Free Birdy by Jess Vallance Page B

all out. It was like having someone explain the punchline of a joke to you – it just didn’t really work after that. Once, when I was looking for some past exam papers online, I found a copy with the examiners’ marking notes attached. ‘Examiners are encouraged to reward any valid interpretations,’ it said. I knew it, I thought to myself. Just like I always thought: Any old rubbish will do. I felt a bit better then, less like they were trying to catch me out. But still, it seemed a very bizarre thing to be studying at school.
    With Bert though, I tried to approach English with a new enthusiasm. After all, I thought, she seems to love it, so there must be something I’m missing. Like me, Bert was a reader – I guess most people who’ve grown up without many friends are – but unlike me, she loved nothing more than to spend hours talking over the motivations and personality traits of the characters. And to my surprise I found that, with Bert, I quite liked it too. It was fun with her. She had interesting ideas. She wasn’t like drippy Miss Lily, head on one side, eyes getting all misty at the drop of a hat. When Bert talked, she was so passionate; it sometimes did feel like we were talking about real people. She was sparky. She made me laugh.
    By this time, we were well into Bert’s first term and the boys who’d been initially sniffing around her seemed to be losing interest. I think on the whole they just found Bert a bit too odd.
    Once a scrappy little boy called Tom Coleman sidled up to her. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you know what? I think there might be something wrong with my eyes. I can’t take them off you.’
    Bert spun round and looked Tom straight in the face – the poor kid probably thought he was in with a chance for a minute – but she just stood there, staring at him intently.
    ‘What?’ he said, backing away. ‘What are you doing?’
    ‘Checking your vision.’ She held up a finger. ‘Can you see this? Can you follow it with your eyes?’
    Tom had batted her hand away and slunk away, muttering, ‘Nutter,’ under his breath.
    I don’t know for sure if those kinds of reactions were genuine – if she really was so out of practice when it came to teenage flirting stuff that she just didn’t know what was expected – or if it was a bit more contrived than that, and playing the innocent was her way of letting people down without upsetting them. I wasn’t really bothered either way, just as long as she kept turning them down. Even though I was pretty sure that Bert and I were quite solid friendship-wise by this point, I still didn’t really fancy the idea of being ousted by some annoying boyfriend type.
    The one boy who’d really stuck around despite Bert’s slightly odd knock-backs was Jac Dubois – of index-finger salute fame. He was one of those who enjoys playing the role of the joker, whatever the situation. The whole act got a bit annoying at times, but he was harmless enough. He was the son of a French couple who owned the Parisian bistro in town and he was bilingual – a fact which lifted him a bit above the class clown status he’d assigned himself, I always thought. I used to like to hover around nearby when one of his parents picked him up from school and listen to them babble away in French together. How lovely, I always thought, to have another language that you could just slip into like that.
    Jac would loiter around us in registration, trying to engage Bert in banter, alternating between outrageously sexist teasing and shameless flattery. I couldn’t tell for sure what Bert felt about it but the whole thing made me nervous. He wasn’t technically spoken for, but he was quite popular with the girls in general. I was worried someone might step forward to stake their claim if it looked like Bert was getting too involved, which might lead to tension all round. Luckily though, Bert managed to knock any romantic ideas on the head herself, one day in early November.
    ‘I think