Mice Read Free Page B

letters of our first names.
    Looking back now, I can see that things had started to go wrong between me and the other three long before the bullying started.
    When we were eleven, twelve, thirteen, we would have been seen as good girls. We took our schoolwork seriously – comparing our answers after the weekly spelling test, colouring in every map as if it were the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, ringing each other up after school to discuss difficult homework. I always came top of the class in English and art; Emma (nicknamed ‘Pippi Potter’ for her bright ginger hair and round glasses respectively) seemed to have a gift for maths; Jane, the most serious of the four of us, played the cello and was in the school orchestra and a Saturday musicschool orchestra as well; Teresa, with her pretty eyes and strawberry blonde hair, wanted to be an actress and was mad about drama. We talked in class, I’m sure, like all children, but we were terrified of the teachers; we would never have dreamt of answering back and I can’t remember any of us getting into serious trouble.
    At around fourteen, however, the others started to change. And I didn’t.
    Emma exchanged her glasses for contact lenses and had her beautiful hair cut into a punk style – shaved close above her ears, a crest of flaming red spikes on top. Jane gave up music and just seemed to stop caring about her schoolwork altogether. She started dyeing her hair black and painting her nails to match. She filled out and grew big-breasted, and when she was made up she could easily have passed for eighteen. Jane was constantly getting into trouble with the teachers, but nothing they did – not detentions, not suspensions – seemed to bother her in the slightest. It was as if she’d rejected everything to do with school and was like a convict in prison, just bitterly counting the days until her release.
    But it was Teresa Watson who changed the most. She shot up to five foot nine seemingly overnight. She went from being pudgy and cute to thin and sullen-faced. Her body became lean and bony and hard - looking, her face gaunt, her angular cheekbones jutting out like ledges of rock. She started to wear clothes that brazenly challenged the school’s dress code – green ten-up Doc Martens, low-cut hipsters, skimpy crop tops that left her long, pale midriff bare. She wore a silver stud through her left eyebrow even though the head teacher told her again and again she wasn’t to come to school like that. She grew her hair long and wore it parted in the centre and pressed flat to her scalp. As her body took on this spare hardness, so something hard appeared in her green eyes, something hard and unforgiving. Something vaguely threatening.
    In light of what happened next, I’ve often thought about the way their looks changed around the same time that their behaviour towards me started to change. And I’ve wondered if there was any connection. Does the way we look affect our personality? Or does our personality affect the way we look? Does the warpaint turn the tribesman into a fierce warrior? Or does the fierce warrior put on the warpaint to advertise his cruelty? Does a cat always look like a cat? Does a mouse always look like a mouse?
    Whatever the truth might be, the fact was that I didn’t change. I still worked hard in class and crammed for my tests and coloured my maps. I still came top in English and art, but now I often finished top in history, French and geography as well. I still jumped out of my skin if a teacher shouted in class. I kept my hair in the same style I’d worn it in since I was nine – straight, shoulder-length, with a fringe. I grew a little taller but didn’t lose my puppy fat – I still had rolls on my belly, and my thighs rubbed together when I walked. I didn’t start wearing make-up to school like they did, as Mum was always telling me it wasn’t good for my skin. When I did get spots I left them (Mum said squeezing them left scars), while the