Every gift a curse, p.10
Every Gift a Curse, page 10
Any of these cards might be fine if they came up in a happier spread, but together, it’s hard to find anything positive about them. The Eight of Swords chills me the most: a woman with a blindfold on, swords surrounding her body. The blindfold is meant to represent insularity, like she’s so in her own head that she can’t see the threats around her. But I just see Holly’s blank white eyes, glowing as I put my hands on her. The girl at the Lodge, so panicked about her weather reports that she didn’t even realize that Aaron and I were complete strangers. She immediately assumed we were staff.
I look at the card again, the Eight of Swords, and wonder if there’s anything I’m missing. Some threat that’s right under my nose, like Heather Banbury. Something I’m missing because I’m focused on the wrong things.
Fiona!
I jump out of bed and pull clothes on, realizing that twenty minutes have passed since I started dithering around with tarot cards, and Fiona is meeting her TV people at one.
I’m halfway down the street when I remember that Fiona is mad at me, so I slow my steps a little. Last night’s conversation did not end well, after all. Fi heavily implied that she might be better off never being friends with me, and I—rather shamefully—implied that our friendship was the only reason she was getting this TV opportunity.
I flag down a bus, wincing at the memory. A bubble of fury rises through me. A bubble that says Screw you, Fiona. Screw you for making me feel like your loser friend who has destroyed your credibility, even if it’s true.
Then the bubble bursts. She is my best friend, and I did behave like a lunatic, after all. Besides, what if they really are the Children, waiting to lure Fiona into some kind of trap?
I reach the bubble-tea place only ten minutes late, with the meeting already in progress. Fiona is sitting with two vaguely stressed-looking people in their thirties, a man and a woman.
“Fiona!” I say brightly, as if we’re fond acquaintances rather than fighting friends. “Fancy seeing you here!”
“Oh, hi,” Fiona says, equally as fake. “Hi, Maeve.”
I stand in front of the three of them, trying to latch on to their energy. There’s an awkward pause, and Fiona quickly tries to recover the situation. “This is Paula and Nick,” she says grandly. “We’re having a meeting.”
“Hello,” Paula says politely. “Are you an actor, too?”
“Um . . .” I’m still trying to find their colors, so Fiona has to talk for me.
“No, Maeve doesn’t act.”
“You were in the newspaper, too, weren’t you?” Nick says. “One of the Kilbeg witches.”
I latch on to their energy, sea-glass green and light blue.
“No,” I say bluntly. “Fiona, I’m just going to sit over there, OK?”
“OK.” Fi nods. And I think she looks grateful. I think she does.
Fiona talks to the producers for an hour, and for the most part, there isn’t much difference between what they think and what they say. They talk about authenticity and ask Fiona if she really does know Wicca and tarot. But they ask the way you ask someone if they can do the splits. They don’t think she can actually do magic. They just want something that looks good and natural on-screen.
For the most part, though, they think she’s talented and charismatic, and notice that she seems very grounded. Older than her years. They want her to do a taped audition, but they are fairly sure it is a formality. They’ve struck gold: a real witch, a talent, a beauty, and through a local newspaper. The PR opportunities are endless.
They both think about Fiona’s race. The woman is excited by Fiona being Filipino, because of how it will improve the show’s diversity. The man isn’t so sure. He thinks Fiona is great, but he wonders whether the moneymen will need convincing. The writers will have to change the character’s storyline, after all, to factor in how Fiona looks. The writers might not like that.
In this world that is wholly dependent on visual storytelling, it doesn’t matter if they’re thinking positively about her race or negatively about it. They are thinking about it. And Fiona must know that on some level.
I might worry that everyone thinks I’m an arsehole, but at least they’re judging me on the stuff I do and say, and not so much on what I look like.
Eventually they leave. Fiona races over to my table. “Well?”
I smile at her. “I think they’re probably, like . . . fine. Not outwardly evil.”
“Where’s the doubt?” She looks worried.
“I mean. They’re TV people. They think about how you look and stuff.”
“But they like how I look?”
“I think so.”
“And they didn’t think anything Children-y?”
“Not Children-y, no.”
“OK, good.” Then she looks addled. “So I can actually take this seriously, then? As a real opportunity?”
I nod solemnly. “It is one hundred percent a real opportunity.”
We look at each other and, for a second, weigh up whether we have the energy to still be angry. Fiona suddenly breaks. She starts laughing uncontrollably.
“What the shit, Maeve?” She giggles, covering her mouth. “How the hell is this happening?”
“You’re going to be a TV actor, Fi.” I smile at her. “This is it. It’s happening.”
“No,” she says, not quite able to believe it. “I still have to do an official audition.”
I shake my head. “It’s a formality,” I say. “I heard their thoughts. They want you, Fi.”
The tears come then. Crying and laughing, laughing and crying, hiccuping from one extreme to the other. “I hate that we fought last night,” she says eventually. “I’m sorry I said that stuff.”
“Same,” I reply. “I acted crazy. I’m so sorry for humiliating everyone. Most of all myself.”
“You were drunk, and you were trying to protect Lily,” she says. “I shouldn’t have gone off on you like that.”
I tell her I will apologize to Holly and Becky. I’m so grateful for her explanation that I was drunk and protective, even if I can still feel Aaron’s words echoing through me.
Something has changed.
Like, fundamentally.
Something in your body.
We drink our bubble teas, and I counsel Fiona through a range of emotions about being on television. “What if I’m trolled?” she asks. “What if I’m canceled?”
“Canceled for what?”
“I don’t know, maybe I’ve done something.”
“You haven’t,” I say, shaking my head. “You’re beloved.”
“What if I’m secretly problematique?” she says, French-ly.
“That’s a question for Manon.”
She bites her lip, remembering our conversation from last night. “Manon,” she says.
“She’ll be here when you get back.”
“Will she?”
“Maybe if you go away for a while, she’ll realize that she likes you, too.”
“That feels like . . . not a thing.”
“You never know. Sometimes people go away and they . . . they notice new things about you.”
Fiona goes home soon after that, hugging me tightly before she does. “Now I need to explain this to Mum,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I feel like it might be an easier sell, seeing as I can do school remotely now, anyway?”
“You never know,” I repeat, which seems to be my catchphrase now. It’s fitting. At base, I truly do not know anything.
WHEN I TELL THE GANG ABOUT THE COR-ridor, they all look at me as if the information is incomplete. Like there’s a middle chapter missing, linking Holly’s party to the Lodge.
“I don’t understand” is the first thing anyone says after Aaron and I finish the story. It’s Roe, looking puzzled. “Why were you at St. Bernadette’s in the first place?”
“What do you mean?”
We’re gathered in Nuala’s kitchen again, the room rich with cooking smells.
“OK, so,” Roe continues slowly. “You went to the party . . .”
“Yes.”
“And you had some kind of . . . fistfight?”
I twitch a little. “Becky Foghorn was being mean to Lily.”
The truth is, I still don’t have an explanation for why I flipped the way I did. Defending Lily is one thing, and pummeling Holly quite another. It’s a level of violence I didn’t even know I possessed. Wild, reactionary, thoughtless. Not slow and plotting, like they tell you female rage should be.
Roe turns to Lily.
“That’s right. She was,” Lily says, sounding profoundly untraumatized by the experience. “So Maeve, uh, went nuts on her.”
“Why did you go nuts on her?”
“She was a bit drunk,” Fiona interjects, trying to make up for our fight last night by over-defending me today.
“But you don’t fight when you’re drunk,” Roe goes on, still looking confused. “You get, like, sleepy. And silly.”
“Why are you so fixated on this?”
“It just doesn’t sound like you.” Roe pauses again. “And so what, it’s the middle of the night, and you head to the school? Why? We didn’t have a plan to meet. Did we?”
Tension envelops the room, a sense that this is about Roe and me, and not about the gang as a whole. Manon and Nuala start to look uncomfortable, like this is really none of their business.
“The important thing,” Aaron reminds us, “is we have a path into the Lodge now. Some kind of . . . I don’t know, vortex has opened up at the school. Maeve and I were there. We talked to that girl. We know how they’re living.”
“And,” I add worriedly, “Dorey gave her those tarot cards. She must be looking for a new sensitive. One to replace me after she’s killed me, probably.”
“But why would she even need a sensitive?” Fiona asks. “She can’t drain the Well through one. Not since the ritual sealed it. So what is she doing? What’s her game?”
“Sensitives are rare,” Manon muses. “One in a generation. Sometimes less than that. Their powers are not limited to a Well. A young person with a gift for magic, but who doesn’t know it yet? They are like diamonds.” She thinks quietly for a moment. “And like diamonds, they often form under pressure. Which explains the starving, the mind games.”
“This girl,” Nuala says. “The one from your school. The Lorna girl. What do you know about her?”
Lily, Fiona, and I look at one another, each of us expecting the other to have something solid to say. I picture Lorna, her smooth features and dark, thin eyebrows. She isn’t stupid—she couldn’t be, she’s in all the top classes—but whenever I picture her, she has the mild expression and slight dopey blankness of a cow.
“Fi,” I nudge. “You had more classes with her than anyone.”
“I’m thinking,” Fiona says, furrowing her brow. “Uh, I don’t know. Quiet, I guess. Not, like, absurdly shy or anything, but just kept herself to herself.”
“Who are her friends?”
Silence among the three of us again.
“I don’t know,” Fiona finally answers.
I realize that Lorna occupied a similar place in the social strata to me last year: floating between cliques based on class schedules and little else. I wonder why it never occurred to me to be friends with her. Probably because she seemed a bit boring.
Manon is interested now, forming a theory. “Is there anything to suggest that she may have sensitive leanings?”
“I don’t think so,” I answer. “But there was nothing to suggest that I had leanings, either.”
“What are leanings?” Lily asks. “We can’t just decide that there are leanings all of a sudden.”
“She’s right, we are talking out of our arses here.”
Manon stands up. “Lily is right. No more talking out of assholes,” she says, and it is, for some reason, far more explicit in her accent. “Let’s go to the school. We need to see what is going on with this Corridor business.”
We take two cars. I sit in the passenger seat next to Roe, with Lily and Fiona in the back. A hard rain has started, pelting thick against the window.
Roe is strangely quiet, concentrating on the road in a way that I know they don’t really need to. The rest of us chat, batting our theories around, discussing whether or not we think Lorna McKeon is a sensitive, too. Roe says nothing.
“Any more chat on the single, then, Roe?” I say, trying to draw them in.
“We got on a playlist,” Roe says after a brief pause. “The Alternative Éire playlist on Spotify. It’s got, like, a quarter million subscribers. And they used our picture for the cover image. So. That’s something.”
“That’s brilliant!” I reply.
“It’s OK. I mean, if this were the nineties, we’d be talking about, you know, radio and CD singles. Instead it’s digital streams and a penny for every hundred thousand plays. Hard to get excited.”
A pause follows as we all consider how to comfort them about the utter madness of a life in music. Fiona looks embarrassed. I haven’t asked her how much she’ll get paid for this TV show, but I know it won’t be pennies.
“I also hate when things are not the nineties,” Lily says, and it’s so perfectly piss-takey that Roe breaks into a cackle.
“Sorry,” they say. “I’m just feeling a bit under pressure, you know? College, the band, this tour in April. We’ve spent so much on this single and I just want it to work.”
We arrive after Nuala’s car does. Our phone flashlights out, we all stumble into the building, Fiona’s hand in mine, mine in Lily’s. I’m usually here in the middle of the night, and it doesn’t feel the same in the evening. I can still hear traffic outside, and the quality of darkness isn’t quite the same. There are cool shadows, beams of streetlight illuminating scraps of rubbish and Milky Way wrappers. Dilapidation, but not mystery. No magic. Just ruin.
We pour into the old office, and I notice someone is missing.
“Manon,” I say. “Where’s Nuala?”
“She’s . . . Uh, she’s taking a moment.”
“I’m fine,” Nuala calls from the hallway. “I’m just, you know.”
Manon casts a worried glance out the door. “This is where they told her about my aunt, Heaven.”
Nuala stumbles in, her eyes shining. Manon puts her arms around her mother’s shoulders. “I’m grand, Manny, I’m grand. It’s just, I said I’d never come in this room again.”
“It’s not really here anymore,” says Lily sympathetically. “Or it’s not the place it was. You won, Nuala. It died and you’re alive.”
Sometimes Lily says things and I’m reminded why, at six years old, I picked her to be my best friend.
We wait. We look in 2A, we creep up each workable stair and peek in abandoned classrooms. We tell tarot to pass the time. Roe wanders. Touches the guts of the building, and we start to hear the pipes gurgle slightly with the last remains of water. The banker’s lamp on Sister Assumpta’s desk flickers on when Lily touches it. An hour passes. And no crying.
Aaron, who had been silently and compulsively reciting the Book of Job to himself, looks up.
“Maeve,” he says. “Do you hear that?”
It is only nine p.m., but the crying has begun again.
The cry we heard last night was bereft, solemn. Tonight’s cry is edged with a scream. With fear, with hysterics, with the sudden discovery of something brutal.
And of course, no one but me and Aaron can hear it. The screech vibrates within me, drawing my bones together. I put my hands over my ears.
“Jesus Christ, can none of you hear that?”
The rest of the room looks mystified.
“All right, Chambers,” Aaron says solemnly, brushing the dust from the mantelpiece off his hands. “Off we go. Let’s follow the screams to our certain death.”
Roe stands up. “Uh, no? We’re obviously all going up.”
We all trail upstairs, following the terrible sound. Lily has her hands in her pockets so she doesn’t accidentally spark the fragile building and send it tumbling down.
The shrieks, still rolling through the building, become louder and settle into a pattern. A spike of high-pitched wailing, then an undulating cry.
“What’s it like?” Lily whispers.
“Like a banshee,” I say, pressing my fingers down more firmly on my ears. “Like everything you associate with a banshee.”
There’s a snap from behind me, the sound of tired timber finally giving in.
“Merde!” Manon’s foot has gone through the staircase, her body crashing into the building. She screams, grabbing out in front of her, catching Fiona’s jacket. Fiona falls, too, and a cloud of dust explodes into the air in a creamy wave.
“Christ!” I scream, momentarily drowning out the banshee moans. “Are you guys OK?”
The dust has cloaked everything, and all I can see are limbs and wood.
“Putain d’escalier de merde!”
“Manon is hurt,” Fiona calls.
Nuala and Lily each take one of Manon’s arms over their shoulders, lifting her out of the stairs.
“My ankle,” Manon cries. “My ankle is shit.”
“I’ll fix it,” Fiona says. “Come on, let’s get you to the couch downstairs.”
“Splinters, Fiona,” Nuala says worriedly. “We’ll need to get out the splinters. Can you do that?”
“Probably?”
The roaring in my ears is getting louder, and I can tell it’s getting louder for Aaron, too. I can barely hear them, the din is getting so loud. I can feel my eardrums rupturing, the sound so piercing that I’m convinced it will carry on ringing deep in my brain forever.
“Come on,” Aaron says, both hands on his head. “I can’t stand it.”
Fiona, Nuala, and Manon are already downstairs, Manon’s cries joining the haunted din. Lily and Roe are still with us.
“Stay together,” Nuala calls up the stairs. “Don’t separate.”
The four of us are huddled outside 2A, my fingers on the door handle. “All right, guys,” I say. “Are you ready to go to the Lodge?”
Only, when I’m on the other side of the door, it’s just me and Aaron again.
THE DOOR AT THE END OF THE PAINTED corridor opens not into another hallway, but into a small room. Dark, rich, and quiet. But strange. Everything just a little bit off.
