The Following Girls by Louise Levene

their novels, although she would be permanently on call to stick her oar in, change the ending and rewrite the whole thing in a style she preferred – ‘consulting’ as she liked to call it.
    ‘So much more fun than essay writing,’ gushed Beverly. She squeezed herself, unasked, on to the very end of their bench. ‘Mine’s called The Hope Chest .’ No one was listening. ‘It’s set in the wild west and it’s about a young schoolteacher. All her family die of scarlet fever and she’s making a quilt out of all their old clothes.’ No response. ‘Memories of when they were in the covered wagon.’ Still nothing. ‘Mummy’s idea. Miss Gleet says it’s very evocative .’
    ‘That’s one way of putting it.’
    ‘I’ve written twenty thousand words.’
    ‘Wossat in pages?’ Queenie called after her as Beverly headed for the cloakroom. ‘Twenty thousand words? Silly moo.’
    ‘GTP,’ said Bunty. It was short for ‘Good Team Player’ and it wasn’t a compliment.
    Baker looked at her watch.
    ‘Off we trot.’ She scraped the remains of her hotpot onto the top of the stack of plates. ‘Triple English? They want locking up.’
    Miss Kopje, the librarian, who had a knack for such things, had spent the previous August wrestling with the upper school timetable. For three weeks her dining room suite was loose-covered with pencilled charts and scraps of coloured paper, but there had been no getting round it. Nothing to be done. There had been a ‘terrible glitch’, a ‘ghastly blunder’ with the blocking (as the deputy head had put it when she broke the news to the staff room) which meant that three of the Upper Shell’s five weekly English lessons would now all take place one after the other on Tuesday afternoons. The girls weren’t too thrilled about this but Miss Gleet had burst into tears at the news. A repeat prescription for lithium had taken the edge off the pain and then an old college chum had suggested the energy-saving wheeze of having her fifth formers write a novel to use up the final four weeks of term.
    Queenie had called hers Wanted on Voyage and it was all written in postcards. ‘The Gleet eats up that kind of tripe with a spoon,’ said Stottie, enviously.
    ‘Bloody gets on your nerves though. Has she let you read it? Really, really hard to tell who’s wishing who was where.’
    Baker’s novel was called The Snapdragon Harvest .
    ‘You can’t call it that. She’ll know you’re taking the mick.’
    ‘She loved it. Look: “Intriguing title” it says here. Liked the plot summary as well: young woman meets rude man; rude man fancies young woman, becomes less rude, young woman marries rude man. I didn’t mention “Rude Man” in my plan, obviously, just some rubbish about self-discovery, love and loss and a dark family secret – practically wet herself. I didn’t tell her about the twist at the end either.’
    Miss Gleet was going to hate the twist. It occurred four pages before the end – the bit in the ‘true love’ stories when the scales fall and it dawns on the heroine that Rude Man is not, in fact, an overbearing, sadistic pig but the love of her life. The bit when she thinks she’s never going to see him again just as the taxi turns round or the telegram arrives or she finds the first class plane ticket tucked into her knicker elastic and yes, reader, she can have him after all, that bastard she didn’t want in the first place. That was where Baker was putting her twist.
    ‘I nearly called it The Forgotten Wishbone but then she really would smell a rat.’
    ‘Mine’s called Thirteen for Croquet ,’ said Bunty as the four Mandies slumped into the back row of desks, ‘and I’m killing everybody .’
    Miss Gleet had a new top, stretchy and zebra-striped and she was wearing a fashionably chocolate-coloured lipstick to celebrate (‘Secret Squirrel’ according to the label).
    ‘What’s black, white and brown round the mouth?’ whispered Baker.
    ‘Quieten down,