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Like any other time this would happen, Zerelda knocked on the door of the fifth-form common-room. Any excuse to talk to these fifth-formers, who always seemed to be wrapped up in an affair that appealed to her fondness for the theatrical. There was always something happening in their common-room. Much unlike the stolid sixth-formers, with whom smiles seemed rather scarce, she could knock on the door of this common-room and find her fifth-form friends laughing or smiling over something or other.
Gee, the last time she'd done that, everyone was all smiles. Mavis was singing a tune. Mary-Lou, the quiet Mary-Lou was smacking a table, and the firm and hard Moira Linton — not seeming either when she looked at her then — had a laugh in her.
The sixth were always left out of the goings-on of the lower school. It wasn't done to even think of those babies! The head of her form always said that sort of thing when she was too late in re-joining the sixth. It was her fault, she supposed, for not making an effort to make friends with them. But the fifth were so natural and likeable! The sixth were always so solemn and mournful. Always going on about how this was their final year, and Malory Towers was really quite the wonderful school and won't it be a shame to leave it? Their sister — or was it their mother — great-aunt, perhaps, always told them about how their stomach twisted when they got that final glimpse of the school before departing down the drive that final time.
Gee, surely it wasn't a sin to appreciate their time here whilst they still were? To not sound like the school should die without them being students there anymore?
It was with this rather frustrating thought that Zerelda ducked her head in the fifth-form common-room.
She expected to be shouted at by Alicia and beckoned back to her form. Even Catherine would tell her, "Is it not that your form feels someone missing when your glowing presence disappears? Not that I would know what it would be like to have a presence like that. But, don't you suppose they do miss you when you're with us, Zerelda?" Catherine, who only ever had nice things to do or say for anyone without being asked, was willing to wave her away.
But there was no Sally. No Darrell. Bill and Clarissa were probably out riding. No Alicia to scoff at her.
Nobody but Moira, oddly. Moira, who was folding up her French book to go put it back in her desk for the lesson tomorrow. Well, it would be a bad idea to catch her eye again! Moira smiled and laughed with the others at times, but she never liked Zerelda. Zerelda wasn't so empty-headed as to think Moira more than tolerated her!
No sneering or anything of the sort happened when Moira met eyes with her. Just a short nod of acknowledgement as she exited the common-room in the all-too-familiar over-dignified manner a Head Girl of the form did. The way Moira always swept out the room when Zerelda was down in the Fifth with her.
She looked at the firm face with lips drawn into a thin, near invisible line.
What was it she had said when she was in the Fifth? "What, don't want to share your Hollywood know-how with us E-Listers?" That twitch of the lips that Zerelda couldn't possibly dare call a smile. Zerelda had shrank back that day when the rest of the form pitched in ideas, most of which Moira balked at but one she accepted — giving Zerelda a knowing look that made her, otherwise able to shake off those things, wince and feel decidedly uneasy.
Flushed during that first handful of rehearsals, she tried to hide behind the stage's back curtain. But, gee, Moira seemed to see through that — with a dangerous glint in her eye, she'd told Zerelda she would get a principal part in the entertainment. After this revelation, Catherine fussed over her the way she did with anyone else, but it was worse to Zerelda. No, she mustn't think herself 'wunnerful' again, so Moira must've gone mad! She had confided exactly this in Jean, the sole girl in her form she got on well with, who only advised her to tread carefully.
Wiser from her years at Malory Towers, she saw behind Moira's sneers and glints soon enough. Moira had always acted like this when she felt upstaged, according to other girls in the form, and because she didn't discuss it with the others, she took drastic measures to make sure she was still ahead. That girl who once posed like Lossie Laxton was underneath all the new comfort in being a schoolgirl, that lost girl with nothing to be after her acting had been turned down was underneath — and Moira wanted her to come forth again!
An odd, dishonest sort of pluck came to Zerelda after that revelation. She'd show that ninny of a Moira where she stood! It was when she was meant to rehearse that she came down to the fourth form to vist Mavis and the rest. Even just listening to their laughter from the doorway was better than being reminded of her previous poor showing. When the day for performance came, Moira shouted down the whole school looking for her — "That idiot of a Zerelda, where has she got to? Doesn't she know show starts in fifteen minutes?" — but she hid in the stables. She'd never otherwise go there, but to escape Moira... It had felt right, somehow.
Naturally, the frank and sensible Jean hadn't thought her escape wunnerful at all! "A little underhanded, don't you think?" was all she told Zerelda once she found her hiding behind a hay bale after the entertainment was through.
Moira jerked her back into the present, that thin-lipped expression deepening. "Any reason you don't trust me to take my French book up to my desk?"
Hearing a sneer that wasn't at all present, Zerelda stiffened. "Sure, I trust you. I was just going back to my dormy."
"Then why aren't you?"
Zerelda said a strained, "Sure thing", but stayed put as Moira slipped into the class-room to do as she had said she would. Moira stared at her, but without any of the usual sneering. Instead, decided Zerelda, she looked more baffled than anything else.
"Were you coming to ask about the performance?" Moira asked.
But Zerelda only shrugged, then flinched in expectation of a cutting comment that didn't come.
"You're fond of the others," she said bluntly. Zerelda waited for something cruel to follow, but nothing did.
All Zerelda could do was nod at that assessment, before beginning her usual, "Of course, the sixth are fine in their own way —"
Moira stared, shaking her head. Nothing sneering came after her sigh, though. "Good to be liked, isn't it?"
"Wunnerful, really," Zerelda said, her usual smile returning uneasily. Perhaps that Moira really had changed, and she hadn't been imagining those smiles she'd given the current fifth-formers once Irene played that final note of music and the curtain fell on that remarkable Cinderella performance.