Pulling Princes

Chapter One

Even I, the Queen of Doomsday Prophecies, hadn't considered the possibility that I would be forced to share a dorm room with the Honourable Georgina Castle Orpington...

Calypso is the school misfit. She's been packed off to St. Augustine's Boarding School for Ladies by her parents in America. It's not just her accent that stands her apart from the posh Sloanes in her year...there's her fencing expertise too - and her only friend is Star, another social outcast and daughter of an eighties rock legend. The cool It Girls, Ladies and Hons, like Honey O'Hare and her clique, are making Calypso's life miserable.

She starts the summer term of Year Ten determined to change all that - to launch Operation Cool. She plans to reinvent herself as a new worldly-wise and experienced-with-boys Calypso. The results are unexpected, effective and very entertaining, especially when Calypso receives some royal attention...

'Outrageously funny and a serious contender for the teen chick-lit throne.' Claudia Moody, THE BOOKSELLER

Chapter One - Saint Augustine's

Talk about random. This was the worst worst-case scenario in my long history of worse case scenarios. But then, my entire life is a random series of worse case scenarios.

At fourteen, you start to realise these things.

On the flight back to school after the Easter Break, (wedged between enormous professional mom-type and a smelly backpacker) I had weighed up my tactics for turning my life around during the summer term at Saint Augustine’s.

Life at Saint Augustine’s had been hell since Day One, which was why I had made a decision that I would do everything I could to get the cool crowd to accept – if not respect – me. I mean, OK, so I suppose I knew deep down they were shallow and mean but ... well, there is only so long you can spend as the form freak before you actually go mad and start wanting to be part of the cool set.

I knew I had a tough term ahead of me if I was going to finally start fitting in. I knew I was going to have to reinvent myself. That is, become the sort of girl who can pull boys – particularly really fit ones.

So it was sorted, I was on the case.

I knew radical action was needed.

But it was cool. I had a radical plan.

I had even factored in things getting worse, before they got better.

In short, I was prepared.

But even I, The Queen of The Doomsday Prophesies (my mom’s nickname for me – what can I say, she’s hilarious) hadn’t considered the possibility that I would be forced to share a dorm room with The Honourable Georgina Castle Orpington.

The girls, all dressed in our hideously evil uniform – maroon pleated skirt and green ruffled shirt – were all crowded, with their toff parents and toff valets in tow, in the dimly-lit, carved mahogany, wood-panelled entrance hall, peering at the notice board to find out which dorm they were in and with whom they’d be sharing a room that term.

‘Oh great, I’m with the American Freak,’ I heard Georgina whisper sarcastically to Honey O’Hare, one of her cool pod of friends.

That’s what they call me – American Freak. They do these horrendously bad piss-takes of my accent, which is so ironic, because when I go back to Los Angeles at breaks everyone starts talking like Dick Van Dyke, imitating what they perceive to be my proper English accent. You can’t win, really. I’m telling you it’s hard being an American in the twenty-first century.

Crowded at the back of the crowd waiting for my chance to see the list, I pretended not to have heard Georgina’s lament while secretly thinking of something really cutting to say. (I rarely actually say the cutting things that I think up in my head, though, because I have discovered that it is better to stay under the radar and just to keep my witty remarks to myself.)

Both Georgina and Honey were holding their Louis Vuitton pet carrier bags with their matching super cute pet rabbits, Arabesque and Claudine. They’d have hated it if they’d known, but I was always dropping by the pet shed to cuddle their rabbits; particularly Georgina’s, Arabesque, who is really adorable and had the sweetest pink eyes and the softest, floppiest ears. Honey’s toffee-coloured rabbit, Claudine, was always biting me (no surprises there).

I would have loved a rabbit of my own, but part of being an American freak at an English boarding school is you don’t get to have a pet, because of the totally cruel quarantine laws. My parents probably see this as character building, like everything that depresses me.

My parents are big on character.

Honey pointed one of her long French manicured fingers at the list and went, ‘Oh yeah. But darling look, it’s not just the American Freak. Guess whom else you’ve been roomed with? Only her weird friend, Star!’

Georgina’s eyes almost popped out of their long lashed sockets. ‘Darling, are you serious? I am so going to get Daddy to complain,’ she declared loudly as she peered despairingly down the list and placed her own perfectly manicured hand to her brow.

Honestly, it’s a wonder these two don’t wear tiaras . . . whoops – they do on occasion.

This was going to be a great term.

My despair at having to share a room with Georgina was somewhat diluted by the thought of Star being in my room too. I had asked to share with Star, but as Georgina now knew, you don’t always get to share with your first choice. Star’s my best friend. Well, to be perfectly honest, she’s my only real friend on account of us both being the form freaks.

We had bonded the first day of Year Seven (my first year at St Augustine’s) in fencing. That year, we spent so many hours alone together in the salle d’armes, practising (escaping the other girls, or in Star’s case, fancying Professor Sullivan our fencing master), and we grew pretty close – especially when we both chose sabre as our weapon. The other girls were beginners, so had to start on foil, but because Star and I had been fencing since we were quite young and were showing so much enthusiasm, Prof. Sullivan allowed us to advance on to epée and then on to sabre.

Sabre is the most aggressive of the three fencing weapons; it has a really cool full fist guard and a flat cutting blade, with a folded-off end rather than a tragic-looking bobble. Sabreurs have a bit of a reputation for being a swashbuckling, ruthless lot.

In our ignorance, Star and I thought ruthlessness and swashbuckling would be agonisingly chic qualities to foster. But that was before we realised that being sabreurs would make us stand out, something, that wasn’t done at Saint Augustine’s.

Things that make girls stand out (and therefore make them the object of ridicule and derision) at Saint Augustine’s School For Ladies include:

  1. Not being willowy and having really long hair (preferably blonde).
  2. Not having a title (although using your title was considered tragic) – or at least a double-barrelled surname
  3. Not owning a massive house in the country and one quite big one in a really smart area of London.
  4. Having a bad spot problem (i.e. any spots whatsoever).
  5. Being overweight (i.e. being of average or above weight for your height). NB: even bulimia and anorexia were more status enhancing than being a chubba.
  6. Having unusual amounts of body hair (i.e. any).
  7. Having a funny accent (i.e. any accent that wasn’t madly posh and English).
  8. Not being asked to be a debutante (presented to the Royal Court). NB: Perversely saying ‘yes’ and actually being a debutante, marked you out as even more uncool than if you hadn’t been asked in the first place.
  9. Not being attractive enough to pull fit boys (preferably older ones) who then went on to leave messages on your mobile for other girls to listen to.
  10. Not being completely obsessive about sweets and fags.
  11. Having clothes that no one wanted to buy – i.e. non designer (i.e. like mine)

Number 9 was the clincher, though.

Pulling older, fit boys is vital for all girls, but especially girls who live in an all-girls school where the ability to pull fit boys confers a status like nothing else can. (I’m talking under eighteen here, mind, not geriatric or anything.) I knew this because there was a girl in the year above called Octavia. Like me, Octavia had very little social cache and stood out like a sore thumb with her short dykey hair. She also had this body hair problem (i.e. she was covered in the stuff) that had earned her the nick name Pubes.

Like me Octavia had been one of the girls who hid in the cupboard at lunch and stuff to avoid being confronted by our total lack of friends. (NB: Who sits next to whom at lunch says everything about your status at Saint Augustine’s.) Then suddenly after the Christmas break, Octavia transformed into one of Georgina’s best mates, all because she pulled a lower sixth boy from Eades. One Exeat (that’s a weekend when you are allowed home) he even came and picked her up on his Ducati motorbike and we never saw her again.

You could fail every other test, but developing a reputation for never pulling boys was the end. Like providing the alcohol at social events, pulling boys was always the girl’s responsibility and consequently we talked of little else – when I say ‘we’, I mean the cool girls – not me, but the girls I wanted to be like.

Failing to share stories about the boys you had pulled was as bad as not sharing your tuck (your stash of sweets and crisps etc). It was vulgar.

When I was back in Los Angeles with my parents over Easter, I’d tried to explain the imperative of pulling a boy by the time I was fifteen but they’d gone totally ballistic about it – as if I’d said I wanted to start having sex.

Naively imagining that it would calm them down, I explained what pulling actually meant, i.e., kissing and that sort of thing. I mean, hello! They work in Hollywood for goodness sake! Kissing is PG 13 there! But instead of saying something sensible like, ‘Oh, yes darling, of course we understand, get onto that pulling business quick smart! If there’s anything we can do to help, etc, just let us know, dear,’ they delivered this really long dissertation about how you can get mono (glandular fever) from kissing. Until eventually I nodded off into my carb-free meal.

As an American with parents who have virtually impoverished themselves (in Hollywood terms, not real terms, obviously – I mean they could still afford to pay for the fees, the flights and the tragic uniform; it just meant they had to do without a pool) in order to send me to boarding school in England, I pretty much flunked all eleven tests. I suppose I was tall and thin and my hair was blondish (if I sprayed myself stupid with Sun-In). But it wasn’t sleek and straight like the cool girls, it was wavy and had little fluffy bits at the front that stuck up like horns no matter how much I tried to stick them down.

In Year Seven when we were all eleven, the dorm bedrooms all had six or more girls in them but as the years went on, the number of girls per bedroom was getting smaller and smaller, and it became harder and harder to hide what a freak I was compared to all the other girls who were pulling boys left right and centre.

Year Nine and Ten were housed in shared bedrooms of three in Cleathorpes, which was an ancient house with a gabled roof and mullioned windows, in some ways I guess it looked kind of spooky and Addams Family-ish but I had always longed to be roomed there. It was away from the main building where all the other dorms were. Cleathorpes had good points and bad points.

Cleathorpes, Good: because it was away from the main building and meant we could sneak out at night through the bursar’s window, which was conveniently never locked. This meant IF we could dodge the attack dogs and armed security guards, slip through the electric barbed-wire fence and sprint through the woods (where it was rumoured flashers and rapists lurked) and take the 11:23 train to London we could go clubbing at one of the really cool clubs like the Ministry of Sound – that is if you knew someone who knew someone who knew the doormen.

NB: Not that anyone in my year had done anything as cool as that yet but all the lower sixth girls claimed they did it all the time when they were in Cleathorpes.

Cleathorpes, Bad: because the House Mistress (or as we referred to her, House Spinster) was the horrible Miss Cribbe. Not only was she bearded and mad and always trying to get all chummy with us like we were her real children or something but she had a disgusting incontinent Springer Spaniel called Misty who was constantly sneaking into the dorms and weeing on our duvets.

All Miss Cribbe said was, ‘Oh Misty, you are a naughty little doggins aren’t you.’ (Miss Cribbe always spoke to Misty in a baby voice).

The whole of Cleathorpes smelt of wee even though we all made a concerted effort to get Misty to run away by spraying her with Febreze.

I lugged my trunk up the narrow, dimly lit, oak-panelled stairwell that wound around the central hall. Each of the cold stone stairs had been hollowed in the centre from about two hundred years of wear. As I struggled alone behind all the parents, valets and guardians carrying up the other girl’s trunks, I took in the smell of bees wax.

The stained glass window depicting Saint Theresa doing something miraculous cast a wintry half-light on the stairwell, even when it was fabulously hot and sunny outside. I looked up her peaceful features - the strap of my fencing kit cutting into my shoulder, bent double under the weight of my trunk - and wished she’d do something miraculous for me like carry my wretched trunk up these stairs. The gloomy light also meant it was hard to negotiate the two flights of cold narrow stairs that wound around the central hall, especially carrying five thousand tonnes of trunk on my back.

My parents lived in LA so I suppose they couldn’t accompany me every time, but also they claimed lugging a five-thousand-tonne trunk on my back was character building.

Clearly the fact that I was going to end up looking like an osteoporosis-riddled old woman by the time I was eighteen didn’t concern them in the least.

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