Page 58 of (Not So) Mad About You

“Right,” said Alli. She’d given a half-hearted apology at lunch and everyone had seemed to accept it.

“Seems odd without Charles here,” Izzy said. “Like we’re a limb missing or something.”

“Seriously?” Alli said. “We haven’t even been here a week yet. We’re not a bonded band of brothers or anything.”

“I loved that show,” Marcus sighed.

“Me too,” said Izzy.

“Two angry people loved a program about fighting, what a surprise,” said Alli.

“No,” said Marcus. “No, not at all. It wasn’t a show about fighting. It was a show about love, compassion, about friendship and sacrifice.”

Izzy sniffed and looked like she was blinking away tears. “It was beautiful.”

“Yeah, well, we’re not like that,” Alli said. She looked over at the place where Charles normally sat. “But it is a bit weird,” she added.

“Maybe he’ll come and visit,” Julia said.

Alli scraped her plate and then stood up. “I’ve had enough of this. Josh is getting me Charles’s phone number. If you lot want it, you can have it. That way you can ring him, alright?”

“Really?” Izzy said, beaming. “Thanks, Alli. That’s really nice of you.”

Alli sighed. She wasn’t trying to be nice, not really. She just wanted them all to shut up so she could think. She couldn’t see Bea and it was pretty obvious that she wasn’t coming to dinner and Alli was starting to think that she might have really screwed up.

Alright, she shouldn’t have lost her temper like that, probably. But she hadn’t been angry at Bea. Surely Bea could see that?

She took herself out of the dining room, checking all the classrooms and finding them empty.

It was only now that she had a thought. A dreadful thought. The thought that maybe Bea had changed her mind. Given that just this morning Alli had no intention of touching the woman again, the idea that Bea might not be interested anymore was more painful than she’d expected.

She sighed, leaning on the banister at the bottom of the stairs, wondering where Bea could be and what was going on.

Dare she go upstairs to the staff quarters? She closed her eyes. As far as she could remember, the rest of the staff were in the dining room. With the exception of Luke. He hadn’t been seen all day.

Okay, so she was going up.

She paused when she got to the corridor, listening for any sound she could, but there was nothing. So there was nothing she could do except walk down the corridor and open doors until finally, inevitably, she opened Bea’s.

And there she was, lying on her bed, reading a book. She looked up as Alli opened the door. “Don’t you knock?”

“Don’t you eat?” countered Alli, leaning on the doorframe and feeling more relieved than she’d thought she would.

Bea sighed and swung her legs over the edge of the tiny bed until she was sitting. She patted the bed next to her. “Alright, I’ve hidden away enough. Close the door, sit down, and let’s talk.”

“About what?” Alli said, a weird twisting starting in her stomach, like she was being sent to the headmistress’s office or something.

“About this morning,” Bea said calmly.

Alli swallowed. This was not a position she was used to being in. She closed the door. “Yeah, right, I’m sorry about that. I wasn’t angry at you, you know.”

“I know that,” Bea said. “But I didn’t like it. It worried me, scared me even. That anger was real, hot, frightening, surely you can understand that.”

Alli sat down on the bed, a sudden chill inside her. “I didn’t mean it to be,” she said.

“But you did,” said Bea. “And, frankly, seeing you like that made me have some serious second thoughts.”

Now the anger was coming, warm and liquid inside her and Alli almost, almost let it go. But Bea’s hand was on the bed next to hers, close enough to touch and as she took a deep breath she saw it out of the corner of her eye and the anger stilled itself. “Right,” was what she said in the end, a little sadly.

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