My heart jumps at the word “brother” again. Roe. I have been so upset at the thought of Lily in danger I had completely forgotten about Roe, and how he must feel about all of this.
“Yeah. I was always kind of … the leader, I suppose,” I say lamely. “Lily always feels what I feel.”
“So this is why you were so jumpy all weekend,” Jo says. “You were feeling bad about Lily.”
I nod.
“That’s why all those girls were chanting ‘witch’,” reasons Griffin.
Another nod.
“There’s something else,” I say, and I can feel the three adults physically lean towards me, wanting to catch my words as though I were spitting tickets like an arcade game. My eyes flicker to Jo, hoping that she will protect me when I tell the final piece of information, the thing that will reveal just what a cruel and terrible friend I really am.
“Me and Lily had sort of … an argument on Friday. She said some mean stuff to me, and then I said some stuff to her.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“She said … she said she didn’t know why we were ever friends, and I said I wished we never had been.”
A thick, porridge-y lump forms in my throat. “And then I said that I wished she would just disappear.”
Griffin, Ward and Joanne all look at each other, wide-eyed.
“And now she has disappeared,” I say, my eyes filling up again. “Lily’s missing and it’s all my fault.”
Jo puts her arm around me.
“Mae,” she says affectionately. “It sounds like you’ve freaked yourself out over some spooky nonsense. It’s OK. It’s not your fault. Whatever has happened with Lily, it’s not as if you were bullying her, or preying on her in some weird way. You were every bit as freaked out as she was. I remember a sleepover where they played with a Ouija board and Maeve rang Mum to bring her home.”
At this last bit she smiles at Griffin and Ward, in a sort of “girls will be girls” way.
“Listen to your sister, Maeve. There’s no point beating yourself up about this. The way to help Lily is to tell us everything you know about your best friend. Anything could be helpful.”
My best friend. Present tense. Who treats their best friend like this?
I talk, and they write. They ask endless questions about Lily, none of them specific. They sound like they’ve been taken from The Big Book of Teenage Problems.
“Did Lily ever have any problems with bullying? Catty behaviour among the other girls?” Griffin asks. “Was she concerned about body issues? Drink or drugs?”
Drink and drugs: that’s easy. No way. Once, we decided to drink a bottle of vodka, neat, while on her trampoline. Just to see what happened. We got about a third into the bottle before Lil vomited down the side and vowed never to drink again.
Body issues: maybe. It doesn’t feel likely, though. The summer we were twelve Lily shot up five inches. She went from being a kind of monkey-faced kid to a somewhat gawky teen, the tallest girl in our year by a good inch or two. It never seemed to bother her. She has that vaguely alien look you see on certain Russian fashion models, the ones that aren’t necessarily pretty but seem to be picked for photograph shoots that require disjointed positions wearing sack dresses.
Bullying: well, that’s a little more complex. The girls at St Bernadette’s could be bitches, sure, and even the kids at primary school were cruel. There were weird prying questions about her hearing aid on good days and outright insults on bad days. Here’s the thing about Lily, though – she genuinely doesn’t care. People say that all the time, but for her, it’s true. Whenever anyone was mean to us for being in the slow-learning class, she would just roll her eyes. “Don’t worry about that, Maeve. It’s just noise.”
Because, for her, it was. Lily is an expert lip-reader, entirely self-taught from birth, so no one caught on about her hearing issue until relatively late. She learned to listen for the right sounds by tuning the wrong sounds out, and it had a permanent effect on her personality. If someone’s saying something she doesn’t want to hear, she simply decides not to hear it.
I wish I could be that way. I wish I didn’t care what people like Michelle or Niamh thought of me.
“I think that’s quite enough,” says Joanne, after what feels like hours of questioning. “Maeve needs to do her homework and eat dinner. You can phone me if you have any other questions.”
The Gardaí sneak a look at my phone on the coffee table.
“You’re to contact me,” she repeats protectively.
Ward flips his notebook closed, and they get up to leave.
“You’ve been amazing, Maeve,” Ward says, smiling at me. You can see why Niamh thought he was handsome. “You’ve certainly ruled out a lot of things.”
As Joanne walks them to the front door, I hear Griffin talking out loud, mostly to herself. “Frankly, she ruled out so much I’m not sure what’s left.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE NEXT MORNING, I TRY TO CONVINCE JO TO LET ME STAY home from school. No dice.
“If Mum were here, she’d let me stay home,” I plead. My classmates yelling “witch” across the yard is still echoing in my ears, vibrating like a can kicked around an alley.
“No,” she says firmly. “I’m out all day and I don’t want you home, watching the Kardashians and getting depressed. You’ll only start blaming yourself, and I won’t be here to talk you out of it. I will drive you in though. How’s that for a compromise?”
“Fine,” I say grouchily, even though I know she has a point. In fairness to Jo, she did a pretty good impression of an ideal sister last night. I talked all night about Lily, about the tarot consultancy, and how our friendship fell apart when I started being friends with Niamh and Michelle.
It’s not something I’ve talked to anyone about before. Mum and Dad did ask why Lily had suddenly stopped coming over, but I always responded huffily, trying to imply that there was a fight that involved both of us and not just me. Lily’s mum tried to bring it up with mine a few times. I heard them talking about it.
“It’s such a shame, isn’t it?” Mrs O’Callaghan would say tersely.
“They’ll come back around. Girls always fall out and make up again,” Mum would respond.
To this, Mrs O’Callaghan would say nothing. She was too clever and too kind to say, “Well, not Lily. It must be that nasty cow of yours who’s the problem,” but I could tell she was thinking it whenever she passed me in the hallway or at the school gates.
“Look, Maeve,” Jo says, with her arm around me. “You shouldn’t have frozen Lily out the way you did. But it’s clear you feel terrible about it, and have for a long time. When Lily comes back, you’re going to apologize to her, and ask, very nicely, if she wants to be pals again. In the meantime, you can’t take responsibility for her disappearance.”
“But I was the one who gave her the reading, Jo. I upset her. I said she should disappear. Then she went missing.”
“But didn’t you give twenty other girls tarot readings? And they weren’t all rosy, were they? I bet some scary cards came up there, too.”
“I suppose,” I say, and rest my head on her chest.
“The thing is, Mae, Lily has always marched to the beat of her own drum. Even when she was a really little kid. She’s always been the sort of girl you saw in a crowd and thought, Oh yeah, she’s going to do something different. Now, whether that’s run away and join a cult, or solve world hunger using three toothpicks, I was never quite sure.”
I’m silent as we drive to school, turning this over and over in my head. Jo’s right about Lily. The air around her has always been charged with something else. She’s like a walking electromagnetic field. And there I was, her lumpy friend who could just about grab on to the lowest rung of popularity, and abandon someone truly great in the process. Why wasn’t I unique and strange? Why couldn’t I solve world hunger with three toothpicks?
The fact of the matter is this: I dumped Lily, but she would probably have bee
n better off dumping me.
“I’m going to come in with you,” Jo announces when we get to the school gates.
“What?”
“I want to talk to Miss Harris. I don’t want the police to be hauling you out of class, trying to tap you up for more Lily information. I could tell that Detective Griffin’s not done with us, not by a long shot.”
Every morning Miss Harris stands outside the front door of the school until the bell rings, but she crosses the car park the moment she sees us.
“Good morning, Maeve. And you must be Joanne,” she says brightly, sticking her hand out to shake Jo’s.
“Yes,” Jo says nervously, and I remember, briefly, that she’s only twenty-four. To me, she’s a grown up, but to someone like Miss Harris, she’s as much of a child as I am. “Maeve’s parents – uh, our parents – are away on holiday at the moment. I’d like to have a word about Lily O’Callaghan and Maeve’s place in all this.”
Miss Harris nods. “Yes, I think that’s a good idea. Maeve, I was hoping to speak to you before class anyway. Would you like to come this way?”
Jo is amazing in Miss Harris’s office. She’s all firm and crisp, telling Miss Harris that I had nothing to do with Lily’s disappearance and that a sixteen-year-old girl shouldn’t be brought into something so serious. Then she says a bunch of embarrassing stuff about how I’m “not as tough as I look”, a sentence that is completely annoying because there’s no good way of responding to it. I can’t say, “Yes I am!” because it makes me seem petulant, but I can’t say, “You’re right, correct, I am a hairless worm, please go on…” either.
“I quite agree,” Miss Harris says tightly. “I think it’s best if, for the good of Maeve and for all the girls, we minimize her involvement in this. I’ve been teaching in girls’ schools a long time, and once something gets in the water, it’s very hard to control it. Fads start, and they’re quickly followed by a kind of mania. One that brings out the worst in people. I believe the story going around is that Maeve is … a witch?”
I flush red. “Yes,” I say. “I mean, no, I’m not one, but that’s what they said yesterday.”
“And that you have been reading tarot cards for the other girls on your lunch break?”
“Er … yeah. It was harmless, though. Ask anyone. It was just a bit of fun.”
For them. It was a bit of fun for them.
“Even so, I’ve decided that from now on, there will be an official ban on tarot cards, and, more broadly … occult-ish things. So no cards, no spells, no Ouija boards, no incense. No sage.”
At this, Miss Harris produces a shoebox full of things that I had been keeping in the Chokey. Everything I bought in Divination, all that I had thoughtfully arranged to turn the cupboard into my own little magic shop, has been reduced to a couple of bits rattling around in a cardboard box.
I’ve never felt like more of a child.
“Do you have the tarot cards with you today, Maeve?”
“Um, yes. They’re in my school bag.”
“Can you take them out, please?”
I unzip my bag and take them out, the cool weight of them still comforting and solid, despite the trouble that they have caused.
“Give me the tarot cards, Maeve.”
“What? Why?”
“They’re banned from school. And I’m concerned that some of the girls will start asking you for readings outside of school.”
“I’ll just say no,” I protest.
“You won’t say no,” Miss Harris says, and a coldness comes into her voice. Like she knows how easily I can be pressured into doing things if it means that people will like me. “So I’m not giving you the option to say yes.”
I can see that Jo wants to rush to my defence, but that silently, she agrees with Miss Harris.
I feel betrayed.
“Please, Miss,” I plead. “They’re mine.”
“Actually, they’re not yours. You found them in the basement cupboard. They’re school property, and frankly, Maeve, I should be giving you a Behavioural Correction for using the cupboard without permission. You purposefully didn’t return the key to me. Please return it now.”
Me and Miss Harris have never been best friends, but I’ve always thought that deep down, she sort of liked me. Or, at the very least, she had faith that I was a basically OK person. The way she’s speaking to me now though goes beyond gently chiding a misbehaving student. It’s like she thinks I’m a criminal.
I fish the key out of my pencil case and give it to her without a word. Miss Harris opens her bottom desk drawer and places the tarot cards in there, locking the drawer with a little key.
“Now, I believe you have Geography first, don’t you? You can head there now, unless you have anything else to say.”
Jo gives me a small “I’ve done everything I can do” smile and gets out of her chair. “I’ll be at home later. Give me a text if you need a lift from the bus stop.”
I don’t want Miss Harris to know she’s won, so I saunter out of the room like I couldn’t care less, my school bag flung over one shoulder. I can sense the lack of the tarot’s weight immediately, and suddenly I feel like my tether to the earth’s surface is very fragile. Like I might float away and disappear, just like Lily did.
Before I leave the room, I turn around to face Miss Harris again. “Miss,” I say, shy all of a sudden. “Have Lily’s parents asked about me at all? Because, y’know, I’m happy to talk to them, like I did to the Gardaí.”
“Oh yes,” Miss Harris responds. “They had … quite a lot to say. I wouldn’t worry, Maeve. The Gardaí has passed on any relevant information. I think it’s best if you let the O’Callaghans have their space, for now.”
Roe’s face swims into my head and my pulse quickens. Is he still wearing my lump of rose quartz under his clothes? I picture it hitting the bare skin of his chest and feel a blush creeping up my neck.
Poor Roe. Poor Mr and Mrs O’Callaghan. I keep picturing Mrs O’Callaghan’s face when she finds Lily’s bed empty. The hammering on the bathroom door, her confusion turning to panic. The raw, ripe fear of realizing her only daughter is missing.
Classes are a nightmare. I had been afraid that, after yesterday’s “witch” chant, the others would keep well away from me out of terror that they, too, would disappear in the middle of the night. The reality is much worse. People are clamouring to speak to me, but only want to talk about Lily, about witchcraft, about the tarot. There are rumours of a curse. There have been wild stories about Miss Harris finding Lily O’Callaghan voodoo dolls in the Chokey cupboard. There’s another about how Lily is not missing at all, but dead. That she killed herself after being taunted by me on Friday.
They gather around me at lunch, desperate to be the one who shakes more information out of me. As angry as I am to have my tarot cards confiscated, I kind of see why Miss Harris needed to do it.
“Maeve, I’ve been so worried about you,” Niamh says, tugging at the shredded sleeve of my school jumper. “People were saying you used to bully Lily, but I told them that was bollocks. You were her friend, weren’t you? In primary school, I mean?”
Why is Niamh saying this, like she had nothing to do with the fact that me and Lily are no longer friends? How can she look at me, her eyes pricked with tears of concern, as if she is completely innocent in all of this?
“It’s just so sad,” she continues. “I couldn’t sleep last night because I was so worried about Lily.”
Suddenly, I can’t take it any more. I can’t sit here and look at Niamh pretending to cry because she’s upset about a girl she despised from day one.
“Niamh, are you freaking high?”
Oh God. I’m shouting now. Why am I suddenly shouting?
“You didn’t give a shit about Lily. In fact, you’re the reason I pretended not to give a shit about her, when she was the best friend I’ve ever had. And now you’re going to pretend like you’re so concerned?”
Niamh blinks at me, her tears thick now,
running down her pretty face in even streams.
“Why are you yelling at me? I’m on your side.”
“There are no sides! I didn’t do anything.”
Silence. Every single one of my classmates are staring at me.
“Right,” Niamh counters, coolly. “You didn’t do anything, Maeve.”
At the end of the day I pick up my school bag to find that someone has written W I T C H on it in permanent ink. I pretend not to notice it, not wanting to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me squirm.
It’s only when I’m on the bus home that I realize whoever wanted to call me a witch changed their mind. The “W” is crossed out and, with a very sure hand, has been replaced with a “B”.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE NEXT MORNING I HAVE MATHS FIRST THING. MATHS HAS always been my worst subject, made even more difficult by the fact that Lily and I are in the same class.
Or, we were.
As soon as I step through the door the air is tinged with a prickling static. There’s an immediate silence. Usually when you’re talking about someone and they enter the room, you quickly change the subject and start talking in a fake, halting way about what your dog did last night. This is different. This is a silence that wants to make itself known. A deathly quiet that lets you know that you were being talked about, and everyone wants you to know it.
I trudge through the room, looking straight ahead. I don’t allow myself to blink, terrified my eyelid will push a stray tear out of my eye and let it roll down my cheek. Proving my terror. Proving my guilt.
Just get to your seat, Maeve. Get to your seat.
But I can’t get to my seat. My chair, the back-row gap wedged between Michelle and Niamh, is currently being filled by Aoife O’Connor. None of the girls look at me.
I will not say anything. I will not confront them. I will not beg for friendship.
My eyes shoot around the room, looking for somewhere else to sit. Thinking: OK, I’ll just take Aoife’s old seat. But someone else is in Aoife’s old seat. There’s a hot pulse of terror pounding in my head, so forceful that I’m sure my eyes must be bulging out of my skull. I keep scanning the room. There should be at least two empty seats, what with Lily missing and me on my feet, but there’s only one. Maybe they dragged the other one into the corridor outside to prove a point. The kind of bitchy, silent point you only get in a girls’ school of this size and calibre. I take the empty seat.
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