Secrets at St Jude's: New Girl Read Online Free PDF

as glop.
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    ‘What is this?’ she’d asked Min, mystified.
    ‘Cheese-o-beano pie. Speciality of the house . . .
    delicious!’
    Gina had been able to identify orange beans and mashed potato, and she’d taken a nibble of the dark toast topping, only to choke on the weird salty taste.
    ‘Grilled Marmite toast,’ Min had explained, wolfing down another large mouthful. For such a dainty, petite little thing, she could really eat, Gina couldn’t help noticing. Maybe she was bulimic . . . ?
    Then there had been the Year Four sitting room – a beige and pink place with battered chairs and sofas, a TV no one switched on and a piano – where she’d met the other boarders in her year. A quick-fire of names and faces she hadn’t a hope of remembering yet.
    Strangest of all had been bedtime.
    The wailing siren had warned them all that it was nine o’clock: ‘Fourth Year’s slot for the showers,’ Amy had explained.
    Gina had watched her roommates strip off, don dressing gowns and head for the bathroom. Once they’d gone, she’d undressed in privacy, put on her pyjamas and decided that, if there was a communal shower they all had to stand in together, she was calling her mom and flying home the next day.
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    Not that calling home was going to be easy. Cells weren’t allowed (her lifeline home had been handed in!) and Niffy had told her about the elaborate queuing system for the boarding house’s two payphones and three Internet computers.
    ‘Basically, you’re lucky if you get to make a call or pick up your email twice a week. That’s why we have to resort to letters! Can you believe it! We’re the last teenagers in the twenty-first century to still communicate by post!’
    The showers turned out to have cubicles. There were also three private baths, but the rows and rows of sinks, towels and wash bags with name tapes in the bathroom had made Gina think of her personal pink bathing boudoir with utter longing. This was just so impersonal, so public. Where was she supposed to put on her make-up?
    Close to 10 p.m., the loud screeching hinges of the fire door along the hallway had set Amy off on a countdown: ‘Nineteen . . . eighteen . . . seventeen . . .’
    And sure enough, as she reached one, the Daffodil dorm’s door had opened and Mrs Knebworth, or the
    ‘Neb’, as everyone nicknamed her, had come in to wish them goodnight.
    ‘Lights off in fifteen minutes and no later. We all 37
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    need our beauty sleep,’ had been her parting shot.
    ‘Some more than others,’ Amy had muttered once the door was shut again.
    ‘The Neb may seem friendly,’ Niffy had whispered to Gina, ‘but really she’s the devil in disguise.’
    Closing her eyes now and trying to summon up sleep, Gina felt a tear slide from the corner of her eye.
    Why had her mother sent her to jail?
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    Chapter Four
    The wailing alarm had not just woken Gina but nearly sent her tumbling from her bed in panic at 7.30 the next morning. A frantic hour and a half followed: jostling for space in the bathroom, applying light make-up (on her bed with the aid of a compact mirror), dressing in the stiff new uniform and seeing immediately not just how horrible she looked, but how wrong .
    Amy and Niffy’s uniforms were well worn in and customized. Amy especially had found a way to make the individually hideous items at least slightly flattering. Her white shirt looked soft and comfortable and was unbuttoned low. Her sludgy cardigan was shrunken and bobbly, so it hugged her slim figure.
    Even better, her grey skirt was above the knee and worn with thigh-high socks and ballet pumps.
    Gina suspected that just about every girl in Year 39
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    Four would