by Webb, Holly
The two girls sat huddled together under Rose’s blankets, staring at the polished leather. ‘It’ll be a lot smaller, if it even works,’ Rose warned.
‘I don’t mind.’ Maisie didn’t take her eyes off the boot. ‘I want to see what happened.’
‘It isn’t really what happened…’ Rose reminded her. ‘Just a story I’m making up, you know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes, yes.’ Maisie flapped her hand at Rose irritably, but Rose didn’t think she was really listening. ‘Show me!’
Long after Maisie had cried herself to sleep that night – heartbroken by the flickering image of her tiny self running through the park and crying for her mother – and the other girls had come chattering to bed, Rose lay awake.
Had she made it all up? It had seemed so real, somehow. What if I’ve turned into a fortune-teller? Rose worried to herself. She didn’t believe in fortune-tellers. But of course she’d invented it – she’d put in that pink coat, from the little girls she’d seen out of the window. So if it wasn’t real, why had it upset Maisie so much? Why had she believed it more than all Rose’s other stories? The pictures, Rose told herself. The pictures made it seem too real. I wanted to believe it, too. I’m not doing that again.
Next to her, Maisie’s breath was still catching as she slept, her thin shoulders shuddering, as if she were dreaming it all over again, the lost child that she believed was her, running round the glittering fountain to fetch her boat, then turning back and seeing only other children’s parents.
Rose didn’t know how she’d done it. This had never happened when she told stories before today. She hadn’t done anything differently, not that she could think of. But she must never, ever let it happen again. It was too strong. Rose was sure she’d made it up – or almost sure – but now Maisie had seen it, for her it was real. She would remember it for ever.
Although, Rose thought, as she eventually closed her eyes, if it were true, the boat would be in Miss Lockwood’s office, with the other Relics…So it couldn’t be. It was just a story. But her stories had never frightened her before.
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