‘Ehhh…both,’ I hissed back. ‘I meant to, it was just that last night…’
‘Your dorm-mate kept you up chatting half the night?’ he guessed knowingly, the black eyes dancing.
‘Something like that, yeah.’
‘Sounds like Yolanda all right,’ he said, but kindly and not in any way putting her down.
Meanwhile the girl herself, seated two full rows ahead of us, had heard him utter the magic word…her own name…and turned around to beam suggestively and swish her blonde, freshly-washed locks at him. Now don’t get me wrong; I liked Yolanda very much, but even at this early stage I was starting to learn that she wasn’t much of a rules girl and didn’t for a single second believe that if a guy liked you, he’d find some way to ask you out. No, she was of the ‘take no prisoners and bludgeon a fella into submission until you eventually become his girlfriend’ school of thought. She smiled when Dan smiled and her eyes barely left his, like he was her magnetic North. And I just knew from the mildly inquiring look on her face that I’d have to relay every detail of the conversation I’d had with him back to her at lunchtime, omitting no detail, however trivial.
Then…to the soundtrack of a drumroll in my head for dramatic effect…came the dreaded phrase.
‘So,’ said Miss Hugenot, glowering at me with beady grey eyes that spotted fresh blood. ‘Let’s all hear from the latest addition to our class, shall we? Miss Annie Cole? Let’s see what they’ve been teaching you out in Karachi, then. Would you care to come to the top of the class and derive from first principles, x, x squared and x cubed, sin x, cos x and tan, from your notes? In full, if you please.’
Mike Sherry was on the opposite side of the class to me and, to a chorus of giggles immediately made this really annoying kissy-kissy noise that almost sounded like he was calling a horse, while I stumbled to my feet, trembling like jelly.
But that was all it took to distract Miss Hugenot. The full headlamps of her attention momentarily turned on Mike, to berate him for displaying such immaturity and in that split second and with sleight of hand that a professional magician would envy, Dan instantly switched copybooks with mine. So there was the answer, all perfect and neatly written and all I had to do was transcribe. Honour was saved and for the first time in my life, I was actually able to leave a maths class with my head held high.
Later on after class, as I was packing up to leave, Dan grabbed my arm and caught up with me as I stumbled off to try and find my next class.
‘Hey, wait…where are you headed?’ he asked me as I consulted an unintelligible map of the school.
‘Ehhh…room 201?’
‘Wrong way. Here, let me show you where it is.’
He took my books and strolled alongside me and to this day I can still remember the nervous, nauseous sensation of butterflies suddenly hitting my stomach. Bear in mind, I’d only ever been to all-girls schools before this and was totally unused to male attention, never mind the dense, sweaty atmosphere of sex that practically ricocheted off the walls at Allenwood. Sex and teenage pheromones that is, impervious either to open windows or deodorant. And now here was Dan, all tall and earthy and confident, utterly secure in his own popularity as only a captain of the school rugby team could be. The approximate size of a block of flats and so muscular he looked like he rowed everywhere. Handsome is such a Jane Austen-esque word, I thought, and yet it was the only possible adjective you could use to describe Dan Ferguson.
I tried to thank him for digging me out in maths class, but he just grinned and brushed it off. Then he abruptly changed the subject and asked me how I was settling in.
‘Great,’ I answered, trying my best to match his cool confidence. ‘Everyone’s being really friendly.’
That much was a polite, white lie; I was crippled with shyness back then, and the truth was that apart from him and Yolanda, I’d barely said two words to anyone else to date.
‘You must really miss your family though,’ he said gently, suddenly stopping in the packed corridor to look intently down at me. And I really do mean to look down at me – even at fifteen he was pushing six feet tall.
‘Very much,’ I nodded, ‘but I’ll see my mother at mid-term. And at Christmas, of course.’
‘She’s in…South America, isn’t it?’
‘Georgetown,’ I nodded, then stupidly tacked on, ‘in Guyana.’ By now people were starting to bang into us in their haste to get to the next class, but still Dan didn’t budge.
‘And your dad?’
‘Remarried. Lives in Moscow now. His new wife is Russian. I don’t really…that is, I don’t really see him all that much. In fact…I don’t see him at all.’
I think he must have guessed this wasn’t a subject I particularly wanted to be probed on, so he tactfully changed the subject back to Mum.
‘Still though, South America’s a helluva long way for you to travel to see your mother,’ he said, worry suddenly flashing into the coal-black eyes. ‘And then keeping in contact can’t be easy either. All those long-distance phone calls, emailing the whole time…’
‘Oh no, it’s absolutely fine, I’m well used to it.’
I might have sounded all sure of myself and blasé, but his quick mind seemed to read me accurately and he easily sensed the insecurity that lay beneath.
‘Do you have any other family here in Ireland?’ he asked kindly.
‘My grandmother…but honestly, I’m completely fine about Mum being so far away. As Yolanda pointed out to me, I’ve got to look on the positive side.’
‘Which is?’
‘She said I’m probably the only one in this school who can go home for the holidays and pick up a suntan at the same time.’
He smiled his gorgeous crooked smile at that, then changed the subject, saying that there was a big rugby match that Saturday in the school grounds against Clongowes Wood, a rival boarding school, and did I fancy coming along to watch?
‘I’m playing in it,’ he grinned and in that second I was utterly sucked into his easy, relaxed charm. ‘And believe me, if last night’s training session is anything to go by, we need all the support we can get.’
Course at lunchtime, Yolanda cornered me and didn’t so much ask as demand to know the exact nature and substance of what we’d been talking about. So I told her, correctly guessing that she wouldn’t like it.
‘He invited you to watch the match?’ she hissed, her blue eyes a beautiful study in wounded pride. Bless her, she’d been kind and welcoming to me; really bad idea to go pissing her off now. And given that I had a social circle that consisted of one girlfriend, the last thing I needed was to start making enemies.
‘Come on, Yolanda, he meant as friends, that’s all,’ I stressed. ‘He was asking me about my mother being so far away and just felt a bit sorry for me, that’s all. For God’s sake, it’s only a rugby match. Won’t half the school be there supporting the team?’
This mollified her a bit and by the time I reminded her that Dan was only being nice to the new girl, she’d finally started to cool down a bit. But not before impressing on me that Mike Sherry had expressed interest in me, that he was a sweetheart and that I’d be a right moron not to really, really, really consider giving him a whirl.
‘You know you really should give Mike a chance,’ Yolanda had said for about the thousandth time one evening during study time, as she stared out the window and through the lashing rain at Dan training hard on the rugby pitch, rolling around with the rest of the team and covered in shite. Incidentally, him at his happiest, I’d later discover.
‘You