Sara Waters - Dancing with Mr Darcy - Stories Inspired by Jane Austen

Kelsey, Lucy, Bex and Charlie. Charlie let them down, and not just with money. For one thing she enjoyed doing homework, and for another there was her hair. It was a) red and b) unstraightenable. Persistent offences for which she must eventually pay the price.

She guessed this ought to bother her more than it did.

‘Charity shops are cool,’ she suggested one lunchtime, while they were sitting in Subway digesting the warm smells of mass-produced bread and too many fillings. They watched Bex growing bored with her salami and brie. She’d begun picking out olives and flicking them into a soggy heap on the table top.

Kelsey, newly-blonded and with a sufficient coating of fake tan to insulate her from most of life’s barbs, tapped her lip. ‘Why?’

‘Good places to buy from,’ Charlie said. Of them all, Kelsey had the most disposable cash; at their school wealth seemed to come in inverse proportion to brains. Charlie quietly hugged to herself the fact that none of the others knew what inverse proportion meant. Charlie was in the top maths set, with the nerdy girls who wanted to do it for A level.

‘Buying is like giving them a donation. And you end up with something you want. Maybe a bargain.’ She nibbled regretfully at an olive. It was always hopeless to mention how little you’d spent on something. Admiration, after all, went simply and directly in line with price.

As if to press home this obvious truth Bex wrinkled her nose. ‘Why would you want to?’ Bex’s teeth were tanked with wire, as if her opinions needed shoring up.

‘There’s this blue dress in Oxfam.’

Lucy’s phone buzzed with an incoming text. Lucy was tall and naturally golden and used to play tennis for the school before she got too cool for sport.

‘Josh passed his driving test!’

It was summer, GCSEs, and Year Eleven was drawing to an anxious and disorientating close. Charlie got up at seven-thirty every morning and did an hour’s revision before breakfast. The others lay in bed until lunchtime unless they had an exam, when they’d need time in front of the mirror with straighteners and lip gloss, texting each other about how little they knew. Panic was a competitive sport.

‘I don’t get it,’ Kelsey moaned as they left Subway. It took twelve-and-a-half minutes to walk to school. ‘LECDs. Tell me.’

‘LEDCs,’ Bex said. ‘Less Economically Developed Countries.’

‘Less than what?’

‘Than MEDCs. It’s on the front of the exam paper.’

‘So, they’re, like, poor.’

The girls rounded the corner by the post office and the school gates slid into view. Charlie read the latest from Lucy’s phone.

‘Josh is getting a car.’

Josh was big and dark and beautiful, with hair down to his shoulders and a bum in his rugby shorts that might have been carved from teak. During the winter they’d all taken to watching rugby on Thursday nights, parading their handwoven scarves and slouch boots along the touchline. They’d learned phrases like drop goal and forward pass. There was a bit of a frisson about walking into the boys’ school, from all the hormones that got mixed with the floor polish in the corridors. Little boys at the lockers gawped as they went past. Sometimes the teachers did too, but they never said anything, not if you’d come to watch sport. Boys’ schools encouraged that kind of thing.

‘He wants a Mini Cooper. One of those new ones.’

Josh was also Lucy’s unreachable stepbrother. He occupied a separate and unimaginable stratospheric orbit, coddled by other grey suits and yellow-striped sixth form ties, worn wide and loose and sexy. Kelsey, Lucy, Bex and Charlie picked out names to decorate their school planners in highlighter pens and Tipp-Ex. Ben, Josh, Grant, Callum. They sought information from Facebook but none of the boys added them as a friend.

Worse, the rugby season had ended months ago.

Eighty-four girls in damp white shirts huddled in the school foyer, clutching biros and rulers.

‘Hey. Megan looks scared.’ Kelsey nudged Bex.

‘Scared she’ll get less than ninety-nine percent.’

Charlie turned to glance at Megan, who sat behind her in maths and barely spoke. Megan had waist-length hair that no one remembered ever being cut. It was as greasy as chip fat and had a halo of split ends.

‘No time to shower when there’s LEDCs to learn,’ Bex murmured, but somehow loud enough for everyone to hear.

Charlie knew, because her mum talked to Megan’s mum – they lived on the same estate and had younger siblings who walked to the primary school two streets away – that Megan washed her hair sometimes twice a day, and took medication for her acne. The drugs she’d been prescribed were so dangerous you had to do a pregnancy test before they let you have them. Even if you’d never had a boyfriend.

She hadn’t mentioned any of this to Kelsey and Lucy and Bex.

From her corner Megan smiled at Charlie, the sort of woebegone little smile that made Charlie want to team up with Bex and squirt superglue into Megan’s ponytail. Although of course there were days when she thought of rallying Megan so that together they could gather all the Ugg boots and designer handbags and chuck them in Lost Property with the old gym shorts and rancid lunchboxes. Occasionally Megan walked to school with Charlie, but usually her dad gave her a lift so she didn’t have to walk anywhere with anyone. Charlie held up crossed fingers and grinned non-committally, jiggling her pens.

‘Don’t encourage her,’ Kelsey hissed.

Afterwards, numbed by Geography, they reeled into Starbucks. Bex and Lucy ordered iced cappuccinos. Charlie, who had to rely for cash on her Saturday job at the newsagent’s, leaned on the counter and read a message from her phone.

What did u think? Last q was murder r u @ kelsey’s?

Megan was the only person Charlie knew who used apostrophes in her texts. She flipped the Back button to hide the screen and watched Lucy rearranging her hair in a fresh cascade of glossy clichés. Vibrant. Glowing. Because She Was Worth It.

Sometimes Charlie managed to think of her own hair as pre-Raphaelite. Days like this it was just frizzy, and badly conditioned to boot.

‘There was this top in Monsoon,’ Bex began loudly. Charlie sighed.

‘Come with me to look at that dress?’ she said to Kelsey.

Charlie’s mum worked in the Oxfam shop on Wednesday afternoons and gave Charlie a lift home at the end of the day if she didn’t mind hanging around for an hour, helping with the stock. Today was Thursday.

As Kelsey crossed the threshold her face actually puckered, like she needed a pomander to stuff under her nose. It seemed to Charlie, annoyingly, that the clothes in the shop were thinner and more lifeless than usual. Granny garments, and not in the nice, retro, antique sense, like twenties lace or a real cloche hat. This stuff was more printed polyester and jersey knits in poisonous patterns. She hooked the blue dress off its rail.

She’d remembered it as silky, but now she saw that the fabric was cheap and stiff, its colour an electric ultramarine rather than the pale indigo she’d held in her head. Which was annoying because Charlie had a knack for recalling shades. She’d arrive at art lessons with colour schemes memorised and ready to put to paper. She got them right, too. Charlie was hoping to do Art for A level. They all wanted to, but in Bex’s and Kelsey’s and Lucy’s cases it was because there was nothing else they liked. And they thought Art was easy.

‘Well?’ Charlie draped the dress over her arm, knowing that Art was actually impossible. How could anyone look at something you’d created for an exam and give it a mark? A mere number? Kelsey shrugged. ‘It’s up to you.’