Free Cross Your Heart, Connie Pickles by Sabine Durrant

behind their backs. Proud? Moi?
    I could go and find William or someone, but sometimes there is comfort in the company of other boffins – ‘the Library Crew’ as Julie calls us when she needs help with her essays. I’m sitting next to Stacey Evans –or I was until she went to the loo. She’s quite nice. Bit dull, but not the sort of person to go off you for no reason. She’s very excited about the French exchange. ‘I’m surprised you’re not going. Don’t you have French blood, Connie?’ she said. ‘Or isn’t it your cup of tea?’
    ‘Not my tasse de thé ,’ I said gloomily. An airmail letter with a French stamp arrived for Mother this morning. I saw her put it straight in the bin. I wonder when I get home whether I might not take it out and answer it myself. I wonder what my grandparents would think if they heard from me. I might give them both a heart attack with the shock.
    Mr Patrick, our class teacher, has just come in to put away some books. He’s wearing thick beige corduroy trousers that make his legs look very stumpy. I’m rather painfully alert to the physical appearance of any male I come across at the moment. I spent geography comparing the muscle tone in the shoulders of the boys in front of me. I had to share a book with Joseph Milton and became fixated on the texture of his skin. Worst of all, in French oral I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Mr Baker’s nipples, which you could just about see through his thin white shirt. I mustn’t confess that to anyone. EVER. (He’s been very sweet to me about not going on the French exchange, so I mustn’t be too mean.)
    As for Uncle Bert, there’s just too much of him for my liking. His hair is too long and flouncy, his buttons are too undone and his jeans are too tight. He wears a copper bracelet on one wrist, which he says is for arthritis. I must say I find it odd that a man so concerned with seeming young should so openly advertise the creakiness of his bones.
    Oh, hang on. Here’s Stacey back from the loo. Looking agitated.
    1.30 p.m.
    Oh no. Bell’s about to go. Here’s what Stacey saw.
    She rushed up to me and dragged me to the girls’ toilets. In the second cubicle to the left, on the inside of the door, someone had written, ‘Delilah is a slag’.
    Now Stacey knows Delilah. She used to be at Brownies with her or something. She, like me, thinks there is probably only one set of parents in south-east England mean enough to call their daughter Delilah; that there is definitely only one set of parents mean enough to do so within graffiti distance of Woodvale Secondary’s first-floor girls’ loo.
    We stared at her name in silence. Stacey said, ‘What are you going to do? You’re going to have to do something.’
    ‘Like rub it off?’ I said.
    ‘No, like talk to her. She’s getting A Reputation. Ask Julie. She’ll tell you.’
    So, shall I? Shall I ask Julie?
    The bell’s gone. More later
    5 p.m.
    I’m home now. Amidst internal and external turmoil. Mr Spence has started work on the kitchen roof. He’s in there now, with his ladder and his tools, causing havoc. He’s taken some of the tiles off and put some polystyrene sheet up instead. It’s not a peaceful thing, but alive and vicious; it’s rattling and lunging in the wind and making me more edgy than I already am. As is the holey nature of the paint-splattered tracksuit bottoms he’s wearing. He’s so creepy. ‘Hello, hello, hello,’ he said when I came in. ‘What do we have here, then?’
    ‘A fourteen-year-old girl who happens to live in this house,’ I said snippily before taking up residence on the sofa, which is where I am now. It’s cold and grubby. Mother’s clothes from yesterday are hanging over the armchair. The fridge has been moved in here to make room and it’s lurking next to the TV like some kind of big greasy white monster. The Delilah graffiti is lurking in my head like something equally big and greasy. There’s only one thing for it. I’m