Never Evers Page 6

  ‘No, maybe we just need to go outside and find some.’ She studied the book. ‘It says here, “You will find the right wand for you when you go looking for it.”’

  ‘Can’t we use a temporary wand?’ I said. ‘I mean, surely we can improvise and then find proper wands tomorrow?’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t say you can’t improvise,’ Keira said.

  ‘Exactly. Maybe the right wand for us is right in this room?’ I suggested. ‘Maybe the right wand for us isn’t a wand. Well, maybe it’s not even wand-shaped.’ I reached into the bottom of my bag. ‘Maybe the right wand for us is a head torch.’

  ‘I think you’re right,’ Connie said. ‘And I think we should dress up.’

  Keira rolled her eyes. ‘I swear you’re obsessed with dressing up. As what?’

  ‘Ourselves,’ said Connie. ‘Our witch selves. Group hug!’

  She screamed, and she and Keira jumped at me. I squealed as they squeezed me, and jumped along with them.

  Connie put on her lion onesie and drew warpaint on her cheeks in purple felt tip. Keira had drawn tiny stars next to her eyes, and changed into an all-black outfit, except for brown socks with owls on them.

  I rifled through my bag again. ‘I don’t really know what my witch self is.’

  ‘I know,’ said Connie. ‘Your witch self should be Juliet. Because Jack is your Romeo.’

  Connie started wrapping the bedsheet around me, and then made me a crown out of a belt and a T-shirt.

  ‘I look like a Roman,’ I said.

  ‘Or a mummy?’ Keira offered.

  ‘I think it’s perfect,’ Connie said. Keira drew a heart on my cheek in red felt tip to complete the effect.

  ‘OK, now we have cast the circle and embodied our true witch selves,’ said Keira. ‘Next, we need to find the spell.’ She flicked over to another page. I suddenly wondered if the book had a spell to make you a better dancer. Or maybe even turn back time.

  ‘Got it,’ Keira said and smiled. ‘Irresista-spell.’

  Connie squealed. ‘Jack and Mouse, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!’

  ‘Er, it’s a bit more complicated than that,’ Keira said. ‘We need paper and a pen. A true belief in magic. A full moon – I can’t see it so let’s presume it’s full. A hair from your head and a jam jar.’

  The only thing we didn’t have was a jam jar, so Connie scooped her suntan cream out of its pot and rinsed it out.

  As Keira was the most experienced witch she took control. ‘OK, so, Mouse, you need to stand in the centre of the circle.’

  ‘Oh, I’m getting a bit scared,’ Connie whispered.

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s not a hex, it’s a totally white magic spell,’ Keira said. ‘The first rule of teen witchcraft is not to wish harm on others.’

  ‘Yeah, but we could be opening a vortex in to another world,’ I said, smiling.

  ‘OK,’ said Keira, ‘you have to put the hair from your head into the jam jar.’

  Keira pulled one out and handed it to me and I dropped it into the sticky pot.

  ‘Now you have to write his name and put it in the jar.’

  ‘This feels really weird and psycho,’ I laughed, scribbling his name down.

  ‘OK, now we’re going to hold hands, and we all have to sing, “Name is written/Hidden singing/Compel the object to my bidding/So mote it be.”’

  ‘“So mote it be”?’ Connie burst out laughing.

  ‘And then we all have to sing his name three times and Mouse has to sing it into the jar.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can remember all that. Can we practise?’ I said.

  We stood in a circle and the others held hands and I held the pot and we all started chanting the song.

  ‘Now!’ Keira shouted and we all shouted, ‘Jack! Jack! Jack!’ and then Connie yelled, ‘Wherefore art thou, Jack!’

  There was a pause, then Connie screamed, Keira hit the floor and I froze in terror.

  Someone was knocking at the window.

  Jack

  Me and Max locked eyes in panic.

  ‘Why are they screaming?’ he whispered. ‘They told us to come!’ He jumped to the left of the window and pinned himself against the wall, out of sight.

  ‘Maybe they were expecting us to knock on the door, like normal people,’ I muttered.

  Suddenly, the curtains were flung open and I was face to face through the glass with the tall, curly-haired girl who’d been hanging around at the end of the film night. She boggled her eyes at me, then squealed and flapped the curtains shut again.

  Max was still standing flat against the wall, his eyes darting about like a nutcase.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he whispered. ‘Is it the girls or not?’

  ‘It’s a girl,’ I said. ‘Just not any of the girls we were looking for. I think we’ve got the wrong room.’

  Max unpinned himself from the wall and peered up at the window.

  ‘What are you on about? The curtains are still shut.’

  Before he could pin himself back against the wall, Curly-Haired Girl flapped the curtains open again and yanked up the window.

  ‘Hi!’ she grinned. ‘Come inside, you must be freezing!’

  Me and Max looked at each other and shrugged. We had been wandering around the outside of the hotel for a good ten minutes, trying to figure out which window belonged to room 22. Despite wearing two hoodies and a jacket each, we were both absolutely frozen.

  ‘Er, yeah, OK. Cheers,’ I said, trying not to sound too pathetically grateful for the chance to get out of the cold.

  I pulled myself up on to the window ledge and looked around the room. I saw that there were two other girls inside, and one of them – sat in the middle of the floor – was Long Hair Girl. I felt my heart jump right up into my throat.

  She wasn’t wearing the grey hoodie any more, but what she was wearing was absolutely mental. She had a bedsheet draped over her, a belt tied around her head and a massive red heart drawn across the side of her face. The two other girls were also rocking the same mad, hippy look.

  I became suddenly aware that my nose was actually dripping from the cold. I ran my glove over it, hoping none of them had noticed. In proper light, and closer up, Long Hair Girl looked seriously hot. Even the fact she was dressed like a nutter couldn’t disguise it. The combination of the shock and the cold and her serious hotness was too much, so I just hung there on the ledge for a few seconds with my mouth open. The girls just stared back at me.

  Finally, Max broke my trance by yelling, ‘Can you get inside, Jack! I’m freezing my face off out here!’

  I hauled myself through the window and tumbled into the room.

  ‘Well, this is a bit of a surprise,’ said Curly-Haired Girl.

  I stood up and brushed myself off. My heart was beating so hard I could feel it bumping against my T-shirt.

  ‘Er, yeah, sorry,’ I stuttered. ‘We were actually …’

  I caught eyes with Long Hair Girl, and something inside me said not to tell them that we’d been looking for another group of girls.

  ‘We … were actually just bored so we thought we’d go for a midnight walk,’ I said.

  ‘Nice idea!’ beamed Curly-Haired Girl. ‘Midnight walks are my favourite kind of walks.’

  ‘I, erm …’ I tried to think of something to say. ‘I like your outfits,’ was the best I could come up with, and I felt the sudden urge to curl up in the corner and die.

  ‘Thanks!’ said Curly-Haired Girl. ‘We made them ourselves. Well, except, I didn’t make this lion onesie. I got it for Christmas from my Auntie Alison.’

  She beamed at me. The other two girls looked mortified and slightly in shock. Behind me, Max hauled himself on to the window ledge and propped himself up on his elbows.

  ‘All right, girls?’ he grinned. ‘What’s with the dressing up?’

  Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. We all froze. Outside in the hall, we heard a woman’s voice.

  ‘Girls? I thought I heard some com
motion. Everything all right in there?’

  Curly-Haired Girl mouthed, ‘Oh no!’ and Long Hair Girl suddenly sprang up and whispered, ‘It’s Miss Mardle!’

  ‘Jack, let’s go, man!’ hissed Max, dropping off the windowsill and back on to the snowy ground outside. I made to follow him, but there was another knock at the door and this Miss Mardle woman’s muffled voice said, ‘Girls? Are you OK? I’m coming in now.’

  The door clicked and started to creak open. Long Hair Girl mouthed the word ‘Sorry’. Before I could ask what she was sorry for, she shoved me into the wardrobe and slammed the door.

  In the darkness, over the sound of my heart thudding in my ears, I could hear the girls getting grilled by Miss Mardle.

  ‘I thought I heard someone screaming in here,’ she said. ‘What are you all up to?’

  ‘It must have been another room, miss,’ said the third girl. ‘We were asleep.’

  ‘Asleep? Then why are you all dressed so strangely?’

  There was silence. Then one of them coughed and said, ‘This is just … what we wear when we go to sleep, miss.’

  ‘Right …’ said Miss Mardle. ‘I don’t mind you having fun, girls, but just try to keep it down. And get some sleep. We’ve got a big day ahead tomorrow.’

  ‘OK, miss. We—’

  I didn’t hear what came next, because I was suddenly flooded with shock, pain and cold, horrible terror.

  Something was in the wardrobe with me.

  Connie was staring open-mouthed at the wardrobe. She might as well have been holding a sign that said ‘BOY HIDING IN THERE!’ I didn’t know where to look. Panic was immobilizing me. Luckily, Keira was much cooler under pressure than either of us.

  ‘OK, miss. We’ll try and keep it down,’ she said. ‘We were just a bit, you know, excited or whatever for tomorrow.’ Keira somehow perfectly pulled off her trademark underwhelmed-by-everything tone.

  ‘OK then, girls,’ said Miss Mardle, backing out of the door. ‘I’m excited, too. Night, then.’

  ‘Sleep tight, miss!’ Connie chirped, slightly manically.

  I could feel the panic starting to melt. She was centimetres from leaving the room.

  And then, from inside the wardrobe, there was a loud thud.

  Miss Mardle stepped back in. ‘What was that noise?’

  Connie had gone white and was still staring at the wardrobe like she thought it led to Narnia. Why wasn’t he just keeping still in there? We could get expelled for having a boy in our room. Kicked out of two schools in one month. Surely that would be some sort of record?

  I looked over at Keira, but she was busy eyeballing Connie, willing her to look away.

  I curled my hands in to balls to try to stop them trembling, and somehow managed to get out, ‘Oh, sorry, miss … I put three jackets on the same hanger in there. One of them must have fallen off.’

  Miss Mardle nodded. She seemed satisfied. And then there was another thud.

  ‘There goes the second one,’ I said, mock-breezily, and Keira laughed a little too loud. What was Jack doing in there? Was he trying to get us in to trouble?

  Miss Mardle frowned and took a step forward, towards the wardrobe. Suddenly, Connie snapped in to action.

  ‘Miss Mardle,’ she said, her whole body shaking. ‘I am a really good person. I raised £240 in the trashion show last year and I also do guerrilla gardening with Miss Ford and I’m on the school council …’ Her voice started to quiver like tears were coming.

  I looked wildly at Keira. It was all over. There was no way Miss Mardle wouldn’t check the wardrobe now. Another faint knock came from inside. Jack had clearly gone mad. We had to get her out of the room. Quickly.

  ‘Can I talk to you privately, miss?’ I blurted desperately. She didn’t move so I walked past her and out in to the corridor.

  ‘Of course, love,’ she said, her eyes still on the wardrobe. Then she followed me out, shutting the door behind her. I had done it. My heart was still racing but as long as she didn’t go back in there then we might have got away with it.

  But now I was standing opposite Miss Mardle, alone in the corridor. And she was waiting for me to say something. Something that was apparently so important I couldn’t say it in front of anyone else.

  ‘It’s all just really … hard,’ I said lamely. She put her hand on my shoulder and gave it a little squeeze. The weird thing was that even though I was making up a lie on the spot, it was actually true. I opened my mouth to say something else but nothing came out. Lauren and the ferry and all the trauma of the last month was all there, but it was too big and too true to tell her.

  ‘I know, love,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  We stood in silence for a bit. Was that enough? Did that merit a private chat out in the corridor? I thought about lying and telling her my parents were getting divorced. For a mad second I even contemplated hugging her.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you, that’s all.’ It hung there, sounding ridiculous.

  Then she said, ‘Thank you, Matilda.’ She put her arm around my shoulders. ‘I think you’re very brave. Night, love. Get some good sleep.’ And she walked back down the corridor.

  I nearly fainted in relief.

  When I stepped back into the room Keira pounced on me. ‘I literally love you, Mouse! You are a legend!’ she whisper-shouted, squeezing me. It was like she had won some kind of fool-the-teacher competition.

  And then the wardrobe door burst open and Jack came flying out across the room.

  ‘There’s a rat!’ He was jumping up and down on the spot. ‘In there! A massive, huge RAT!’

  Keira laughed. ‘You what?’

  Jack was fidgeting on the spot and ruffling his hair. His face was bright red, and it looked like he was sweating. ‘It bit me! Right on the ankle! I’m telling you, there’s a rat in there!’

  Connie still looked a bit shell-shocked, but without saying a word she got on her hands and knees and crawled right into the wardrobe, her lion’s tail swishing as she rustled about. Then she reappeared and held out her palm to reveal Mr Jambon. ‘My hamster is not a rat,’ she said.

  She and Keira burst out laughing, and Jack went even redder. He was rubbing his ankle and staring down at the floor.

  ‘Yeah, well, you should check again,’ he muttered. ‘Cos there’s definitely a rat in there as well.’

  ‘I would have thought exactly the same thing,’ I said, and he looked up at me. ‘France is known for its killer wardrobe rats after all.’

  He smiled a kind of thank-you smile and then looked down and shoved his hands in his pockets. Him being so near me felt like too much, like I might implode. So I just focused on a spot over his shoulder where Keira’s bra was hanging on the end of the bunk. His hair was dark and thick, sticking up all over the place. He was even fitter than his outline at the film night had suggested.

  He looked at Mr Jambon. ‘You brought a hamster on a school trip?’ He sounded impressed. ‘That is quite a … mad thing to do.’

  I saw him look me up and down, from the T-shirt crown to the bottom of the bedsheet dress. I didn’t know what to do, so I just put my hand over my cheek to cover the red felt-tip heart. And just left it there, trying to seem casual, like I always stood like that, my hand glued to my cheek. I was trying desperately to think of an explanation for why we were dressed like this, when there was another knock on the window.

  Connie screamed, ‘The spell’s still working!’

  ‘Shut up!’ Keira whispered. ‘Mardle will come back.’

  ‘What spell?’ asked Jack, but we all ignored him. Keira walked over to the window and opened it. The same freezing-looking boy with shaved red hair was peering over the ledge.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he hissed. ‘Did you get caught?’

  Keira shook her head. ‘Your mate did get savaged by a killer hamster, though,’ she said. ‘He could have died.’

  Max snorted with laughter.

  ‘It was a rat, actually,’ Jack snapped. ‘There was definit
ely a rat in there as well.’

  ‘I don’t think they even have rats in France,’ Connie said.

  ‘Yes they do,’ I said, and something made me smile at Jack, to make him feel better, maybe. ‘What about the rat in Ratatouille?’

  Jack smiled straight back at me and a little dimple appeared in each of his cheeks. My stomach jolted. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘That rat’s American,’ Connie said. ‘He has an American accent.’

  ‘He lives in Paris!’ Jack said.

  ‘And he’s called Remy.’ We both said it at exactly the same time.

  ‘You said the same thing at the same time.’ Connie clapped her hands. ‘Spooky.’ She looked over-meaningfully at me and Keira.

  ‘Thanks for pushing me into the jaws of death,’ Jack said, nodding at the wardrobe. ‘I’m Jack.’

  ‘Oh, we know,’ Connie nodded. Keira visibly winced and gave Connie a Death-Eater stare.

  ‘We know now,’ Keira amended. ‘I mean, you’ve just told us, so obviously we know. Anyway, I’m Keira. Hamster trafficker over there is Connie.’ Connie was letting Mr Jambon crawl on her head. ‘And that’s Mouse.’

  All the things that usually come naturally started to feel hard. Thinking, speaking, standing in a relaxed way. So I settled for shifting from foot to foot, my hand still clamped to my cheek.

  Jack laughed. ‘Mouse? Why do people call you that?’

  I opened my mouth to speak, but Connie answered for me. ‘Cos in reception, she used to have her hair in two big bunches, like Minnie Mouse. Plus, y’know, she looks like a mouse.’ Connie broke off and started miming a mouse cleaning its whiskers. ‘Snaffle, snaffle, snaffle,’ she said. Mr Jambon started snaffling on cue.

  I was cringing inside. I was trying to look normal while giving myself orders in my head. Don’t smile too widely, try and stand in a sexy way. What is a sexy way of standing? Stop standing weirdly. But Jack was just stood there, smiling at me. So I just kept smiling back.

  From outside, the other boy said, ‘And if anyone cares, I’m Max, and I’m about to get frostbite. Jack, can we go now, please?’

  Keira popped her head outside the window. ‘My god, it’s freezing out here. What room are you lot in?’