Pella and the Quiet Table

Pella has a lot of friends. That’s not a boast; it’s just a fact, like the fact that she has a gap between her front teeth. She talks to everybody. She knows who is fighting with whom, who sits where, and who isn’t speaking to their cousin.

You might think that’s gossip. Pella would say it’s information. In the Clue Club, it’s her job to check the friends clue.

Because Pella has learned something. When things go wrong between friends, it doesn’t stay between friends. It leaks into everything else.

Her best case was a girl called Jess.

Jess used to be one of the loud ones. She did impressions of teachers. She organised birthday cakes. Then, after half-term, she went quiet. She came to school with her hood up. She stopped putting her hand up in class. When the PE teacher asked her to be a team captain, she said, “Can’t be bothered,” and sat on the bench.

“Moody,” someone said. “She thinks she’s too cool now.”

Pella checked her information. And she noticed something that nobody else seemed to have noticed. Jess wasn’t sitting with her usual group at lunch any more. She was sitting at the quiet table by the bins, on her own, eating very slowly so she’d have something to do.

That’s a clue, thought Pella.

At the Clue Club, she asked Inez what to do. “I don’t want to be nosy,” she said.

“You don’t have to solve the whole thing,” Inez said. “Maybe just sit at the quiet table.”

So the next day, Pella took her tray to the table by the bins and sat down opposite Jess.

“Mind if I sit here? My lot are arguing about a football match and I’ve heard it nine times.”

Jess shrugged, but she moved her bag.

They didn’t talk about anything important for three days. Then, on the fourth day, Jess turned her phone round and showed Pella the screen. It was a group chat. Her old group had made a new chat without her, and somebody had accidentally added her to it, and she had seen everything. All the plans she wasn’t in. A joke about her. Then they’d removed her again, as if it had never happened.

She hadn’t told anyone. She’d been carrying it around for three weeks.

Jess wasn’t too cool. She was hurt, and embarrassed, and lonely, all at once.

Pella didn’t try to fix the friendship. That wasn’t her job, and some friendships don’t get fixed. But she did three things. She kept sitting at the quiet table, and soon two other people joined. She said that a joke about someone in a chat is a real thing, not nothing. And she went with Jess to tell their form tutor, because when a group is ganging up on someone, a grown-up should know.

Jess is louder again now, though not all the way. She did an impression of the head teacher last week that made Pella laugh so hard she got the hiccups.

Here’s what Pella tells the Clue Club.

Friends stress is one of the heaviest kinds. Being left out. A falling-out. Someone spreading something about you. A group chat that buzzes all night so you never get a break. It doesn’t always show up as sadness. Sometimes it shows up as being moody, or quiet, or saying you don’t care about things you used to love.

So check the friends clue. Who is in, who is out, and what is the group chat doing?