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 said. “Thanks a lot, Chambers.”
Mum and Dad come back from holidays on Friday. Jo has filled them in about Lily already, and I suspect, about how life has been for me at school. Their bags are stuffed with trinkets for me: earrings that look like miniature blue tiles, Portuguese custard tarts that have been slightly squished by air travel.
“I know we’re taking things easy with the … New Age stuff,” Dad says, sheepishly. “But I found myself in one of those crystal shops, and ended up stumbling out with this.”
He extracts a long, golden thread with a hard, black pendant on the edge of it, accompanied by a single red bead. “She told me it was a protection charm,” he says. “Azabache. Or, jet. But I like azabache. They give it to babies in South America when they’re born. Helps ward off the evil eye.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I say, smiling weakly. Imagining him trying to make conversation with a crystal-seller is enough to make my heart glow with a sense of hope. My parents are home. Things have to get better, don’t they?
He drapes the necklace over my head and the stone lands in the centre of my chest, settling at my breastbone. I run my finger over the smooth black stone, the shape and size of a thumbprint and immediately think of Roe.
Talk eventually turns to the O’Callaghans. Mum has already texted Lily’s mum from Portugal.
“Have you spoken to her?” I ask hopefully.
“No,” she says sagely. “You don’t phone at a time like this. Especially if you’re not family. You need to give people space, but let them know you’re there.”
“That family needs grace,” Dad says, shaking his head.
“That family,” Mum says, standing up to take out our biggest frying pan, “needs lasagnes.”
I help Mum make the lasagnes all night. I grate the cheese, chop the garlic, run to the shop to get big pasta sheets. In the morning, she drives me to school in the car and we hit the O’Callaghans’ house on the way. The shortness of the trip – just three streets, two left turns and you’re there – is a nauseating reminder of just how often I used to make this journey. I have been down this road on Barbie rollerblades, on light-up trainers, on the sunshine-yellow bicycle I begged for that was stolen two months later.
We park outside their semi-detached house, identical to every other house on the road except for the fact that I spent half of my childhood inside it. I hold the two tin-foil-covered lasagnes – one meat, one vegetarian – in my lap.
“Right,” she says. “Pen. Notepaper.”
I rip out a page from my spiral-ring notebook and hand her my best pen. She scribbles something about reheating at 180 degrees, adding that she’s “on call” for anything they need.
She signs off with love always, Nora Chambers and then takes a long look at me, sitting low in the passenger seat.
… and Maeve, she writes.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THERE ARE SEARCHES FOR LILY. PEOPLE WALKING AROUND the riverbank and marshlands with flashlights and dogs. Items of her clothing sniffed at. Mum doesn’t let me go. I hear her and Dad arguing about it in their bedroom. He thinks it will make me feel proactive; she thinks it will traumatize me. What I think seems not to matter.
Dad goes both nights and returns home only after I’ve gone to bed. I hear his steps creaking on the old staircase and then the sound of a long, exhausted sigh when he enters their bedroom.
My brother Pat comes home for the weekend, back for the wedding of two school friends, and the house is momentarily distracted by the big silliness of him. I spend a long time sitting in the beanbag in his bedroom, showing him the list of songs I cribbed from the Walkman.
“Oh wow, it’s happening,” he says, scanning the list with raised eyebrows. “At long last.”
“What?”
“You’re developing taste.”
He picks through his vinyl collection and extracts a big, square record with a red-haired woman on it.
“Maeve, I think it’s time you met Jenny Lewis.”
Suddenly, I’m plunged into a world of loud women with guitars, an endless family tree of people Pat talks about as if they were beloved ex-girlfriends. Courtney and PJ and Carrie and Jenny. Kim and Joni and, for some reason, Prince.
“Prince wasn’t a woman,” I say.
“Prince wasn’t anything. Prince was just Prince.”
Every album and song that Pat passes on to me makes me think of Roe. I want to tell Pat about him, but I can’t get the words out right.
I don’t say anything. Instead, I just lap up the music Pat gives me, eager to memorize his opinions so I can possibly repeat them to Roe later, at some faraway point on the horizon when Lily is back and we can go back to our bus conversations. Pat, of course, thinks it’s because his taste is superb.
“Come in and listen any time you want,” he says, plucking at the strings of his old bass guitar. “Just leave everything in here, yeah?”
But then Pat goes, and real life is the dreary act that follows him. The days pass with a sluggish melancholy, and the school-wide iciness towards me doesn’t even begin to thaw. People avoid conversation with me in the line for the loos. They just raise their eyebrows and then look right through me.
The rhythm of my schedule is still completely the same: I take the bus to school, I go to classes, I take the bus home. Yet everything feels coloured by an unsettling shadow, like the bluish cast on a duck’s egg. Missing post
ers go up, and every time I see Lily’s face on a telephone pole, I feel as though I’ve bitten into ice cream. I don’t see Roe. The girls in school stop asking me questions, and instead just stop talking when they see me approach. It would all be completely unbearable if it weren’t for Fiona.
I start eating lunch in the art room in the attic of the building, a room people tend to avoid because of how perpetually freezing it is. On Wednesday, Fiona silently enters the room, sits down, and opens a Tupperware container. We don’t say anything for a few minutes.
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 ceiling.
“I love that shop,” Fiona says excitedly. “I convinced Mum to take me in there one time, and she dragged me out by the ear when she saw all the bongs for sale.”
“They have a whole section for crazy evening wear and gross wedding dresses. Let’s go try them on. We can run your lines for Othello after.”
I’ve only actually been in Basement once, back when Abbie was getting married and someone had told her they found an original Vera Wang in there. They were, it turns out, messing with her.
We stop to admire the window display before going in. There’s a female mannequin in a gas mask wearing a neon tutu, walking a male mannequin on a lead. The male mannequin is wearing a leather harness.
“Oh my God,” Fiona says, trying not to laugh. “Is this a sex shop?”
“I think they just like to push the envelope.”
“They’re pushing it all right,” she says, looping her arm through mine and pulling me through the door. “She is pushed.”
A man with green hair and huge holes in his earlobes nods at us as we stride to the back of the store. We find an old theatre trunk full of yellowing lace and a sign that says, Broken Dreams – 50% off. There is a shower curtain draped across one corner as a makeshift changing room.
Fiona ends up in a puffy-sleeved 1980s monstrosity, the satin fabric slit to reveal her entire thigh. I’m in a giant meringue, the layers of taffeta itching my leg. We can’t stop screaming at each other, collapsing into giggles every time we discover a new hideous
feature.
“You look like you should be carrying a big brick phone,” I say. “So you can be an eighties power business bride.”
“And you need –” she examines me – “a hat. You need one of those stupid hats that sit at the front of your head. I’m going to ask.”
She pushes past me and runs barefoot to the counter. I hear her voice, giddy and shrill. “Hi, sorry, excuse me, do you have any hat—? Oh.”
The “Oh” sounds worried, defensive. I stick my head out of the shower curtain, anxious to go to the front of the shop in my stupid dress. A group of men are talking to the green-haired boy. They’re about the same age, but the way the men are dressed makes them seem decades older. Or, not older, but from an older time. They’re in navy-blue suits, and have a sort of 1960s masculinity that makes me think they’re going to say something from Mad Men, a show I have not watched but feel I understand the vibe of.
Two of them stop to leer briefly at Fiona. One, a young-looking guy with short blond hair, is speaking to the green-haired boy.
“So, as you can see, sir, you’ll find that in Section 18 of the Irish Criminal Act, any person who commits, in public, any act that may offend modesty or injure the morals of the community can receive a fine of up to six hundred euro. Or, if the court decides, they may be sent to prison for up to six months. It’s really in your best interest to comply.”
The man is American. My knowledge of American accents isn’t good enough to know where it’s from exactly. It’s that kind of clear-water accent that you only expect Americans in adverts to have, as opposed to Americans in films. The kind of adverts that always end with “side effects include nausea, depression and diarrhoea…”
“Piss off,” Green Boy retorts.
“Sir, I really must stress that this is the law, OK, and that your store – and your window display – is in direct contradiction to this country’s moral heritage.”
All Our Hidden Gifts Page 8
