Zara

by Mary Hooper

  Chapter Two

  ‘Meeting Zara today?’ Mum asked over breakfast the next morning.

  I nodded.

  ‘Does the Pope wear a long frock?’ Dad said, putting down his bacon sandwich.

  I shot him a look. He obviously thought he was being witty.

  ‘Well, when don’t you see her?’ he went on. ‘Haven’t you got any other friends?’

  ‘Of course I have,’ I said. Though, actually, I thought to myself, have I?

  ‘I like going round with her,’ I said heatedly, even so. ‘She’s a laugh.’

  ‘Hmm. I can see why the sight of her makes anyone laugh.’

  ‘Don’t be so horrible!’

  Mum stuck an egg on toast in front of me. ‘Don’t start anything,’ she said to me. ‘I’ve been looking forward to a nice quiet morning.’

  ‘I haven’t started anything!’ I protested. ‘That’s so unfair! It’s him. Tell him!’

  ‘Tell,’ Dad repeated, pronouncing the word like he was on the BBC or something. ‘Tell him. How many times do I have to say that before you improve?’

  I groaned.

  ‘I was just pointing out that it doesn’t always do to live in another person’s pocket,’ he went on. ‘And, let’s be frank, sometimes I can’t help wishing that you’d chosen someone else to be “best friends” with.’ And he said the ‘best friends’ bit like it was the stupidest thing in the world to have a best friend.

  ‘You’re such a snob!’ I said. ‘Just because Zara’s got a couple of piercings and she doesn’t live in a very nice place –’

  ‘Piercings! All round her ear and through her nose. God knows what else she’s got with rings on.’

  ‘She’s got a couple of ear piercings and one tiny little stud in her nose and I think they look really good.’

  ‘Really good?’ he repeated witheringly. ‘I don’t think much of your taste.’

  I slammed down my knife and fork, exasperated. ‘Look, my friends are nothing to do with you! I don’t tell you who you can –’

  ‘Tell you,’ he interrupted. ‘There are two “l”s in the word.’

  I could have screamed. ‘You’re friends with that idiot down the road who practically lives in the betting shop and –’

  ‘Go to your room,’ Dad snapped.

  ‘I’m going!’

  And to another sigh from Mum, I picked up my plate and went.

  And so ended another happy family breakfast.

  Dad, of course, was a bit of a control freak. I knew that all right, and thought I knew why: because he managed about twenty people at work and he liked to think he could manage me and Mum when he came home. He usually tried to bring Zara into things, saying that she was the wrong sort of friend to have and that by going round with her I was lowering myself.

  The thing was, the bad thing was, I sometimes thought he was right. The piercings – well, he was always bringing those up. It was one of his big things: pierced equalled common in his book, and with each extra piercing your commonness increased. Zara, I knew, had had her ears pierced for the first time when she was just a baby, and by the time we were going round together had several piercings around the top curl of her ear. Last year she’d had a tiny little stone put into her nose and – worst sin of all and thank God Dad didn’t know about it – she’d also had her belly-button pierced.

  I thought all these looked cool, actually, and I was quite jealous of them. Because Dad had such a thing about ears being pierced I’d not been allowed to have mine done until my fourteenth birthday, and even then Dad had kicked up a stink and it had caused a row between him and Mum, because it had been her who’d taken me along to the hairdresser’s to get them done. I’d been so thrilled, though, that afterwards I’d taken up a new hobby: earring-making, and spent hours in my room fiddling with bits of wire and threading tiny beads on minuscule chains. Everyone got earrings for their birthdays and Christmases from me, so much so that they were at saturation point with them and I’d started making little wire bracelets for a change.

  I’d more or less forgotten about the row by the time I went off to meet Zara. Dad was a complete nightmare sometimes, but I figured that that was his problem, not mine. I tried not to let it get to me.

  Zara was waiting for me on the wall that ran around the open space outside our shopping mall, wearing low-cut black jeans and a short T-shirt with a skull on it which showed off her belly-button piercing. Her hair was what she called ‘interestingly messy’, which meant she’d put masses of gel on it and then scrunch-dried it without a brush so that it now hung all over her face in knots and tangles. This wasn’t a terrific look, to be honest, but at least she was different.

  I sat down next to her, feeling drab. I was dressed much the same as I always dressed out of school: in jeans and a grey sweatshirt, with nothing in the way of gel on my hair or even much of a style to it. It could have been worse, I suppose, I could have been wearing a pink sweatshirt and my hair could have been tied back with ribbon instead of string, but looking as I did I felt a total frump compared to Zara.

  We usually sat outside the mall for a while so we could talk about what we wanted to get, and plan what shops we were visiting and in what order. We didn’t ever have much money to spend, but whether we had it or not didn’t make much difference; shopping still took up the best part of the day.

  ‘OK?’ she asked as I sat down.

  I nodded, and it was only then that I remembered what had happened the previous night. ‘Hey, listen to this … what did you say to me when I got off the school bus last night?’

  She shrugged. ‘Can’t remember. See you tomorrow?’

  ‘No. Something about sending me a psychic message.’

  She stared at me, startled. ‘Oh yes! What happened, then?’

  ‘I kind of dreamt you; saw your face looming up in front of me. I tell you, it did my head in!’

  She gasped. ‘What did you actually see?’

  ‘Well …’ I struggled to remember but the memory had gone all fuzzy in the same sort of way that a dream does. ‘It happened just as I was going to sleep …’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Gone eleven. Eleven-thirtyish.’

  She nodded eagerly. ‘That’s right. That’s just when I was thinking of you.’

  ‘I jumped – you know, did a big twitch. And then I opened my eyes and it was as if I could see your face projected in front of me.’

  ‘Wow,’ she breathed.

  ‘What d’you mean – Wow?’

  ‘Well, I told you I was psychic, didn’t I? I was thinking of you; sending you a message just at that time – and you received it.’

  I didn’t know whether to burst out laughing or just rubbish her. ‘Oh yeah!’

  ‘That’s called telepathy. It really works!’

  I gave her a push and pointed at my foot. ‘Try that. It’s got bells on.’

  ‘No, really, Ella!’

  I shook my head and, though my expression was scornful, I must admit that a part of me was wondering if there was anything in it. ‘It was just a dream,’ I said.

  She looked at me carefully, like she was assessing me, and then she said, ‘So perhaps I just put the suggestion into your mind and it went into your subconscious and you remembered it just as you were falling asleep.’

  I nodded. ‘That’s more like it.’ It all made sense. More or less. I jumped up. ‘Where to first, then? And where shall we eat?’

  She stayed sitting on the wall. ‘Did you think about what I said, then? About pretending to be psychic and spooking everyone?’

  I shrugged. I hadn’t, up till then. But why not? It would be a laugh. ‘Yeah. Yeah, let’s do it!’ I said.

  ‘OK,’ she said, smiling, pleased. ‘We’ll make the plans later.’

  And we set off shopping, for once not having any particular notion of where we were going.

  A couple of hours later, when we were sitting on the top floor where the food places were and eating pancakes, we looked over
and saw Sky and Sophie on the floor below. They were leaning against the glass wall that ran right round the place and talking to a tall, good-looking guy with black, thickly-gelled hair.

  ‘Get a load of him,’ I said. ‘Some girls get all the luck.’

  ‘Some girls get all the looks,’ Zara said.

  ‘Too right.’ Out of school uniform, Sky and Sophie looked even more stunning than usual. Best friends sometimes look alike, but Sky and Sophie weren’t at all. Sky was small and shapely, with a smooth olive skin and dark spiky hair. She had blue eyes – a very bright blue – and had told us they were why she’d been called Sky. Her mum, apparently, had wanted to call her Heaven, but luckily her dad had put a stop to that. Sophie was taller than Sky (tall enough to be a model, which was where she was heading) with very long, very straight blond hair that fell in a waterfall down her back. As well as all this, though, they both had a kind of glow about them; a bonus extra that you couldn’t quite fathom.

  ‘Look at them,’ Zara said a bit sourly. ‘Bet you’re thinking what I’m thinking. Don’t they make you sick?’

  That hadn’t been what I’d been thinking at all, so I didn’t reply.

  Zara nudged me. ‘They do, though, don’t they? Bet you’d hate to be best friends with one of them!’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said, though actually I was thinking, just give me half a chance. ‘I bet they never have bad hair days,’ I went on.

  ‘Or spots!’

  ‘Or snotty colds.’

  We giggled and I carried on staring, as if I could somehow work out where all their assets came from and harvest some of them for myself. After a moment Sky suddenly looked up, saw us and waved. She nudged Sophie and I heard – or lip-read – her saying, ‘There’s Ella!’ and Sophie waved as well. And then they said something to the guy and he grinned.

  I think Zara must have realised that they hadn’t mentioned her, because she suddenly said scornfully, ‘Yes, well, we could all look like that if we had the money. But then again we don’t all want to be footballers’ wives, do we?’

  I didn’t say anything and we carried on eating our pancakes, with me taking the occasional look over the balcony, and a bit later Lois and Poppy came along and the four girls all greeted each other as if they’d been apart for six months. The fit guy was introduced and after a while went off on his own and they all stood staring after him, nudging each other and whispering. After that, two by two and arm in arm, they made their way into the big card shop nearby. From where we were sitting we could hear little giggles as they walked in. One of them was saying, ‘He’s gorgeous! How on earth did you manage to pull him!?’ and one of the others was shrieking with laughter and saying she couldn’t believe she had. From this distance, they all sounded the same and we couldn’t tell whether it was Sky or Sophie who’d snaffled him. I was fascinated by all this – it was like watching one of the soaps, but in the end Zara got irritated and said for God’s sake couldn’t I stop looking, and anyway, was I with them or with her?

  * * *

  When we’d finished shopping we went back to Zara’s house. We didn’t usually go to hers, but it was closest and her mum had said that she’d be out until later that evening. Zara’s bedroom, I noticed as soon as I went in, had gone Goth too. It now had a great big map showing the positions of all the signs of the zodiac, and there was purple muslin draped over the windows, and candles and crystals along the windowsill.

  We began working out how we were going to do the horoscope scam. Well, I say we began working it out, but it was really all Zara’s doing. She’d read loads of books about using your psychic abilities, ‘developing your sensitivities’, she called it, and had already worked out some tricks.

  ‘What we’ve got to do first of all, very subtly, is let everyone know that I’m psychic,’ she said. ‘You can do that bit; tell them that I managed to find something you’d lost, or knew something was going to happen before it did. Everyone will be interested in that.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Then we’ll talk about horoscopes and stuff, and I’ll say I can prove I’m psychic because I can work out what someone’s star sign is without being told.’

  ‘OK,’ I nodded. ‘But you might know people’s star signs anyway. We all know when girls have had birthdays in the year and you could have remembered them.’

  ‘Not if I don’t know who I’m talking to …’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, what if I’m blindfolded – or in a cupboard or something where I can’t see anything – and one by one the girls come to stand in front of me and I can tell what sign they are just by sensing it.’

  I blinked at her. ‘How are you supposed to do that?’

  ‘Because you and I will have worked out a code between us!’

  I must have had a baffled expression on my face because she went on, ‘Look, we’ll find out the star signs of everyone in our class – that’ll be easy – and then you’ll memorise them. When we’re doing the trick, you bring whoever it is to stand in front of me, then say something about beginning whenever I like.’

  ‘And?’ I screwed up my face, bewildered.

  ‘And from what you say, I’ll be able to tell what sign they are.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Because we’ll have a code which we’ll have worked out between us! Like, say it’s a girl who’s Leo – when you lead her up you’ll say a sentence beginning with L.’ She thought for a moment. ‘‘‘Look out, Zara. Here’s a tough one.” And Aries could be, “Are you ready for this one?”’

  ‘OK,’ I said slowly. I thought for a moment. ‘But there are two Ls – Libra and Leo. And two Cs and two Ss.’

  ‘Easy. So the second letter of the star sign will begin the next word in the sentence. Like, Libra starts L I so you could say, um … “Look into your mind and tell us what sign this girl is, Zara.” Something like that.’

  I sat and thought some more about it, and what a laugh it would be to be the centre of attention and be talked about by everyone, and what a change from the usual boring stuff we did at school. I’d only been noticed, really noticed, perhaps twice in my whole school life. Once had been at primary school when I’d fallen over in the playground, gashed my forehead open and had to be taken to hospital in an ambulance, and once a couple of years back when my brother had come in to give a talk about university life. He’d stayed on to eat in the school canteen with me at lunchtime and because we never got to see boys in our school, they’d practically mobbed him; gone mad for him.

  Eventually I said to Zara, ‘Wow! Do we really dare?’

  ‘Course we dare,’ she said. ‘It’ll be a laugh. And from that we can move on to other things.’

  ‘What other things?’

  ‘Tarot cards and stuff. And we can hold a seance.’ She shivered excitedly. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to a seance.’

  I wasn’t quite sure what this would involve – if it was anything to do with seeing ghosts I wasn’t going to be keen on it – but I nodded just the same. ‘We’ll amaze everyone, won’t we? Sky, Sophie … they’ll all want to be friends with us.’

  ‘No gathering will be complete without the famous twosome, Zara and Ella! We’ll be sensational – just you wait!’

  As I was staying at Zara’s that evening we’d planned on eating together, but about six o’clock her mum came in unexpectedly.

  Zara’s mum. Well, I don’t think my own mum is anything special, but next to hers mine is Supermum. Hers, to be quite honest, is a bit of a horror. She’s quite a big woman with lumpy white legs which, because she wears very short skirts, you usually see too much of. She wears lots of gold-coloured jewellery, including big hoop earrings practically down to her shoulders, and I always thought it was a good job we didn’t live closer to them because if Dad was bothered about Zara then he’d have had a fit if he’d seen her mum. When Zara and I started going round together it was ages before I met her mum. We always met at mine and hung round at mine, and in the end I b
egan to wonder if she had a parent at all. We eventually met up when Mum and I bumped into the two of them at the local supermarket. I was a bit shocked, seeing her for the first time, but I covered it up, of course. Afterwards Mum started to say something to me, something expressing surprise at her appearance, but I pretended not to know what she was on about. ‘She looks all right to me,’ I said, though actually she hadn’t done at all.

  The other thing was, she was a drinker. I knew that because her speech was often slurred and she was sometimes ‘poorly’ when I went round there. Besides, I’d seen her often enough coming out of the local offy with a bottle under her arm. On this particular day she said she had a headache, was going to bed and wanted no noise around the house.

  Zara just sighed and rolled her eyes at me, so I thought it best to disappear. She gave me some homework: I had to try and learn the dates that all the star signs began and ended, ready for our debut at school the following week …

  Chapter Three

  ‘I’m glad there aren’t more than twelve signs of the zodiac,’ I muttered to Zara on the school bus. ‘We’d never manage if there were.’

  ‘Oh, we’d manage fine!’ she said. Her eyes glittered. ‘I can’t wait to get going. It’s exciting, eh, Ella?’

  ‘Yeah, but what if it goes wrong, though?’

  ‘It won’t! Besides, even if we do get something a bit wrong, that’ll be OK. Everyone makes mistakes – I bet even a real psychic does.’

  ‘It’s not getting their signs wrong as much as getting found out,’ I said. ‘Suppose they realise it’s all a trick …’

  ‘So what?’ she said airily. ‘We’ll just say we were having a laugh.’ She nudged me. ‘Lighten up, girl! Go on, try out the codes again.’

  And for about the twentieth time, we went through our key phrases: the phrases we’d devised and which I would say as I led each girl to stand in front of a blindfolded Zara. These were:

  ARIES

  Are you ready, Zara?

  TAURUS

  Try and guess this one