I wish I could be that way. I wish I didn’t care what people like Michelle or Niamh thought of me.
“I think that’s quite enough,” says Joanne, after what feels like hours of questioning. “Maeve needs to do her homework and eat dinner. You can phone me if you have any other questions.”
The Gardaí sneak a look at my phone on the coffee table.
“You’re to contact me,” she repeats protectively.
Ward flips his notebook closed, and they get up to leave.
“You’ve been amazing, Maeve,” Ward says, smiling at me. You can see why Niamh thought he was handsome. “You’ve certainly ruled out a lot of things.”
As Joanne walks them to the front door, I hear Griffin talking out loud, mostly to herself. “Frankly, she ruled out so much I’m not sure what’s left.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE NEXT MORNING, I TRY TO CONVINCE JO TO LET ME STAY home from school. No dice.
“If Mum were here, she’d let me stay home,” I plead. My classmates yelling “witch” across the yard is still echoing in my ears, vibrating like a can kicked around an alley.
“No,” she says firmly. “I’m out all day and I don’t want you home, watching the Kardashians and getting depressed. You’ll only start blaming yourself, and I won’t be here to talk you out of it. I will drive you in though. How’s that for a compromise?”
“Fine,” I say grouchily, even though I know she has a point. In fairness to Jo, she did a pretty good impression of an ideal sister last night. I talked all night about Lily, about the tarot consultancy, and how our friendship fell apart when I started being friends with Niamh and Michelle.
It’s not something I’ve talked to anyone about before. Mum and Dad did ask why Lily had suddenly stopped coming over, but I always responded huffily, trying to imply that there was a fight that involved both of us and not just me. Lily’s mum tried to bring it up with mine a few times. I heard them talking about it.
“It’s such a shame, isn’t it?” Mrs O’Callaghan would say tersely.
“They’ll come back around. Girls always fall out and make up again,” Mum would respond.
To this, Mrs O’Callaghan would say nothing. She was too clever and too kind to say, “Well, not Lily. It must be that nasty cow of yours who’s the problem,” but I could tell she was thinking it whenever she passed me in the hallway or at the school gates.
“Look, Maeve,” Jo says, with her arm around me. “You shouldn’t have frozen Lily out the way you did. But it’s clear you feel terrible about it, and have for a long time. When Lily comes back, you’re going to apologize to her, and ask, very nicely, if she wants to be pals again. In the meantime, you can’t take responsibility for her disappearance.”
“But I was the one who gave her the reading, Jo. I upset her. I said she should disappear. Then she went missing.”
“But didn’t you give twenty other girls tarot readings? And they weren’t all rosy, were they? I bet some scary cards came up there, too.”
“I suppose,” I say, and rest my head on her chest.
“The thing is, Mae, Lily has always marched to the beat of her own drum. Even when she was a really little kid. She’s always been the sort of girl you saw in a crowd and thought, Oh yeah, she’s going to do something different. Now, whether that’s run away and join a cult, or solve world hunger using three toothpicks, I was never quite sure.”
I’m silent as we drive to school, turning this over and over in my head. Jo’s right about Lily. The air around her has always been charged with something else. She’s like a walking electromagnetic field. And there I was, her lumpy friend who could just about grab on to the lowest rung of popularity, and abandon someone truly great in the process. Why wasn’t I unique and strange? Why couldn’t I solve world hunger with three toothpicks?
The fact of the matter is this: I dumped Lily, but she would probably have been better off dumping me.
“I’m going to come in with you,” Jo announces when we get to the school gates.
“What?”
“I want to talk to Miss Harris. I don’t want the police to be hauling you out of class, trying to tap you up for more Lily information. I could tell that Detective Griffin’s not done with us, not by a long shot.”
Every morning Miss Harris stands outside the front door of the school until the bell rings, but she crosses the car park the moment she sees us.
“Good morning, Maeve. And you must be Joanne,” she says brightly, sticking her hand out to shake Jo’s.
“Yes,” Jo says nervously, and I remember, briefly, that she’s only twenty-four. To me, she’s a grown up, but to someone like Miss Harris, she’s as much of a child as I am. “Maeve’s parents – uh, our parents – are away on holiday at the moment. I’d like to have a word about Lily O’Callaghan and Maeve’s place in all this.”
Miss Harris nods. “Yes, I think that’s a good idea. Maeve, I was hoping to speak to you before class anyway. Would you like to come this way?”
Jo is amazing in Miss Harris’s office. She’s all firm and crisp, telling Miss Harris that I had nothing to do with Lily’s disappearance and that a sixteen-year-old girl shouldn’t be brought into something so serious. Then she says a bunch of embarrassing stuff about how I’m “not as tough as I look”, a sentence that is completely annoying because there’s no good way of responding to it. I can’t say, “Yes I am!” because it makes me seem petulant, but I can’t say, “You’re right, correct, I am a hairless worm, please go on…” either.
“I quite agree,” Miss Harris says tightly. “I think it’s best if, for the
