The It Girl(9)

“Something like that.” A smile crinkled the tanned skin at the side of Will’s mouth. Hannah found herself staring up at him. He had clear brown eyes, dark brows, and his nose had clearly been broken, maybe more than once. Hannah’s mouth felt dry and she swallowed, trying to think what to say, but Will filled in the silence for her. “I went to Carne—all boys. So they paired us up for socials with April’s school to try to ensure we didn’t get to uni without having met a real live female.”

“No danger of that with you, darling,” April said. She took a swig of the chocolate milk on her tray, and then slid onto the bench beside Will without bothering to ask if she could. Will sat back down beside her.

“I was actually saving that seat, you know,” he said to April, but conversationally, not as if he expected her to move. Hannah, still standing, hesitated. There was a space opposite—but only one. Maybe Will wanted it for his missing friend? She looked at April, seeking a cue, but April was tapping away on her phone.

Hannah bit her lip, half turned away, and then Will spoke.

“Hey, don’t go, we’ll make room.”

Her heart flipped again. She smiled, trying not to look too pathetically grateful, as Will put his bag on the floor and nudged his neighbor up a few inches, making an extra space.

“Look, sit there.” He indicated the space opposite. “Hugh can squeeze in next to me and April.”

“Did you say… Hugh?” April’s head came up from her phone at that. There was an odd expression on her face, surprise, even delight, but mixed with a kind of mischievousness that Hannah couldn’t totally figure out. “Not… Hugh Bland?”

“The very same. Didn’t you know he was applying here?”

“I knew he was trying for Oxford, but I had no idea he’d picked Pelham,” April said. She put her phone down, and then a smile curved her lips as a tall, pale boy with heavy Stephen Hawking–style glasses came up to the table. “Well, well, well… speak of the devil.”

“April!” the boy said, and then, all at once, he stumbled, tripping over his own feet so that his tray lurched out of his hands, the pasta crashing to the floor.

There was a moment’s dead silence, every head in the place turned, and then one of the other boys at the table spoke up.

“Ey up, show’s over, everyone. Move along now.”

Hugh, though clearly mortified, laughed and gave a little self-conscious bow. His face was scarlet as he picked up his can of Coke and scooped up stray tortellini.

“Sorry. Such an ass.” His voice was muffled, but plainly what Hannah’s classmates would have called classic posh boy. “So sorry. Thank God it landed right way up. Mostly.”

He slid into the seat beside Will with the ruined plate of pasta, his cheeks still flaming, and picked up a fork.

“Don’t eat that, you idiot,” April said a little scornfully. She stood, waving her arm at the counter. “Hey, could we get some help over here? And another plate of the tortellini?”

They all watched in silence as a member of the catering staff came across with a spare plate and a cloth to wipe up the spilled sauce.

“I’m so sorry,” Hugh said again, this time to the caterer, who just nodded and walked off. Hugh looked miserable, and Hannah suddenly felt unbearably sorry for him.

“Do you all know each other?” she said to April and Will, more in an attempt to change the subject than because she was in doubt. April nodded, smiling, but it was Will who answered.

“Hugh and I go way back—we were at prep school together, and there’s nothing that binds friends like a shit prep school, right, Hugh?”

“Right,” Hugh said. The flush was fading from his cheeks, and he had his head down, bent over his food as if he was trying to avoid everyone’s gaze. “Hugh Bland,” he said to Hannah. “Medicine.”

“Hugh and I are very good friends,” April said with a kind of purr. She reached across and pinched Hugh’s cheek, and the scarlet tide rose in his face again, this time reaching to his ears. There was a brittle silence.

“And what about you?” April said, with the air of breaking an awkward moment. She was speaking to the boy sitting next to Hannah, the one who had told everyone the show was over. He was a broad, stocky kid with Mediterranean coloring, wearing a Sheffield Wednesday football shirt.

“This is Ryan Coates,” Will said. “He’s doing Economics, same as me.”

“A’right,” Ryan said, grinning. His accent was straight-up Sheffield, and after so many posh southern voices, it sounded almost aggressively northern. Hannah felt a sudden shock of kinship—even though Dodsworth was about as far south as it was possible to get. But here was someone normal like her—someone not from the monied, private-school background that Will and April seemed to take for granted.

“We’re all on the same floor in Cloade’s,” Will said.

Cloade’s, Hannah knew from the prospectus, was the big modern wing at the back of the New Quad where most of the first-years had ended up. It was square and made of brutalist concrete, but the rooms were en suite and the heating actually worked. Still, Hannah couldn’t help feeling secretly grateful that she and April had been allocated a picturesque old-style room. After all, wasn’t this what she had come to Oxford for? She had wanted to walk in the footsteps of four hundred years of scholars—not on the carpet squares of the last few decades.