‘I don’t care. She’s – she needs looking after. Kerry’s not as switched on as you two.’
‘Switched on? She’s not even plugged in,’ Zoe muttered and I smiled. We could hear Kerry fiddling with the bathroom door.
‘Why do you even care?’ Zoe asked Jodie. ‘I know what it is with Anna here. She’s a complete sucker. She feels sorry for any old waif and stray. And she fancies Kerry’s big brother.’
Was it that obvious, I wondered? But Zoe always had a way of seeing into my head, somehow. She went on: ‘But what’s Kerry to you?’
Jodie looked out of the huge, bare window, one hand fingering the scar on her cheek. ‘I was bullied at school too, I know what it’s like. That’s all.’
‘You just have to learn how to scare them off,’ Zoe said, with a tiny shrug of her slim shoulders. ‘You never show you’re afraid, for one thing.’
‘We’re not all as cool as you,’ Jodie said.
Kerry came into the room. ‘Thanks for the tea,’ she said. She was looking at Zoe.
‘You sorted out now?’ Zoe asked.
Kerry nodded.
‘We’d better get back,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Jodie.’
Jodie held open the door. Dave was just coming in, with what smelled like a curry in a plastic bag. ‘Back again?’ he asked us. We pretended to smile at him.
Jodie held up her hand. ‘Take care of Kerry, you two,’ she said. She was looking at me.
‘Ambushed,’ said Zoe, under her breath. I knew what she meant. We’d just been charged with making sure Kerry stayed OK, whether we wanted to or not.
8
Witchcraft
For the next few days, Zoe was flush with cash. She said it was her birthday money, though I wondered why her mum was suddenly so generous and she’d never mentioned any doting aunties or grannies. But if Zoe didn’t want to talk about something, she was really good at avoiding it. Those bruises she sometimes had, for example. It was weird because they were never anywhere you could usually see. They were at the top of her arms or on her back, places she usually covered up. I’m sure I was the only person who ever noticed them, because I’d be next to her in the school changing rooms, or sometimes she’d get changed at my house, into stuff her mum wouldn’t let her wear. I tried a few times to ask about them. Once she claimed she was always falling over, though I’d never seen her do that when I was with her – in fact, she was much more graceful than I was. Usually, though, she just talked about something else altogether. I didn’t want to sound like a parent or a teacher, so I didn’t go on about it. Zoe could be really slippery, even when you asked her a direct question. I don’t think you could have got her to answer anything she didn’t want to, if you’d sat her in a chair with a light in her eyes and tried to torture it out of her.
So when I asked her how much she’d got for her birthday and she said she hadn’t counted it yet, I knew she was fibbing. Everyone counts their birthday money, don’t they? Usually more than once, just to be sure. But I wasn’t the pocket money police, was I? So I let it go.
We went to Dead Bouquet to find things to spend it on. It was the only place we managed to escape Kerry and that was because she did some sort of thing at her church on a Saturday morning and didn’t come pestering us until later in the afternoon. Zoe once said that if Kerry followed us into Dead Bouquet she would have to kill herself.
Zoe zoomed in on the bookshelves. I hadn’t looked at them all that much, though I’d spotted books about goth bands and bios of dead people, some arty books about Aubrey Beardsley and medieval gothic art. I was expecting her to get something like that. But she showed me some books on witchcraft. They were hardbacked and wrapped in plastic so you couldn’t look inside them unless you bought them and they cost a stupid amount of money. One was about starting off in witchcraft and one was called Soulcraft and it was about calling on dead people to help get things that you wanted.
‘That’s really creepy,’ I said, but Zoe just laughed. ‘I have always wanted to read these,’ she said, her eyes shining. ‘It’s driven me mad that they’re all sealed up.’
We went to the little cafe next door and Zoe pulled the books out of their brown paper. ‘These books are going to change my life,’ she said, using her fingernail to slice through the cellophane. She told me she’d been on a website called SweetWitchTeen and it suggested these books for people starting off with ‘the craft’. She already started doing something called visualizing, which was imagining something you want and meditating on it. ‘I asked for some money to buy books,’ she said. ‘And.’ She held up her purse.
‘But you got the money for your birthday,’ I said. ‘Everyone gets money on their birthday.’
‘There’s no guarantee of anything in my house,’ Zoe said.
‘You can’t believe all that stuff?’ I asked.
Zoe shrugged. ‘It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’
I would’ve thought it was a joke, if she hadn’t just spent so much on the books. ‘Magic, though?’ I said, screwing my face up. ‘Come on, Zoe, you can’t think anything like this will actually work?’
Zoe squashed her fruit tea bag down into her mug. ‘No one tries it, not properly, because no one believes it. It’s not waving wands about. It’s more serious than that. Even scientists say you can make things happen by will power. I reckon it will be a good experiment.’
‘Whatever,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘But I wouldn’t hold your breath for the results. What’re you going to do a spell for, anyway? Lottery numbers? The maths exam questions?’
‘I know exactly
