Part 7 (1/2)

'Hang on!' Jason called out and began to follow her down. 'I think it's funny! I think it's very sweet of you.'

This just made Amy speed up to get away from him.

Now she was blinking tears away, head down, hands balled into fists, not wanting him to see how upset she was because of him.

'Amy!' he called out after her. 'I'm sorry about today. I'm busy all afternoon with the match and I don't have a late pa.s.s from school. I couldn't get out today.'

'You're out!' she stormed at him. 'Couldn't we have had a coffee? Just for an hour this morning?'

'Well, yeah,' he answered. 'But I didn't think you'd want to do that. I wanted to take you on a proper date and show you the kind of fantastic time you showed me in Glasgow.'

This stopped Amy in her tracks. A fantastic time in Glasgow? So he still remembered it as a fantastic time? 'Where have you been since then?' She turned and stormed at him: 'No phone calls? No emails? You couldn't even send me a flaming text. Unless I contact you first, you never think of me for a second!'

'I do,' Jason told her, and his face seemed to cloud over. 'I've been . . . tied up.'

'Yeah, tied up! Like you're tied up today! If it's so fantastic when we get together, why don't you want to get together more?'

He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder.

'Stop it,' he urged. 'You're here now, I'm here. Do you want to come and buy some rugby boots with me? Then, I don't know . . . We could get an ice cream.'

An ice cream? Did he think he was her uncle or something?

'An ice cream?' she blurted out in dismay.

'Yeah, I love ice cream,' Jason said with his most persuasive smile.

To her surprise, she found herself laughing, and then they were laughing together. To her further surprise, Jason caught hold of her hand and kissed it, as if he were some debonair prince or an old-fas.h.i.+oned film star.

She felt the brush of his upper lip against her fingers so intensely it was as if time had slowed down for those few seconds. Then they walked hand in hand to the sports shop. Afterwards, Jason bought them both a ninety-nine cone from a van by the gardens alongside Prince's Street. Then, still hand in hand, they walked all the way back to St Lennox, where Amy had to say goodbye because Jason had a rugby match. He promised he absolutely one hundred per cent guaranteed that he would call and they would arrange to do something together next weekend.

Only when he was well and truly out of sight did Amy think to glance at her wrist watch. It quite clearly showed that the time was 1.15! Mince! How had it got to 1.15? She was supposed to have signed in at the boarding house fifteen minutes ago, and worse, much worse, she knew that Gina and Min would already be there. But what would they have told the Neb?

Chapter Twelve.

As Amy sprinted up Bute Gardens towards the boarding house the amount of running around she'd done this morning was going to kill her she tried to listen to the garbled messages on her mobile. Yes, her mobile! The one she'd forgotten to turn back on after her little tantrum up on The Mound.

An increasingly frantic Gina and then Min had raged at her voicemail: 'That's it, we're going back. We can't hang about hoping you'll call or we'll somehow b.u.mp into you. We're taking the bus. We'll get off at the usual stop and walk back very slowly. Hopefully we'll meet you on the way.'

Well, that had been quite nice of them, Amy had to admit. She was going to have to think of an excuse though. She tried to remember all the advice Niffy a totally expert liar had ever given her. Keep it simple. Keep it casual. Never over-elaborate. Just go for the obvious. Expect to be believed! That had been her mantra. Expect to be believed.

Amy opened the door of the boarding house and saw at once that lunch was over. She might as well go straight into the Neb's sitting room and see if the dragon was there she wanted to get this over with as soon as possible. She knew she was in real danger of being gated next weekend. Burning at the forefront of her mind was the devastating possibility of missing her date with Jason.

'Mrs Knebworth?' she said meekly, poking her head round the sitting-room door.

The housemistress was ensconced in her favourite armchair with her feet up, her reading gla.s.ses perched on the end of her nose and one of the Sat.u.r.day newspapers spread out on her lap. Hearing her name, she swivelled her steel-blue eyes in Amy's direction, then narrowed them at the sight of her.

'You are forty-five minutes late,' her tirade began, 'and you very obviously did not meet up with your friends as you promised me you would. This is completely unacceptable, Amy. I will not have girls roaming about Edinburgh on their own. It is against the house rules-'

'Mrs Knebworth,' Amy interrupted before the terrible words 'you are gated' could be issued. She knew that once they had been said, they could never ever be taken back. The Neb would never tolerate any challenge to her authority. She would rather gate the innocent by mistake than retract a gating. 'I am so, so sorry,' Amy began, because nothing less than full-on grovelling was going to get her out of this. 'The uniform shop didn't have any skirts in my size, so they sent me over to the branch right on the other side of town . . .' Amy was straining her memory . . . where was that other shop again?

'And did they have the skirt?' Mrs Knebworth had now put down the paper and was peering at Amy over the top of her gla.s.ses, her eyebrows raised.

'No . . .' Amy had to say that, because otherwise, why didn't she have a shopping bag with her? 'They sold the last two in my size ten minutes before I got there,' she managed.

This was too elaborate, she realized at once Niffy would have thought of something better. Much more simple and clever. She was tangling herself up in knots.

'I tried to meet up with Gina and Min, but . . .' Amy went on, moving away from the skirt. But what? She couldn't do a mobile-flat-battery story because that could be checked; and she couldn't say she'd entered both her friends' numbers incorrectly because that wasn't likely . . . 'But the signal was really weak out there.'

'How curious weak signal in Morningside, and all those mobile phone users out there.' Mrs Knebworth made a tut-tutting sound.

'So then I decided to come straight back and there wasn't a bus for ages.'

'You should have taken a taxi,' Mrs Knebworth commanded. Her gaze was still fixed on Amy.

Amy had no idea whether she was succeeding here or not. Did Mrs Knebworth believe a word she was saying?

'If I'd seen a taxi all the time I was waiting at the bus stop, I'd have taken it,' she said meekly.

'Oh, the bus service is frightful as soon as you're out of the city centre,' the housemistress agreed; to Amy's surprise she looked almost sympathetic.

And that's when Amy remembered that the Neb didn't drive and had ranted about terrible local bus services in the past.

'I couldn't believe it,' she hazarded. 'I was just waiting and waiting and waiting. According to the timetable there should have been a bus every twelve minutes.'

'Oh, I know,' Mrs Knebworth agreed. 'It's absolutely ridiculous. And like you say, no taxis ever pa.s.s that way, so you're stuck.'

'Totally.' Amy nodded vigorously.

'Well . . .' Mrs Knebworth looked at Amy searchingly, as if making one last attempt to sniff out a rat. 'These things happen,' she said finally.

Just as soon as she could get out of Mrs K's sight, Amy hurried off in search of Gina and Min. She found them in the Upper Fifth sitting room.

'Did you see him?' was Gina's first question as soon as Amy came in.

'Yeah!' And despite the tension of the last thirty minutes, just thinking about her mini-date with Jason brought an unmistakably dreamy expression to Amy's face. Much to the amus.e.m.e.nt of her friends.

'Oh boy, oh boy! So how did it go?' Gina was desperate to know.

But their conversation was interrupted by a knock at the sitting-room door and Amy's friend Rosie from the year below poked her head round.

'Hi, Amy!' Rosie enthused. 'Can I come in? I saw you going in here and I'm just desperate to know how it went. Did you see him? What did he say? Are you guys going on a date soon?'

As she came into the room, firing questions at Amy, Gina felt her irritation growing. She just didn't like this girl knowing even more about her friend than she did. And it certainly didn't escape her notice that Rosie was wearing exactly the same jeans and an almost identical top as Amy. How could Amy stand it?