“It’s just so sad,” she continues. “I couldn’t sleep last night because I was so worried about Lily.”
Suddenly, I can’t take it any more. I can’t sit here and look at Niamh pretending to cry because she’s upset about a girl she despised from day one.
“Niamh, are you freaking high?”
Oh God. I’m shouting now. Why am I suddenly shouting?
“You didn’t give a shit about Lily. In fact, you’re the reason I pretended not to give a shit about her, when she was the best friend I’ve ever had. And now you’re going to pretend like you’re so concerned?”
Niamh blinks at me, her tears thick now, running down her pretty face in even streams.
“Why are you yelling at me? I’m on your side.”
“There are no sides! I didn’t do anything.”
Silence. Every single one of my classmates are staring at me.
“Right,” Niamh counters, coolly. “You didn’t do anything, Maeve.”
At the end of the day I pick up my school bag to find that someone has written W I T C H on it in permanent ink. I pretend not to notice it, not wanting to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me squirm.
It’s only when I’m on the bus home that I realize whoever wanted to call me a witch changed their mind. The “W” is crossed out and, with a very sure hand, has been replaced with a “B”.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE NEXT MORNING I HAVE MATHS FIRST THING. MATHS HAS always been my worst subject, made even more difficult by the fact that Lily and I are in the same class.
Or, we were.
As soon as I step through the door the air is tinged with a prickling static. There’s an immediate silence. Usually when you’re talking about someone and they enter the room, you quickly change the subject and start talking in a fake, halting way about what your dog did last night. This is different. This is a silence that wants to make itself known. A deathly quiet that lets you know that you were being talked about, and everyone wants you to know it.
I trudge through the room, looking straight ahead. I don’t allow myself to blink, terrified my eyelid will push a stray tear out of my eye and let it roll down my cheek. Proving my terror. Proving my guilt.
Just get to your seat, Maeve. Get to your seat.
But I can’t get to my seat. My chair, the back-row gap wedged between Michelle and Niamh, is currently being filled by Aoife O’Connor. None of the girls look at me.
I will not say anything. I will not confront them. I will not beg for friendship.
My eyes shoot around the room, looking for somewhere else to sit. Thinking: OK, I’ll just take Aoife’s old seat. But someone else is in Aoife’s old seat. There’s a hot pulse of terror pounding in my head, so forceful that I’m sure my eyes must be bulging out of my skull. I keep scanning the room. There should be at least two empty seats, what with Lily missing and me on my feet, but there’s only one. Maybe they dragged the other one into the corridor outside to prove a point. The kind of bitchy, silent point you only get in a girls’ school of this size and calibre. I take the empty seat.
The seat that, last week, belonged to Lily O’Callaghan.
There’s nothing I can do except trudge to Lily’s old desk in the front row, feeling each pair of eyes on me, the white heat like a bulb that has just popped out of its socket.
And there, carved into the ancient wood, alongside the hearts and the crossbones and the fancy Superman “S” left by students of years past, is a new offering:
S O M E F R I E N D.
This, I learn over the next few days, is the part of the story my classmates are the most hypnotized and disgusted by. Not just that Lily is missing. Not just the tarot cards. But the fact that Lily had been my best friend, that I had ditched her, then bullied her, wished she would disappear in front of everyone and now – as far as anyone could tell – she has either killed herself or run so far from the city that she might as well be dead.
No one actually says this to me, of course. But I catch snatches of conversation as I pass girls in the hallway.
“… her best friend!”
“…well, I never saw them together but Becca went to their primary and…”
“Their mums! Their mums are still friends!”
“Did you hear? What she said? To her friend? HER BEST FRIEND?”
“… she’s always been a bit of a bitch of course, but once she started getting a bit of attention for that witchy shit, she got really nasty…”
“Her BEST friend!!!”
One day after coming back to lunch I noticed a gang of first-year girls crowded around my bag, and I leapt on it, baring my teeth at them.
“What were you doing?” I snapped, thinking they were filling the pockets with something smelly, like mouldy fruit or tuna.
“Nothing,” a pink-eyed twelve-year-old says, stuttering the entire time. “W-we were just d-d-daring each other.”
“Daring each other? To do what?”
“To … t-to touch your b-bag.”
It was the first time I became aware that I wasn’t just the talking point of my year. The whole school was in on this. I had become a legend. Miss Harris asked me to be extra nice to the younger girls. One was apparently afraid to come to school.
But the younger girls I can handle. It’s the ones my age and above that are the most worrying. Since Lily’s disappearance, all of their parents have started freaking out about letting them go into town after school, and suddenly there are traffic jams at the school gates because no one wants their daughter to get the bus home. A girl in the year above shoulders me into the wall as I’m walking to assembly.
“My mum took away my phone,” she
