“Cards, cards, cards, what should Maeve do about her fancy man?” Fiona plucks one at random from her upside-down position on the floor.
“Here we go,” she says brandishing it at me. “Upside-down man.”
“It’s the Hanged Man!” I say, grabbing hold of it. “That’s the card Roe drew the other day on the bus!”
“Woah.”
“He got super weird about it. He didn’t want to talk or anything. I just told him about how the Hanged Man was about being suspended between two states.”
“Or genders,” says Fiona thoughtfully. “Maybe he’s enby – non-binary. Roe is kind of a gender-neutral name.”
“I guess,” I say. “I’m not really sure what that means, though.”
“I think it can mean different things for different people. I have an actor friend who is enby.”
“I get it, Fiona, you have actor friends.”
“Don’t be a gowl.” She grabs an old textbook and hits me with it. The bell sounds.
“We should get to class,” she says, and neither one of us moves.
“What do you have now?” I ask.
“English. You?”
“Bio.”
There is a small, self-conscious quiet while we both ponder asking each other the same question.
“Yeah,” I say, and lie on the floor with her, my jumper a cushion. The Chokey is really quite cosy, once you get used to the smell. “Skip.”
That afternoon, no one shows up to teach History. This happens a lot at St Bernadette’s. Sometimes teachers just don’t appear because of a scheduling conflict or a sudden emergency. They usually rush in with a supply teacher for the first years, but they tend to be a bit laissez-faire with the fourth, fifth and sixth years. Twenty minutes after the bell goes, we’re still alone, no adult supervision.
“Maeve,” Michelle says. “Do my tarot.”
“I’ve done your tarot, Mich. Three times.”
To tell you the truth, I’m getting a little bored of this now. I like being famous for something, but I hate how everyone expects me to be a performing monkey. It’s always been like this, with me. If I think I’ll get a laugh for something, I’ll do it. That’s how I ended up throwing the shoe at Mr Bernard. Tarot hasn’t elevated my reputation, but set it in stone.
“Do mine,” says Niamh. “You haven’t done mine since Wednesday.”
“Your tarot hasn’t changed that much in two days, Niamh. Anyway, I left them in the Chokey.”
“Maeve, you liar. You haven’t left them in the Chokey. They’re right here,” Michelle fishes them out of my blazer on the back of my chair.
What?
“Did you put them in there?” I ask snappishly. “Were you messing with my stuff?”
“Jesus, no. God, you’re so cranky,” she huffs. “We’re just bored.”
“I can’t keep reading for the same people over and over,” I respond, peevishly, and consider the matter closed.
“Lily hasn’t had a reading yet,” she says.
“She hasn’t asked for one,” I snap.
Lily is sitting where she always sits, at the very far left of the top row. Her head’s in another one of those weird books that I tried to get her to stop reading in first year. She hasn’t engaged with any of this tarot stuff. Partly because I’m sure it frightens her, and partly because she doesn’t talk to me any more.
“Lily doesn’t want a tarot reading.”
“Sure she does,” Niamh says, before calling out to Lily. “Hey! Lil! Do you want Maeve to do your tarot?”
“Lil!” Niamh shouts again, and because Lily still can’t completely hear what she’s saying, she gets out of her chair and crosses the room to us.
“Hi,” Lily says shortly. “What is it?”
“We were just wondering if you want to get your tarot done.”
“Why were you wondering that?”
“Well, because you’re the only girl in the year who hasn’t got hers done yet. We thought you’d be curious.”
Niamh isn’t a mean bitch all the time. She’s actually pretty nice. But like a lot of girls she has a lot of Mean Bitch Potential that comes out around easy targets like Lily O’Callaghan.
Lily tucks her hair behind her bad ear, something she always does when she’s nervous. It’s like she remembers all of her weaknesses at once and compulsively needs to show you them, the way a dog shows you the soft pink skin on his belly.
“I’m not curious,” she says. She still hasn’t looked at me yet. She doesn’t, if she can help it.
“See?” I say to Niamh. “She doesn’t want to. So drop it.”
“Are you scared?” goads Niamh. It’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché for a reason. It works.
Lily’s lip twitches.
“No,” she says.
“Then just pick three cards. Any three,” says Niamh, grabbing the Chokey cards from the table.
Lily delicately picks her cards with her thumb and forefinger, holding each one by her fingernail as if to minimize contact with them. She places them face down on the table.
“Are you going to turn them over, Maeve?” Lily asks, and suddenly there’s fire in her voice. Then, she looks me right in the eye. “You’re used to turning on people, aren’t you?”
There is a loud, audible gasp. Lily just called me out.
It feels like everyone in the room is looking at us. Even Fiona has put her phone down and given up the “over it” look she usually adopts for class time.
It’s impossible to know what to expect from Lily. I blush with shame thinking of yesterday evening, when I closed my eyes and waited for her older brother to kiss me. Did he tell her? Are they close? They weren’t a year ago, but they might be now. They’re both weird enough, after all.
I flip Lily’s first card over. It’s the Five of Cups, aka, a picture of a woman crying with some knocked-over cups around her.
Lily looks straight at me. “What does that mean, then?”
I suddenly feel frightened of her. Where is the prissy, babyish Lily I used to know? The one who used to beg me to tell her ghost stories, but then cry if they got too scary?
“Sadness,” I say with a wince.
Lily and I were both put in the slow-reading class in primary school. We were six and still struggling with “C-A-T” and “D-O-G”. When our mums realized how close our houses were, they became friends. The whole arrangement was magic for me and Lily. We had weekly sleepovers, went on family holidays together, tore around the wildlife park while our mums sat and chatted in the cafe for hours and hours. We both got out of the slow-reading class, but we stayed best friends.
Until secondary school came, and who you were friends with was now much, much more important.
Or. At least. I thought it was.
“Sadness,” Lily repeats sceptically. “That sounds a bit general.”
“What do you mean?”
“People are always sad. People can be sad for lots and lots of reasons,” she says coolly. “Why am I sad?”
Because I abandoned you.
I can hear Niamh and Michelle getting bored and annoyed by how slow this is going. Do they remember, how me and Lily used to be friends?
“You’re sad because…” I flip the next card over. The Three of Swords. Heartbreak. “Because someone dumped you.”
There’s a shriek of laughter. “Oh my Godddddddd,” says Michelle. “YOU had a BOYFRIEND?”
“That’s a pretty amazing accomplishment, Lily, well done,” says Niamh with patronizing sincerity.
Lily’s face goes red. For a moment, I’m sure that she’s going to say any number of things that she knows about me, and that whatever tenuous popularity I’ve gained over the last few weeks will dissolve into nothing. Even though we haven’t been proper friends in over a year, our mums still talk a lot.
No one has ever looked at me with the kind of hatred that Lily O’Callaghan is looking at me with right now. I can feel it burning through my bones like acid.
�
�Flip over the last card, Maeve,” she says tightly.
I flip it over. At first, the letters don’t even make sense. They take a few seconds to form in my head, and I’m momentarily transported back to being six years old and sounding out every letter of “boat”.
H O U S E K E E P E R
My mouth opens and closes in complete shock. How can the Housekeeper card be here, when I know for a fact it’s locked in my top drawer? I definitely took it out.
“What does it mean?” asks Lily, all her fire turned to smoke. She’s always been a huge believer in magic, equally fascinated and terrified by fairy forts, changelings, witches, banshees. She would seek these things out, but then frighten herself with her own belief. Even if Lily and I were still friends, there’s not a chance she would have asked for a tarot reading willingly. Her respect for the occult is too high to want to actually engage with it.
“I don’t know,” I say, and she can tell right away that the tremor in my voice is real. “It’s the extra card.”
“Tell me what it means,” Lily says. Her eyes are locked with the illustration, the woman with the knife in her teeth and the mangy greyhound at her side. “It’s bad, isn’t it? Tell me what it means, Maeve?”
“There are no bad cards!” Fiona, who has apparently been watching this whole exchange, interjects. “Isn’t that what you always say, Maeve? No bad cards?”
“Yeah,” I say hoarsely. “No bad cards.”
Lily looks as if she’s about to burst into tears. “Tell me, Maeve. I’m not too much of a baby to know.”
“I don’t know what it means,” I say again.
Lily’s face reddens, her nostrils flaring. Pure, molten rage is surging past the anxiety in her voice. She hates me for doing this to her. For putting her on the spot like this, for making her fear something I knew she would.
“This is so like you,” she snarls, and girls who weren’t even paying attention to the reading look up.
“This is so Maeve,” she finishes, her teeth gritted.
“Lily,” I say, keeping my voice low in an attempt to hush her. The panic and guilt I feel at involving Lily is being compounded by the sheer terror of seeing a card I know I removed. “Stop. I genuinely don’t know what it means, OK?”
But Lily doesn’t want to stop. She’s slow to anger, but when she does, she won’t be told to shut up.
“You’ll do anything for a bit of attention, won’t you, Maeve? But then, when all eyes are on you, you’ve got nothing to back it up.”
The girls around us go “ooooooooooh” and I hear one “me-ow!” near the door.
“I can’t believe we were ever friends,” Lily says, staring at the Housekeeper. “You’re not a good friend, Maeve.”
Fiona winces with the brutality of it, her face heavy with pity for me. Over her shoulder, I see Michelle and Niamh exchange a look. A look that says: “Wow, if even that loser doesn’t want her for a friend, why are we hanging out with her?”
I can’t just let Lily say that to me, not in front of everyone. I have to fight back with something.
“I wish I had never been friends with you,” I snap. “Lily, I wish you would just disappear.”
Lily looks at me like I’ve slammed her fingers in a car door. She takes one step back, her eyes brimming, and bites down on her lip.
The bell goes, and everyone starts moving on to their last lesson of the week. I have Civic Studies now. Lily has Geography. After class, I look around for her, gnawing my fingernails. I can undo this, can’t I?
How could I have told Lily that I never wanted to be friends with her? The truth is, I haven’t laughed – really, clutch-your-guts laughed – since Lily and I stopped being friends. I miss her, and I have missed her for a long time. Even before I severed her off like a bad limb last year, I had been putting distance between us since we started secondary school. I used to think this was normal. Normal to grow apart, normal to grieve the distance. It was a healthy grief, the grief you feel for Barbie dolls and pony figures when you become too old to play with them and still be socially acceptable. But Lily isn’t some object that can be chucked to the back of a toy chest. She’s a person. A great one.
I can’t find her after school, and I don’t see Roe on the bus, either.
I spend all weekend worrying about her, asking Mum faux-casual questions about Mrs O’Callaghan and whether they’ve spoken lately. They haven’t. Mum and Dad go to Lisbon on Sunday night and Joanne and I get takeaway. We eat it in front of an episode of The Masked Singer.
At around ten o’clock, the power cuts suddenly and the room goes dark. I jump up, yelping like a dog in a thunderstorm.
“Jesus, Maeve. Relax. It’s only blown a fuse.”
“I know. Sorry. I just got a fright.”
Our house is old and badly wired, so this kind of stuff is relatively common. Jo stands on a chair in the pantry and flips a switch in the fuse box. The lights come back on immediately, but the TV doesn’t. Jo gets up and fiddles with it, but quickly realizes she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and gives up. We sit in front of it, completely out of ideas.
“I guess the TV’s broken,” she says lamely. “Dad’s going to have a field day with this. ‘I leave you alone for two minutes’, etcetera, etcetera.”
I look at our reflections in the shining black screen. Two sisters who look nothing at all alike. Joanne looks and moves like a professional tennis player. She’s all lean and muscular, with big cheekbones and a vaguely Nordic air about her. Her blonde-streaked hair is always in a ponytail. She looks wholesome, like the sort of person who should always be eating carrot sticks. I have an aesthetic that Mum likes to call “straight off the Armada”, which means that I’ve got a lot of dark, wiry hair and a unibrow that I have to pluck every other morning if I want it to stay invisible. My brother Cillian looks like this, too. “Maeve and Cill are more Mediterranean,” she always says, which is remarkable considering no one on either side of our family is from anywhere but Ireland.
“Are you OK?” she says, poking me with a chopstick, suddenly moved to speak after hours of companionable silence. “You haven’t said a word all weekend.”
“I’m fine,” I say blandly.
“Do you want to practise your tarot on me?”
“No, thanks. I’m kind of over it, now.”
“Over it? Already?”
Maybe I’m overreacting. Lily is sixteen now, after all, same as me. She’s probably grown up a lot over the past year. Her overactive imagination and her easiness to scare are probably things she’s left behind, but I keep thinking about how fierce she was during the reading. She gave as good as she got, and forced me to consider her as an equal, rather than a childish old friend. It felt like an ocean had moved within her since I last spoke to her, an ocean that’s made us drift even farther apart.
I feel sick every time I look at the cards. I’ve leafed through them a couple of times, to try and weed out the Housekeeper card, but she’s disappeared. Does Lily have it? Did she pocket it in all the excitement?
I’ll apologize on Monday. I’ll even give up the tarot consultancy, and I’ll be nice to Lily, and then maybe we can think about being friends again. Now that me and Roe are friends, we could all pal around together.
Except Lily doesn’t come to school on Monday. She doesn’t come in on Tuesday, either.
It’s not until Wednesday that the police show up.
CHAPTER NINE
THE FIRST I HEAR ABOUT THE POLICE IS FROM NIAMH, WHO saw them waiting outside Sister Assumpta’s office that morning.
HOT COP, she WhatsApps the group. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. There is a HOT COP in the building.
As you can expect from an all-girls Catholic school with only one male teacher – if you can really call Mr Bernard a man, or a teacher – everyone goes nuts. Three people message, PICS! at once.
Niamh sends through a picture of two Gardaí in luminous jackets. One is a blonde woman, stocky and fair, with a tiny little ponytail at the base of her
neck. The other is apparently the Hot Cop in question: a very tall, very thin, tawny-haired man of about thirty-five.
Niamh, Michelle pings back. You call THAT a hot cop? We need to talk about your taste.
Why are there Gardaí in school? I text, but no one responds. It’s just Michelle and Niamh now, getting increasingly defensive over what constitutes as an attractive man.
Are you going to go up to him, Niamh? someone else asks.
I will in my HOLE.
Several laughing emojis.
I text Fiona the same question. No response. She’s busy this week with some new performance troupe she’s formed with her older acting pals. There were pictures of her in wartime fishnets on Instagram Stories all yesterday evening.
I keep typing out messages to the group that I don’t send. I’m too afraid to say what I really think is happening: that this is about Lily, and her absence over the last few days.
Morning classes tick by. Maths, then Geography. We are learning about soil creep. “The slow movement of rock and soil down a slope.” That’s what the book says. I try to keep up with the teacher but my eyes keep skittering over that one sentence. “The slow movement of rock and soil down a slope.” The words on the page are merging with some internal gut instinct, and I feel as if I’m about to be crushed under the weight of a heavy, endless mass.
Then, it happens. Ten minutes before the end of class, there’s a knock on the classroom door. Miss Harris enters, flanked by Hot Cop and Blonde Cop.
“Hello, girls,” she says, trying to keep her voice bright. “This is Detective Garda Sarah Griffin and Inspector Matthew Ward. I know you’ll all be keen to have your morning break, but they just have a couple of questions for you before you do. It’s about Lily.”
I can feel the hovering glance of twenty-one pairs of eyes all on me. I don’t think anyone had truly noticed Lily’s absence until now, and I imagine most of them forgot about the Housekeeper card by late Friday evening. But now that they’ve heard her name, they’re starting to put it all together.
All Our Hidden Gifts Page 5