I look down at his nails. They’re still painted that ballet slipper pink.
“Oh cool,” I say, reaching into the paper bag in my coat pocket. “I have a stone the same colour.”
I show him the rose quartz. He chucks it between his hands as though it just came straight out of a forging fire.
“Hey! Be careful! Those things aren’t cheap.”
“You spent money on this?” he says, clearly amused. “It doesn’t have a string or a clasp. You can’t even wear it.”
“It’s a rose quartz. It’s for…” but then I can’t remember what it’s for. “It’s for something important.”
“Are you into this now? Crystals and incense and all that?”
I pull a stick of incense out of my pocket and brandish it like a wand. “Er, you could say that.”
“Wow,” he rakes his hand through his long, curly fringe that obscures his eyes so much of the time, pulling it back towards the crown of his head. “Maeve, you are the last person in the world I envisioned getting into New Age stuff.”
His eyes are a bright hazel, that rare colour where the green and gold shine with equal lustre. There’s an intense prettiness to Rory that gave him a spooky, Victorian-ghost-child look when we were kids but now is weirdly engrossing to look at.
“Me? Why am I the last person you’d picture?” I ask, incredulous. “Not … Vladimir Putin?”
“Putin, now see, Putin has that sort of evil where you could see him sacrificing a virgin on an altar to win another election, y’know?” Rory says playfully. “Putin is definitely more witchy than you.”
“OK, so Putin is witchier than me,” I concede, trying to think of more un-witchy celebrities. “What about … the Rock? No, no, sorry, take it back. The Rock is definitely witchier than me.”
“Oh yeah.” Rory smiles. “I mean, he’s named after something from the ground. He’s like earth goddess levels of witch.”
We go on like this for a bit, trying to think of the un-witchiest celebrities. Eventually, when I have run out of famous people and Rory has run out of reasons that they’re more magical than I am, I finally tell him about the Chokey cards.
“Oh, right, those. You had them a few days ago, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” I say, careful to avoid mention of the other cards we saw that day.
“Well, go on, show me then.”
He pulls three cards. The Page of Cups, the Hanged Man, the Ace of Rods.
“Well…” I start, flexing my fingers. “This Page of Cups guy right here? He represents dreams and subconscious stuff that is on the verge of coming to the surface.”
I point at the page, who is holding a fish in a cup. “That’s what this fish represents.”
“Do I have to get a fish now?”
“No, you just have to work on … ideas that haven’t quite formed yet. The Hanged Man, he’s hanging by his foot, do you see?”
I hold up the card. Rory nods at the man who is upside down, tied to a tree by his ankle.
“He’s stuck between things. Not able to commit to one thing or the other. Or maybe he’s just stuck in an awkward position that he can’t figure out a way to get out of.”
Rory’s expression suddenly changes. His face, already pale, now takes on a greyish tinge. “What do you mean by that?”
“Um … I don’t know. What do you think?”
Rory says nothing.
“It’s supposed to be a two-way street, these readings. You talk to me and we figure out the cards together.”
“What does the last card mean?” he says, his voice stern.
“Don’t you want to talk about the Hanged Man first?”
“No. What does the last card mean?”
“The Ace of Rods? It’s like pure potential, pure fire. It’s about you finding drive to do what you want to do. Whatever the Page and the Hanged Man are cooking up, the Ace of Rods will help you get to it.”
Silence. Rory arranges his face into visible boredom. “This is dumb,” he says finally.
“No, it isn’t.”
“It is. How do I know you’re not making this shit up as you go along?”
“Because I’m not. What are you so annoyed about? It’s a very mild reading. The Hanged Man isn’t a bad card, Rory. He’s not literally hanging.”
“Whatever,” he says. His gaze goes to the window. When the bus gets to Kilbeg, we go our separate ways with another mumbled goodbye. I’m halfway home before I realize that he still has my rose quartz.
CHAPTER SIX
I HAD HOPED THAT MY ABILITY TO MEMORIZE THE TAROT cards would spell a breakthrough for my memory generally, and that school would get easier. It doesn’t. But school suddenly gets a lot more bearable when my whole day is arranged around tarot readings. People have gone nuts for them. Morning and lunch are spent in the Chokey now, and notes are constantly being passed to me and Fiona to make appointments.
I put my new crystals on the shelves of the Chokey, and even though I’m pretty sure that the lady in Divination was being overly cautious with her whole “energy” thing, I still burn my incense after every reading. I go a little heavy on it though, because by 3 p.m. all the teachers are complaining about the smell rising up through the building, but no one rats on the Chokey Card Tarot Consultancy. Even people who aren’t that interested in the tarot are in love with the fact that we, as a year, have a secret. Something that sets us apart.
Fiona runs the appointment book with an iron fist, never letting anyone skip the queue or bargain their way into a better time slot. She always keeps ten minutes for herself, at the end of the day. I don’t even tell her much. We draw cards but she mostly just lies on the floor and tells me how she’s going to study Drama in Trinity, but that there are only seventeen places a year, and how she has to get in.
But despite all that, I like Fiona. She always does brilliantly in exams, but never makes a fuss about it, and she’s not a lick-arse with the teachers either. And she doesn’t bother herself with gossip, like everyone else does. Most of the girls who come in for a reading have the exact same questions: what their best friend is thinking, and what their best friend is saying. Moira Finch and Grace Adlett have both been in three times, just to set the record straight on why, exactly, they’re no longer speaking to one another.
Some girls have incredibly benign readings and they still leave the Chokey weeping and shaking. It’s all show, of course. Everyone wants to be the one who had the life-changing, future-telling, you’ll-never-believe-it reading.
Fiona’s on the floor again, rubbing a piece of orange-tipped calcite between her hands.
“My older brother’s a doctor. He lives in Boston,” she groans. “My mum thinks acting is for egomaniacs.”
“Both of my brothers are engineers,” I sympathize. “And my sister Abbie works for the EU, in Belgium. No one can believe that I can’t pass Italian.”
“Ugh, that sucks. Who cares about Italian?”
“I know, right?” I say, relieved to hear her say it. “We should all be learning Spanish.”
“They speak Spanish in most of LA, you know. And there’s lots of Spanish words in Tagalog.”
“Really? You see, that’s exactly my point.”
We’re friends, kind of. I think. It’s hard to say.
Things get complicated, however, when Tarot Time bleeds into class time. The girls I can’t fit in during my lunchtime sessions start dropping by my desk between lessons. Mr Bernard is almost always five or ten minutes late, and people take full advantage of this. They crowd around me, pleading for a reading.
“It’s better if we do it in private,” I say, hesitant at the gaping audience of girls too cheap to pay for a reading, or too spooked to go into the Chokey alone. “It’s supposed to be a private thing.”
“I don’t mind!” Rebecca Hynes says gamely. “People can watch!”
“But … I need to … y’know, conserve my energy.”
It’s true. I’m beginning to feel what the Divination Lad
y was saying. I miss my aimless old lunch breaks, listening to Michelle talk about nose contouring. I’m starting to feel heavy at the end of every day now. I get home and don’t watch Raya Silver videos any more. Two days in a row I fall asleep on my bed in my school uniform until Mum calls me for dinner.
But I still give the readings. It’s hard to say no. I don’t want people to think that I have ideas above my station, just because I have a deck of cards now. I have to stay nice, stay likeable, stay funny. With my grades looking the way they do, being funny is the only thing that keeps people interested in me at all.
So, when I give my classroom readings, I ham it up a bit. I play to the crowd.
“The Lovers!” I say, as if the words were fresh strawberries. “Now this is an interesting card.”
“Is it about love?” Rebecca Hynes says, all excited. The girls crowded around exchange giggles and nudges. The only girl not peering to see the reading is Lily. I glance at her through the clutter of heads and shoulders and watch her hand reach to her hearing aid.
Is she turning it off?
“It is about love,” I say to Rebecca, though that’s not strictly true. The Lovers is more about finding harmony between two opposing forces than proper romantic love. But who wants to hear that?
“You’re going to meet your soulmate,” I say.
“When? Where? How?”
I stick out the deck to face her. “Ask the cards. Ask them. Ask them who your soulmate is.”
I see Fiona’s face from across the room. She’s more annoyed by people abusing the tarot than me. She rolls her eyes at me and picks up her phone. My WhatsApp beeps. I look down at it quickly, the screen half-shielded by my pocket.
Hamming it up, much?
I grin and decide to ham it up even more. “Rebecca, you have to ask the cards with an open heart. Ask them who your soulmate is.”
“Who is my soulmate?” Poor, stupid Rebecca Hynes asks the cards.
“LOUDER!”
“WHO IS MY SOULMATE?”
“The forces of magic can’t hear you, Rebecca!”
“WHO IS MY BLOODY SOULMATE?” she yells.
She yanks a card from the deck. It’s the Devil card.
“Satan!” I shout, trying to look afraid. “Your soulmate is Satan!”
At that moment, Mr Bernard walks into the room and the whole circle gathered around me screams in sudden panic.
“What? What’s all this? What’s going on here? Maeve?”
I sneak my cards away. “Nothing, sir,” I say sweetly.
“Andiamo! Andiamo!” he commands, gesturing everyone back to their seats.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I DON’T SEE RORY FOR A FEW DAYS, BUT BY THURSDAY I’M next to him on the bus again.
“Heya,” he says. “I have your thing.”
He fiddles at the collar of his shirt and pulls out a long, brown string that he has fixed to my rose quartz.
“Thanks,” I say, as he drops it into my hand. I’m embarrassed by how warm it is from the heat of his skin. “You’re kind of into jewellery, aren’t you?”
It’s an innocent-enough question, but the way it comes out feels loaded and awkward.
“Yeah, I am,” he answers, casually enough. “I like …”
He stretches his hands out and shows me his freshly painted nails. They are aquamarine now.
“… plumage,” he concludes, with a self-effacing grin.
“I don’t blame you,” I say, observing his blue-green fingers. “I mean. I’m not really into make-up or jewellery or anything, but I feel like … the only reason I’m not is because everyone expects you to be, as a girl, y’know? Like, whenever I put it on, I’m so aware of how I’m supposed to be wearing it. It kind of ruins the whole experience.”
He nods, looking at me as if I’ve started speaking a language he hasn’t heard since childhood.
“Sorry, I’m talking out my hole. That probably doesn’t even make sense.”
“No, it does,” he says, his voice completely firm. “It really does. I guess neither of us wants to do what’s expected of us, then.”
We’re quiet for a moment, both observing the other in a completely new light.
“Hey,” I say, still feeling the warm, pink stone clasped in my palms. “Why don’t you just keep this?”
“What? No. It’s yours.”
“No, really. As I said, I don’t wear jewellery.”
I lift it over his head and it dangles outside of his jumper. He quickly tucks it under his clothes.
“Thanks, Maeve.”
We’re quiet for another few minutes as the bus rolls on, and when we get off, he lingers.
“Do you have to go straight home?” he asks.
“No,” I respond. “Why?”
“I just … can’t be arsed going home straight away.”
“Oh. OK,” I say, my stomach surging. “Well, where do you want to go?”
We walk along the Beg for a while, kicking stones and branches, not talking much. He doesn’t seem to have anywhere in particular in mind. I’ve been down this walk before, with other boys. No one important. They’re constantly looking around for somewhere private, secluded, somewhere they can touch me and I can let them. It’s happened twice before. Never full sex though. Just enough so that I can feel like I’m keeping up with everyone else.
I wonder if Rory has had sex. He is seventeen, for what it’s worth. I start to blush thinking about it, then rewrap my scarf around the lower half of my face.
We get to a long, narrow underpass where some people have abandoned beer bottles and cigarette packets. This has been a hideout for teenagers for years. There’s graffiti on the tunnel walls that mourns the passing of each generation’s tragedy: Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Mac Miller. We sit and look at it for a little while, and talk about how pop stars and rock gods and icons are just people, people who die.
“God, we’re being so goth,” Rory laughs, wrapping his arms around his knees.
“Do you know what would be even MORE goth?” I say, reaching into my school bag. “A homemade mixtape.”
“Holy crap,” he says, as if I just pulled a severed human foot out of my bag. “Spring 1990,” he reads. “Does it work?”
“You bet it works.”
I play the mixtape. We take an earphone each, and I’m amazed by how many songs Rory knows.
“The Cure!” he says when “The Lovecats” comes on. “Oh, wow! And the Pixies!”
“I didn’t know you knew so much about music.”
“Duh. Maeve. I play guitar. I’m in a band. You knew that.”
“How on earth would I know that?”
“I thought Lily would have—”
I cut him off. I don’t want to talk about his sister. “I didn’t know, OK? Now tell me all the song names.”
He tells me all the song names. I write them down in my phone.
The cold ground starts spreading a creeping chill up my back. I stand up.
“I should go home,” I say.
“Yeah, me, too.”
There’s a silence for a moment. I’m so confused by this surreal little afternoon with him. We’ve never spent this much time alone together in our lives, even though I’ve been having sleepovers at his house since I was six years old. There’s this weird nervousness I get around him, offset by a sense of over-familiarity. Like I could say anything and he would just smile, and smile, and say something funny.
Do I fancy Rory?
It’s too big a question, somehow. Usually when I fancy someone, I’m absolutely sure of it. It’s a gut thing. Not this weird muddle of adrenalin and friendship.
“Well, see you soon,” I finally say. I lurch a hug on him, an awkward clash of our bodies that is all odd angles.
“OK, yeah. See you tomorrow, probably.”
And then, something incredible happens.
He cocks his head to one side, and gives me the strangest smile. A sideways smile that doesn’t exist in the realm of ordinary friendsh
ip. A smile that makes my legs burn and my throat tickle.
“Maeve,” he says, and his voice is low, lower than I’ve ever heard it. He is very close to me now. I can see the roots of his lashes where they connect to his skin. “C’m’ere.”
Is he going to kiss me?
Am I about to be kissed by Rory O’Callaghan?
Well, Jesus, why not?
I close my eyes, and wait for it.
And then, nothing. No touch. Just a sound.
“My name,” he says, “is Roe.”
My eyes flicker open.
“Huh?”
“I want you to know what my name is,” he says simply, all the magic and intimacy of the previous moment either completely disappeared or, worse, totally imagined. “So you can call me it.”
“Roe. Roe,” I repeat. “You want to be called Roe?”
He nods. “It’s my name. I chose it.”
“Wow. OK, Roe,” the word settles on my mouth. “I like it,” I say, truthfully. “It’s kind of mysterious.”
Roe turns to go and gives me one last rueful smile. “All the witches in stories know things by their true names, don’t they?”
And then he leaves me to gape at the river.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“YOUR BOYFRIEND SOUNDS HOT.” SAYS FIONA. “I’M JEALOUS.”
Fiona is lying on her back in the Chokey, five minutes before our first class. I almost never see the girls she had with her the first day. I sense that, like me, Fiona knows a lot of people but doesn’t have any particularly special friendships. For the first week of the tarot phase, five or six girls would be here in the morning, but now that most people have had their tarot read at least once, the sessions have eased off. Fiona still shows up every morning though.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I say, defensively. “We didn’t even kiss.”
“I like the name thing. Has he asked you to use different pronouns?”
“No.”
“Has he text you since?”
“I don’t think he has my number.”
“Hmmmmm. How about we ask the cards? Can we do that?”
“Sure,” I say, shuffling them. When I’m not in class, I’m shuffling. It’s soothing. It helps empty my mind when, at night, all I can hear is the voices of the girls in my class, each one of their problems clamouring in my ear like clowns trying to push through a car door.
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