Behind Closed Doors Read Free Page A

Someone might have heard.
    Nico had shown her a cicada. A dead one. It had been lying on the sun-baked tiles of the restaurant terrace, presumably having flown into the glass door and stunned itself. He’d put it on the palm of his hand while she shrieked and drew back from him. It was the biggest insect she’d ever seen and had big, ugly bug-eyes and black and grey armour-plating over its body. But when she realised it was definitely dead she got closer, and for a moment she could admire the delicacy of the wings, wonder at how something with a body so big and wings so whisper-thin could ever fly. And then he’d pushed his hand quickly towards her with an angry buzzing sound as though the thing was alive and she’d screamed and jumped back, clutching her chest, and Nico had laughed at her.
    ‘That was mean!’ she’d said.
    ‘You’re so funny,’ he’d replied. ‘They don’t hurt. They are just loud.’ He’d held open Scarlett’s shoulder bag, dangling the insect over it by one of its legs. ‘We give it to your mother,’ he said. ‘What you think, she will like it?’
    ‘Nico!’
    He’d thrown the bug out on to the street, dusted off his hands. Then he had rested both his arms on her shoulders, head on one side as though he was appraising her. ‘You are angry with me?’
    How could she be? How could she ever be angry with him?
    ‘No,’ she’d said, and smiled.
    And he had pinched her cheek between his knuckles and pulled her chin towards him so he could kiss her. The night before, he’d kissed her for the first time and it had been gentle; already their kisses were becoming hungry, hard, possessive. On her part as well as his.
    It hurt her, now, to think of him. ‘Nico,’ she said, whispering into the dirty blanket underneath her that smelled of engine oil and something else, something bad that she could not give a name to.
    Nico had not been the first boy who had shown any interest in her.
    Mark Braddock had been told to sit next to her one day because she had been talking to Cerys and Mrs Rowden-Knowles had wanted to separate them. She’d used Mark Braddock to hammer home her punishment because he was weird, nobody liked him, and she knew that sitting Scarlett next to anyone else, male or female, would not have done the trick.
    As it turned out, Mrs Rowden-Knowles’s ploy backfired because, to Scarlett’s big surprise, Mark Braddock was all right. Contrary to popular opinion, he didn’t smell of BO, he didn’t have bad teeth, and behind the glasses he had lovely blue eyes that took everything in. Trouble was, instead of Mark’s impeccable behaviour rubbing off on Scarlett, the opposite happened and she ended up corrupting him.
    She started it by drawing a cock on his notepad. He blushed and put his hand over it until Mrs Rowden-Knowles’s back was turned, but then he lifted the page and turned to a fresh one. And then, the excitement of embarrassing him past, just as she was starting to get bored again, he reached across to her notepad and within a second had drawn a pair of boobs and a big smile underneath.
    It made her laugh, stifled because all of a sudden she didn’t want to get moved somewhere else, or, worse, sent to see Mr Callaghan.
    After that, it progressed to notes. Not about anything dramatic, just a conversation passed back and forth between two people who hadn’t realised they had anything in common until precisely that moment.
    The next lesson they had together, she chose to sit next to him. She thought she would get some stick for that, especially from Cerys who had a gob on her like you wouldn’t believe, but in fact Cerys somehow got the impression that Mrs Rowden-Knowles had put her next to Braddock for the rest of the term, and Scarlett didn’t bother to put her straight. Possibly Mark thought the same thing, because his first note to her was an apologetic one saying he was sorry that she’d been put there. And she didn’t contradict him, either; she wasn’t