Free The Flirting Games (The Flirting Series - Young Adult) by Stella Wilkinson

That’s all Sophie
and Grace seemed to talk about this year. Maybe throw in a little gossip,
clothes, magazines and make-up. But otherwise it was boys. Boys they might like
and the boy band they definitely liked, boys they knew and boys they wanted to
know. School came a very poor second.
    Rose Falcon was really enjoying
being back at school this year. The summer had been great but her parents were
always working and she had missed the girls. She and her younger brother Toby
had spent three weeks of the holidays with her cousins, Jack, Alex and Ellie,
but she had been on the phone almost every day to Sophie or Grace or both.
    She supposed that officially Alex was her best
friend. Even though they were cousins, they had been born only days apart and
had been close their whole lives, but at 16 she had found that she and Alex had
started to drift apart slightly. They were both in the same year at Compass
Court Boarding School and both in the same Schoolhouse, West Tower, but this
year she just seemed to be hanging out a lot more with Sophie and Grace and
seeing less of Alex.
    At a certain age you just needed
good girlfriends, and Alex certainly didn’t want to talk about boys.
    Rose, Sophie and Grace had shared a
dormitory at Compass Court since they all started over five years ago and
though the three of them were very different they had bonded instantly.
    The fourth girl in their room,
Diana, had never really been their friend.
    Diana didn’t seem to have or want
female friends. She was thin and had perfect porcelain white skin, with an oval
face, dark eyes and naturally red lips. There were a few girls in the year
below who hung on her every word and tried to copy her waist length long dark
hair, but she seemed hardly to notice them. Rose thought Diana was very
beautiful but very cold.
    The only person Diana was close to
was Leo Flanagan. Both Diana and Leo were originally Irish, though both their
families now lived in England, only about half a mile away from each other by
all accounts. Rose thought that Diana and Leo might be related, but as neither
of them spoke much to her or her friends she didn’t really know.
    “Who are you looking at?” Sophie
nudged Rose out of her reverie.
    “No one.” Rose shook her head. “What
were we talking about?”
    “I was just saying what a dry term
it’s been for boyfriends. It’s Christmas already and we’re all still single.”
Said Grace
    It was the 20 th of
December on the last day of their first term in Year Six. It was dark now by
five o’clock and the Common Rooms were the coziest place to be in the evenings.
The three of them were sitting in the West Tower Common Room enjoying the fact
that as it was the end of term and they didn’t have to do any studying. They
had a low coffee table at one end of the room with a sofa and a leather
armchair that they always tried to get to before anyone else. It was
comfortable and intimate. There were no other seats close by so no one could
overhear their conversations. Across the room in an alcove under a tall lamp,
Leo and Diana had a little table for two and looked like they were actually
doing homework.
    “And I was wondering what’s going on
with you and Ben Castle this year?” Grace continued as she swiveled sideways on
the sofa to rest her feet against the radiator on the wall.
    Rose shrugged. “You know how it is
with me and Ben, he asks me out, eventually we kiss and then it just seems to
fizzle out.”
    “So are you going out or not?” Grace
furrowed her brow in confusion.
    “Beats me. I would say probably not
seeing as we haven’t spoken in over a month. We had that snog at Halloween and
we spent most of the evening talking. But we’ve hardly had time to speak since.
He’s always got sporting commitments and I’ve been working on my English
coursework most nights. It all just seems a bit of an effort to find the time
and I’m not going to chase after him.”
    “I think you should just dump him
once and for