The Girls Read Online Free

like other children her age.
    Yes. Home-schooled children. Communal living. All very alternative. Verging on controversial. But to Adele, entirely and completely normal.
    At 1.15 p.m. she went to the back gate and called the girls in for afternoon school. They came, her brood, her gaggle, with their unkempt hair and their unworldly clothes, their brains filled with everything she’d ever taught them, their stomachs filled with food she’d cooked from scratch. The babies that she’d never had to hand over to the world.
    For half an hour they studied mindfulness. It had appeared on the national curriculum this year. Adele had been delighted. She’d been effectively teaching them mindfulness skills for years; she’d called it meditation although that hadn’t been quite accurate.
    The girls arranged themselves into their usual layout, long legs outstretched in wash-faded leggings and hand-me-down jeans, scrubbed faces in mindful repose, wearing holey old jumpers and unbranded sweatshirts from the charity shops along the Finchley Road – nothing from Primark, nothing from New Look, nothing ethically unsound. The girls understood. They’d watched the documentaries about the sweatshops, seen the news reports about the factory fire in Mumbai that had killed all those people. They knew fashion wasn’t as important as people. They weren’t vain. They weren’t shallow. No smartphones. No Facebook. No Instagram. All too likely to turn them into narcissists. They understood. They sneered at the posturing and posing of their contemporaries, the twelve-year-old girls in mascara puckering into camera lenses, the misguided fools on talent shows. They got it, her girls. They absolutely got it.
    They weren’t weird, Adele thought now, looking at them in turn. They were magnificent.

Three
    Pip stared up at the girl standing in front of her, squinting against the low sun. It was the blonde girl, the one who looked like the leader of the garden clique. She’d been watching them from a distance and then suddenly got on her bike and cycled towards them with some urgency. ‘Hi.’
    ‘Hi,’ said Pip.
    ‘Have you just moved in?’ the girl asked in a flat monotone.
    ‘No,’ said Grace. ‘We moved in last month.’
    ‘Oh. Right. Haven’t seen you before. Who are you?’
    ‘I’m Pip.’
    ‘Pip?’
    She nodded.
    ‘Is that your real name?’
    Pip blinked.
    ‘Seriously? You’re called Pip?’
    She felt her cheeks fill with warm blood.
    ‘It’s her nickname,’ said Grace. ‘Short for Pipsqueak. What we called her when she was a baby.’
    ‘So, what’s your real name?’ The blonde girl stared at her impatiently as if this conversation had been going on for long enough even though she’d been the one who’d started it.
    ‘Lola,’ she said.
    ‘God, that’s a much nicer name. Why don’t you ask to be called that instead?’
    Grace spoke for her again. ‘The woman next door where we used to live had a really yappy dog called Lola. It put us all off.’
    ‘But still,’ she said, ‘you don’t live there any more. You could change it back now.’
    Pip shrugged. She still thought of the yappy dog when she thought of Lola. She still thought of the woman next door and the thing that had happened and, besides, she’d always been Pip. She was Pip.
    The girl stood astride her bike, a big black thing with gears. Her fine blonde hair was tucked behind one double-pierced ear; her thin hands gripped the handlebars possessively. She wore denim shorts with pocket bags hanging out and a grey sweatshirt that was as wide as it was long; she had narrow feet in bright white Converse and blunt-cut fingernails.
    ‘What’s your name, then?’ Pip asked her.
    ‘Tyler.’
    ‘Tyler like the boy’s name?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    Pip nodded. She looked like a Tyler.
    ‘Where do you live?’ asked Tyler.
    ‘That flat there,’ said Grace.
    Tyler nodded again. ‘Where do you go to school?’
    ‘Mount Elizabeth.’
    ‘Are you twins?’ She