More Flirting Games (The Flirting Series - Young Adult) by Stella Wilkinson

Chapter One
     
    Boys, boys,
boys! That’s all Sophie and Grace seemed to talk about this year. Maybe they’d
throw in a little gossip, clothes, magazines and make-up. But otherwise it was
boys. Boys they might like and the boy band they definitely liked, boys they
knew and boys they wanted to know. School came a very poor second.
    Rose Falcon
was really enjoying being back at school this year. The summer had been great
but her parents were always working and she had missed the girls. She and her
younger brother Toby had spent three weeks of the holidays with her cousins,
Jack, Alex and Ellie, but she had been on the phone almost every day to Sophie
or Grace, or both of them.
    She
supposed that officially Alex was her best friend. Even though they were
cousins, they had been born only days apart and had been close their whole
lives, but at sixteen she had found that she and Alex had started to drift
apart slightly. They were both in the same year at Compass Court Boarding
School and both in the same Schoolhouse, West Tower, but this year she just
seemed to be hanging out a lot more with Sophie and Grace and seeing less of
Alex.
    At a
certain age you just needed good girlfriends, and Alex certainly didn’t want to
talk about boys.
    Rose,
Sophie and Grace had shared a dormitory at Compass Court since they had started
at the school over five years ago and though the three of them were very
different they had bonded instantly.
    Rose was
arty, she wore her long wavy hair loose and when she was out of school uniform
she tended to favor brightly colored clothes and floaty dresses that
complemented her auburn hair. She thought her tummy and her bum were too big,
but they were curves which suited her well.
    Sophie was
always fashionable, with a perfect hourglass figure; she wore her jumpers tight
and her skirts short. Her blond hair was highlighted and she spent ages every
morning with a pair of straighteners getting her bobbed cut sleek and shiny so
it curled just under her jaw line.
    Grace, on
the other hand, always pulled her brown-blond hair into a ponytail; she was the
practical one of the three. Small and slim, she envied the curves of her
friends and favored much more casual wear. Jeans, fluffy jumpers and knee-high
boots were all she would consider at this time of year and she rarely bothered
with make up.
    The fourth
girl in their room, Diana, had never really been their friend.
    Diana
didn’t seem to have or want female friends. She was thin and had perfect,
porcelain white skin, with an oval face, dark eyes and naturally red lips.
There were a few girls in the year below who hung on her every word and tried
to copy her waist length long dark hair, but she seemed hardly to notice them.
Her aloofness seemed to make her even more attractive to boys, who fought to
sit next to her and carry her books, but she acted as though they were merely
annoying and had said ‘no’ the only two times a boy had been brave enough to
ask her if she wanted to go on a date with him. Rose thought Diana was very
beautiful but very cold.
    The only
person Diana was close to was Leo Flanagan. Both Diana and Leo were Irish,
though both their families now lived in England, only about half a mile away
from each other by all accounts. Rose thought that Diana and Leo might be
related, but as neither of them spoke much to her or her friends she didn’t
really know.
    “Who are
you looking at?” Sophie nudged Rose out of her reverie.
    “No one.”
Rose shook her head. “What were we talking about?”
    “I was just
saying what a dry term it’s been for boyfriends. It’s Christmas already and
we’re all still single.” Said Grace
    It was the
20 th of December on the last day of their first term in Year Six. It
was dark by five o’clock now and the Common Rooms were the coziest place to be
in the evenings. The three of them were sitting in the West Tower Common Room,
enjoying the fact that as it was the end of term, they didn’t have to do