Read Me Like a Book Read Free

on us actually doing any work.
    Turns out we’ve got a temporary replacement: Miss Murray. She’s all right, I suppose. Fresh out of teachers’ college, I reckon, so she’s brought the average age of the staff down by about fifty years.
    We’ve got English after lunch. She makes us play this game where you have to pick someone in the room and describe them by saying what they’d be if they were a flower or a car or an animal. Then everyone has to guess who it is. I normally hate that kind of thing, but she makes it OK somehow. She smiles a lot and laughs at the same kinds of things we laugh at, not like the rest of the teachers, who just glare at you the minute you look as if you might actually be enjoying the lesson. Not that that happens often, but if it did, they’d probably think they were doing something wrong.
    Robyn describes me. I don’t really know her that well. She sat on the other side of the class last year, but they’ve moved the desks around and we’ve ended up next to each other. She’s OK, I guess. She’s kind of mousy-looking: brown bob, brown eyes, glasses. Quite pretty when she smiles. Gets along with teachers. You know the kind. Harmless enough, just not really my kind of person.
    Anyway, she has me down as a cactus, a lion cub, and a Mini Cooper. I’ve no idea what she’s going on about, but Miss Murray works out that it’s me after a few others make wrong guesses.
    It’s beginning to feel like we’re goofing off when Miss Murray glances at her watch. “Right, enough of the fun and games,” she says. “We’d better get down to some work.” A muffled grumble spreads through the room.
    She goes to the front of her desk and half sits, half leans back against it, as if she wants to show us she’s totally cool and laid-back but can’t bring herself to go all the way and sit on the thing.
    “So.” She clasps her hands together, brings them up to her mouth. It reminds me of morning prayers at primary school.
    “Hands together, eyes closed,” Mr. Jackson, the headmaster, would say, and we’d deliver the Lord’s Prayer in three hundred synchronized monotones.
    “Our father, who art in heaven, Harold be thy name,” I intoned earnestly every morning. It was years before I realized God wasn’t actually called Harold.
    I look up at Miss Murray. She’s propping her lips on her fingertips, eyes almost closed, and, for a second, I wonder if she’s praying too.
    “So,” she repeats. “Can anyone tell me a poem they’ve read and enjoyed recently?”
    No one says anything. A
poem
? That we’ve
enjoyed
? I stifle a laugh and look down at my desk like everyone else.
    “Oh, no!” she suddenly exclaims and goes back behind her desk. She picks up a piece of paper and frowns at it. “I must have written down the wrong room. I thought this was an English A-level class.”
    Why do teachers
always
have to be sarcastic?
    But then I notice her cheeks have gone red. Just a bit, just enough to make me feel sorry for her, and I don’t care about the silent agreement. So I do something I haven’t done for as long as I can remember. I put my hand up.
    “Does it have to be an actual poem, miss?” I raise my eyes to look up at her without lifting my head.
    “What did you have in mind? Ashleigh, isn’t it?”
    “Ash, yeah.”
    “What did you have in mind, Ash?”
    “Well, there’s this song I wrote the words out to; I think it’s kind of like a poem.”
What am I doing?
    “That’s great,” she says with a smile that feels like it reaches right into me and looks around inside. Can a smile even
do
that?
    “Can you remember it?” She’s leaning forward, looking at me so intently I’m afraid she’s wading through all my hidden secrets.
    I can feel a room full of gobsmacked eyes zoning in on me. So I pull myself together and give the only answer that’ll save me. “No. Sorry.”
    Miss Murray purses her lips, still looking at me.
    “But I know it’s good,” I add feebly. She’s