Peppermint Kiss Read Online Free Page B

how it is with some people. You just get a good vibe.
    When I glanced over to the girl next to me, she smiled too. “I’m Summer,” she whispered. “That’s Ben. And I gather you’ve met Mr. Vain.” She winked at Marco and sang, “Yeah-yeah, I wanna be a rock star,” under her breath. He grinned and flicked her a V-sign.
    Out of everyone in the room, Summer had taken her uniform closest to the limit with hippy bracelets and beads, stripy tights, DMs with painted flowers on, a minuscule skirt and a huge floppy yellow bow in her long curly black hair. She looked A. Mazing.
    Snuggling up in Marco’s blazer, and enjoying the smell of his body spray or whatever it was swirling all around me (I was picking up the cedar wood from it now as well), I felt like things might not be going too badly after all.
    At break, Summer showed me where the loos were and I got a chance to dry off my hair and shirt under the hand dryer. The nun tights were still soggy and stretching evilly. At this rate they were only ever going to fit someone eight foot tall, so I took them off and threw them in the bin. My make-up was so wrecked the only choice I had was to scrub it all off. Which meant I’d be stuck like that for the rest of the day – bare-faced. Yikes. Kids were probably going to be staring at me in the corridor, asking each other, “Where
has
that girl’s head gone?”
    How on earth could I forget to bring any make-up to school? How could Summer not have any with her? I did get why not, actually. Some girls don’t need it. Summer looked amazing with just a slick of Lypsyl – her eyelashes were naturally full and dark, her skin was peachy and her cheeks were slightly flushed in a gorgeous way you could never achieve with a blusher brush. Grrr. I’m not saying I wished she could be ugly for
ever
or anything, but maybe just for the day, because standing next to her was making me look even
worse
.
    â€œI’ll bring you some uniform stuff I’ve grown out of,” she offered, and I just automatically said, “Oh thanks, that’s really sweet, but I’ll buy it new.”
    She peered at me. “Oh, okay.” She looked a bit shocked. “It’s just better to reuse stuff, isn’t it?” she said then. “You know, reduce, reuse, recycle and all that.”
    Huh. I mean, obviously we put our bottles and cans out for the recycling truck like everyone else, but I’d never thought having second-hand uniform could be seen as a
good
thing. New was just better…wasn’t it?
    Lots of things were different here though.
    Like, at my old school we all did our ties in a certain way, with only the thin bit hanging down. We thought it made us look so individual. But now I realized it just made us all look the same. The kids here who even had ties
on
were wearing them in so many different ways – short, fat knot, skinny, loose, even just the regular way. Anyone who’d turned up like that at my old school would have been teased so badly, it wasn’t worth it…but here no one seemed to care.
    So then I said yes please to Summer’s offer of uniform, pretending it was only because I wanted to be green, and not also because – as I’d remembered – we couldn’t actually afford anything new.
    When I’d finished making myself look even
less
attractive in the loos, we went into the dining hall. The canteen was open for snacks and I realized all at once that, a), I was starving hungry and, b), I’d forgotten to bring any money with me. Then I remembered that I didn’t have any money
to
bring, and that was such a weird feeling. Dad was always slipping us tenners, he paid for our phones by direct debit, and I had a monthly allowance for supplies for making my soaps and stuff, plus any clothes or downloads I wanted.
Used
to have, I realized with a start.
    Summer pulled an apple out of her bag and crunched into it.