The Daring Game by Kit Pearson

stood up for her against Pam. That night, she had seemed like a real friend.
    Eliza couldn’t work it out. All the contentment she had felt in the last month was spoiled. It was as if Helen had taken a pin and pricked a balloon inside of her.
    After that she began to avoid direct encounters with the other girl. Helen hardly spoke to Eliza either, and when she did, she didn’t call her “Eliza Doolittle.”
    The strain between them wasn’t noticed by the others, for the whole school was gripped by the frenzy of mid-term exams. No one in the Yellow Dorm had written real exams before. Pam crept out every morning at six-thirty to cram in the library. Jean carried her English book with her everywhere, whispering the poets they had to memorize. Eliza was especially worried about French and science. She listed conjugations of French verbs on scraps of paper, on her music books and on napkins. Constantly she repeated to herself the sentence Mrs. Lewis, the science teacher, had taught them: “Man Very Early Made Jars Stand Up Nearly Perfect.” The first letter of each word stood for a planet, and the words were in order of the planets’ distances from the sun.
    The only two who didn’t study extra hours were Carrie and Helen. The former said to Eliza complacently, “I’ve done my best so far. I’m not going to worry about it.” Helen just lay on her bed, cut off from the rest of them by her radio earplug, and scowled.
    â€œFidget’s always picking on her,” Carrie told Eliza. “I think it’s mean. Helen fools around a lot, of course, andher work’s always sloppy. But other people are like that too. She says awful things to Helen.”
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œWell, today was the worst. Fidget came in and caught Helen and Linda O. standing on top of the desks-they were just trying to close the windows. She didn’t even tell off Linda, but she yelled at Helen and said no wonder her parents sent her away to school so young-she was such a brat they must have been glad to get rid of her.”
    â€œBut that’s terrible! Helen should tell Miss Tavistock.”
    â€œIt didn’t seem to bother her. I don’t think anything does. She just laughed really loud, and Fidget took off a house point for rudeness. She was the one who was rude! Some of us thought Helen should tell, but she said to forget about it. And a few kids thought she deserved it. A lot of the day-girls don’t like Helen.”
    It must have bothered her, thought Eliza. Perhaps Mrs. Fitch’s bullying was what had made Helen so withdrawn lately. And why had Helen been sent here so young? She had never told them.
    â€œWhat do you think of Helen?” said Eliza, remembering Carrie asking her the same question on their first day.
    Carrie shrugged. “Oh, well … Helen’s just Helen. She’s not so bad.” Eliza wished she could be as untroubled as Carrie was by their complicated dorm-mate.
    E XAM WEEK WAS appropriately grey and wet. Every morning they shuffled through sodden heaps of leaves, asthey trooped over to the gym for prayers. Many of the trees were bare now, although Eliza’s favourite arbutus and the laurel and holly bushes around the Old Residence were still as green as new paint.
    Eliza felt purged when exams were over. Each of the seven times she’d confronted the typed list of questions and the blank book to be filled with answers she had panicked. But then she’d taken a deep breath and scribbled down what she knew as carefully as she could. She thought she had done all right, even in French.
    The Friday after exam week the boarders were being taken to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre to see a performance of the National Ballet. Eliza had never seen a ballet before, and that morning she tore open her folded blouse eagerly. Every week their blouses arrived back from the cleaners compressed into a starched rectangle. She popped open the