff car park and the reception block, fluorescent-lit against the grey sky. ‘I can go by myself.’

  Mum pulled the key out of the ignition and turned to face me. The worst of it was, she didn’t even look angry, just sad. ‘That’s not what the terms of your bail say.’

  I bit my top lip and stared determinedly out of the window. The clouds seemed to have got darker in the last few minutes. Behind me, Chec started kicking the back of my chair. ‘Hello? Two-door car? I can’t get out unless you do.’

  We clambered out and stood on the pavement outside the parade of shops while Mum fiddled with the locks on her ancient 2CV. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Chec eying me up and down. After a minute or so of her staring I’d had enough. ‘What?’

  She raised her eyebrows and gave me a slightly hurt look. ‘Just having a look at what you’re wearing,’ she said patiently. I said nothing. I knew better than to ask what was wrong with what I was wearing.

  ‘What?’ She widened her eyes innocently. ‘I’m just saying, maybe we should have got together this morning and done your hair. You know, for confidence. Or put together an outfit for you.’ I looked down at the jeans, vest and flannel shirt I was wearing, confused. This was an outfit.

  Chec started to hover, bouncing slightly on her toes as she peered at me. Unable to hold herself back any longer, she clamped her ring binder between her knees and reached for my hair. I scowled and batted her away with more force than was strictly necessary. Usually I was happy to go along with her when she wanted a hair and makeup dress-up doll, but today I totally wasn’t in the mood.

  Her arms fell to her sides and she glowered at me from under her eyebrows. With a sigh I relented, turning my head towards her obediently, reminding myself that she was only trying to help. Chec smiled and started raking her frosted-pink nails through my hair, combing it out and weaving it into a neat fishtail plait. She leaned back against the car to admire her work whilst Mum swore quietly and tried to thump her car key into the lock.

  A few shops along, the door to the newsagents’ opened with a metallic buzz and a tall boy sauntered out, uncapping a bottle of thick pink milkshake. He stopped and took a long slug from it, what little light there was catching his golden hair. Lost in his own world, he started to wander down the street in our direction, reading the label on his milkshake bottle and taking another appreciative swig.

  I fake-coughed loudly and Mal’s eyes snapped up, a grin lifting the side of his mouth. He ambled over to Chec and leant in to kiss her cheek. She giggled and tried to squirm away from him. ‘Get off! Don’t kiss me when you’ve been drinking that revolting stuff.’ He laughed and grabbed her shoulders, trying to nuzzle her neck, making her shriek louder.

  I fought the urge to stick my fingers in my mouth and make sick noises and shuffled a bit away from them.

  Giving up and draping an arm round Chec’s shoulder, Mal drained the last of his sticky drink and chucked the bottle into a bin. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and thumped his chest with his fist, belching. ‘Hey, Ro. How’s it-’ His eyes snapped fully open when he looked at me and he choked slightly. ‘Wow. Ro. That’s...some eyeliner you’ve got going on there. It looks cool, though,’ he said hastily, but he glanced blatantly between me and Chec, doing that thing that people often do, that thing where they stare at us, thinking: Wow. I can’t believe they’re even related.

  Ignoring Chec’s silencing elbow to the ribs, he pointed to his chest. ‘Biology A-level. I do know a bit about protective colouration. Is this because of what Cassie said on Facebook? Because you know no one will believe her. Don’t you?’ He looked at me in what I’m sure he meant to be an earnest, reassuring way.

  I felt the colour drain out of my cheeks. One of the first things Mum had done when we got home from the police station was take away my laptop and phone. ‘What did she say?’

  Mal’s mouth opened and closed for a few seconds like a startled fish. ‘Mal, you’re such a dick!’ Chec wrenched away from him and started swatting at him with her folder.

  ‘What did she say?’ I looked at Chec and Mal, who both had trouble meeting my eye.

  Chec linked her arm through mine, blasting Mal with laser eyes. ‘She’s just being Cassie, doing her attention-seeking thing. She’s like that girl in Mean Girls-’

  ‘Rachel McAdams,’ Mal supplied.

  ‘Shut up, Mal. She’s like Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls, when she goes round telling everyone that the other girl’s a lesbian just to be spiteful.’

  ‘She called me a lesbian on Facebook?’ I asked, thoroughly confused.

  ‘No, she called you a thief.’

  Great.

  As soon as we were through the school gate, Mum said, ‘Mal, you don’t have to come into reception with us.’ Mal, who’d known my mum long enough to recognise an order when it was being given, sidled off, giving me a sympathetic wave and a ‘text me’ hand signal to Chec.

  The beige and blue reception area was quiet, with just the whir of the photocopier in the background. The secretary looked up when we walked in, did a double take and started to look uncomfortable.

  Mum ignored her pained look. ‘Hel-lo,’ she said in her best telephone voice while I hovered nervously next to her. ‘I’m Kate Harper; I need to sign Roanne in today.’ She looked at the secretary expectantly.

  The secretary’s mouth worked, but no sound came out and she started to pluck nervously at her fuzzy cardigan. ‘Mr Mitchum asked to see you, actually,’ she managed to get out eventually, not really seeming to know whether to address me or my mum. The headteacher wanted to see me? This didn’t bode amazingly well.

  Mum pulled an impatient face. ‘Is it going to take very long? I’ve got a lesson starting in twenty minutes.’

  ‘Um... Why don’t I get him to come out and see you?’ The secretary scurried off into the office area in a cloud of flowery perfume.

  Mum shrugged at me. ‘I’m going to go and move the car off the yellow lines. Don’t go anywhere.’ I saluted her and sank down onto the bright blue hessian couch. The school office smelt of photocopiers and instant coffee. I fiddled with my fringe, wishing I had my phone with me.

  I hoped Mum would come back before Mr Mitchum arrived. Chec and I had only been going to this school for a year and the only time I’d spoken to him so far, he’d spent the whole conversation calling me Joanne.

  Chec sat down next to me on the too-squashy sofa and tucked her leg under her. I gave her a watery smile and she responded with a sorrowful look, her delicate eyebrows pinching together in an upside-down V.

  She knotted her fingers together in her lap and then reached over to take my hand, twining her fingers with mine. ‘Don’t worry about what Cassie said. No one listens to her.’ I smiled at her lie. Cassie was the queen bee of the sixth form: everyone listened to her. ‘Nothing ever goes on in this crappy village, and everyone heard what happened on Saturday, so people are going to stare today, but if you just ignore them it
’ll all die down by lunchtime.’

  Which would be a great plan, if I was Chec. She drifted through life casually sticking two fingers up to anyone and anything sent to upset her. ‘I want to go home. I don’t think it was a good idea for me to come in today.’

  Chec frowned at me. ‘But if you hide at home, everyone’s going to think you’re guilty.’

  ‘I think the fact that I was arrested is going to make people think I’m guilty.’

  ‘But you didn’t DO it!’ she hooted in outrage.

  Her faith in me went a little way towards easing the hard, bilious knot in my chest because, God knew, unconditional love had been a little thin on the ground at home this weekend.

  If I hadn’t been aware before, my parents made it clear on the car journey home that they liked being called by the police to say that their daughter had been arrested on suspicion of shoplifting only slightly more than they liked terrorism or malaria. My phone, laptop and iPad had been spirited away as soon as I’d walked through the front door and it had been strongly hinted that I should keep to my room as much as possible.

  ‘Everyone thinks I did it,’ I said, remembering the look on the police officers’ faces while I was being interviewed.

  Chec didn’t contradict me. ‘I should have been there with you.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. It’s lucky you weren’t there; we’d probably both have been arrested.’

  ‘But at least you wouldn’t have gone through all that alone.’ I opened my mouth to disagree, but then shut it again. The time between the store detective stopping me and my parents arriving to pick me up had pretty much been the scariest few hours of my life. ‘You asked me to come into town with you, and I said no. I’m a bad sister,’ she said glumly.

  A group of Year Nines burst in through the front doors, taking the shortcut instead of going round the back to the pupils’ entrance. Their giggles were cut short when they saw me and were replaced by a short period of stunned silence followed by thrilled whispers. Excellent. I closed my eyes, wishing with all my being for the power of invisibility. To just switch myself off and let the world drift on without me.

  The door opened again and I got ready to hide again, but it was just Mum. She came and sat with us, nodding gravely at Chec, like they were hanging round the hospital bed of a mutual friend. The first bell rang, summoning everyone to registration. ‘You should probably go to your class.’ For a second, I thought she was talking to me, but no. Chec started to look mutinous, but she knew our mother too well to bother arguing.

  ‘See you in English,’ she said sadly, shouldering her bag and giving me a limp thumbs-up. She trudged slowly past the dusty trophy cabinet, as if giving my mum time to change her mind, and then out into the main corridor.

  Over at the reception desk the phone buzzed. ‘Mr Mitchum is ready to see you now,’ the unfortunate secretary said, and we duly filed in.

  ‘They can’t do this, you know,’ she ranted to me on the way home. I found it hard to pay much notice; my mind was chanting ‘kicked out of school, kicked out of school, kicked out of school’ in time to the vibrations of the rumble strips on the way back to our village.

  ‘They have a legal obligation to educate you. They can’t just- IDIOT!’ She swerved violently and slammed the heel of one hand down on the horn while making an angry telephone gesture with the other to the man in the white van who had a phone clamped between his chin and his shoulder. I sank a bit lower in my seat. My mum’s two pet peeves were people talking on the phone whilst driving, and litterbugs. I’ve found out through cruel experience that it’s a lot harder to hide when she’s running down the street waving a crisp packet at someone’s retreating back, bellowing, ‘I think you’ve DROPPED something!’

  ‘They can’t do this,’ she repeated. I felt too weary to point out that it was too late; they already had. ‘We can take it to the board of governors. They can’t take away your right to an education.’

  I saw a tiny glimmer of hope. ‘Being as I’m not allowed in school, can I have my laptop back? So I don’t fall behind with my work.’ I wondered whether to ask for my phone too, but decided not to chance it just yet.

  ‘Hmm? Oh. Yes, I suppose so.’

  We came in through the side gate and I let myself in through the back door while Mum went off to my dad’s studio at the end of the garden.

  My stomach growled as I slung my bag onto the kitchen counter. I glanced at the microwave. Ten o’clock. I’d had bacon and eggs for breakfast just two hours ago and I was starving already.

  I wondered if anyone would miss the cold roast chicken sitting under cling film in the fridge, but deciding I’d pushed my luck far enough I grabbed the peanut butter jar and a spoon and ran up to my room. My stomach squirmed and roared again while I waited for our crappy rural broadband speed to finally give me access to the internet, so I dug my spoon into the peanut butter jar and voila! A peanut butter lollipop.

  The internet screen pinged up and a few clicks later Cassie’s profile picture smirked out at me.

  Lock up your valuables - turns out one of the Homeschool Freaks is a jewel thief. Hands up who saw that one coming? It’s always the quiet ones....

  Homeschool Freaks. Good one, Cassie.

  A hundred and thirty-seven likes. Huh.

  Chec and I had been home schooled since we were five. I hadn’t minded it - I didn’t have anything to compare it to - but Chec had always lobbied our parents hard to be mainstream schooled. When we started our A-levels, she’d finally got her wish and was now one of the more popular girls in our year, but looking at Facebook it seemed that the home schooling stigma had been harder to shake off than she’d thought.

  I read and re-read Cassie’s post. Okay, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but her words still felt like a punch to the gut. Working on the assumption that people who kick the queen bee’s hive get stung, I’d never crossed swords with Cassie and it pissed me off that she’d done this.

  While I wasn’t unpopular, I had never been what you’d call popular, either. Not like Chec was, where everyone knew your name, where you went at the weekends and what you were wearing. I knew Chec would bang the drum for my innocence, but to everyone else I would just be That Girl, the one who nicked some jewellery from a shop and got caught.

  Except I hadn’t done it. I hadn’t bloody done it, and everyone thought I had.

  I looked at Cassie’s simpering face again, resisting the urge to stick my fist through the screen. I considered changing my status to ‘Roanne Harper hopes Cassie O’Donnell catches chlamydia’ and decided against it.

  All internet business concluded, I put the laptop to one side and flopped backwards onto my bed, bringing a cushion up over my face. I lay there for a while, enjoying the rare silence, before deciding no. No more wallowing. The To Be Read pile on my bedside table was teetering out of control, but after reading the same paragraph about a billion times I gave up and sloped off into the garden.

  ‘Hey, Pumpkin,’ my dad greeted me as I pushed open the door to his studio. He didn’t look up from the wide canvas he was working on, but this was normal.

  I went over and curled up on the knackered sofa. He started clearing away his paints, wiping his brushes on a cloth and waiting for me to start with whatever I wanted to say.

  My dad created two types of paintings: the big, bland pieces he churned out that made money, and the smaller, clever pieces he actually enjoyed painting, that didn’t. The canvas he was working on was a huge abstract thing in soothing blues, probably meant to encourage people to invest more of their cash with whatever corporate headquarters it was bound for.

  He started poking at the canvas with a small knife, smoothing something over. ‘Did Mum tell you what happened?’ I ventured.

  He put the knife down on his table and nodded. ‘Don’t worry too much. It’ll all get sorted out.’

  I poked at a bit of paint on the wooden arm of the chair with my thumbnail. ‘She’s writing to the governors.’r />
  ‘Yes, she told me that.’ He frowned. ‘I think she also mentioned the local authority and the papers.’ He caught my horrified expression. ‘It won’t get that far, I’m sure.’

  Do you think I did it? I wanted to ask him. Are you looking at your eldest daughter (by ten minutes) and thinking, I raised a thief.

  I picked at a bit of dried paint on the arm of the sofa and sighed. Dad raised an eyebrow at me. ‘Don’t tell me you’re bored already?’

  I shrugged noncommittally, not wanting to ask him what was really on my mind. He glanced at the canvas he’d been working on. My dad kept regular hours, for an artist. He headed off to his studio at eight in the morning and never came back to the house until late afternoon. I’d asked him once whether he didn’t need to wait for inspiration to strike. He’d laughed and told me that most of the time he was a glorified printing press. ‘Fancy a run?’

  Although I avoided unnecessary physical activity wherever possible, over the years my parents had bullied and cajoled me into taking various types of exercise. Team sports - or indeed any activity where you have to try and anticipate what other people are going to do - baffled me, so they’d encouraged me in middle-distance running, purely on the basis that I didn’t have the short, wiry physique to make me a naturally fast sprinter and my boredom threshold was too low for long-distance.

  The deal I had going with my parents was that as long as I did a 5k run every other day or so, they wouldn’t complain about me spending the rest of my spare time curled up on my bed reading. My dad ran middle-distance too, and now that I was tall enough to keep up with him, we often ran together. I recognised his offer as the olive branch/acknowledgement of my innocence he’d meant it as.

  I managed a smile. ‘Only if you want to be thrashed.’

  He looked at me, mock-annoyed. ‘That’s fighting talk where I come from, young lady.’

  Outside, we stretched holding onto the swing set. ‘Normal run or post-apocalypse?’

  I was in the mood to be cheered up. ‘Post-apocalypse, please.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said as he stretched out his hamstring. ‘It’s the year 2153, and humanity has been all but wiped out by a zombie plague-’

  ‘We did zombie plague last week.’ I pulled my arm across my chest.

  He sighed, shifting to the other leg. ‘Fine, then. It’s the year 2153, and humanity has been all but wiped out by environmental disasters. The straggling remains of our species live in a series of vast underground caverns run by a totalitarian, militaristic government. You have discovered that the crazy dictator running your cavern - for some inexplicable reason, given the low population levels and limited resources - is planning to declare war on the next cavern over-’

  ‘How have I discovered this?’

  ‘Because you are a horrible, precocious, nosy child and often go poking around where you’re not wanted. Anyway, the evil overlord is planning on bringing about World War Three, and you’ve just managed to trick your way past the guards and out of your home cavern. Miss Harper, your mission, should you choose to accept it, involves finding the next pod over and warning them before the crazy dictator - that’s me - catches you, or the hazardous environment kills you. You can go in any direction you like and I’m giving you a one minute head start, after which I’m releasing the dogs. Go!’

  Yelping with laughter, I sprinted off towards the woods at the end of our field.