Free A Royal Match by Connell O'Tyne Page A

step-dad-to-be, Lord Aginet.’
    Good. A part of me was glad she was having a horrible time of it at home. ‘Oh, that’s sad,’ I said.
    ‘But Arabella and Clementine stood up for you, darling.’
    I tried not to make too much of the fact that she hadn’t added herself to that list and just said, ‘That’s sweet of them.’ Then I thought, Well, maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe it would be all right. Maybe I wouldn’t be totally vilified by everyone in my year and be forced to hide in cupboards for the rest of term. Maybe I would go to the social, pull Freddie and be the envy of everyone. Maybe I would be accepted for who I was and judged by more important things than my accent.
    ‘Obviously, you still can’t go to the social, though, darling.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘Yaah. Also, darling, if you did go, Honey would so totally kill you.’
    The fact that she’d called me darling didn’t dilute the poison in her words. ‘Oh?’
    ‘My advice is be sick and spend the night in the infirmary.’
    Be sick or be dead is what she meant.

NINE:
The Fine Line between Pleasure and Pain
     

     
    The next morning I woke up with a pounding head and it wasn’t just because Miss Cribbe had banged her wretched gong for ten minutes while I tried to hide under my duvet.
    I always get the most horrendous headaches before my period’s due. Eventually Miss Cribbe decided I wasn’t faking it – or maybe her own head had started to ache from her gonging – so she sent me down to the infirmary where the much-hated Sister Dumpster (real name Sister Dempster) was no doubt waiting to torture me or poison me (depending on how sadistic she was feeling).
    There are two sisters in charge of the infirmary: Sister Dumpster (not a nun, but an actual professional nurse who specialised in the demeaning and torturing of children) and dear little Sister Regina (an actual nun), who handedout the Co-codamol like there was no tomorrow.
    My mom says you shouldn’t take more than six pills in a twenty-four-hour period and that actually it’s not even an over-the-counter medication in the States. But Sister Regina says ‘pish’ to that and plies you with them until you feel better again.
    Sister Dumpster says ‘pish’ to the six-a-day rule as well. In fact, she says ‘pish’ to Co-codamol altogether. She did her nursing training in an era when child cruelty and sadism were in their heyday: ‘A temperature of one hundred and fifty degrees? Why, that’s nothing. In my day we said “tish-tosh” to a temperature like that. These days, you girls want it all your own way,’ etc, etc,
ad nauseum
.
    For some reason Sister Dumpster is
always
on duty when I am sent to the infirmary.
    But miracles do happen (as Sister Constance is always reminding us) and it wasn’t Sister Dumpster that morning, it was sweet little Sister Regina.
    ‘Poor Miss Kelly, now you just lie down here, and I’ll get you a sanitary napkin and some Co-codamol.’
    She tucked me up in one of the horrendously uncomfortable infirmary beds, which I’m convinced are all from World War II and still smell of sick soldiers. The springs in them are so ancient, and make so much noise that you can’t relax, let alone sleep.
    Whenever you go to the infirmary for period pain, the sisters insist on handing out these pads that look like skis. The story is that the nuns were given shed-loads of themin the last century, and they are still trying to get through them all. Seriously though, you could go white-water rafting on them they are so enormous.
    In the Easter break I’d finally got the hang of tampons, but I wasn’t going to discuss such modern advances in personal hygiene with Sister Regina, who probably wasn’t even aware that they’d had been invented.
    I said thank you and gave her a hug, because she was just trying to be sweet, and nun hugs are so lovely, smelling as nuns do of incense and flowers that they pick to decorate the chapel and the gazillion statues of Mary and Jesus that