The school was great. The few students that we had really gotten to know were lovely people. I had updated Pam about our mission, but she agreed with my mother. She asked that we inform the boys only if it was strictly necessary, so that was what we did.
I was really starting to enjoy the Masani way of life. We knew so little about the Masani world, and everything sounded and looked so strange that we complained to other Yans.
We were advised by older Yans to watch something called “reality TV”. As shocking as it sounded, the Masanis, it seemed, documented every aspect of their lives and played it on air for anyone to see.
As entertaining as it was, I must admit that it did damage my opinion of the Masani culture slightly. Their reality television reinforced my belief that the Yan culture was far superior. After Scarlett and Delphine discovered that we were watching reality TV as a reference to their culture, they were horrified.
They both gave us a list of programmes to watch that would be more educational, as well as a list of movies, which became my favourite.
In Yanar we did not have television or cinemas, and being introduced to it convinced me that the first thing to do in Yanar when I became duchess would be to introduce moving pictures to the duchy.
But in the meantime, as much as I had promised not to, I was still watching reality television, with my favourites being The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Counting On and MasterChef Australia.
The honeymoon did not last long. A few weeks after we arrived, while in chemistry class, we heard a commotion. Teachers were called out of their classrooms and asked to go get help. We did not know why. I was terribly curious. What could have possibly been so bad that all the lecturers had to go off and run after who knew what?
Our lecturer came back in, and I thought that we were about to find out what happened, but all he said was that we were to be confined to our rooms. School was interrupted, and our parents were called, so instead of having a seriously good time gossiping, we had to promise them to behave and stay in our rooms.
Salvation for my bruised curiosity came from Amelia, whose French class was opposite the scene of the commotion. I was worried about her, so I went and picked her up, which was when I got all the information I needed.
A fourteen-year-old boy had climbed up one of the fruit trees and fallen and died. His name was Wade Allen Tillerson. It did not take long for us to realise that it had become a media sensation. We learned that his father was deputy commissioner of Scotland Yard and that he had lost his mother a few years ago.
The most troubling thing was that his mother, Joan Carter Allen, had killed herself by jumping off a building. As much as I was sad for Mr Tillerson, I couldn’t help but find the death of his son very troubling, especially as he had died from a fall as well.
A few days later, Amelia came to find me in my room and told me that she was bothered by something she had found out about Tillerson’s death. I shared with her my discomfort about the similarity between his and his mother’s deaths, and she agreed with me.
That afternoon, she told me that a student who had been sitting next to a window facing the tree from which Tillerson had fallen had seen a plastic bottle being thrown just before the fall. He hadn’t thought much about it at first, but after further thought, he had realised that Tillerson must have thrown it before his fall.
Normally, I would have dismissed the information. The “witness” was none other than my sister’s friend Sorel, a horrible little troll with a very vivid imagination and a talent for putting his nose where it did not belong. But that information, if it was true, would add some serious juice to my theory that something very weird was going on in the school.
After a few enquiries, I realised that for the first time, Sorel was right and had been telling the truth. Not only was he not the only one who had seen a bottle in the air, but before we knew it, all sorts of rumours had started to fly around the school about Tillerson’s death, and from what I could figure out, this was not the first time that the angel of death had visited our school.
It was, however, the first time that the dead student had been the child of a wealthy and influential person. It was as if a light had gone on in my head. My entire body was telling me, Yes, I knew it.
I knew something was off with the school, even if I still couldn’t say what, and I hadn’t seen any evidence of anyone doing anything, so why not concentrate on something else?
I decided to conduct my own investigation in order to validate or debunk the multiple rumours I had heard. The idea was tingling my body all over. I liked being in school, but I was starting to find life in a boarding school a bit dull and slow, so any new event was like Yule had come early for me.
I called Hogan after that and asked to meet with him after school. Although Hogan was a very sardonic person, he was also a very good friend and, just like me, loved playing Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, so I knew he wouldn’t make fun of me. To my dismay, he showed up with William. As soon as I saw them, I wanted to scream, “NOOOOOOOOOO!”
From the moment I had met William, my heart had stopped listening to me. Every time I got near him, my heart would start racing, my legs would go weak, and I would feel unwell. Unfortunately for me, he was always with Hogan, and with Hogan being a very good friend of mine, I had no choice but to endure being around William.
Things got a lot more complicated when Pam, Delphine, Scarlett and I attracted the attention of the resident popular mean girls of J.C. They would magically appear whenever we got together in main court, sitting under a tree, or in Gateway Hill, trying to enjoy ourselves.
We shared a lot of classes with the mean girls, and for some reason, they would always find a way to sit behind us in class and make a point of the fact that we were the topic of their conversation.
In Yanar we were not used to having our looks and behaviour criticised constantly. Most mean comments would usually be about our academic performances or fighting skills. Here the jibes felt very calculated. The girls would talk among themselves and say things like, ‘although we were quite beautiful, we most likely would not make many friends, because we gave off a vibe that suggested that we were snobbish and uptight’.
They would also say that they couldn’t understand why Pam and I would want to be around fat and plain-Jane girls like Delphine and Scarlett. They would add that they could only conclude that we had low self-esteem and that being around less attractive girls made Pam and me feel better about ourselves.
Those statements were cruel and unfounded. Scarlett was very cute, and Delphine was as bright and sparkling as a star. And to be honest, Delphine and Scarlett were much more attractive than they were, and after I had mentioned the comments to a few classmates, they agreed with me.
Most of the time, I wanted to get up and confront them, but Pam kept stopping me. She didn’t want to acknowledge their presence and believed that the biggest insult we could give them was our indifference.
I disagreed. Delphine might not have cared about what the girls were saying about her, but Scarlett did, and I had to console her in our room every day. If we had been in Yanar, I would have given the three bullies a well-deserved beating, and everyone around us would have applauded.
In the Masani world, however, violence was considered unacceptable, so Pam had made me swear not to hurt the bullies, and it was taking a lot of self-control on my part to listen to her and follow through with my promise.
I found out pretty quickly that the ring leader was William’s ex-girlfriend Pollard. The story around school was that they had ended their relationship right before school broke up last summer and that she had spent the entire summer taking selfies to remind him of what he was missing, but he had not shown any interest.
I was eventually shown the selfies she had plastered all over social media. The truth was that if I hadn’t been shown the selfies, I would have searched the internet myself after hearing all the buzz that those photos had generated at J.C..
I was ashamed to admit that I was dying to see the photos. As low as it might sound, I was secretly hoping that they would be embarrassing and make her look like a fool. When I was finally presented with them, they did not disappoint me at all.
The photos were quite raunchy and suggestive but nothing improper, and probably no one would have made a big deal about them if they had not been interpreted as being taken and posted in order to win back William. Because everyone had surmised that the selfies were posted as a message to William, they made her look desperate.
I have to admit that if I had taken that much time making myself look that sexy and beautiful, I would have been extremely frustrated to be ignored by the object of my affection. In all the pictures, her hair was flawless. I did find that she was wearing too much make-up, and she was pouting in all the selfies. Why? I had no idea, but otherwise, she looked super-hot.
In all her poses, she was wearing gorgeous bikinis. I recognised them as being Lua Morena’s designs. Morena’s designs were very popular in Yanar because her aunt was a Yan from Wahine, a city in the south of the duchy.
In all the shots, Pollard’s tan was perfect, and every pose showed her curves, especially her boobs and her derrière. Clearly, she had been hitting the gym as well, because her body was perfectly toned.
Just as Pam and I were about to ask my classmate what all the selfies could possibly have to do with the horrible way Delphine, Scarlett, Pam and I had been treated by the girls, we were told that after Pam and I had arrived at J.C., William had said, after seeing me and while standing next to his ex-girlfriend, “Wow! She is stunning.”
As soon as I heard that, I turned red, and Pam turned to me and gave me a smirk. She knew that I was very happy to hear that, but I had to pretend that I didn’t care. I didn’t want my classmate to know about my feelings for William.
I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Well, now I know why she hates me.”
So, seeing Hogan walking towards me to talk about the investigation, and realising that he had William with him, I was caught off guard. It would be the first time I saw him since I had learned that he found me attractive, and I didn’t know how to act around him.
My other worry was that as much as William had been hanging around Hogan since school started, he had been attending J.C. since he was twelve years old, like seventy per cent of the students there. That meant that by the time we arrived, most students had already been divided into cliques, and William’s ex-girlfriend Eugenie Scott Pollard was part of his clique, which meant that they were destined to spend a lot of time together.
Not wanting to let my feelings get in the way of a good mystery, I mentioned my suspicions to the boys, and all that I had been told by Amelia. The boys didn’t have much time to chit-chat, but they promised to get back to me by the weekend.
Seeing William just reminded me that I had a problem named Pollard. I knew I was obsessing too much about her, but when we had first arrived at J.C., we were warned about the worst bullies at the school, and her name was mentioned.
We had heard from Delphine and Scarlett that the previous year, a student had attempted suicide because of Pollard and her friends’ incessant bullying, which had caused the student to leave J.C. and William to break up with her.
The three girls were also arrested for bullying, which carried a six-month community sentence, as well as a fifteen-thousand-pound fine to the victim from each girl. The victim’s family also took out a restraining order against the girls, and they all had a criminal record.
The gods have been generous was all I could think. I was glad that bullying was taken as seriously in the UK as it was in Yanar.
It did not take me long to realise that my chances to ever be with William were from zero to none. I was convinced that with a reputation like hers, there was little chance Pollard wouldn’t spoil any attempt of mine to approach the boy she liked.
Because Hogan had become so close to William, we had started to spend time with William as well. The result was that William’s other friends got into the habit of joining us. It was obvious that even though they were no longer a couple, they still belonged to the same group of friends, so it seemed like they were always together, and she was acting as if he still belonged to her.
I started to dread having to spend time with Hogan and William. I knew that spending time with them meant spending time with his ex-girlfriend, and I really didn’t like her.
In all fairness we were also a clique, and by we I meant the Yans of the same age group. There were six of us: Hogan, Tristan, Pam, Alex, Hassan and me. Hassan’s real name was David Mulumba, but anyone who grew up with him called him Hassan because he always compared himself to Hassan Schneider Bouba, a famous gladiator in Yanar.
Although people knew about the existence of Yans in the world, besides our embassies and a few publicly know official Yan institutions, they couldn’t tell the difference between a Yan and one of them.
The students certainly didn’t know that there were any Yan students in J.C., but our attitude and our cluelessness towards simple Masani ways of life had started to make them suspect us of being Yans.
Little things, like a simple introduction in a social gathering, were totally different in Yanar. In Yanar asking a stranger for their name or where they were from was extremely rude. Until a person volunteered the information, no one could ask them for it.
What Yans did was introduce themselves and hope that the other person reciprocated. If it didn’t happen, then the message was clear: they had no interest in striking up a conversation with you.
When we had arrived in J.C., the students had kept asking for our name and where we were from. We took it as an insult, and it resulted in a lot of verbal arguments, to the point where they all stopped asking and waited to be approached by us.
The other thing was our lack of knowledge when it came to music or movies or even popular hang-outs. It was pretty clear to them that wherever we were from, it was very removed from what they called “the civilised world”.
Despite our shortcomings, it did not take us long to become popular in J.C., but not for the same reasons as in a Yan school.
Being popular in a Yan school was not the same as being popular in a Masani school. In Yan schools, popularity was based on your academic and FIST performances; students became popular only after gaining the highest distinction intellectually and in FIST, and for nothing else.
People like William and his friends, who were popular because they were good-looking and had a chance to go to the Olympics or make a national team, had no value in Yan schoolyard hierarchy.
As terrific as we all were, we were not the greatest at our Yan school, so for Alex, Hogan and Hassan, being popular at J.C. was a dream come true. Actually, Hassan was in heaven; he had really struggled at our previous school. His FIST skills were quite poor, but he was a great athlete when it came to Masani sports, so being in J.C. had restored his confidence and even flattered his ego in a big way. He had started believing that he was handsome, despite our repeated attempts to make him realise that he looked more like Stephen K. Amos than Chadwick Boseman, and we were being polite.
He failed repeatedly to realise that the thing that raised his profile was not help from the gods but the simple fact that he was friends with Alex and Hogan, two of the school’s hottest guys. J.C. had a large group of what I called “the sea of morons”. They were girls who seemed to think that being around Hassan would get them closer to the pretty boys, but I knew that wouldn’t be the case.
That unexpected turn of events made me very reluctant to admit Masanis into my group of friends; we could never figure out who truly liked us and who was just using us to get closer to the boys. Pam and I eventually started to become so detached and cold towards non-Yans that they ended up nicknaming us “the Vulcans”, because Vulcans were known to be cold and difficult to impress.
Not having heard from Hogan about the death of Wade Allen Tillerson, I assumed that he was not interested in the investigation, but I was wrong. He eventually got back to me, showing interest, and demanding more information than what I had emailed him with. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any more. I, too, had been wrapped up in my new life at J.C. and had spent all my time going down the list of movies I had been advised to watch.
We decided to meet on the lower ground, just under the biggest tree on the school grounds. A lot of students liked to sit under it and have picnics. After I had told the boys what I had been up to, they were pretty excited and agreed that we should try and find out more about the previous deaths that had happened in the school.
Once again Hogan was with William, so I decided that since Hogan wanted to include William in everything, I would do the same with my Scarlett. I had decided that I would wait until they were near me to announce to them that my roommate would be joining us, but then suddenly Hogan tensed up.
I would have dismissed it if I hadn’t noticed a smirk on William’s face. Something was going on, and I thought I knew what. I had asked Scarlett to join us, so I could only assume that she was coming towards us and he had seen her. I was not a patient person, so I just said it. “Let me guess,” I said, facing Hogan. “You fancy Scarlett.”
He turned red and started to mumble something, only to stop. I turned around, and there was Scarlett standing behind me, smiling, looking very angelic. She looked so incredibly cute and sweet that I could see why Hogan was smitten.
After a few awkward moments where Hogan did not say a word, we finally got Scarlett up to speed. Luckily for us, the weekend was approaching, so we were allowed to go down into the village. We got to the local library and took apart the newspaper archives. We found out that almost every three years, at least one student had died in the school, and all these deaths were always “accidental”. A drowning, a fall from a tree or a cliff, an allergic reaction – either way, it was like the school was asking for a sacrifice, and one was given to it.
Of course, William saw no reason to think that the deaths were not accidental. He and Scarlett were the resident positive thinkers, and she agreed with him, but I was determined to prove my point. I pointed out to him that we should research the names of the students and try and find a common link between them. The problem was where to find such answers. Half-term was near, and we would be able to go home, so we decided to each keep a list and do our research in the comfort of our own homes.
We also needed to get as much information as we could about the students, and the place to do that was their files in the school archives. Our only problem was that getting any-where close to the record office would require a serious magic trick, unless we got help from someone else. In the Yan world, we had all the equipment required to get all the information we wanted. All I needed was a tracker, but mine was in London. A tracker is a technology capable of tracking anyone on earth including in Yanar by accessing any technology available. Not having access to mine, I decided to ask for Tristan’s help.