Scarlet Wakefield 01 - Kiss Me Kill Me Read Free

so it won’t get in the way when I’m jumping and somersaulting. Not exactly sophisticated.
    If we were packages, we’d be wrapped in brown paper, very battered at the corners, tied up with fraying string. I don’t think this contrast has ever hit me quite in the same way before.
    “Look, there’s that new girl,” Alison says, gesturing subtly with her hand. “The German one.”
    “Sophia Von und Zu Unpronounceable,” I say.
    We all giggle.
    “She’s in Latin with me,” Luce says. “Ms. Hall tried to say it three times before she got it right.”
    “She’s a countess,” Alison says. “And she’s rich. No wonder they snapped her up.”
    Being rich and titled pretty much gives you a passport to Princess Plum’s inner circle.
    “I heard that in Europe, if you’re a count, all your children are counts and countesses,” I observe. “So there are tons of them.”
    “Is that the same for princes and princesses?” Luce asks.
    “I think so.”
    “Nadia’s something.” Alison bites on one of her cuticles and I nudge her with my knee. “I mean, her family are posh.”
    “But they got chucked out, so maybe that doesn’t count,” Luce says.
    “Yes, it does,” Alison insists. “You still keep the title.”
    Nadia’s family had to leave Persia ages ago, when there was a revolution. It’s been called Iran for years and years, but they still call it Persia, because that’s more aristocratic. They kept all their money, though. Enough to easily make Nadia part of the inner circle.
    We’re all staring over at the fountain now, at the group sitting on its steps. They’re all as glossy as show ponies. Polished. Their legs and hair and nails shine, reflecting the early-evening light. No pretense now among the three of us that we wouldn’t give anything to be sitting with them, laughing at their jokes. Being part of the group that gathers by the fountain most evenings, hanging out with the handsomest, richest boys from St. Peter’s, just down the road, is the absolute ideal of every girl at St. Tabby’s.
    “Plum couldn’t,” even do one front handspring,” mutters Luce.
    “It’d mess up her hair,” I chime in.
    But we keep on staring wistfully, projecting ourselves in our imagination over there, sitting on the steps, looking as shiny and sleek as they do. Well, as some of them do. Even in our imagination, none of us can compete with Plum.
    “Is Nadia waving at us?” Luce says, bewildered.
    We turn round to see if Nadia’s actually signaling to a girl behind us. But there’s no one there.
    “It does sort of look as if she’s waving at us,” says Alison, doing her best to sound bland and cool. But I know Alison so well that I can tell how excited she truly is. Her voice is actually wobbling with eagerness.
    “Nah,” Luce says dismissively. “She can’t be.”
    Even Luce, the most unflappable one of our threesome, the most poised and quiet and self-composed of all of us, is getting, well, flapped by this. She’s shifting from side to side restlessly, as if she’s about to take off and start running across the street to the Promised Land where the Golden People sit and laugh as if they didn’t have a care in the world.
    Nadia is definitely waving. And there’s no one else around but us: all the after-school activities have finished by now. The caretaker is coming over to lock up the gates. And somehow I don’t think she’s signaling at him.
    “What should we do?” Alison says, her voice pitching higher with the strain. “Should we go over there?”
    “No!” I say at once. “Think how awful it would be if it was a mistake!”
    The picture of us doing the Walk of Shame back from the Promised Land, rejected, mocked, with Plum’s laughter ringing bell-like in our ears, is so horribly vivid in all of our minds that we gulp in unison.
    “Oh look!” Alison’s practically squealing now. “She’s standing up!”
    Nadia is indeed on her feet. She smoothes down her short skirt, shakes