The Five of Us

1. Crow

CHAPTER ONE

CROW

Miss White’s room has seen better days. Not that we’ve ever seen them, and this is our last year here.

Maybe when the school was first built, probably in the sixties or some ancient age like that, it was fresh and exciting and full of hope.

The white paint wouldn’t be yellowed and covered in old Blu Tack, walls littered with posters from students ten years ago that are curled at the edges, character studies of Hamlet when we don’t even learn that anymore.

On the left is a huge tree made out of colored paper, the leaves examples of homophones, but someone has scrawled Kill Me on the trunk in thick black marker.

The tables are graffitied too, mainly on the front-facing edges, random names and dates and that pointed S we all know how to draw.

Half of them have bits of folded paper under a leg to keep them from wobbling.

It’s not a particularly inspiring place, yet Miss White makes it come alive.

She’s able to transform this room with her energy and enthusiasm so the other stuff somehow disappears, and it’s just us and her and her belief that we can do anything.

Best of all, she’s kept up the photograph of when the five of us won the annual poetry competition.

Schools from across the city compete, and we beat them all.

Nobody expected it. We were given a small trophy that we had to return the following year, but Miss White snapped that photo of us holding it up proudly the moment of our win, and has kept it on the wall ever since.

Without the murder, of course.

These conversations are the kind of thing we do in Literature Club at Wednesday lunchtimes, and Dylan and Jordan have been allowed to sit on their phones while the rest of us debate. It’s crazy, but then the world has gone crazy. All the rules are changing. Any semblance of structure has vanished.

Speaking of crazy: Cuckoo, who has been clicking her pen nonstop in a gesture I am sure is meant to infuriate me specifically, leans forward.

Her school uniform is always in some form of disarray, and today is no exception, shirt untucked, shoes scuffed, nothing ever ironed.

Cuckoo loves an argument. She’ll play devil’s advocate for anything to keep tempers raised.

The last time we discussed The Secret History, she questioned why such a culture is considered aspirational.

Why do the rich kids get to have all the fun?

We’re just as bright and interesting, so why are we always being told we need to escape our lives and aim for theirs?

Cuckoo is certainly not an adoring fan of mine, and when I do become a success, I’ll be sure to send her the wrong dates for all my author talks so she never has the chance to ask an embarrassing question.

“Perfect victims can’t exist,” she says.

“There has to be some kind of motive driving the killer. And it’s the victim that causes that, however unwillingly. ”

“Serial killers do it,” Starling interjects. “Choose a certain kind of victim, one that they know the police won’t care as much about.”

“Exactly,” I say. “See? Perfect victim, perfect murder. If there’s nothing to connect you, you’ll get away with it.”

“Go on, then,” Cuckoo says, refusing to back down. “What’s your perfect murder, Crow?”

We’ve had these nicknames forever: Crow, Goldfinch, Starling, Wren, and Cuckoo.

Cuckoo came later, but the first four were coined on a school trip to the countryside, a desperate attempt to introduce inner-city kids to the wild outdoors.

Look, children, here are trees and fields and you can enjoy them for today only, and then it’s back to concrete towers and graffitied walls for you.

Whichever member of staff thought bird-watching would in any way entertain a class of ten-year-olds was clearly on something, but the nicknames stuck, chosen for the first birds we each spotted.

The five of us even rescued a bird once from one of the bins in our local park.

Wrapped in a plastic bag, a deliberate, terrible act, was a pigeon, trying with all its might to escape.

The opening had been tied shut with a strong knot, only a tiny gap revealing its beady, frightened eyes.

This was prophetic, we thought. To have a bird in need of our help was destiny.

We didn’t have any scissors, but one of us held the bag with the bird inside it carefully in her hands while the rest of us took to digging our nails into the plastic and tearing it apart.

We were able to check there were no injuries, relieved nothing worse had happened to it.

When it flew away, we were glad to see it soar.

“That is the mark of a good person,” Miss White said afterward. “You’ll have bright futures. You’ve earned them.”

So the names have stuck, and we don’t use our real ones anymore.

It’s got to the point where we’re starting to turn into them too.

Cuckoo is loud and brash, and more attention-seeking than anyone.

She gave herself that nickname after she heard ours, saying it was because she’s crazy.

She turned her finger in circles beside her ear and said cuckoo, cuckoo to make us all laugh, but I don’t think she knew about the darker side of her bird, its parasitic nature.

The irony is that she somehow invaded our tight-knit nest of friendship, the four of us together and needing no one else for so long, and then suddenly Cuckoo arrived, and like her bird’s namesake, we accepted her as one of our own.

She’s getting a job after the summer instead of going off to university, even though she could.

She barely makes an effort and gets the best grades anyway.

All that natural talent, and she’s having to start some managerial scheme in a supermarket to support her family.

And I get it, her mum died so her dad has been struggling and she’s had to step up, especially with two younger siblings, but she always says how happy she is, that she wishes things could stay the same forever, and I don’t see how that can be true.

Before I can respond to Cuckoo, Goldie yawns, her left hand with its smudge of ink down the side covering her mouth.

Her charm bracelet falls from her wrist to the middle of her forearm, clinking, the sound so familiar to me I always know when Goldie is near.

She has been drawing a series of elaborate flowers in the back of her English book, uninterested in our discussion.

People assume she’s called Goldie for her bright blonde curls, or her amber eyes, but she’s a bird too: a goldfinch.

She suits this name entirely; she is striking, vibrant, friends with everyone.

She’s moving to London when the summer ends to pursue modeling, and it’s easy to believe she’ll succeed, looking the way she does.

“The Secret History was never really about murder, was it?” she says, in that slow, languid way she has of talking.

She gives a shake of her head, curls bouncing.

“It’s about the pursuit of perfection. It’s impossible.

All perfect actions are. Which is why these characters never achieve what they want. ”

She always does this. Pretends she isn’t listening, then says something irritatingly erudite. Like a goldfinch, she is playful with it, unserious, more to join in than really caring.

“What do you think?” Miss White asks, which is what she always asks when she hasn’t got an answer. She knows our nicknames of course, everyone at school does. Though if someone else were to refer to me as Crow, it would feel wrong. That’s our thing, the five of us alone.

Goldie shrugs. She’s bored of the conversation already, flighty, attention diverted. I roll my eyes at Starling, who grins back at me.

“I wouldn’t do it,” Wren whispers, bottom lip marked from where she always bites it.

She certainly doesn’t have the loud voice of a wren, but she’s tiny and hides herself away a lot.

Her hair is the same shade of brown, not too long or too short, the rest of her unremarkable.

“I could never murder anyone. The perfect murder is none at all.”

“It’s not literal homework, Wren.” Cuckoo rolls her eyes. “Miss White isn’t asking you to go and stab someone to death.”

Wren visibly droops. She’s so soft. She talks in this sorrowful voice and has a habit of keeping her head bent so she never quite meets you in the eye.

She wouldn’t say boo to a goose, yet she’s the one who has a place at Cambridge come October.

I didn’t pass the interview stage. I know they took one look at me in my cheap shirt and trousers, cringed when they heard the heavy accent warbling from my tongue however hard I tried to mask it, and gladly sent me on my way, relieved that they wouldn’t have to have me in their exclusive club.

But someone like Wren, sweet and accommodating and, most of all, disguised, a perfect model of what Cambridge wants our lot to be, ever so grateful and obedient, got in without trouble.

Our school sent us to the local grammar for help with applying to Oxbridge.

Ours didn’t have the facilities, didn’t have a single teacher that went there, didn’t have any idea what the current advice was.

It was enough convincing them to hire an invigilator for the entrance exam, that yes, we really did want to apply.

Starling and Wren and I went three times to the grammar school’s preparation sessions, where they did mock interviews, gave tips, told us what kind of books to read.