Jealous Girl
Table of Contents
Title
By the Same Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
MEET THE ST JUDE'S GIRLS . . .
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
MEET THE AUTHOR . . .
Secrets at St Jude's New Girl
Extract: JUMPING TO CONFUSIONS
EXTREME KISSING
SELINA PENALUNA
Secrets at
St Jude's
www.rbooks.co.uk
Also by Carmen Reid
Secrets at St Jude's: New Girl
for adult readers:
The Personal Shopper
Did the Earth Move?
Three in a Bed
Up All Night
How Was it For You?
Late Night Shopping
Secrets at
St Jude's
Jealous Girl
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ISBN 9781407049533
Version 1.0
www.randomhouse.co.uk
SECRETS AT ST JUDE'S: JEALOUS GIRL
A CORGI BOOK
ISBN: 9781407049533
Version 1.0
Published in Great Britain by Corgi Books,
an imprint of Random House Children's Books
A Random House Group Company
This edition published 2009
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Copyright © Carmen Reid, 2009
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MEET THE ST JUDE'S GIRLS . . .
GINA
Full name: Gina Louise Winklemann-Peterson
Home: A fabulous white and glass, architect-designed beach house with pool on the Californian coast
Likes: Sunshine (sadly not often found in Edinburgh), swimming, Halloween, pointy ankle boots, Prada or anything Prada-esque, Reece's Pieces, her cell phone, her little brother Menzie (sometimes), coffee, a certain charming part-time waiter at the Arts Café called Dermot O'Hagan
Dislikes: Slithery octopus-type kisses, the totally gross sludge-green St Jude's school uniform, deadly dull history lessons, Charlie Fotherington-whatsit, boiled vegetables of any kind (I mean, guys, like, haven't you heard of stir-fry?)
Would like to be: A screenwriter – but absolutely no one in the whole world knows about that
Fascinating fact: Gina has three other best friends at her old school in California – Paula, Ria and Maddison. They still can't believe she goes to boarding school in Scotland
NIFFY
Full name: Luella Edith Millicent Pethurer Nairn-Bassett (no wonder she's called either 'Niffy' or 'Lou')
Home: The ancient crumbling ancestral mansion Blacklough Hall in Cumbria, England
Likes: Playing pranks, enormous horses and slobbery dogs, all team games (especially hockey – she's really good) the St J's assembly game Banshee Buzzword Bingo (which she invented), her big brother Finn, the odd sneaked glass of expensive red wine, all school food – especially pudding
Dislikes: Dresses, dressing up, poncy shoes and fussy clothes of any description, make up, fussing with her hair, fussing about anything at all, her real name
Would like to be: A professional rider – an international show-jumper, or maybe a three-day eventer – that way she could do show jumping, dressage and her favourite, cross-country jumping
Fascinating fact: She can be fully dressed in all her riding clothes and hat in twenty-five seconds flat
MIN
Full name: Asimina Singupta Home: A big family house with a huge garden in a suburb of Durban, South Africa Likes: Running really really fast and winning, being top of the class in every single subject, doing homework (it's so interesting when you really get into it), mango lassis, gold bracelets, reading science books, borrowing Amy's clothes, her Mum's home-made curries
Dislikes: The sight of blood, Biology lessons, baby-sitting her little brothers and sisters, the food at St J's, wearing her hair in plaits, Scottish grey skies
Would like to be: A medical researcher or medical physicist. She has to do something medical because of her doctor parents but it can't involve blood!
Fascinating fact: Min's mother taught herself Italian and went all the way to Pisa to get her medical degree
AMY
Full name: Amy Margaret McCorquodale
Home: An amazing penthouse flat in Glasgow, Scotland, with a terrace and panoramic view of the city
Likes: Designer jeans (Iceberg), designer bags (Marc Jacobs), designer boots (Jimmy Choo, but only when her Dad is feeling incredibly generous), Edinburgh's Harvey Nichols (obviously), very handsome boys, diamonds, champagne, dance music, dressing up and going out, her gran's mince and tatties
Dislikes: Penny Boswell-Hackett, Mrs Norah 'the Neb' Knebworth, everything in Niffy's wardrobe, French lessons, people teasing her about her Glaswegian accent, oh and Penny Boswell-Hackett (have you got that?)
Would like to be: Officially, she's going to do a law degree then join her dad's nightclub business. Secretly, she'd like to be a famous and fabulous actress
Fascinating fact: Amy's mum and dad were teenagers when she . . . er . . . arrived. She was brought up by her dad, her gran and her grandpa. She hasn't seen her real mum for years
Jealous Girl
Chapter One
'Gina, you cannot go back there! You just cannot leave us again!' Ria was lying back on a lilo in the pool, dangling a tanned arm into the cool turquoise-blue water. She was once again bringing up the subject which had bugged Gina all summer long.
'Ria . . .' Gina warned. 'I don't want to talk about this.'
'But Gina . . .' Paula began now, sitting up on the stripy sun lounger where she had been basting her lean black limbs in the shimmering heat of a Californian August.
'Yeah, Edinburro!' Maddison chipped in from the edge of the pool.
Gina, who was walking back out to the tiled pool terrace with a tray of iced drinks in her hands, felt as if she'd been ambushed. Had her best friends been talking about her? she wondered. Had they been planning this little debate while she was in the kitchen mixing up the tall cranberry and grapefruit coolers chinking with ice and soda water?
She knew why her friends were mad at her. Even though they'd all been together since junior high and she knew and loved all three of them very dearly, there were new friends in Gina's life now. There were reasons for Paula, Ria and Maddison to be jealous.
This wasn't about boys . . . well, OK, a certain boy with a wide, mischievous smile was maybe something to do with it. No, this was all because last term Gina had been dragged kicking and screaming by her totally fed up mother to a new school. Not just any new school either. Her mother's old school. Not in California either, or any other state in the whole of the US.
Gina, whose grades had plummeted, whose behaviour had apparently become 'unacceptable', whose all-consuming interest in clothes – and occasionally boys – was driving her mom wild, had practically been frogmarched onto a plane at LAX airport (though admittedly she'd been sent business class to ease the pain).
She'd been flown all the way to Scotland. To a grey, grey, chilly but beautiful city called Edinburgh. To a weirdly old-fashioned girls' school called St Jude's, which she'd pretty well hated for the entire first week at least. But then she'd started to make friends, and the friends were good ones; and then somehow it hadn't seemed so bad; and now, hadn't she promised her new friends, Amy, Niffy and Min – not to mention her mother – that she would definitely be going back in three days' time for the 'autumn' term and the Upper Fifth.
She might even (she and her mother were still in discussions on the subject) sit exams in Scotland next summer.
Gina approached the table, admiring her slim, brown, bikinied reflection in the huge glass doors that led to the terrace. Swimming every day, she'd gained sleek, toned muscles and a deep tan. Her hair had been lightened by both the sun and the expert attentions of her favourite colourist, Sandrina.
She set down the drinks and looked out over the pool. Long and deep enough to be really refreshing, it was picture-perfect blue. Ria's hand dangling in the water had set off ripple after ripple, causing the bright sunlight to dapple, wink and break across the surface.
Gina knew she was going to miss California. The daily bright, bright blue of the sky. The warmth that sank deep into your bones. And of course she'd miss these girls. All summer long they had been together: swimming, playing tennis, hanging out, shopping, driving to the beaches, catching up with other friends from her 'old' school. She couldn't quite get used to the idea that she really had left her Californian school; she kept telling herself that one day she might just come back . . . But Scotland and St Jude's was so different. It was hard to explain, but over there she felt like a different person. Here, she was surrounded by people who had known her for years and it seemed like nothing interesting ever happened. She knew what was coming next every moment of the day. But in Scotland it was as if she'd started afresh. Everything was new and she could invent a whole new future for herself.
'I'm going to really miss you,' she told her old school friends now as she went from one to the other, handing out the tangy sunset-red coolers.
'But you must be missing them more,' came Paula's grouchy reply as she took the drink, tucking her thick hair behind her ear.
'Well . . .' Gina began, wanting to explain.
'Yeah, your new Scottish friends are better than us,' Ria grumbled. 'And what about that cute guy? You know, the one who's all over your cell phone.'
'Oh, yeah . . . well . . .' Gina tried to shrug it off.
'Yeah, well, nothing!' Ria teased. 'Have we all seen it, girls? Have we all seen the picture of little Mr Cuteness on Gina's cell phone?'
When the insistent shouts got too deafening and too embarrassing to tune out, Gina went over to her lounger and retrieved her cell from the shade underneath.
She called up one of the photos and her friends crowded round, all jostling for the closest look as she showed them the tiny shot of the boy who had given her an extra-special reason to return to Edinburgh at the end of the summer.
Dermot O'Hagan wasn't especially tall or especially handsome, but he was especially nice and he had a cheeky, friendly, downright disarming charm that made Gina smile, that made Gina relax, that made Gina feel just like herself – only better, because he clearly thought she was so great. It just shone out of his bright blue eyes and straight back at her that he thought she was so great.
During her first, difficult-to-adjust-to-it-all term at St Jude's, she had really needed someone who made her feel great. All the handsome boys from the other posh private schools hadn't been worth a second glance. But Dermot, who was sixteen and worked part-time in his dad's Edinburgh café, had turned out to be the guy who was just right for her.
He had been deliciously shy about asking her out – it had taken him weeks and weeks. In fact, he'd left it right until the last day she was in Scotland. So although they'd been emailing and phoning all vacation long, they'd only spent three whole hours together on an official date.
'So you're going back just for him?' Maddison asked, a smile on her face.
'No!' Gina insisted, but then she didn't say any more: she didn't want to hurt their feelings by talking about her new friends and how much she was looking forward to seeing them again.
'Going back for him? For him who?' Gina's mum, Lorelei Winkelmann was up on the wide balcony above them.
Wearing a blue and white striped summer dress and sunglasses, her hair swept back in the breeze, her arms stretched out on the railing in front of her, she looked like an old-fashioned movie star. Not that she was though. Lorelei worked in computing. She was a super-smart big-shot. Gina would always boast that Lorelei and her partner, Mick, 'practically invented the Internet'.
'Gina, do you have a boyfriend in Edinburgh?' Lorelei asked with unmistakable disapproval. 'All summer long I've heard nothing about a boyfriend and now—'
'Grades, Mommy – I'm going back to Edinburgh to get good grades. Better than yours.' Gina looked up with a smile as she clicked her mobile shut.
She knew there was a weakness here. Her mother would not want Gina to go on about the lousy grades she herself had got when she was sixteen. Lorelei was a top business executive now: she drove a Mercedes convertible; she wore Armani. It would never ever do to admit to any past failures or weaknesses. These were things she had tried, unsuccessfully, to hide from her own daughter.
'Good grades! That's what you know I want to hear.' Lorelei smiled at her. 'OK, look out down there, I'm about to come and join you.'
But as soon as Lorelei stepped back inside the house, Gina's friends started up again:
'Don't go! Don't go back!'
'You can't leave us!'
'What about all the cute guys over here?'
'And the Halloween party!' Paula exclaimed in tones of total melodrama. 'You'll miss the Halloween party!'
Now this was true and kind of terrible. The Halloween party at Gina's Californian high school was a near legendary event. Costumes were planned months in advance; the entire hall and all the corridors leading up to it were elaborately decorated. The school paths and driveways were lit by no less than 150 intricately carved pumpkin lanterns. And there were loads of best costume prizes – although pets were no longer allowed.
'Tiber Flitberry isn't going to be allowed back in after what happened last year,' Ria reminded them.
'Oh yeah,' Maddison agreed, and they all cast their minds back to the screeches of horror when
, from under his Dracula cloak, he'd released a real bat.
'What do you think they do for Halloween in Scotland?' Ria wondered.
'My aunt was in London last year,' Paula replied. 'She said they hardly do anything. The shop windows weren't even dressed up.'
'Scotland isn't exactly in London,' Gina reminded her with a roll of the eyes, 'but maybe I'll have to try and get them excited. Have a plan. Have a party even.' She tried to imagine the imposing stone steps to the boarding house decorated with pumpkins, girls dressed up as witches and vampire victims, and boys . . . maybe they'd even be allowed to invite some boys?
'Do you realize, Gina' – Paula turned to her, and even the extra coatings of Clinique waterproof mascara couldn't hide the distress in her big brown eyes – 'we aren't going to see you again until Christmas!'
'Christmas? No way!' Ria and Maddison chimed in together.
'Well, there's only one thing you can do about that . . .' Gina began.
When her three friends turned to look at her expectantly, she told them, 'When my mum comes over to see me in November . . . you've got to come too!'
Chapter Two
Gina had plane hair. There was no other way to describe it. Her straight and usually well-behaved blonde locks were all frizzy and full of static.
Crammed into the tiny aeroplane toilet cubicle trying to apply concealer, then blusher, then lip gloss, while someone was rapping on the door and asking: 'Are you nearly finished?' was not exactly easy.
She pulled her hair up into a ponytail, but the more she fiddled with it, the frizzier it got. Pressing her lips together, she took one last look at her face. Despite the tan and the artful blonde highlights, she was hardly looking her best. No wonder – this was her eighteenth hour of international plane travel.
But when she stepped off this flight, she would be in Edinburgh, Scotland, local time 9.45 a.m. She glanced at her dainty silver watch: 9.23. Her stomach lurched with nerves because although it had been eight whole weeks since she last saw him, Dermot had promised he would be at the airport to meet her.