Free The Winds of Heaven by Judith Clarke Page A

she’d begun to cry so much she couldn’t pick a boy, then Mr Meague had gone and chosen John Larsen.
    What would happen if Clementine refused? Would Mr Meague know about Simon Falls?
    Simon Falls shared Clementine’s Maths and English classes. He was a tall, quiet boy with thick dark hair and a serious expression in his long-lashed eyes. ‘He’s gotbedroom eyes,’ Jilly Norris had whispered to Clementine when Simon Falls had handed back the English tests for Mrs Larkin. And then she’d added, with a knowing gaze into Clementine’s face, ‘You like him, don’t you?’
    ‘Of course not,’ Clementine had replied.
    Except she did. She wasn’t sure if he liked her. Once in History class, she’d glanced up from her work and caught him staring at her from his seat across the aisle, but she didn’t know if that meant he was interested in her. She never knew things like that, which seemed to come so naturally to other girls. Perhaps he’d really been looking at Kay Dimsey, who sat next to Clementine in History. A week ago she’d passed him in the corridor outside the staffroom and she’d felt a blush spreading right across her cheeks. She hated the way she blushed so easily; it meant everyone could see the feelings she struggled so desperately to hide. The staffroom door had been open; what if Mr Meague had been in there and spotted her blush when she saw Simon Falls? He’d have marked it down, and if ever he caught her talking – if Jilly Norris asked her that question she really had to answer – he’d know who to choose if Clementine refused to pick a boy.
    She didn’t think Simon Falls had noticed her that day outside the staffroom. He’d been gazing off in another direction, through the window that looked out onto the playground; he probably hadn’t even seen her passing by.
    She knew she wasn’t the sort of girl boys noticed. She wasn’t like Mattie Gaskin or Annie Boland, or even Jilly and her gang – girls who hung round the oval when the boys had football practice and stayed late after school to watch the cadets march round in uniform. She’d remained small for her age, she could easily have passed for a kid in sixth class,still at primary school. And though she was thirteen she hadn’t started her periods and her chest was flat as Mum’s old wooden washing board.
    Only one boy had ever approached her, and that was David Lowell.
    David Lowell was a Home Boy. Clementine had been amazed when, crossing the lower quadrangle one morning, she’d felt a tap on her shoulder, turned round and found David Lowell. He’d asked her if she’d like to be his guest at St Swithin’s Easter Fete.
    His guest!
    A Home Boy’s guest!
    At a Home!
    Clementine had stood there, paralysed with shock. For almost a minute she simply couldn’t speak. No one went out with Home Boys. She hadn’t even known they were allowed out, except for school. Jilly Norris’s mum said they were kept locked up at weekends. ‘And a good thing too,’ she’d declared, ‘or we’d never sleep safe in our beds!’
    Even at school you didn’t talk to them, not like you talked to other kids. And Home Boys didn’t speak to girls. Not normally. So how come David Lowell thought he could speak to
her
? Why did he think it was all right to ask
her
out? What was wrong with her?
    She hadn’t been able to stop herself from staring at him: at his long gangly legs, too long for his Home Boy trousers, which were school uniform trousers but of a distinctive darker grey, the cloth so coarse and stiff it would surely chafe and burn. His socks were thick and hairy, the kind of socks a gorilla might have knitted, Clementine had thought nastily, if someone had taught it how. They slumped clumsily abovehis ugly boots, and between their tops and the bottoms of his awful trousers a narrow strip of pallid shank showed, stippled with fine black hairs. Yuk!
    And yet his voice was mild and gentle, which was confusing because you didn’t associate