Dead Romantic Read online

  And now I’d met another freak. In a graveyard, digging. And she was all I could think about.

  Monday Mourning

  My phone had been off all weekend. I didn’t want to speak to Lynsey or Poppy, my two best friends. I didn’t know what I would say to them after freshers’ night, when they’d left me to stew in the poo with everyone laughing at me. The three of us had been so close all through school, and last summer had been the best. We’d met at the pool a few times a week to get fit and ogle the lifeguards, gone down to the Bracht to get tans and ogle the coastguards, and hung around the Asda cafe drinking iced teas and ogling the security guards. There was definitely something about men who guarded things.

  Now, only two weeks into A levels, I could feel us growing apart. My mum said it was natural for friendships to ‘come unstitched at the seams as you get older’. But she also said Johnny Depp had a house on the hill by our dentist’s, so I wasn’t sure what to believe. The fact was that we were all into pretty different things these days. Lynx, that’s what Lynsey liked to be called these days, had her sights set on the Olympics. Poppy wanted to be a violinist. We were all taking Sociology together, but that was the last stitch really. We didn’t have to be friends any more. We could branch out, be who we were supposed to be in life. I didn’t know what I wanted to be yet. When I’d had my careers interview, I’d been told I came across as a ‘quite like’. I quite liked throwing the discus. I quite liked romance novels. I quite liked death. I’d asked if there was a job where I could throw the discus, read romance novels and study dead people, but they’d said there wasn’t.

  But that morning as I walked to college, I couldn’t think about anything else but Digging Girl. The hems of my jeans were soaked and my bridesmaid’s dress and pink coat were spattered with pretty, clear jewels of rain. Yeah, I still wore my first bridesmaid’s dress. I’d had it since my mum’s best friend’s wedding when I was seven and it still fitted so now I wore it as a top. Poppy said it was a fashion statement. Lynx said it was a death wish. I didn’t know what that meant.

  That day I didn’t care. I was all on fire looking for signs of Digging Girl. In every bus that passed me on the road, every girl I saw with her hood up. I even walked through the churchyard, just in case she was there. But she wasn’t there.

  The awful thought arrived that maybe she had been a ghost. Maybe it had been a dream? Maybe I was like that bloke in that film who meets this mega-cool bloke who you think is just some mega-cool bloke who he gets to be best friends with but it turns out to be just a pigment of his imagination all along. An imaginary friend. I’d been quite drunk that night, thanks to Damian de Jager, who’d kept pouring this green stuff down my throat. I’d only let him to feel his fingers on the back of my neck as he was doing it. I’d liked that. But perhaps Digging Girl had been right. Perhaps Damian de Jager wasn’t the one for me.

  The rain was hammering down when I reached college. Lynx and Poppy were huddled under a red umbrella outside. I could see Poppy’s neat centre parting a mile away. I went over. They both looked at me, coloured red with umbrella glow.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, scuffing towards them.

  ‘Hi,’ they said. Lynx looked at Poppy, who was munching her way through a giant chocolate muffin with the most massive chocolate chunkies I’d ever seen.

  ‘I’m soaked through,’ I said.

  ‘Me too,’ said Lynx. ‘My hems are soaking.’

  ‘Mine too,’ laughed Poppy, flicking her spare-rib-coloured hair away from her mouth as she galloped another acre of muffin.

  We all watched the rain as it bulleted the concrete.

  ‘Have you done the Sociology homework?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Poppy. ‘Have you?’

  I nodded. ‘You?’

  Lynx shook her head. ‘You still thinking of quitting and doing Media Studies?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe,’ I said. ‘Or something else. I haven’t decided yet.’

  There was only so long we could talk about subject choices and how wet our hems were. One of us had to say something about Friday. It turned out to be Lynx.

  ‘I texted you loads on Saturday,’ she said, zipping her jacket to her chin.

  ‘Yeah, me too,’ said Poppy.

  ‘Are you mad at us for freshers’ night? You were so determined, Mills . . .’

  ‘We’d all drunk too much,’ I said. ‘That snakebite thing Damian was passing around went straight to my head.’

  Why was I making excuses for them? It was their fault. They should have stopped me eating that sandwich, drinking that ... Ugh, my stomach lurched just thinking about it. They should have stopped me getting in the poo pool. They hadn’t even been drunk, so it wasn’t as though they could use that as an excuse. Lynx never drank because of her training and Poppy’s parents forbad/bedded/bidded it, them being all churchy and stuff. But for some infuriating reason, I gave them both another chance. ‘It’s fine, really. I’m my own worst enemy. Don’t worry.’

  A group of boys in football kit breezed past us, and one of them called out, ‘How was your sandwich, Camille? Make a nice meal, Camille, did it?’ The other boys laughed. Hur hur hur.

  ‘Ignore them,’ said Poppy. ‘None of them had the courage to eat it.’

  ‘Or the stupidity,’ giggled Lynx.

  I fiddled with my coat zip. We stood in silence. Me and my best friends, without a clue what to say to one another.

  Tamsin Double-Barrelled and her clicky-clacky brunette Daddy-pays-for-everything crew breezed past with mumblings about Friday night, giggles galore. I knew they were laughing about me. I heard the word ‘pube’. But I didn’t have time to dwell. Lynx dropped a bomb on me.

  ‘Damian’s asked me to the Halloween party,’ she blurted.

  Poppy gulped down a mouthful of muffin.

  ‘Oh right,’ I said, my guts coming to the boil. ‘Wow.’ My mouth was saying wow; my brain was saying You utter backstabber. The Halloween party was the next big event on the college social calendar. It was bigger than freshers’. I had hoped Damian would ask me and we’d arrive in his dad’s orange Ferrari and totes blow everyone out of the water. Or at least, blow the memory of freshers’ out of everyone’s minds. But it was not to be. And I felt sick.

  ‘No hard feelings, Mills,’ said Lynx. ‘I know you liked him and everything.’

  I screwed up my face to look not bothered. ‘Nah, he’s not really my type.’

  I’d just said that so Lynx didn’t know how much it hurt me. In truth, Damian de Jager was anyone’s type, and he knew it too. I was deeply in something with him, that I knew. Whether or not it was love, I knew not. But I’d Googled my symptoms when I was watching him play football a few weeks before – my heart rate sped up when I looked at him, my knees went to jelly and when I looked in my little compact mirror after he’d winked at me when I’d thrown the ball back to him, my pupils were massive – I had all the signs of being in love. So it was a pretty safe bet that I was.

  I remembered how Digging Girl had wrongly called him de Jagger. Where was she today? I peered through the rain at the students stepping out of buses and parked cars. I wanted to see her more than anyone else in the world.

  ‘And guess what,’ said Lynx. ‘Splodge Hawkins has asked out Pops!’

  My guts boiled over. They both had boyfriends now? I couldn’t believe it. They started OMGing over a text Poppy had got from Splodge, one of Damian’s mates.

  ‘I just can’t believe he actually asked,’ Poppy chuckled, over and over – phone in one hand, muffin in the other. At one point she went to take a bite out of the phone. I didn’t know what Poppy saw in Andrew Hawkins. He and Poppy didn’t really fit together. She was all neat and prim and never swore, and he swore a lot and looked like a grubby blonde baby who’d fallen face first into a pizza. But they were both churchy and did orchestra, and lately they’d been Tweeting quite a bit about some band they both liked called Little Maniacs, so I guessed it worked for them.

  ‘Read it again. Tell me e
xactly what it says,’ said Lynx, all squealy-voiced.

  Poppy squinted her enormous eyes behind her glasses as she read the text again. ‘Do u want 2 go 2 Halloween prty wiv me? Luv Splodge and there’s a kiss.’

  ‘One kiss?’ said Lynx.

  ‘Yeah, but capital X. And a full stop.’

  ‘Oh my God, that’s so definitive!’

  My attention wandered the third time Poppy read out the text. I saw this figure, striding across the concrete where the buses pull in – long black coat, hood down, hair covering its forehead. As the figure got closer, I could see it was her. It was Digging Girl! In the daylight, I could see she had the most intense blue eyes, bluer than swimming pool water, and they fixed on mine as I stared. If she had been in one of my romance novels, she’d have been the princess, no question. She was Cheddar Gorgeous. Maybe not with that hair though. It was black and matted and looked like every so often she just grabbed a handful and hacked at it with a knife. She strode straight past us, soaking wet and stinking violently of bleach. I could barely breathe.

  ‘Camille? Camille? Mills!’

  I don’t know how long Lynx had been saying my name but when I looked, she and Poppy had started walking towards the Humanities block where our Sociology classroom was.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, scurrying over.

  ‘Where did you go?’ she laughed. ‘Death Watch sucking you in, was she?’

  ‘Who?’ I said, catching up with them.

  ‘I don’t know her name,’ said Lynx, ‘but she glared at me in the hall on Friday and I full on checked my pulse. I thought she’d struck me down dead. Weirdo.’

  ‘Isn’t her dad that mad bloke?’ said Poppy.

  ‘What mad bloke?’ Lynx and I said in synchro, smiling when we’d said it.

  Poppy’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘That mad professor who lived up on the hill. Went on a mmmm and mmmmd all those students.’

  ‘Mmmmd?’ I said. Poppy did this whenever there was a word she couldn’t say. She didn’t like swearing or saying any word which had a harsh meaning. I think it was because her dad was a vicar. They had to say grace before meals and everything. So she mmmmd instead.

  ‘Yeah, he was a professor at that university in London. He went on a killing spree,’ she whispered. ‘Killed his students.’

  ‘Oh I know,’ I said.

  ‘No!’ Lynx gasped.

  ‘They found . . . things,’ Poppy continued. ‘At his house. The police came out with boxes. Boxes and boxes of bits. Bits of people. Heads and arms and mmmms.’

  I knew all about it. I’d been all over that story when it had first broke on our local news. His name was Thomas Lutwyche. He’d been a professor at this big university and he’d gone totally bonkers and started living in the trees. I went up to his spooky-looking big house on Clairmont Hill the day they started bringing out the boxes of things the police had found after they’d taken him to a psychiatric hospital. I couldn’t get closer than the police tape, no one could. But we all saw the boxes being brought out. Digging Girl was his daughter? Wow. Just, wow.

  ‘It’s absolutely true,’ said Poppy as we rounded the main building and came to the square next to the Humanities block. It was raining a lot harder now.

  ‘So what was he doing with the body parts?’ asked Lynx.

  ‘Nobody knows,’ said Poppy, in the spooky way she always used to tell us ghost stories when we slept over at the vicarage. ‘They couldn’t identify the bodies. He went to a loony bin though. The day the police broke the door down, I swear, you could smell that house from here. I heard they’d been eating bits too.’

  ‘Ugh!’ said Lynx. ‘Freaks!’

  ‘So what happened to the professor?’ I said, folding my arms.

  ‘That’s the most frightening part of the whole story,’ said Poppy. ‘Nobody really knows. Her grey eyes were double-wide behind her rain-spotted glasses. ‘Some say he escaped from the asylum and went on the run and mmmd people and allsorts. I heard one rumour he cut off his own head to see how long his body would live without it . . .’

  ‘Gross!’ shrieked Lynx, as she checked the flatness of her stomach in a passing window, then checked her ponytail in the next one along.

  ‘. . . and another rumour that he’s actually living back in the woods on Clairmont Hill, like Tarzan. And that she, the daughter, is looking after him. Feeding him human flesh and stuff.’

  I laughed. ‘A professor who eats people and lives in the woods? That’s mad.’

  ‘Yeah, so is he,’ said Poppy. ‘And so is she.’ We all watched Digging Girl as she disappeared into the Science block. ‘I’d keep your distance from her if you want to keep your organs where God intended. Who knows what goes on up at that house.’ Poppy took out some mini Jaffa Cakes from her blazer pocket as we followed Lynx into the Humanities block and along the chattery, locker-slammy corridor towards Sociology.

  ‘Do you know her name, Pops, the professor’s daughter?’ I asked, like I really didn’t care.

  ‘No,’ said Poppy, as two Jaffa Cakes committed double suicide in her mouth.

  ‘Bet it’s something like Elvira or Morticia,’ Lynx chuckled, stopping to remove a stone from her trainer.

  ‘It’s Zoe,’ said a deep voice behind us.

  Damian de Jager, sexy-faced footballer extraordinaire, was behind us, flanked on both sides by his usual book-ends, Splodge Hawkins and Louis Burnett. We stopped walking as Damian grabbed Lynx by the waist and gave her a kiss so tonguey and wet I almost felt a bit of sick come up. He had on a tight white t-shirt that showed off the hard shape of his chest beneath it, all toned and perfect. My heart went predictably bang-bang-bangy in my chest, which was annoying cos I didn’t want it to. I couldn’t help it though – he was still sexy with sprinkles on and I wasn’t in the least bit ready for his jelly.

  ‘Yeah, she lives up at Spook Central on Clairmont Hill,’ he said in his Cockney twang. ‘Second most expensive house in the town, my dad reckons. After ours. D’you have a good time Friday night, Camille?’

  ‘Yeah, it was good,’ I laughed. ‘Made a bit of a fool of myself I suppose though.’ I was going a shade redder with every word I said.

  ‘Nah, nah, it was good. Well funny,’ he said. ‘You’re funny when you’re pissed.’

  I felt my pulse – it was going banana cakes. I bet my pupils were dilated too. I wanted to get my pocket mirror out of my bag to check my eyes but Louis Burnett was looking at me like I was on the blink.

  Damian and Lynx were talking and I caught the tail end of their convo.

  ‘ . . . totally, yeah, they’re in the back of my car. It’s half what you’d pay in the canteen here. Twice what I paid for them though.’

  He grinned the sexiest grin in the world. I could just look at him all the livelong day. The way his brown hair stuck up at the back. His eyes like the bluest marbles. His diamond ear-stud. His jaw-line so sharp you could cut your birthday cake with it. I couldn’t help feeling the same sicky pang in my stomach I always felt at the sight of him. Damn you, sicky pang!

  I watched his lips as he spoke. I always watched boys’ lips when they spoke. I imagined what they would feel like on mine. Damian was talking about how last night he’d broken into a sweet shop in town and stolen all this stuff. He had his own business, selling sweets, drinks, stationery, sim cards, whatever students wanted – for half the price they would pay for them at the college. He was making a fortune, even though his family already had one. His dad, Jeff de Jager had come down to the Bracht from London a few years ago and gone around buying up most of the town like he was in a game of Monopoly. My dad said it was because of Jeff and his ‘friends on the council’ that we couldn’t have planning permission for a porch on the front of our guest house. The de Jagers were ‘power-crazy greedy bastards’, according to my dad.

  Louis Burnett was still staring at me, so I totally gave up on getting my mirror out and zipped up my bag. Louis was in my History class but he never spoke. He always sat on his own at the back, tryi
ng to look like he wasn’t there. I knew of him from primary school but we’d never hung out then either. He was a bit weird. Cute in a brown-eyed puppy-left-out-in-the-cold kind of way but his dress sense was wacko. Today he was wearing a faded green Bride of Frankenstein T-shirt, a hat like my grandad wears, chimney-sweep boots and a kilt. Even Splodge dressed better in his jeans and grubby rugby shirt, despite all the fat rolls and stains. He and Poppy were doing some weird flirting thing with their Jaffa Cakes.

  ‘So yeah, Splodger spent all of yesterday eatin’ my bullets on Call of Duty. Cig?’ said Damian, and offered me his packet of Marlboros. I shook my head. I didn’t smoke. Not since I’d taken a sneaky drag of my auntie’s cigarette at a party when I was ten and had such a tickly cough for a week afterwards, I convinced myself I had lung cancer.

  ‘You can’t smoke indoors, baby,’ Lynx reminded him.

  ‘You can’t,’ said Damian, lighting up regardless. ‘What they gonna do to me?’

  I still had one of Damian’s old Marlboro dog-ends at home in a matchbox. I’d seen him chuck it down on the second day of term. I thought maybe one day I’d be able to clone a boy just like him, from the spit. I just had to learn to clone first.

  ‘You hooked up for the Halloween party yet, Camille?’ he said, biting his inner lip. I really didn’t know why he kept singling me out when I was saying nothing at all. It seemed like the more I was trying to be invisible, the more noticeable I was.

  ‘Uh, no, not yet,’ I smiled, once again Miss Cherry Tomato Features.

  ‘Loser needs a date, don’t you, Lou?’ said Splodge, wiping his mouth with his hand and draping his arm around Louis the way people do when they’re acting like you’re friends but really they just get a kick out of watching you go red. Lynx did this all the time and I hated it.