How could I have told Lily that I never wanted to be friends with her? The truth is, I haven’t laughed – really, clutch-your-guts laughed – since Lily and I stopped being friends. I miss her, and I have missed her for a long time. Even before I severed her off like a bad limb last year, I had been putting distance between us since we started secondary school. I used to think this was normal. Normal to grow apart, normal to grieve the distance. It was a healthy grief, the grief you feel for Barbie dolls and pony figures when you become too old to play with them and still be socially acceptable. But Lily isn’t some object that can be chucked to the back of a toy chest. She’s a person. A great one.
I can’t find her after school, and I don’t see Roe on the bus, either.
I spend all weekend worrying about her, asking Mum faux-casual questions about Mrs O’Callaghan and whether they’ve spoken lately. They haven’t. Mum and Dad go to Lisbon on Sunday night and Joanne and I get takeaway. We eat it in front of an episode of The Masked Singer.
At around ten o’clock, the power cuts suddenly and the room goes dark. I jump up, yelping like a dog in a thunderstorm.
“Jesus, Maeve. Relax. It’s only blown a fuse.”
“I know. Sorry. I just got a fright.”
Our house is old and badly wired, so this kind of stuff is relatively common. Jo stands on a chair in the pantry and flips a switch in the fuse box. The lights come back on immediately, but the TV doesn’t. Jo gets up and fiddles with it, but quickly realizes she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and gives up. We sit in front of it, completely out of ideas.
“I guess the TV’s broken,” she says lamely. “Dad’s going to have a field day with this. ‘I leave you alone for two minutes’, etcetera, etcetera.”
I look at our reflections in the shining black screen. Two sisters who look nothing at all alike. Joanne looks and moves like a professional tennis player. She’s all lean and muscular, with big cheekbones and a vaguely Nordic air about her. Her blonde-streaked hair is always in a ponytail. She looks wholesome, like the sort of person who should always be eating carrot sticks. I have an aesthetic that Mum likes to call “straight off the Armada”, which means that I’ve got a lot of dark, wiry hair and a unibrow that I have to pluck every other morning if I want it to stay invisible. My brother Cillian looks like this, too. “Maeve and Cill are more Mediterranean,” she always says, which is remarkable considering no one on either side of our family is from anywhere but Ireland.
“Are you OK?” she says, poking me with a chopstick, suddenly moved to speak after hours of companionable silence. “You haven’t said a word all weekend.”
“I’m fine,” I say blandly.
“Do you want to practise your tarot on me?”
“No, thanks. I’m kind of over it, now.”
“Over it? Already?”
Maybe I’m overreacting. Lily is sixteen now, after all, same as me. She’s probably grown up a lot over the past year. Her overactive imagination and her easiness to scare are probably things she’s left behind, but I keep thinking about how fierce she was during the reading. She gave as good as she got, and forced me to consider her as an equal, rather than a childish old friend. It felt like an ocean had moved within her since I last spoke to her, an ocean that’s made us drift even farther apart.
I feel sick every time I look at the cards. I’ve leafed through them a couple of times, to try and weed out the Housekeeper card, but she’s disappeared. Does Lily have it? Did she pocket it in all the excitement?
I’ll apologize on Monday. I’ll even give up the tarot consultancy, and I’ll be nice to Lily, and then maybe we can think about being friends again. Now that me and Roe are friends, we could all pal around together.
Except Lily doesn’t come to school on Monday. She doesn’t come in on Tuesday, either.
It’s not until Wednesday that the police show up.
CHAPTER NINE
THE FIRST I HEAR ABOUT THE POLICE IS FROM NIAMH, WHO saw them waiting outside Sister Assumpta’s office that morning.
HOT COP, she WhatsApps the group. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. There is a HOT COP in the building.
As you can expect from an all-girls Catholic school with only one male teacher – if you can really call Mr Bernard a man, or a teacher – everyone goes nuts. Three people message, PICS! at once.
Niamh sends through a picture of two Gardaí in luminous jackets. One is a blonde woman, stocky and fair, with a tiny little ponytail at the base of her neck. The other is apparently the Hot Cop in question: a very tall, very thin, tawny-haired man of about thirty-five.
Niamh, Michelle pings back. You call THAT a hot cop? We need to talk about your taste.
Why are there Gardaí in school? I text, but no one responds. It’s just Michelle and Niamh now, getting increasingly defensive over what constitutes as an attractive man.
Are you going to go up to him, Niamh? someone else asks.
I will in my HOLE.
Several laughing emojis.
I text Fiona the same question. No response. She’s busy this week with some new performance troupe she’s formed with her older acting pals. There were pictures of her in wartime fishnets on Instagram Stories all yesterday evening.
I keep typing out messages to the group that I don’t send. I’m too afraid to say what I really think is happening: that this is about Lily, and her absence over the last few days.
Morning classes tick by. Maths, then Geography. We are learning about soil creep. “The slow movement of rock and soil down a slope.” That’s what the book says. I try to
