Looking Glass Girl

by Cathy Cassidy

If you have never tried to play croquet with a flamingo, I do not recommend it; the flamingo keeps twisting round to look me in the face, and when I do manage to get it to straighten its neck I find that the croquet ball, which seems to be a hedgehog, has got up and walked away. I can’t say I blame it.

  I am not the only one struggling; the garden is filled with party guests: kings, queens, knaves – even the White Rabbit. If you add assorted flamingoes, hedgehogs and playing-card soldiers into the mix, it is a kind of chaos. It makes my head ache.

  The Queen of Hearts appears in the distance, her face like thunder. She scans the crowds, her eyes coming to rest on me.

  ‘Off with her head!’ she roars. ‘Off with her head!’

  Sleepover

  Savvy answered the door and the boys swarmed into the hallway; laughing, talking, clowning around. There were five of them and five of us; I saw at once that this had been planned, and wondered if I had been invited to somehow make up the numbers.

  I didn’t have time to worry or even care – I was there, and that was what mattered.

  The only one of the boys who’d bothered to dress up was Luke. Just like in the primary school play, he was the Mad Hatter, grinning in a tall top hat with a label saying ‘10/6d’ tucked into its crimson band. He didn’t see me at first, because Lainey had taken him by the hand, introducing him to Erin. ‘I’m charmed!’ he said, taking his hat off and bowing low, and although it was a cheesy gesture it was somehow cool too. It made everyone laugh.

  ‘Savvy you met the other weekend,’ Lainey reminded him. ‘And you’ll remember Alice and Yaz from primary school, of course,’ Lainey went on. ‘Right?’

  ‘Of course,’ Luke said, but his eyes slid over Savvy and Yaz and fixed on me, and it was like he was looking right into my soul. I could feel my cheeks burning; my heart thumped so hard I was surprised it wasn’t visible through the soft blue cotton of my dress.

  Luke Miller was taller than I remembered, his shoulders broader, his face more angular; but his hair was still a tumble of unruly waves and his eyes were still the same dark blue. The boy I’d had a secret crush on the summer after Year Six was just plain gorgeous now.

  I wanted to turn and run away, find the nearest rabbit hole and fling myself down it. I didn’t, though. I stood my ground and acted like I wasn’t terrified. I tilted my chin up and smiled at Luke, pretending I was confident, calm, cool.

  ‘Hey, Alice,’ he said. ‘Long time no see.’

  ‘Hi, Luke. Or should I say Hatter?’

  His face broke into the hugest grin, and he raised an eyebrow, teasingly. ‘So tell me, Alice,’ he said. ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’

  It was an old in-joke we’d once shared – a line from the play – and as he spoke it the awkwardness and embarrassment I’d been feeling peeled away. This was Luke, just Luke, who had been a good friend to me that long-ago summer when Lainey and Yaz were going cold on me and drifting away.

  Time can change people, I knew that, but I wasn’t sure it had changed Luke.

  ‘So, these are my friends; Robbie Sharp and Dex Robbins and Josh Brown and Kamil Akan,’ he said, and the boys behind him grinned and waggled their fingers in greeting. ‘You did say we should just drop in, Savvy, so we did!’

  ‘Awesome,’ Savvy said. ‘Alice – Lainey and I were in town a couple of weeks back and we just happened to bump into Luke and Dex. I mean, we were literally just in the same cafe grabbing a drink, and Lainey recognized Luke, and we all got talking.’

  ‘Cool,’ I said lamely, watching the way Savvy’s eyes lingered on Dex, who was one of those boy-band lookalikes with fair tousled hair and soft brown eyes. ‘Really cool.’

  ‘We all got on soooo well,’ Savvy explained, carelessly. ‘Didn’t we, Dex? I was telling Luke and Dex that we St Elizabeth’s girls don’t get to hang out with boys much these days, being at an all-girls school and everything.’

  ‘So we decided to get together again, with a few new faces thrown into the mix, and here we are,’ Lainey finished. ‘Luke and I were mates back in primary, of course …’

  I wasn’t sure that Lainey and Luke had actually even spoken to each other at primary school, in spite of her mad crush, but still she placed her hand on his arm as if laying claim. I thought for a moment he might brush her away, but Luke was too polite for that; still laughing, he allowed himself to be pulled forward, towards the dining room, the other boys following in his wake. When Savvy threw open the door to reveal the Alice-themed spread, they all whistled and laughed and piled in, eyeing the food as if they hadn’t eaten in a week.

  The big teapot sat abandoned on the sideboard, but a big cut-glass punchbowl was in the centre of the table, filled with a fruity, fizzy mixture. A label saying ‘drink me’ was tied to the handle of the ladle Erin was using to fill everyone’s teacups.

  Savvy touched my arm as I hesitated in the doorway.

  ‘Don’t worry, Alice,’ she whispered. ‘That one really is fruit punch, I promise. The teapot brew was just for us; I thought we might need a bit of a confidence boost with the boys around. I know I did, anyway. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I said, relieved that there’d be no more of the eye-watering rum mixture and amazed that someone like Savvy might need a confidence boost to hang out with a few boys. I had imagined her to be perfect, but the more I saw of her the more she seemed just perfectly imperfect, with strengths and weaknesses the same as everyone else.

  Savvy sat at the head of the table with Dex next to her. The rest of us sat down awkwardly, wherever there was a spare chair. Luke was about to flop down next to me when Lainey tugged his arm and pulled him round to the other side of the table. He looked at me from behind a towering three-tier cake stand piled high with cupcakes, and I thought I saw him mouth a silent apology at me; maybe it was just wishful thinking.

  The boy called Kamil sat down next to me and leaned across to tell me that I reminded him of Keira Knightley, which was so ridiculous I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I just raised one eyebrow, too polite to suggest he find a slightly less bizarre chat-up line; he turned away at once, deflated, to talk to Erin instead. I could hear him asking if anyone had ever told her she looked like Shakira, and she snorted and asked him if anyone had ever told him he needed an eye test, and then a stony silence descended over our corner of the table.

  The others were in flirt mode; chatting brightly, offering sandwiches and ‘eat me’ cupcakes around the table, but it was still kind of awkward. We were five slightly tipsy teenage girls who weren’t used to having boys around, trying to make small talk and not quite succeeding. We were in fancy dress and the boys weren’t, apart from Luke with his vintage top hat. It all seemed too contrived, like some kind of ill-advised multiple blind date with zero chemistry.

  ‘D’you like football?’ Kamil tried again, a note of desperation in his voice. ‘I support Chelsea. I used to live in London, y’see.’

  ‘My little brother supports Aston Villa,’ I said politely, but it was a mistake. Kamil was off on a rant about the Premier League and I picked up an ‘eat me’ cake and nibbled absently at the icing, wishing it really could make me taller or smaller; anything to escape the ear-bleeding dullness.

  Luke grinned at me across the table and mimed a yawn, and that made me smile.

  Once we’d eaten, the chat stalled again, but of course, Savvy had a fallback plan. She put on a CD and announced we’d be playing some party games. I was pretty sure that thirteen was too old to play pass the parcel and musical chairs – the kind of games Lainey, Yaz and I had played years ago at birthday parties in draughty church halls or crammed living rooms – but Savvy had something different in mind, of course.

  ‘Let’s do a bit of truth or dare,’ she said. ‘We all have to confess to some dark secret nobody else knows, or do a dare of my choosing. So – tell me, what’s the naughtiest thing you ever did as a child?’

  The ice began to melt, slowly at first, then faster. Savvy went round the table in turn. Erin confe
ssed that she’d switched the labels on Christmas presents under the tree because she had wanted the chemistry set she knew her brother was getting; Lainey admitted she’d scratched the paintwork on her mum’s boyfriend’s car with a nail because he’d yelled at her; Yaz said she’d buried a brand new pair of school shoes at the bottom of the garden because she hated them so much, and nobody had ever found out; Josh wouldn’t confess to anything, and Savvy made him stand on a chair and sing ‘It’s Raining Men’, while we gave him marks out of ten, X Factor style.

  Everyone was screeching with laughter by the time it was Luke’s turn, and he looked right at me across the tiered cake stand and confessed how, back in primary school, he’d once deliberately tripped up a girl he really liked, making her drop a dish of rice pudding all over the dining room floor.

  ‘What did you do that for, if you fancied her, idiot?’ Kamil wanted to know.

  ‘I wanted her to notice me,’ he said with a shrug.

  ‘And did she?’

  ‘No. She kicked me in the shins and didn’t speak to me for the next three years,’ Luke admitted.

  His eyes hooked on to mine again, and I couldn’t look away, even though my cheeks had flared scarlet. I knew Luke’s story already, because I’d been in it.

  I was the girl.

  25

  The Copper Kettle Cafe, Ardenley, Thursday

  ‘Thanks for coming to meet me,’ Lainey says. ‘There’s something serious I have to tell you, Luke. Something terrible. When I spoke to you last night I realized you hadn’t heard, and maybe I’m a coward, but I just couldn’t tell you on the phone. Oh God, it’s too awful!’

  Lainey’s eyes brim with tears, and Luke feels the first stirrings of panic. This is not going to be a conversation about whether Alice wants to see him again; it’s something else entirely. Something really bad.

  ‘What is?’ he demands. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Luke, there was an accident. At Savvy’s. After you and the others left.’

  The skin on Luke’s neck prickles with fear.

  ‘Accident?’ he echoes. ‘What accident?’

  Lainey starts talking then, about how they were all asleep at one in the morning when they were woken by an almighty crash. The girls stumbled out on to the landing to find that Alice had fallen from the first floor landing right down the stairs to the bottom. She had hit her head on the tiled floor and pulled down a glass vase of roses and a big mirror which had shattered and cut her face, and they’d had to call an ambulance in the middle of the night. Alice had been in hospital ever since.

  ‘Hang on,’ Luke interrupts, distraught. ‘How did she fall? What happened? Is she OK?’

  Lainey wipes her eyes. ‘Not really,’ she says. ‘Alice is really ill; she hasn’t regained consciousness. I mean, it’s awful for Alice, obviously, but it’s traumatic for the rest of us too, because we found her. It was terrible, Luke. I’ll never forget it. I thought she was dead!’

  Luke puts a hand on Lainey’s arm, as much to steady himself as anything else.

  ‘She wasn’t,’ he says. ‘You found her, and you raised the alarm, and hopefully she’ll be OK.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Lainey whispers. Her eyes are brimming with tears and Luke tries to comfort her because crying girls make him panic a little, but when he tries to take his hand away to find a clean tissue she grabs it and hangs on tight. Her hand is hot and slightly clammy, and her fingernails are digging into his palm a little, but he tries not to notice.

  ‘Look, talking won’t help,’ he says. ‘Shouldn’t we be visiting her?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Lainey gulps. ‘I think the visiting starts from midday. We could go together.’

  He nods. ‘How did she fall? I don’t understand.’

  Lainey sighs. ‘We were all asleep,’ she explains. ‘Like I told you, it was past one in the morning, and suddenly we woke up to this horrible crashing noise. We ran out on to the landing, and Alice had fallen. It was so scary, Luke!’

  ‘You think she tripped in the dark?’ he asks, pulling his hand from her grip. He can see where her fingernails have left pale crescent marks on his skin.

  ‘It wasn’t dark,’ Lainey corrects him, quickly. ‘The landing lights were on. Maybe she just lost her footing. She was wearing those shoes, and they were quite high for someone who always wears flats.’

  Luke frowns. ‘Why was she wearing shoes in the middle of the night? When you were all asleep?’

  ‘I don’t know. She even had her coat on. I suppose we were wondering if she’d got homesick suddenly and decided to go home.’

  Luke rakes a hand through his hair. ‘She was pretty bright and lively when we left. And, well, she doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’d run away from a sleepover in the middle of the night.’

  Lainey sips her hot chocolate and sighs.

  ‘Alice has changed,’ she says. ‘She’s not the girl we knew at primary. Since we started secondary she’s been nervy and moody; a bit of a loner. She didn’t want to know me or Yaz any more; stopped hanging out with us completely, which was a bit upsetting at the time, but well, there wasn’t anything we could do.’

  Luke looks troubled, like he’s working on a particularly difficult maths problem and something just isn’t adding up. He finishes his latte and pushes the mug away.

  ‘Thing is,’ he says, ‘we didn’t leave till past eleven, and Savvy said you’d be watching DVDs and doing makeovers and girly stuff all night. So how come you were all fast asleep at one in the morning? I mean, seriously, you were all totally hyper when we left. What the heck happened?’

  Lainey’s face registers panic, and a dark flush of pink stains her cheeks. A tear rolls slowly down her cheek, and she wipes it away with her sleeve.

  ‘Change of plan,’ she says. ‘We were all tired, and Savvy said the DVDs could wait till morning, so we crashed out. I’d give anything to change that now, Luke. Anything!’

  Without warning, she flings her arms around him and hangs on tight, sobbing on his shoulder, and Luke finds himself patting her back awkwardly and whispering words of comfort, over and over.

  26

  Alice

  ‘Alice? This is Mum. Guess what; your friends are here to see you! Elaine and that nice boy Luke who was in the play with you at primary school. Isn’t that lovely? Alice? Can you hear me?’

  By the time I stop running, the croquet party is far behind me. I’m in a clearing shaded by trees, and I can hear talking and the clink of china and cutlery. Peering through the trees, I see a table set for a tea party, and the March Hare and Dormouse sipping their drinks.

  The Mad Hatter is on his feet, taking off his hat as he sweeps into a low bow. ‘Alice!’ he exclaims, raking a fall of wavy brown hair back from his face. ‘You made it at last! We’ve been waiting for you! Do you remember me?’

  The Hatter looks very familiar, but still, I don’t remember him. I wish I did. He seems like someone you’d never want to forget.

  Sleepover

  The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party was a success. Every sandwich was eaten, every cupcake scoffed, every last scoop of fruit punch dished up and drunk. Never underestimate the appetite of a teenage boy – or five. By the time we left the table, abandoning the empty plates, scrunched-up cupcake cases and crumbs, we had bonded over embarrassing childhood confessions and drunk enough fizzy punch to be hyper on sugar and laughter.

  Savvy led the way through to the living room, and by that time she had Dex practically eating out of her hand. Erin seemed to be getting on well with Robbie, and Yaz and Josh were bonding over football teams and computer games. That left Lainey and me with Kamil and Luke. Kamil looked less than impressed, and Lainey was hanging on to Luke’s arm for dear life, as if he might make a run for it at any minute. He shot me a long-suffering look, as if he were at least considering it.

  Erin put her iPod on shuffle and Yaz opened a big bottle of Coke, in case we weren’t wired enough already. Savvy pulled the plush brocade cushions right
off the sofa and flung them on the floor, and she sat us down on them in a rough circle: girl, boy, girl, boy. Savvy produced a wine bottle from behind the sofa, and my heart sank – but it wasn’t to drink. It was much worse than that.

  ‘Spin the bottle,’ she told us. ‘You’ve all heard of it, haven’t you?’

  I’d heard of it, all right; every teenager’s worst nightmare, a game where one person had to spin the bottle and then head off somewhere quiet to kiss whoever the bottle pointed at. I’d never played it, but I’d always thought it sounded like pure torture.

  ‘This is kind of the same,’ Savvy was saying. ‘Only there’s a time limit. My older cousins in America play it; they call it seven minute heaven. It’ll be fun!’

  I tried to smile, but it turned into more of a grimace.

  According to Savvy, the rules were simple. Someone would spin the bottle and wait for it to stop, pointing to someone of the opposite sex; they’d then get seven minutes alone together. ‘To talk,’ Savvy explained. ‘Break the ice, get to know each other a bit better. Or … whatever!’

  ‘I like the sound of “whatever”,’ Dex joked.

  ‘I bet,’ Savvy laughed. ‘Anyway, I have a timer, and I’m going to be really strict about it.’

  It wasn’t strict; it was chaos. The music was thumping and everyone was talking at once. Savvy went first, and the bottle pointed to Josh. The two of them vanished for seven minutes, and the rest of us were supposed to guess the answers to riddles while they were away, but this diversion failed almost at once and Lainey got us all to pose for photos for her Instagram feed instead. I felt anxious, panicky. I remembered the part in Alice in Wonderland where Alice found herself drowning in a sea of her own tears, and although I wasn’t about to cry in front of a bunch of people I hardly knew, I knew I was way, way out of my depth.

  I didn’t want to go off into a back room and kiss a random boy I’d never met before, or whatever we were supposed to do. This wasn’t my idea of fun at all. If this was a test to see if I was right for Savvy’s little posse of friends, I was failing it, big style. My frozen grin betrayed me.