Page 2 of The New Girl

‘What? That’s more than the whole population of Ireland,’ Denise gasped.

‘Way more,’ Clara said.

‘It must be hard to leave your country,’ Ruby said.

‘Not if there’s bombs going off and a big war,’ Denise noted. ‘I mean, Ireland’s not great and it rains a lot but still, it’s, like, peaceful and stuff.’

Ruby supposed she was right. Still, though, if Syria was near Turkey, the new girl would be frozen in Ireland. Ruby’s granny said that Turkey was boiling hot and she had spent the whole ten days of her holiday sweating in the shade, eating ice-cream.

From across the room, where Amber and Chrissie were sitting, they heard a loud voice say, ‘Refugee? Ewwww, we don’t want them in our school. They come from really poor places and don’t even know how to read or eat with knives and forks. Most of them are criminals. They’ll steal all our stuff. Watch your bags, girls! Don’t leave anything out or it’ll be gone.’

Clara clenched her fists. ‘God, I hate Amber.’

But Ruby knew Clara wouldn’t tell Amber that she was an idiot. Everyone was a bit scared of Amber because she was a year older than them and she had three older sisters in the school. If Amber decided she didn’t like you, she and her sisters would make your life hell. Rumour had it that her sister Irene had flushed another girl’s head down the loo and put dead spiders in her sandwiches, all because the girl had refused to give Amber’s sister her Mars bar.

The classroom door opened. All twenty-four heads spun around. There stood Miss Ingle and a small girl with thick dark hair and huge brown eyes.

‘Girls, I want you to welcome Safa to our class,’ Miss Ingle announced.

Ruby sank down in her seat. She knew Safa would be put beside her because she was the odd one out. Although Denise and Clara were her friends, they were each other’s best friend and she was the ‘other’ friend. Whenever it came to pairs, they always chose each other. Ruby pretended she didn’t care, but sometimes she did.

Right now, she really did. She didn’t want the refugee girl beside her. What if Amber was right? What if she stole Ruby’s things? Ruby stuffed her favourite glitter pen into her bag.

Safa sat down quietly beside Ruby and pulled a copybook and a plain blue pen out of her backpack.

‘Ruby will show you the ropes and help you settle in this week, won’t you, Ruby?’ Miss Ingle made it sound like a question, but it wasn’t. It was an order. She had that serious tone in her voice, like, a ‘Don’t mess with me, Ruby, do what I say’ tone. Ruby knew she’d have to obey or be in trouble.

‘Yes, Miss Ingle,’ she muttered. Damn, now she was stuck with the stupid refugee for the whole week.

CHAPTER TWO

Safa

Safa felt naked without her hijab. She’d only been wearing it for a year, but she’d got used to it. It felt like a protection around her head. It made her feel safe and secure, but Mrs Roberts, the headmistress, said that no headscarves were allowed inside the school.

When Safa had translated this news to her mother, she had looked sad but shrugged. She told Safa to just say yes to everything the headmistress said. She wanted Safa to go to this school. It was supposed to be the best one in the town – or so the woman from the local refugee council said.

It wasn’t as nice as Safa’s old school back in Syria. But then again, that was gone. A bomb dropped right in the middle of it one Sunday morning. Boom. The beautiful building collapsed into rubble.

Safa and her friends had cried when they saw it. That was the day her family decided to leave Syria. Her father had said, ‘Enough. If they are now bombing schools, we cannot live in this country any more. We have to go.’

Two weeks later they had left Syria and begun the long and awful journey to Ireland. Safa tried not to think about it. She tried to block out the bad memories. But at night, when she dreamed, the images came back to her. She woke up most nights sweating with her heart racing. She’d sit bolt upright in her bed, panting. Then she’d realise that it was only a dream and feel so relieved. But then she’d remember that it wasn’t a dream; those terrible things had actually happened.

The counsellor at the emergency centre they were put into when they first arrived in Ireland kept saying to her, ‘Try to remember, you’re safe now, Safa, you’re safe. If you feel afraid, repeat the sentence over and over: “I am safe now.”’

But it was very hard to feel safe when you’d felt afraid for so long. Safa’s mother, Rima, pretended not to be afraid any more, but Safa could see she still was. Yesterday when they were walking home from the shops a car horn had beeped loudly and her mother had almost jumped out of her skin. She’d dropped her bag of shopping on the road and everything had spilled out.

Safa had had to chase a mango that rolled down the hill. When she’d got back to her mother, she had still been shaking. But then Rima had done that thing she’d been doing for over a year now: she had fake-smiled and placed the palm of her hand on Safa’s cheek. ‘It’s OK, Habibti.’

But it wasn’t OK. None of it was OK.

They had been in Ireland for eight months now. When they’d first arrived in Ireland, they were stuck in the emergency centre in Mosney with other refugees from all over the world. But now they had a little house in Wexford. The house was nice, but it rained all the time and the sky was grey all the time and it was cold, and the food tasted awful and Safa just wanted to go home. She really, really wanted to go back to Syria and for everything to be normal again.

But she had to pretend too. It made her mother feel better if Safa just smiled and said, ‘Yes, Mama, everything is fine.’

After putting all the shopping back into the bags, they’d walked back to the house in silence, each lost in her own thoughts and memories.

Now Safa sat very still and tried to listen to every word Miss Ingle was saying. Her English was very good, thanks to her father being an English teacher and talking to her in English since she was born. But even though she was fluent in English, the Irish accent was hard to understand sometimes. Like when they said ‘water’, they didn’t pronounce the ‘t’. They said ‘washer’. And ‘tomato’ was ‘tomasho’. It had taken Safa a few weeks to realise that Irish people pronounced ‘t’ like ‘sh’.

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