Birdy by Jess Vallance Page A

work, she never seemed that bothered about actually being a nice person.
    This one time, in Year Eight, I’d come to school with a new haircut. It was just something I thought I’d try out to make me look a bit older – a bit shorter and a few layery bits. It didn’t really work out as I planned though, partly because as soon as my hair gets shorter than my shoulders it puffs up like a mushroom but also because I’d tried to cut it myself and things had got a bit tricky around the back. I was feeling a bit self-conscious as I walked into school that morning, but I’d been trying to reason with myself:
No one cares about your hair, Frances. No one looks at you at all. They wouldn’t notice if you walked in without a head
. But then, when I stepped into our tutor room and slipped into my seat, Pippa did this loud ‘
Woooo
’ noise and everyone looked over to me.
    ‘Look at
you
,’ she called, making sure her voice was loud enough for the whole room to hear. ‘New look, is it? Well, well, well.
Very
brave.’
    I just ignored her and pretended to look for something in my bag.
    She came over to me and made a big thing about circling around me, trying to get a look at me from all angles, everyone else still watching too.
    ‘Ooh,’ she said, doing a wincey face and shaking her head. ‘It’s so hard, isn’t it? When you’ve got so much
body
in your hair. Does have a tendency to make you look like you’ve stuck your fingers in a plug socket if you go too short.’ She shook her head again in mock sympathy. ‘Still,’ she said. ‘Well done, you, for trying something new. You’ve got to try things, haven’t you, before you can know they don’t work.’
    I glared at her but she just turned away from me and headed back to the other side of the classroom, pulling an exaggerated horrified face as she went.
    Luckily, by Year Ten, although we were still in the same tutor group, our timetables were different enough that I only really had to see her in registration. Even then we ignored each other. I knew we’d always remember the chalk day in the playground. I hoped she was ashamed. She probably wasn’t.
    In our school, assemblies were held every Thursday and, at the end, there was a five-minute slot for students to deliver messages to the school – stuff like updates on the football team’s performance, requests for sponsorship for charity walks, that kind of thing. One Thursday in late November, Pippa Brookman stepped forward together with Ana Mendez, a dark, mousey girl from my French class. I rolled my eyes and looked out of the window.
    Pippa pulled down the projector screen at the front of the hall.
    ‘Sorry, could we … could we do the lights?’ she called, looking around for someone to follow her command.
    A sixth-former stood up at the back of the room and flicked the switch. Pippa gave Ana a nod and Ana darted forward to switch on a laptop on the table in the middle of the hall. An image flicked onto the screen of an old woman. She had one of those faces that’s so crinkled and toothless it looks like it’s going to crumple right in on itself. A couple of Year Sevens giggled at the sight of her, but Pippa shot them a fierce look to shut them up.
    Pippa paused, waiting for everyone to have a good look at the woman, then she said, ‘I’d like to introduce you to Edna.’ Another pause. She’d obviously been practising her dramatic delivery. ‘Edna is ninety-four years old. She’s lived through two world wars.’ I did some fast maths and looked around me to see if anyone else had picked up on the obvious mistake here. It didn’t look like they had. I looked at Bert, but she was staring intently at the image of Edna.
    ‘She was married to George for sixty-two years, until his death ten years ago,’ Pippa went on. ‘She had one son, Jimmy, but he was killed in a motorbike accident in the seventies.’
    At the side of the hall, our head, Mr Jeffrey, pointedly tapped his watch but Pippa wasn’t