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“So, drink then?” Hannah said, coming into the living room, where April was scrolling through her phone. Hannah had finished putting away the last of her belongings, and the set finally looked like home again.
“Sure,” April said. She stretched, catlike, spreading out all her toes and fingers. “Pelham bar? I don’t think I can be arsed to go into town.”
“Sure. But can we go via Cloade’s? I met Ryan on the way over and he said to knock on if we were going for a drink.” She said the last part with a slight flush, knowing that she was giving herself an alibi for calling past Cloade’s that had nothing to do with Will, but knowing too that of course April would collect Will while they were over there, so it would come to the same thing. By picking up Ryan, she was ensuring Will’s company.
“No probs,” April said. She grabbed her phone, keys, and purse, glanced at herself in the mirror, and followed Hannah down the staircase and across the quad to Cloade’s.
As they crossed the courtyard in front of the big, blocky modern building, Hannah found herself glancing automatically up at Will’s window, as she always did—second from the right, sandwiched between Hugh’s and Ryan’s. It was dark, but next door Ryan’s was bright, and the window was open, in spite of the cold air.
“Bet they’re smoking,” April said with a slightly wicked look that made Hannah’s stomach shift a little uneasily. She had come to know that look of April’s, and it usually foretold some kind of mischief. The only question was how far she would go.
When they reached Ryan’s room Hannah raised her hand to knock, but April put her finger to her lips. Her eyes were full of laughter.
“Can you smell it?” she whispered. Hannah nodded. The smell of weed was filtering under the door, in spite of the dense municipal carpet, along with the sound of Bellowhead’s “New York Girls.”
“Don’t say anything,” April whispered, and then she raised her hand and knocked, a sharp peremptory rat-a-tat, quite unlike her usual single thump.
“Er, who is it?” Ryan’s voice came from inside. April winked at Hannah and then, to Hannah’s enormous surprise, she spoke, but in a voice quite unlike her own—plummy and rather prim.
“Mr. Coates, this is Professor Armitage. We have received a complaint that the scent of the marijuana weed known as skunk has been detected emanating from your room. Could you please open the door?”
“Shit,” Hannah heard, very muffled from within, and the sound of people scrambling to their feet. The music was abruptly silenced. Then, still Ryan, but more loudly, “Um, just a minute, Professor—I’m—I’m just on the bog. Hang on a sec.”
More flurried noises came from behind the door—the sound of the bathroom door opening and then a toilet flushing.
“Open the window,” she heard, whispered urgently from within, and then, in reply to some remark she couldn’t hear, “Well open it wider, you dickhead.”
April meanwhile was creasing up with silent laughter. She recovered herself enough to say, “Mr. Coates, Mr. Coates, I must ask you to kindly open this door immediately!” though there was a suspicious wobble in her voice at the last word as the toilet flushed again.
“One sec!” came Ryan’s voice, this time with a note of desperation, and then the door opened and Ryan, face red and hair tousled, his clothes giving off a strong smell of weed, was standing in the doorway. For a second he just looked at them both, puzzled, trying to make sense of the situation, but as April burst into an irrepressible guffaw, realization dawned, and his whole face flushed purple with barely suppressed rage.
“You little fucking bitch,” he said, grabbing April’s arm and dragging her inside the room. April was still howling with laughter, but she was also trying to pull herself out of Ryan’s grip.
“Get off me, you bastard! That hurts!”
“It fucking should hurt.” He shoved her, and she sprawled backwards into an armchair, looking up at him with a mixture of annoyance and defiance, rubbing her arm. “I just flushed a perfectly good eighth down the bog because of you, you stupid little cow!”
“Hey, hey, Ryan, calm down,” Will said. He came across to stand between Ryan and April. He looked torn between relief and irritation. “Come on, it was just a joke. April didn’t know we’d flush it.”
“Yeah, I had no idea you’d be that stupid,” April retorted. “Why didn’t you just drop it out the window like a normal person?”
“Because I thought I was about to get sent fucking down,” Ryan said through gritted teeth. He was standing over April as though he would have liked to hit her, and Hannah wasn’t certain whether he would have done so, if it hadn’t been for Will. “I daresay this is all very funny to posh birds like you, in’t it? But those of us without a rich daddy to pay people off have to live with the consequences of our actions. If I get expelled, that’s it. Kaput. I am royally fucked. And you know what, I understand why you wouldn’t get that—but you.” He rounded on Hannah. “I didn’t think you were such a silly little bitch. Maybe living with her, it’s rubbed off.”
“Hey, leave her out of it,” April said, standing up and facing Ryan. “She had nothing to do with it so pick on someone your own size.”
“That’d be you, would it?” Ryan said, with a kind of snarling laugh. He gestured at the disparity between them—April probably no more than five foot four, and eight stone soaking wet, Ryan over six foot and built like the rugby player he was. “Well, you’ve got balls, at least.”
“Two more than you have,” April retorted. They stood for a moment, glaring at each other, a kind of palpable tension crackling in the air between them so strong that Hannah felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. “Wanker.”
“Bitch.”
“Hey, hey,” said a voice from the corridor, and they both swung round to see Emily standing in the doorway, hands on hips. “What’s with the rampant misogyny, Coates?”
“Rampant misogyny my arse,” Ryan snapped. “She just made me flush an eighth of weed.”
“Yeah, I made him,” April said sarcastically. “With the power of my miiind, woooh!” She made wavy ghost fingers in front of Ryan’s face, and he slapped her hand away irritably. “I knocked on the door while he was having a spliff and the idiot was so scared he flushed his entire stash.”
“Nice move, Coates.” Emily raised one eyebrow. “With cool like that, maybe better not take up drug smuggling.”
