Jaishree Misra - Secrets and Lies

‘If I were you, I’d have screamed my lungs out at that point,’ Anita said sharply.

Zeba looked pityingly at her as though assessing the unlikely prospect of anyone, Gomes or otherwise, making a pass at someone who wore glasses and pigtails.

‘You let him grab your thigh?! Really, Zeba, how can you be such an idiot!’ a horrified Sam exclaimed, ignoring the sound of the bell clanging in the distance, which announced the end of the break.

‘When you’re Zeba, being an idiot is the easy bit, Sam,’ Anita put in drily.

Sam could not bring herself to smile, despite Bubbles and Natasha going off into gales of giggles at that. ‘Just don’t encourage him, Zebs, please!’ she implored.

Zeba got up along with the others, now looking slightly more shame-faced than before. ‘It’s actually not so easy to put Gomes off, you know, Sam…’ she said as they dusted down their uniforms.

‘Why not?’ Anita demanded, picking up her satchel. ‘Give me one good reason.’

‘You see…well, okay, I’ll tell you because I eventually would have anyway. But, listen to this—Gomes says he might be able to get the Chemistry paper for me before the Board Exams. A friend of his is the person who’s going to be setting it. Just think of it…’ Zeba looked around at the group, half pleading and half excited.

There was a sudden silence as everyone stopped walking to look at her open-mouthed.

‘He what?!’ Anita screeched.

‘Oh Zeba, how could you…’ Sam breathed.

‘Listen, I was going to share the paper with you guys, so don’t look at me like that!’ Zeba said.

‘Oh God, Zeba, like that would make it all better. Oh, I just don’t know what to say,’ Sam wailed.

‘Listen, without it I’ll just flunk. And there’ll be no getting to the film institute without a school leaving cert. Then my parents will ground me and there’ll be no outings and no fun, and life just won’t be worth living,’ Zeba said, her voice rising dramatically.

‘We’ll talk about this later—okay? God, there’s the second bell! Now I won’t even have time to go to the loo,’ Sam wailed over her shoulder as she hurried away from the group of friends. Leaving them to wend their way across to the Chemistry lab, she ran towards the water-coolers, nodding absently as she passed a gaggle of seventh graders on their way out of choir practice. They had temporarily suspended their trilling to say hello to her but Sam’s thoughts were miles away as she hastened past them with a serious look on her face. Normally she made it a point to talk to her many fans among the juniors, but today she had not even noticed that she had left them gazing disappointed at her retreating back.

How horribly muddling all this was, Sam considered while filling her water flask. As head girl she really ought to do something about this ghastly mess, but what? Perhaps she ought to let Gomes know somehow that the girls all knew what was going on and that his dirty secret could not be contained any more. Anyone could stumble upon Gomes and Zeba in the lab, which was where—as far as Sam knew—most of their trysts took place.

She ran down the corridor and reached the lab just as her group of friends were walking through the door. By now Sam was perspiring profusely, both from the heat and out of fear. Fortunately the Chemistry lab was the coolest and darkest room in the school, shaded by ancient trees. Set back from the Edwardian building that housed all the classrooms, it had once been the outside kitchen of the old convent that had since acquired a brand-spanking-new stainless-steel canteen indoors. Converting a kitchen to a lab must have been easy, Sam had observed when she had first set foot in this building. The shelves of colourful spices had been replaced by bottled chemicals and the sink now bled the pink juice of potassium permanganate crystals rather than the blood from meat. The faintly unpleasant smell of hydrogen sulphide hung over everything now, though that apparently hadn’t been much of a deterrent to either Gomes or Zeba.

Sam tried not to feel nauseated when she saw their Chemistry teacher simpering openly at Zeba while the group took their places on the stools surrounding his desk. Gomes was a tall, slim man with a mop of oily black hair, and would not have been bad looking were it not for an underhand kind of manner that Sam had often found quite sly. Even the way he walked around made it look as though he were sliding around the lab rather than walking. The incorrigible Zeba looked nonchalant as she perched herself on a stool right under the teacher’s nose amid all the clattering and shuffling. She placed one foot on the stool next to her, a position that caused her skirt to slide a few inches up her long legs. Gomes whipped out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead with it, his small black eyes flicking momentarily towards the shadow between Zeba’s thighs before he struggled to look away. Sam took up her station at the counter as Gomes came around lighting the Bunsen burners, keeping a wary eye on Zeba who was whispering with Bubbles and saying something so hysterical that it was making both girls shake with laughter. As Gomes approached the pair, he dropped the matchbox, scattering matches all over the floor. This made the girls crease up some more and then, while he was scrabbling around on his knees, Zeba stood up behind him to make a thrusting gesture with her hips, wearing a droll expression on her face. Sam flashed a warning look at Zeba as the whole class started to titter and Gomes staggered back to his feet, red in the face. The laughter didn’t seem to bother him, though, and he merely looked adoringly at Zeba as she readjusted her facial expression to one of faux respect, leaning forward on the counter so that he could see right down the V of her open-necked blouse to where her cleavage nestled temptingly. Sam shot a look around the classroom and saw that while most of the girls remained oblivious to the drama of Zeba and Gomes, busying themselves with today’s silver-making experiment, Lily D’Souza had her eyes carefully fixed on the pair. Sam saw those pale blue-grey eyes narrow in recognition before Lily looked as though she were calculating something in her head. Sam shivered and looked pleadingly at Zeba, who was still behaving as though she’d inhaled a whole canister of nitrous oxide. Oh, she was going to get such a telling-off when the school day finished.

Zeba was, however, her usual insouciant self when Sam cornered her after their lab session.

‘You should have seen the way Lily was looking at you when you were flirting with Gomes,’ Sam hissed, squeezing Zeba’s elbow hard as they walked to the gate to emphasise her point.

‘First of all, Sam, it’s not me flirting with Gomes but the other way around, okay? And secondly, I’m not scared of Lily. What can she do to me, hanh?’ Zeba replied brazenly.

‘What can she do? She can tell Lamboo, that’s what! And then we’re all in big trouble.’

‘She’ll never tell Lamboo, yaar,’ Zeba dismissed airily.

‘Oh, and what makes you so confident?’

‘Well, because they never talk to each other at all—we all know that. Whatever goes on in the Princy’s cottage after school, happy chit-chat between Lamboo and Lily doesn’t seem to be part of it.’

Sam recognised the truth of what Zeba said. The principal and Lily certainly did not seem to get on very well. On some days they barely made eye-contact with each other when Miss Lamb was taking their English lesson, or so Sam had observed. So it was a relatively safe deduction that Lamboo was the last person Lily would go snitching to. But that didn’t take away from the fact that Zeba was still dancing with death, playing with fire—no hyperbole would suffice to express Sam’s terror.