10 By summer, my connection to Sheba was well established. Hardly a week went by when we didn’t see each other outside of school hours. Sue Hodge had not yet been utterly vanquished; she was still hanging in there, waddling with us to lunches at La Traviata. But her days were numbered. Now, on afternoons when it rained, it was I—not Sue—who heaved Sheba’s bicycle into the back of my car and drove her home. (Sheba, I was amazed to discover, had never learned to drive. “I always get lifts,” she told me cheerily. “I know it sounds terribly conceited, but I’m the sort of person people like to do things for.”) Sue had fought a valiant battle, but in the end she simply wasn’t able to put the sort of work into Sheba that I was. She had her impending Sue-spawn, her ghastly little love nest with Ted, to worry about. Try as she might, she couldn’t keep her eye on the ball. Shortly after Sue caught on to the fact that I had leapfrogged her in Sheba’s affections, it became apparent that she was saying things about Sheba and me to other members of staff.
