Eventually, I crack.
“Your lunch smells good.”
“Thanks,” she says, flushing a little. “My mum has the week off, so she’s making me lunches.”
“That’s nice of her.”
“Yeah…” she replies, uncertainly. “Except I brought in a goat stew yesterday, and you’d swear I brought in a dead My Little Pony or something. Everyone made this big thing about it.”
She sounds exhausted. I don’t blame her.
“You can buy goat here?”
“Oh yeah. My mum gets it from a Jamaican shop in town.”
“There’s a Jamaican shop in town?”
Fiona gives me a wry smile. “There are a lot of shops white people don’t know about.”
Fiona’s first name is Irish, her second name is English, her skin is brown and her patience for other people’s bullshit is limited. I’ve always admired the way she can gently cut people down for being ignorant, but it also intimidates the hell out of me.
“Well, it smells great,” I say. “I wish my mum made me lunch.”
She offers me some. It’s delicious.
We have different class schedules, but we fall into the pattern of eating lunch together in the art room. I roll pieces of modelling clay between my fingers while she uses different highlighters to colour in her shoelaces, making a striped tricolour of pink, yellow and blue.
I’m grateful to her for not abandoning me like everyone else has, even though I’m not sure what she gets out of the arrangement. She’s pretty, talented and fun.
And me? I’m the girl who used to have tarot cards, and who killed her best friend.
“Hey,” she says, threading her newly-rainbowed laces back through her white Converse. “It’s a teacher training day tomorrow. We’re off at one.”
“Oh yeah. Cool.”
“Do you want to go into town?” Fiona asks, her voice casual.
The question cuts like a beam of light through a grey fog. Fiona wants to be proper friends. After-school friends. Town friends. I blink at her in vague disbelief.
Look. I’m not a total cretin. It’s not as if I don’t get invited to parties or trips to town. But I’m almost always invited as part of a larger group, my presence the end product of someone saying, “Oh, and invite the Bernadette girls” or “Invite Michelle and her friends”. I don’t know when the last time was that someone wanted to hang out with just me.
Yes, you do, Maeve. It was Lily, and it was over a year ago.
Clearly, I’m taking too long to respond, so Fiona rushes in, full of anxious qualifiers.
“It’s just that, there’s auditions for Othello in a couple of weeks, and I really think I could do Desdemona, but I really need someone to practise lines with. To do Othello’s bit. So. Don’t worry if you’re busy, or whatever. I can ask someone…”
I can’t help but crack a smile. “This is a really long-winded way of saying you want to get off with me.”
“Oh my God, don’t be such a philistine.”
“It’s grand. Let’s do it. Wait, doesn’t Othello murder Desdemona at the end?”
“He sure does. Maybe I should ask someone else. What with your track record…”
Fiona slaps her hand over her mouth almost the minute she says it. I gape at her.
“Sorry. That’s not funny. I have like, stupidly inappropriate humour sometimes.” She goes bright red, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I’m such a liability. I’m sorry, Maeve.”
It takes me a moment to gather myself. “So they’re still saying that, then.”
“No.”
“Fiona.”
“OK. Yes. But they’re a bunch of cows just looking for a story. They’re bored. Christ, they’re boring.”
I chew at the dry skin under my thumbnail, not sure what to say. Fiona starts apologizing again, clearly upset. “This is what Mum always gives out to me about. No filter. Jesus. Look, it’s fine, we can forget about tomorrow.”
“Fiona, calm down. It’s OK,” I say, smiling at last. I’m finally beginning to understand, I think, why she wants to be my friend. I’ve been too in awe of her prettiness and her poise to notice our similarities. Namely, that we both have foot-in-mouth syndrome. “Let’s go into town tomorrow.”
The next day I meet Fiona in the car park and I am glad, so glad, that I remembered to bring a change of clothes with me. She’s abandoned her uniform in favour of grey jeans, an emerald-green leotard designed to look like a mermaid’s tail, and an oversized biker jacket with wide sleeves and deep, zippy pockets. It’s clear to me now how she snagged an older boyfriend. She looks about twenty.
I, meanwhile, am in a stripy jumper from Next and a pair of leggings I keep having to pick dog hair off. It’s painful enough standing next to her in my street clothes, but I don’t think I could manage it if I was in my uniform.
We walk down the hill and into the city, streams of girls descending with us in pairs and trios. For the first time since my tarot reading with Lily, I feel a pink bubble of joy expand in my throat.
“Let’s do something dumb,” I say, swinging my giddy body off a lamp post. “Like try on wedding dresses.”
“Wedding dresses?” She laughs. “Who would let us into a wedding dress shop? They’re all appointment-only.”
“Not if we go where they sell the crappy wedding dresses.”
Fiona’s eyes sparkle with possibility. “Go on.”
“Let’s go to Basement.”
Perhaps at one point in its long history, Basement was really just a basement. At this moment in time, it’s a four-floor building, and is home to some of the most questionable clothing choices you can imagine. Polyester evening gowns, eight-inch clear heels, neon rave wear, Halloween costumes that attempt to avoid copyright infringement by calling themselves “Bat Gentleman” and “Wonderful Woman”. No one’s quite sure how they make rent, but once I was looking through a rack of second-hand army coats and a tile fell out of the
