Say Her Name Read Online Free PDF

on the rail. She curved an arm around the curtain, waving it left and right, unable to locate the towel rail just outside the cubicle.
    Her hand brushed against someone – specifically someone’s hair.
    She recoiled. Bobbie was sure she’d been alone. ‘Sorry! I didn’t know there was anyone … ’ She wiped the water out of her eyes and gingerly pulled back the mildewed shower curtain. The washroom
was
empty.
    Bobbie wrapped the towel around her soaking body and listened carefully. The room was thick with steam and there was a constant
drip, drip, drip
from the shower, but the room was deserted. ‘Hmmm,’ Bobbie said, stepping out of the shower stall and onto the cool tiles. ‘That’s weird.’ Perhaps she’d grazed her hand on the towel, but it really had felt like hair.
    As the extractor fan creaked and groaned, removing the excess steam, Bobbie saw the mirror clearly. Someone had written in the condensation on the glass, little streams of water running like veins from the words.
    It didn’t make any sense to Bobbie. The two words simply read:
    FIVE DAYS

Chapter 4

Sunday
    Bobbie didn’t dwell on the watery words, her growling stomach taking precedence. If she thought about them at all, she dismissed them as the name of a new boy band that some horny fan-girl had dedicated the mirror to. By the time the steam on the mirror had faded, she’d already forgotten about it.
    The canteen was a high-ceilinged hall in the old building, with grand wooden beams arching up to a point – Bobbie always liked to imagine she was inside Noah’s ark. Leaded slit windows only allowed in meagre light on even sunny days so today the room was especially bleak and oppressive. It was the end of the sitting so the room was about half full – the competitive bulimics compensating for the absence of the competitive anorexics. Whatever the competition, boarding school sure had a way of bringing out the killer instinct in high-achieving teenage girls.
    As Bobbie shuffled past Grace and the rest of The Elites, who always sat at the informal ‘head’ table, she could hear them whispering about what she was wearing or something equally trivial; they always did. Bobbie rolled her eyes. She didn’t know what disgusted her more: the existence of a blatant hierarchy that the teachers chose to ignore, or that everyone seemed oblivious to the fact that the plural of elite is
elite
. Bobbie couldn’t even be bothered to get involved – she was
never
going to be the cleverest, prettiest or fastest. That said, she was one of the best writers. That was
her
thing.
    Naya waved her over. ‘Hey, I grabbed you a bit of everything.’
    ‘You’re the best.’ The pre-mixed scrambled eggs didn’t look edible, but Bobbie took a stab at a rasher of bacon.
    ‘What’s the plan for today?’ Naya asked.
    ‘Dunno,’ Bobbie admitted through a forkful of congealed beans. ‘I was going to work on that new story I was telling you about.’
    ‘No, that’s boring! Let’s head into Oxsley! Oh come on, not like there’s anything else to do, is there?’ she said, picking up on Bobbie’s lack of enthusiasm. ‘Sit around here and watch paint dry?’
    Piper’s Hall is what paint watches when drying gets too exciting
, Bobbie thought. On a weekend, Piper’s Hall Ladies are supposed to better themselves in some way that would enrich their applications to Cambridge or Oxford. Bobbie took a creative writing class on Saturday mornings, but Sunday was all sports stuff –
so
not her thing. ‘Yeah, okay. We could hit the library.’ Not as dull as it sounded; the librarian was keeping some Susan Hill books to one side for her
and
they had free DVD loans.
    ‘Child, you know how to party!’
    ‘Ooh, or maybe we could go hover outside the off-licence and see if we can lure men into buying us drinks with the promise of sexual favours like slutty booze sirens?’ Bobbie’s voice was rich with sarcasm.
    ‘Very funny. But I wouldn’t mind hanging with those