I flip Lily’s first card over. It’s the Five of Cups, aka, a picture of a woman crying with some knocked-over cups around her.
Lily looks straight at me. “What does that mean, then?”
I suddenly feel frightened of her. Where is the prissy, babyish Lily I used to know? The one who used to beg me to tell her ghost stories, but then cry if they got too scary?
“Sadness,” I say with a wince.
Lily and I were both put in the slow-reading class in primary school. We were six and still struggling with “C-A-T” and “D-O-G”. When our mums realized how close our houses were, they became friends. The whole arrangement was magic for me and Lily. We had weekly sleepovers, went on family holidays together, tore around the wildlife park while our mums sat and chatted in the cafe for hours and hours. We both got out of the slow-reading class, but we stayed best friends.
Until secondary school came, and who you were friends with was now much, much more important.
Or. At least. I thought it was.
“Sadness,” Lily repeats sceptically. “That sounds a bit general.”
“What do you mean?”
“People are always sad. People can be sad for lots and lots of reasons,” she says coolly. “Why am I sad?”
Because I abandoned you.
I can hear Niamh and Michelle getting bored and annoyed by how slow this is going. Do they remember, how me and Lily used to be friends?
“You’re sad because…” I flip the next card over. The Three of Swords. Heartbreak. “Because someone dumped you.”
There’s a shriek of laughter. “Oh my Godddddddd,” says Michelle. “YOU had a BOYFRIEND?”
“That’s a pretty amazing accomplishment, Lily, well done,” says Niamh with patronizing sincerity.
Lily’s face goes red. For a moment, I’m sure that she’s going to say any number of things that she knows about me, and that whatever tenuous popularity I’ve gained over the last few weeks will dissolve into nothing. Even though we haven’t been proper friends in over a year, our mums still talk a lot.
No one has ever looked at me with the kind of hatred that Lily O’Callaghan is looking at me with right now. I can feel it burning through my bones like acid.
“Flip over the last card, Maeve,” she says tightly.
I flip it over. At first, the letters don’t even make sense. They take a few seconds to form in my head, and I’m momentarily transported back to being six years old and sounding out every letter of “boat”.
H O U S E K E E P E R
My mouth opens and closes in complete shock. How can the Housekeeper card be here, when I know for a fact it’s locked in my top drawer? I definitely took it out.
“What does it mean?” asks Lily, all her fire turned to smoke. She’s always been a huge believer in magic, equally fascinated and terrified by fairy forts, changelings, witches, banshees. She would seek these things out, but then frighten herself with her own belief. Even if Lily and I were still friends, there’s not a chance she would have asked for a tarot reading willingly. Her respect for the occult is too high to want to actually engage with it.
“I don’t know,” I say, and she can tell right away that the tremor in my voice is real. “It’s the extra card.”
“Tell me what it means,” Lily says. Her eyes are locked with the illustration, the woman with the knife in her teeth and the mangy greyhound at her side. “It’s bad, isn’t it? Tell me what it means, Maeve?”
“There are no bad cards!” Fiona, who has apparently been watching this whole exchange, interjects. “Isn’t that what you always say, Maeve? No bad cards?”
“Yeah,” I say hoarsely. “No bad cards.”
Lily looks as if she’s about to burst into tears. “Tell me, Maeve. I’m not too much of a baby to know.”
“I don’t know what it means,” I say again.
Lily’s face reddens, her nostrils flaring. Pure, molten rage is surging past the anxiety in her voice. She hates me for doing this to her. For putting her on the spot like this, for making her fear something I knew she would.
“This is so like you,” she snarls, and girls who weren’t even paying attention to the reading look up.
“This is so Maeve,” she finishes, her teeth gritted.
“Lily,” I say, keeping my voice low in an attempt to hush her. The panic and guilt I feel at involving Lily is being compounded by the sheer terror of seeing a card I know I removed. “Stop. I genuinely don’t know what it means, OK?”
But Lily doesn’t want to stop. She’s slow to anger, but when she does, she won’t be told to shut up.
“You’ll do anything for a bit of attention, won’t you, Maeve? But then, when all eyes are on you, you’ve got nothing to back it up.”
The girls around us go “ooooooooooh” and I hear one “me-ow!” near the door.
“I can’t believe we were ever friends,” Lily says, staring at the Housekeeper. “You’re not a good friend, Maeve.”
Fiona winces with the brutality of it, her face heavy with pity for me. Over her shoulder, I see Michelle and Niamh exchange a look. A look that says: “Wow, if even that loser doesn’t want her for a friend, why are we hanging out with her?”
I can’t just let Lily say that to me, not in front of everyone. I have to fight back with something.
“I wish I had never been friends with you,” I snap. “Lily, I wish you would just disappear.”
Lily looks at me like I’ve slammed her fingers in a car door. She takes one step back, her eyes brimming, and bites down on her lip.
The bell goes, and everyone starts moving on to their last lesson of the week. I have Civic Studies now. Lily has Geography. After class, I look around for her, gnawing
