Free Secrets at St Jude's: New Girl by Carmen Reid Page A

they’d have to stay in the boarding house all weekend.
    ‘Of course!’ Amy laughed. ‘We’re allowed out at the weekend, by day and by night,’ she added.
    ‘Under carefully controlled conditions,’ Niffy reminded her.
    ‘Which we bend a little.’
    ‘What about Min?’ Gina wondered. ‘Where is she?’
    ‘In training,’ said Amy. ‘Look out of the window.’
    The dorm’s high third-floor window gave an eagle’s-eye view of the school playing fields. The pitches were empty now, but on the athletics track there was a lone figure still in sports kit.
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    Min was pacing out distances and marking them with what looked like two water bottles.
    ‘She’s hoping to win the under-sixteens eight hundred metres on Sports Day,’ Amy explained. ‘She came third last year, so there’s a good chance. But anyway, c’mon, scrub up, we’re going shopping!’
    ‘I can come with you?’ Gina wanted to check, because going shopping with someone . . . it was kind of personal. Did Amy really want to invite her?
    ‘Yeah. We’ll show you round, newbie,’ Amy replied.
    ‘It’ll be fun.’
    ‘OK, here’s the deal.’ Gina turned to them with a determined look on her face. ‘You have got to stop calling me that!’
    ‘Six hundred and fifty quid for a handbag!’ There was no mistaking the outrage in Niffy voice. ‘A handbag !’
    She put the offending item back on the shelf. ‘I’m sorry, Amy, but even you can’t afford that.’
    ‘Well’ – Amy tossed her blonde hair, knowing perfectly well they were within earshot of the sniffy sales assistant – ‘if I wanted to use up my entire term’s allowance on one fabulous investment piece, I could.’
    ‘Get lost,’ Niffy told her. ‘Six hundred quid? You could buy a horse for that.’
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    ‘Yes, I’m sorry, but we’re in Harvey Nichols,’ Amy snapped, ‘not Pony World.’
    Niffy snorted in a very horse-like fashion.
    ‘Come on,’ Amy instructed. ‘Let’s go and buy some make-up.’
    Ever since they had got off the bus . . . OK, that had taken Gina by surprise.
    ‘We’re going by bus?!’ she’d asked the others. ‘Is that OK? I mean . . . will we be safe?’
    Back home, when Gina went anywhere, she was taken by car, which usually meant there was a parent on hand wherever she went. Buses were for crack addicts, muggers and beggars, or so she’d been given to understand.
    The idea of three girls just jumping onto a bus and travelling into town was . . . terrifying.
    But Niffy and Amy looked at her in astonishment.
    ‘Safe?’ Niffy laughed. ‘Unless you think toddlers or little old ladies in hats are dangerous, then yes, it is safe!’
    But as soon as she’d stepped off the bus and in through the shiny revolving glass doors of Edinburgh’s chicest department store, Gina had felt just ever so slightly at home.
    Unlike the boarding house, with its screaming 89
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    alarm and weird food and communal bathrooms, unlike school, with the bitching and the hockey and the uptight teachers, Harvey Nichols was a place Gina immediately understood.
    This glossy consumer paradise was all about clothes and shoes and shopping. Here, just like at home, she could linger over the expensive shampoos and luxury lipsticks, and then treat herself to an overpriced latte.
    Here, she got it. For the first time since she’d arrived in this strange Scottish city, she felt herself relax.
    Considering they came from opposite sides of the globe, Amy and Gina were dressed in remarkably similar fashion. They were wearing their latest shopping outfits: tight jeans, flat pumps, complicated jackets and bags (Diesel and Mulberry for Amy, Nordstrom and Coach for Gina). Amy had wound a thick pink and silver scarf around her neck and applied too much blue eye shadow. Gina had overdone the bronzing