All Our Hidden Gifts by Caroline O’donoghue (ink ebook reader txt) 📕

this shit worse. Luckily, we have a secret weapon.”

“What?”

“You, you idiot. You’re the other sensitive. Glenda the Good Witch.”

“I’m not powerful like he is.”

“Oh, right, it must be that other girl who defeated a deathless witch spirit and rescued her friend. I’ll go find her.”

I laugh, but my skin feels tight, itchy. Lily might be back, but CoB are still more popular than ever. I start rubbing at the bandages on my arm.

It’s going to be so interesting. If you live.

“Are you all right?” Fiona asks, looking at my arm. “This is always the worst bit. Your skin is probably irritated because it’s not getting enough air.”

I pick at the tape holding the wad of nappy-ish gauze to my arm. The angles are all weird, though. I can’t get my fingernail under it.

“Here,” Fiona says. “Let me help.”

She removes the tape and examines the stitches on my arm. “So do you think they’ll let you off homework until next week?” she says, tracing the puckered brown skin.

“I don’t know,” I answer, sighing at the thought. “I reckon I can get a sympathy vote for…”

But I don’t finish the sentence. My eyes are on my arm, still being held by Fiona.

My stitches are beginning to disappear. The surgical thread that I was told would take weeks to dissolve start to crumble away, the broken skin puckering and joining together.

“Are you doing that?” I whisper. “Because I’m not doing that.”

“Oh no,” Fiona says, dropping my arm like a hot potato. “Oh no.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

ON SATURDAY, ROE HAS BAND PRACTICE. HE’S OUT OF hospital now, and has reassured his parents that he will keep practice short, and will sit in a chair the entire time. I go to the O’Callaghans’ house carrying a plastic bag full of sweets and art supplies.

“Hello, Maeve,” Mrs O’Callaghan says at the door, her voice disapproving. “Rory mentioned you might be stopping by.”

“Yes, hello, Mrs O’Callaghan,” I say politely. Lily always called my mum Nora. I have never not called Lily’s mum Mrs O’Callaghan. “I was wondering if Lily was up for visitors.”

“I’ll have to ask her,” she says shortly, and leaves me standing on the doorstep while she disappears inside. She doesn’t even let me come in the sliding door and wait on the porch, instead leaving me to linger in the front garden. She leaves me there for so long that I consider leaving. After a while, I’m certain she’s forgotten that I’m here at all.

Mrs O’Callaghan opens the sliding door. “Only for a minute,” she says. “She’s still not well.”

I follow her up the stairs, following the progression of Roe and Lily’s childhoods as I go. Tiny Roe with jug ears. Tiny Lily with drowsy, half-closed bug eyes. A few of these photos were taken by my mum at the back of our garden. There is a framed one of me and Lily jumping over a sprinkler. Not very many of either Roe or Lily in recent years. I think parents stop being so interested in taking photos of their children when they stop being children.

Mrs O’Callaghan creaks open Lily’s bedroom door. “Go on,” she says. “I’ll come back in ten minutes.”

Lily’s room isn’t much more than a single bed and a dressing table. I haven’t been in here in almost two years, but not a lot has changed, except that the drawings on the wall are more advanced. Lily is sitting up in bed, her long blonde hair over her shoulders, drawing pad in her hand. Her eyes flicker up when I come in, but she doesn’t put the pad down.

“Hi,” I say. “How are you feeling?”

“Hello,” she says, but she doesn’t answer the question.

“I brought you some Heroes,” I say, rattling the plastic bag in my hand.

“Thank you,” she replies, shortly.

“How are you feeling?” I repeat, because she hasn’t answered.

She puts down her pad and takes a long sip of water from the glass next to her. “Why are you here, Maeve Chambers?”

I’m startled. Why is Lily referring to me by my full name?

“I’m here because I wanted to see how you are. And I wanted to say I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry.”

“Yes.”

“For what?”

“For treating you the way I did. For ditching you. For doing that stupid tarot reading that started this … this whole mess.”

I say this last part tentatively. I’m still not sure how much Lily even knows about what has happened to her. Was she just knocked unconscious for the past month, like in a coma? Or does she know everything?

She gazes at me for a moment, bored as a boy king. “You don’t have to be sorry.”

“Oh.”

“No, wait,” she says, cocking her head. “If you’re sorry for anything, say sorry for bringing me back.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Say sorry for ending it all. Say sorry for turning me back into this … this creature in bed.”

Her eyes are glassy now and beginning to brim with tears. She swipes at them aggressively, determined I don’t see her cry.

“Do you know what I was thinking, on that stupid day you did your dumb tarot reading? I was thinking…”

A single, crystal tear falls down her cheek and onto her sketchbook.

“I was thinking, God, what I wouldn’t do to be anywhere or anything else. To be away from that school. Away from you. Away from the whole disgusting business of being a human.”

Something clicks in my head. “I wished for you to go away. And you wished to be taken away.”

Was that what activated The Housekeeper? Two twin desires, and an enchanted deck of cards to join them?

She swipes at her face again, as more tears fall. She looks like she is trying to punch herself in the eye.

“And I was, Maeve. It worked. I was away.”

I gaze at the new drawings stuck to the wall with masking tape. I see an overturned trolley, floating downstream. I see tadpoles hatching. I see the purple gleam of a rainbow trout.

“You were the river,” I say simply.

“I was,” she says, miserably. “I was.”

She resumes sketching, mostly as a