Song to Wake to - Levels # 1 (Paranormal Romance) Read online

  Chapter 2: Levels

  I pulled the curtains closer together, hiding everything save my eyes, and strained them at the fair-haired woman and the severed head or whatever it was she carried. The streetlight flashed on and the head turned into a motorbike helmet. A bird squawked and the woman slowed. She turned into an alleyway and disappeared. I stood at the window for five minutes more, but I had seen all the night life Chalice Drive offered.

  Maybe music would help me sleep. I considered that month’s favourites. Motorhead, Abba; Abba, Motorhead, before realising I didn’t know where I had unpacked my earphones. Instead I opened my laptop and watched a series of cheesy old music videos. The last was the final scene of a movie from the seventies. I strained to recognise the handsome, strong-faced actor, wearing a white uniform and striding through a factory. I felt like had seen him before, but didn’t know where. A lump swelled in my throat when he appeared behind the beautiful factory girl, tapped her on the shoulder, and swept her up into his arms. A power ballad soared and I considered how wonderful it must be to have a beautiful man just carry you out of nasty situations. I shook my head. I didn’t need anybody to carry me anywhere, but still I resolved to watch the entire movie, and made a note of the title: ‘An Officer and a Gentleman.’

  At two o’clock in the morning it started raining, finally a noise I recognised. Raindrops on my window had always soothed me, and this was no exception. I fell asleep and dreamed of rain, falling and falling, until it filled a small, steely-looking lake.

  Mum took me to Levels the next morning. The school rules stated that no make-up was allowed, but I wanted to give myself every possible advantage. In the car I brushed a touch of mascara over my lashes and smeared on some lip gloss. Mum raised an eyebrow.

  “If anybody asks I’ll say it’s lip balm.” I rubbed my lips together. “But they won’t. They’ll think the new girl just has a special glow.”

  I ran through my lines in my head. My role: Madeleine who doesn’t stand out. Explanations of why I was there would be muted and the coolness of my life in London only hinted at. I intended to imply I could be an amazing swimmer without actually saying as much. Most of all I wanted to deflect and avoid questions. Questions were the enemy.

  Surrounded by acres of playing fields, the school stood on a rise south of Glastonbury, just outside a small town called Street. The school office occupied a pale grey stone mansion that looked as if it could be five hundred years old. It probably was five hundred years old. Around it clustered buildings that housed the classrooms. Further away lay sports facilities, gymnasiums and swimming pools, and the boarding houses, seven of them, where the residential students lived.

  Mum and I entered reception together. The secretary took my name, then ushered us to sit down in a waiting area beside her desk. I had a view down a long, stone flagged hallway. At the end a wooden door stood half open. The brass plate on the wood read ‘Mr. Neil – Chairman’ and through the gap I saw an enormous dark wood desk. On the wall over the desk hung a long, heavy looking sword. I shuddered. What kind of place had I come to?

  A girl in a uniform like my own entered from a side corridor and the secretary beckoned me back to her counter. “Madeleine, this is Sarah. She’s in your tutor group and she’ll be helping you out today. Your tutor group is the class you meet with every morning for notices, your tutor represents you on the staff.”

  I smiled my best meeting-new-people smile. “Hi.”

  “Hi Madeleine. I’m pleased to meet you. Welcome to Levels College.” Sarah had short blonde hair and bright blue eyes. “What’s your sport?”

  I paused for a moment. Getting to know you at Levels had a quite distinct form. “Um, I’m a swimmer, I suppose.”

  “Cool. I’m gymnastics.” Sarah stood a head shorter than me with shoulders almost as broad as my own, freakishly wide swimmers shoulders. “You’re in Logres house with me.”

  “I’m in what?”

  She said it again, slower. “Logres. It’s spelt like ogres. It’s pronounced loggers, but with an ‘R’ after the log. Logres.”

  My voice rose a notch. “I’m not going to live here.”

  “It doesn’t matter; everybody’s assigned to a house. It’s for administration and sports competitions and stuff.”

  I turned to Mum. “See you this evening.” I flashed a wide smile, as much for Sarah’s benefit as Mum’s.

  “Okay sweetheart.” Mum examined me one last time. “Have fun.”

  Sarah led me along a path around a wide lawn to another stone building, not as old as the school office, but still graceful, with a gothic-arched porch. “Our tutor group is all students from Logres. We meet in the tutor room in the mornings for our tutor to check our names off on the register and give us information. Also, in inter-house sports you play for the Logres team and get points to see which house is the best.”

  “Ok.” Thoughts of my old school in London flashed through my memory. Sports teams there had just been named Red, Yellow, Blue or Green.

  My tutor room was large, though there were only sixteen of us in it. On the second floor of the building, it looked away from the centre of the school, across paddocks where horses grazed and barns, which I guessed housed more animals. The room hummed with foreign accents, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, American, and others I didn’t recognise. I concentrated on moving smoothly to an empty desk, keeping my eyes steady and a confident little smile on my lips. Sarah made introductions. The four other girls smiled enthusiastically but the eyes of at least three of them lingered too long on my hair. I winced; I knew I should have straightened it. The boys puffed out their chests as they said their names. They would be easier allies. I concentrated on asking questions and sounding impressed. The more questions I asked, the fewer opportunities they would have to probe me with their own. I paused for breath.

  “What about you?” A tall girl with a pinched, narrow face glanced at my shoes as she talked. “What do your parents do?”

  The ‘secrets alarm’ rang in my head. “My Mum was born here, and my Grandma used to run a business near Glastonbury. We’ve...” I leaned on the word ‘we’, trying to make it sound like as many people as possible. “Come down here, since she died.” I let my eyes glisten a little.

  On cue one of the boys stepped in. “I’m really sorry, you-”

  The classroom door opened and Mr. Vaughan, our tutor arrived. I sighed with relief, while maintaining my tight little smile.

  A whirl of rules and administration followed. Explaining the details of the British ‘A’ Levels system of classes and exams to new foreign students took a while. They all seemed surprised that we got to choose just four or five subjects and ditch everything we didn’t like. For me choosing had been a nightmare, I would have much preferred it if they just instructed us to study everything. After an hour and a half a bell rang. “Come on.” Sarah stood up at the desk beside me. “Let’s go and get something to eat.”

  She led me back outside and around another path to the dining hall in an airy modern building. Drink and snack machines lined one wall. “I’ll get this.”

  “No, it’s okay.” I knew nothing about Sarah, but I guessed she was loaded. I didn’t want her to think I couldn’t afford to buy my own soda.

  “Don’t worry. You can get it for me next time.” Sarah smiled. “But you’re new, so I should.”

  “Okay. I was going to get a Diet Coke.”

  Sarah bought it for me, then we moved together to lean against floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over tiers of playing fields that fell away into the distance. I watched hordes of teenagers coming into the hall and shook my head. “There’s so many.”

  “Yeah, and this is only the sixth form. You probably called it years twelve and thirteen in your old school. The American exchange students call the sixth form juniors and seniors. We’re lumped together for all sorts of things, like break time, sports, parties. There’s five hundred of us. Other years have their breaks at other times, or the younger ones use t
he Assembly Hall for breaks.”

  Groups of students sat around tables, mainly boys and a few older, glamorous looking girls. Younger looking students hung back against the walls like us, or bought their snacks and returned outside.

  “So what’s it like living here?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s...” Sarah looked away from me.

  I followed her eyes. Five boys had strolled through the dining hall entrance. A hush slowly spread through the room and heads turned toward them, or kids watched their progress from the corners of their eyes. The students all wore school uniform, four of them walked abreast in beautifully tailored suits, definitely not from the school shop where I got mine. All of them stood over six feet tall and moved with long, graceful strides. The fifth, slightly behind the end of the line, was even taller with shaggy blond hair and a jacket that looked too small for him.

  “Who are they?”

  The leading foursome scanned the room as they walked, raising their chins to acknowledge people. The fifth kept his eyes down.

  “They’re the polo team.”

  “The polo team? Levels has a polo team?”

  “Ssh. They call themselves the Four Horsemen.”

  I snorted with laughter as they reached the snack machines. I bit my lip, sometimes I felt like being irreverent, sarcastic Madeleine, but today wasn’t one of those times. The boy nearest me snapped his head around and stared into my face. He looked like a male model, with blazing blue eyes and perfect, chiseled features.

  “That’s Kieran Hechter. His father owns half of Somerset.”

  I smiled at him and Hechter stopped dead. Making no attempt to hide it he looked me up and down. Kind of freaked out I turned to Sarah. “Um, I guess that’s cool and everything.” I whispered. “But, can we go?”

  “Okay.”

  We walked beside the wall as, unprompted, the group nearest the snack machines conceded their seats to the four – or five – horsemen. Who did they think they were?

  Outside I looked at Sarah as we walked. “Calling themselves the four horsemen. What’s that all about?”

  “They’re the year above us. Gennady Ivanovich, Rami Ahmed, Tiago Toscano and Kieran. I don’t know who the fifth one is. He’s new.” She pointed at the building we walked past. It looked like a country hotel. “This is Orkney House. It’s quite nice. But they’re all in Camelot House, which is the best one. It’s where all the champions are. Everybody wants to be in it. They’re really cool, I think. Maybe quite cocky, but kind of amazing.”

  I suppressed another snort. Jerks like that were among my least favourite in the world. I shook my head. “I guess I’ll have to see.” I winced. Had I sounded rude? I didn’t want to make enemies on my first day. “They all had really nice hair though.” Really nice hair? I couldn’t believe I was saying this. Way to backtrack Maddie. “Apart from the one with the shaved head.” For God’s sake. What had become of me?

  Sarah pushed her lower lip to one side. “That’s Gennady. He’s Russian. A friend of mine once got invited to one of their parties. She said it was the best party she’d ever been to.”

  I doubted I would ever share Sarah’s fixation with the private lives of the Levels A list, but it made her less likely to show any interest in my own background. As a guide she was unbeatable.

  We passed another residential house, white painted with black beams. “Is this Camelot?”

  “No. Camelot is nicer than this one. This is Gaul.”

  I bit my lip. The school was like living in the Middle Ages. “Okay. Interesting.”

  Sarah smiled and nodded. “It’s really old. The houses are tradition. Everything is tradition here, you’ll understand soon. I totally love it all.”

  She was like the complete Levels cheerleader. I doubted we would ever discuss the amazingness of Martin Luther King, but something about her bubbly enthusiasm warmed me to her. Back in our tutor room we spent the rest of the morning on an introduction to university applications and how we would be undergoing exams for what seemed like the whole of the next two years.

  Lunch passed without any more encounters with the four horsemen and their hanger on. In the afternoon the year’s lessons began with history. Using my neat little school map guidance I weaved amongst the stately school buildings to the humanities block, but I seemed to have come the longest way and everybody was there before me. I took one of two chairs at the last empty desk, then smiled to myself when Ms. Merrick, our teacher, announced that our first course would be Napoleonic France. She handed out textbooks doing a headcount as she went, then returned to the front of the class. “You should be twelve, there’s one student missing, I-”

  She broke off as the classroom door opened and a tall boy entered, the blond student who had accompanied the four horsemen that morning. I held my breath and looked straight ahead. I had accepted Sarah’s explanation of how special he and his friends were, but it didn’t mean I could smile sweetly through a double lesson sitting next to him. The red-haired girl in front of me had a different idea. She turned her whole body in her seat and stared open mouthed as he manoeuvred his rangy frame gracefully between desks. There were six empty chairs in the class. He chose the one beside me.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he mumbled. “I got lost.”

  I suppressed a smirk. The Four Horsemen couldn’t be as special as they thought if they hung around with somebody so hopeless. His shaggy blonde hair hid his face, so I examined his hands. They curled on the desk like pieces of machinery, enormous and tanned. As he pulled a piece of paper from his bag I saw that the palms and fingers were oddly calloused, like the hands of an older, working man.

  “Ok.” Ms. Merrick smiled broadly at us. “This morning your tutor gave you all a printout of your classes. I’d be grateful if you could show them to me please. There are three history groups in your year and it’s important that you’re all in the right one.

  I flushed. The printout contained too much dangerous information. I had hoped that nobody else would have to see it.

  “Whilst I’m doing this, um, I’d like to introduce yourself to the student beside you and find out why they’ve chosen to study history.”

  I sighed. Not only was I sitting next to somebody who tagged along with boys thinking themselves kings of the school. I was going to have to ask him about it. “What’s your name?”

  “Sorry?” He turned to face me.

  “I said...” The sharp retort dried in my throat. Looking at me was one of the most extraordinary faces I had ever seen. Deeply tanned, its symmetry was perfect, with a square jaw, wide mouth, thick brows and startling catlike eyes. Gazing down a straight, strong nose, he reminded me of a lion in a wildlife documentary, staring impassively across the savannah.

  Ms. Merrick passed our desk and took our printouts. I glanced at her, trying to clear my head, before returning to my beautiful neighbour. I started again. “Um, I’m Madeleine Bride, I’m new. What’s your name?”

  “I’m called Eddy Moon. I’m new too.” He flicked his golden eyes at me.

  “I’m studying history because I’m interested in historical figures.”

  Pink overlaid Eddy Moon’s tanned cheeks. It seemed he didn’t know why he was studying history.

  “You?” I prompted him.

  He shifted and his jacket strained over the muscles of his arms and shoulders. For a sixteen year old he was surprisingly hefty. “Um, because, because...”

  “Yes?”

  “Because I think I should?”

  “What?” I stared at him. It seemed he was a classic bimbo. Blonde, beautiful and stupid.

  Ms. Merrick returned and placed our printouts back on the desk in front of us. “Thanks.”

  I looked at Eddy Moon’s perfect, straight nose and his pronounced cheekbones as he scanned the papers.

  “Sorry, um, Lady?”

  I bit my lip. Distracted by the lion boy’s beauty I forgot the embarrassing contents of my printout. “No! Please!” Feeling my face go crimson I snatched the pa
per from him and stuffed it into my bag. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “What, are you...”

  “Ok. Just so we get this over with.” I dropped my voice to a whisper. “My grandmother was Countess Bride, now my mother is Countess Bride, and for some crazy, old fashioned reason this school thinks it’s a big deal.”

  Eddy lowered his straight brows, making his golden eyes even more angular and leonine.

  I scowled straight back at him. “If you mention it to anybody else I’ll... Well I don’t know what I’ll do. But I’ll do something.” Underneath my embarrassment I was enjoying an excuse to punish Eddy for the way his friends had walked across the Dining Hall that morning, and for the way Kieran Hechter had looked at me. Eddy Moon shifted his seat away from me. He seemed genuinely discomfited by what I was telling him.

  “Um...” He slid his own form across the desk with a work-leathered hand.

  I breathed in, catching the slight scents of leather and cut grass. Of course the heart of the problem was my house. My house and my clothes and my haircut. Having a title would be bearable if my family wasn’t so obviously down on its luck. If we lived in a huge mansion I wouldn’t mind that Mum was Countess Bride. I didn’t tell Eddy Moon this, though. I hoped to keep seventeen Chalice Drive a secret for as long as possible. Instead I shot him an evil look that made him drop his golden hair back across his face.

  “Everybody calls me Madeleine Bride, including myself. But according to some forms and stuff I’m Lady Madeleine Bride. Don’t ask me about it again.”

  Eddy did as I requested. For the rest of the lesson he sent neither a word nor a look my way. When I answered questions he kept his gaze on his textbook and when I looked across the room he moved back in his seat, out of my eye line. It was as if Eddy Moon wanted me to forget he existed.