Boy2Girl Read online

  ‘And get a load of that hair,’ said Jake.

  ‘It’s like I told you,’ said Matt. ‘He’s a hippy.’

  ‘Looks more like a girl to me,’ said Jake.

  And Matt laughed. ‘You wait,’ he said.

  Matthew

  He swaggered towards us, his T-shirt and jeans and blond hair billowing behind him as if he were a very small ship under sail. When he reached where we stood, he slowed down and wandered up to us, hands in pockets. ‘How ya doin’?’ he said, flashing one of his rare smiles. ‘I’m Sam Lopez.’

  Tyrone and Jake mumbled a greeting.

  ‘So this is the famous shed.’ Sam sat down on the bench and looked around him. I was expecting one of his trademark put-downs, but instead he clicked his teeth in a sort of approving way. ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘We like it,’ I said coldly.

  ‘So what goes on round here?’

  ‘Not much,’ said Tyrone.

  ‘D’you play football?’ Jake asked.

  Sam glanced at the ball at Jake’s feet. ‘You mean soccer? In the States, it’s a girl’s game.’

  ‘That’s because in the States, you can’t play it.’ Jake kicked the ball hard against the wall.

  ‘Sure we could if we wanted to.’ Sam reached over, took Tyrone’s phone and casually worked the game with his thumb. ‘Thing is, we prefer real football.’ He handed the phone back. ‘There you go, you’re on to the next level,’ he said casually.

  He stood up, spat on his hand and caught the ball as it came back off the wall. He held it for a second or two, then flipped it over. For a moment, the ball stuck to his hand before it fell.

  ‘Take a look.’ Sam stood in front of Jake, rolling his shoulders in relaxed, limbering-up movement. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is football.’ He bent at the knees, holding an imaginary ball in both hands, with arms outstretched. ‘Two! Sixty-five!’ He yelled the numbers so loud that the mothers across the playground looked up to see what was going on.

  And suddenly Sam was off, dancing and jinking across the tarmac, shoulder-barging imaginary players aside, half-turning to take a long pass, then sprinting onwards for a few yards until, just past the seesaws, he made to throw the ball in the air in triumph.

  ‘Touchdown!’ he screamed. ‘We haaaaaaave a ball game.’

  He danced along beside the metal fence, head thrown back, his little legs and arms punching upwards in crazed celebration like a demented, long-haired goblin.

  We laughed. There was no other reaction.

  ‘Nutter,’ said Jake.

  ‘What planet is that guy from?’ said Tyrone.

  Sam returned to us and slumped down on the bench, breathing hard. ‘That’s what you call football,’ he said. ‘It’s better with a ball, of course.’

  Jake shook his head. ‘You are one crazy Yank.’

  ‘You ain’t seen nuttin’ yet.’ Sam wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve.

  Mrs Cartwright

  You don’t become a head teacher of a large school without learning how to what I call roll with the punches, but when Mrs Burton, the mother of one of our younger boys, Matthew, rang with the news about his American cousin, I can’t say I was overly optimistic about our ability to help with a schooling facility.

  Bradbury Hill is over-subscribed – we are a very, very successful school – and the idea of an American child turning up out of the blue at the start of our second year seemed like a bit of a non-starter to me.

  But Mrs Burton is a very determined woman. She explained how Sam was alone in the world, exactly the same age as Matthew. She suggested that Bradbury Hill might gain some useful publicity mileage from the whole business.

  Publicity mileage. I’ll be truthful here. That spoke to me.

  As it happened, there was a gap in Year Eight which this Sam person could usefully occupy. Even when Mrs Burton explained that no reports were available to Sam because the mother – something of a hopeless case, by all accounts – had moved her child from school to school so often, I failed to hear the alarm bells in my brain.

  I blame myself on this one. I simply should have been what I call more careful.

  2

  Charley Johnson

  We’re close, we bitches. When we were at primary school, there was one unspoken rule – if you upset one of us, you had all of us to answer to.

  Elena Griffiths, Zia Khan and Charley Johnson. We were like the different sides of one all-conquering personality. Apart, each of us was nothing special. Together we were unbeatable.

  Elena was pretty, skinny, kind of ditsy, a bit too hung up on the whole celebrity business to be entirely normal. Zia was part of this big, successful Asian family.

  Somewhere along the line she had learned that silence, the whole little-mouse thing, was as good a method of getting your own way as the louder approach that Elena and I use. Sensitivity, charm and a talent for playing the guitar – who could be surprised that Zia is top of the charts when it comes to Teacher’s Pet awards? And no one ever suspects that behind the innocent facade lurks the true Ms Khan – scheming, wild and dangerous.

  I envy her the charm thing. It seems that I’m too big, too loud for that kind of stuff. On the other hand, I have been top of every class that I’ve attended and who needs charm if you have brains?

  Zia Khan

  Elena broke the golden rule that summer. It was the one about boys.

  Boys, we had decided when we were about nine, were a waste of time. Our enemies were a sad trio who called themselves (I promise I’m not making this up) ‘the Shed Gang’. They annoyed us and we gained our revenge by getting them into trouble at every opportunity. This was not difficult – they were boys, after all.

  When the Sheds – Jake, Tyrone and Matt – started calling us names, we took their favourite word for us, turned it into a compliment and made it our own gang name. The Bitches.

  All was just fine and dandy with the three of us until Elena decided to fall for the love god of the Lower Sixth, Mark Kramer.

  Jake Smiley

  You want the truth? I didn’t mind him at first Matt had been telling us these horror stories about his cousin over the past few days and I admit the guy looked a bit of a fright, but when he did that crazy jig around the playground the first time we met, it occurred to me that he might be a pain but at least he would liven things up.

  Summer holidays can sometimes drag. You sit around, you check out new video games, you chat, but then what? The answer to the question was that we found out more about Sam Lopez.

  There was something about the American that shook up our little group, that made us talk about ourselves in a way that we normally never did.

  Why? Because, however strange and out of whack our lives might have seemed, it was nothing to what Sam had on offer.

  So, as he was catching his breath after his American football exhibition, he chatted about how he had played back home at one of his schools.

  ‘How many schools have you been to?’ I asked.

  Sam frowned, and counted on his fingers for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Twelve? Thirteen? My mom and I moved around a bit. Something like that.’

  Tyrone whistled, impressed.

  ‘Matt said she was a bit wild,’ he said.

  Sam gave a little gasp, which might have been surprise or pain.

  ‘Tyrone means wild in a good way,’ said Matt quickly. The American smiled, then began to laugh softly. ‘That was Mom all right,’ he said. ‘Wiiiiild.’

  And so we started talking. There was something about the stranger’s, whole dead-mother, multi-school situation that seemed to make it easier to open up about ourselves.

  I talked about how my mum and dad had split up last year, how I felt out of place at home with just my mother and my older sister. I saw Dad once a week but that was no picnic either. We’d go to a film or sit in a restaurant, making small talk about everything except what was really on our minds. Suddenly, it was as if we were strangers.

  Tyrone chipped in wi
th the story about how he had never met his father on account of his having taken a holiday back in the West Indies soon after he was born and never came back. He talked about his weight problem – how they used to call him ‘Jumbo’ and ‘the Tank’ at school, how his mum was forever trying new diets on him, how they made him feel weak and ill but never worked.

  Matt even joined in, fessing up that he felt embarrassed when his dad did the housework and went around in an apron or when his mother rang up the school to complain about something or other.

  ‘Loser City, man.’ Sam winked and there was something so easy and grown-up about his manner that the three of us found ourselves laughing. ‘So,’ he said. ‘What do you guys do for kicks around here?’

  Elena

  I’m not going into the Mark Kramer thing. The way I see it, what happened (what didn’t happen) between me and Mark has nothing to do with anybody. It’s simply not relevant. End of story.

  All right, maybe you need to know a little, just the basics. I showed up for the Cameron Diaz film that Saturday. So did Mark. When he walked into the foyer, I went up to him, blushing sweetly beneath the make-up that had taken me about two hours to put on. Then I saw Tasha, a girl from his class, was behind him. She linked her hand through his arm and for what seem like half a lifetime the three of us stood staring at one another, each of us lost for words.

  Eventually, it was Tasha who broke the silence. ‘And your problem is?’ she said.

  I turned and ran, through the swing doors, out into the night. I hated Tasha, I hated myself but, above all else, I hated Mark Kramer. In fact, I hated all boys.

  So maybe, come to think of it, the whole thing wasn’t quite as irrelevant as I thought.

  Matthew

  Over the next few days, as we showed Sam around what he insisted on calling ‘the hood’, he talked about his life back home. The way he told it, every day was spent hanging out with bike gangs, cruising the projects, getting into fights, and every night he was backstage at some rock concert with his good old mum.

  We listened to these stories, trying not to look impressed. Until then, we had liked to think that we three were tough enough to handle ourselves should things get a little iffy in the park, on the streets, or in the school playground. We were as bad and hard as it took for teachers now and then to express concern to our parents about our ‘attitude problems’.

  But Sam, if half of his tales from back home were true, was in a different league of badness, harder than we even wanted to be. In San Diego, his posse shoplifted for fun. They nicked cars, carried knives. They had frenzied, bloody gang fights just like in the movies. They were known to the police.

  The more we heard about the wild and wacky world of Sam and his posse, the less comfortable we felt with him. Either he was a lying fantasist or he was a mini-criminal. Whatever, he was trouble – and each of us had quite enough trouble of our own to be going on with.

  And that was before the bust-up at Burger Bill’s.

  Burger Bill

  If I had my way, I’d ban all kids between the ages of twelve and eighteen. They’re nothing but trouble, particularly the boys.

  Particularly those boys.

  Matthew

  We were sitting there in this cafe called Burger Bill’s, when Jake started talking about his dad. Mr Smiley had been missing custody visits with Jake recently and now it looked as if father and son would be meeting up even less often.

  Two nights previously, Mr Smiley had been driving back to his flat after a business dinner when his car had been stopped by the police. He had been breathalysed, failed the test and been kept at the police station all night.

  I noticed that, as we talked about all this, expressing our sympathy, Sam was unusually silent. He looked around him, drumming the Formica table with his fingers as if nothing could bore him more than the story of Jake’s dad.

  ‘So what happens round here if you drive when you’re on the sauce?’ he asked out of the blue. ‘You get slammed up or what?’

  ‘Mr Smiley could lose his licence for a while,’ I said.

  ‘And my dad needs his car to get over to see me,’ Jake added miserably.

  Sam sniffed. ‘Excuse me while I cry,’ he said.

  We all looked at him in surprise. He sat back in his chair and raised both hands. ‘Hey, face it, it’s no biggie,’ he said. ‘So Jake’s old man spent a night in the pen and can’t drive for a while. Big tragedy.’

  Jake leaned forward over the table. ‘Don’t push it,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a joke.’

  ‘Who’s joking?’ Sam ran his fingers through his hair and tugged at it in a distinctly unfriendly gesture. ‘You know, Jake, I think you’re in danger of confusing me with someone who gives a good goddam what happens to your daddy.’

  ‘Easy, Sam,’ said Tyrone.

  But Sam continued to stare deep into Jake’s eyes. ‘You see, when you have a dad who’s spent most of his life in the slammer, who’s there right now, then the idea of someone spending a few hours behind bars…’ He shrugged. ‘Well, it doesn’t exactly break my heart.’

  ‘Sheesh,’ said Tyrone. ‘What did your dad do?’

  Sam shrugged. ‘Stuff. That’s what he did. Big stuff. When I was born he had a few nightclubs. He got involved in a few things that maybe weren’t strictly on the level. One night he fell out with a colleague. The colleague had an accident. He got kind of smeared. Dad took the rap. Like I say – stuff.’

  He had done it again. Even when something unusually dramatic had happened in one of our lives, Sam managed to come up with something bigger, scarier and more dramatic.

  ‘That’s…’ Bravely, Tyrone was trying to find the right words for one of those tricky occasions when you discover that your friend’s dad is in jail for murder. ‘That’s…I mean, that’s really terrible.’

  ‘It’s the way it goes, ole buddy.’ Sam slurped at his drink through a straw. ‘My old man ain’t been around since I was five years old. Now and then I’d hear about his latest little scrape with the law from my mom. She’d make a joke of it – she called it the Crash Bulletin.’

  ‘Crash?’ said Tyrone.

  ‘That’s his name. His real name’s Tony but, what with all the busts and accidents and stuff, everyone calls him Crash – Crash Lopez.’ Sam spoke the words with pride.

  There was silence for a moment. Then Jake seemed to tune into the conversation for the first time in a while.

  ‘Crash,’ he said, and I could tell from the look on his face that he was still angry about what Sam had said about his father. ‘Bit of a weird name, isn’t it?’

  Sam looked warily surprised. ‘Waddya mean weird?’ Jake laughed. ‘What’s he got – a couple of brothers called Bang and Wallop?’

  Sam gave a sort of yelp of rage and, before we could do anything, he was out of his seat, lunging across the table, scattering the polystyrene cups, his hands pummelling at Jake’s face.

  ‘Don’t diss my dad!’ he was screaming. ‘Diss my dad and you die!’

  Bill, a fat, sweaty guy who is the manager of the burger bar, hurried over and pulled Sam off Jake. Ignoring the American’s screams and curses, he marched him to the door and threw him out as if he were a stray cat. He locked the door, then walked back to the table.

  He looked down, resting two meaty fists on the table. ‘What are your names, you three?’ he asked.

  ‘Smith,’ said Tyrone. ‘We’re all called Smith.’

  Bill stood there for a moment, as if considering what to do next. Then he walked briskly back to the door and unlocked it. ‘Get out,’ he said with a jerk of his head. ‘And don’t come back unless you want me to take you down to the police station myself.’

  We scurried past him, Jake with a hand over his eye.

  Outside we looked around us. The shopping precinct was deserted. There was no sign anywhere of the crazy son of Crash Lopez.

  Tyrone

  I was scared, and I’d lay money that Matt and Jake were scared too. It was one of those oc
casions where events slide out of control and suddenly you feel lost, helpless and small.

  We wandered down the empty precinct until we were a safe distance from Burger Bill’s. ‘I don’t believe that,’ said Matt, his voice shaky.

  Jake sniffed and wiped his nose. ‘It was only a joke,’ he said.

  I shook my head. ‘He’s too much, that Sam. All those schools and gangs, his mum in a car crash and now his dad turns out to be some kind of psycho killer.’

  ‘He says,’ muttered Jake.

  ‘It’s not his fault, I suppose,’ said Matt.

  ‘It’s not ours, either!’ It was an angry wail that came from Jake. ‘Just because his life’s a mess, why does he need to mess up ours too? I’ve got enough problems without this.’

  His voice echoed off the shop windows, around the concrete walls. And at that moment of despair, we suddenly found that we were not alone.

  Charley

  Good luck, bad luck, whatever, we were in that precinct that night too.

  We were planning to see Ratz, some kind of rodent-based animated feature, at the cinema complex and had decided to grab a Coke at Burger Bill’s before we went.

  As we came up the escalator, we found a very sorry group indeed. It was the Sheds and they seemed to be upset about something.

  We smiled when we saw them. All right, that’s not quite true. We laughed. I’m sorry, but it would take a heart of stone not to find humour in the sight of Conk, Ears and the Tank – better known to their friends (if they had friends) as Jake, Matt and Tyrone.

  Jake used to look quite normal at our last school but, over the past year, he’s grown in all the wrong directions. It’s as if parts of his body – arms, legs, ears, nose, even his hair – were in some kind of race away from him, all heading in different directions. There are no prizes for guessing who the winner was in this race – Jake’s nose is a sight to behold. It was Zia who gave him a new nickname – Concorde, or Conk, for short.