All Our Hidden Gifts by Caroline O’donoghue (books for 10th graders .TXT) 📗

in an evening. But it’s not like learning everything else. It doesn’t fall out of my brain the minute I move on to something else, like school stuff does. It sticks, like song lyrics. Like poetry. Like feelings I already had but finally have a map for.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE NEXT DAY MISS HARRIS MAKES ME SPEND MOST OF MY lunch break finishing the Chokey. I don’t even really mind. Dad gave me some replacement batteries for the Walkman, so I’m enjoying the job now, eager to see the Chokey looking clean and orderly, and I attack it while singing to 1990s goth music. I keep the cards zipped into the front of my school bag and try to resist the temptation of playing with them.

Five minutes before the bell goes, she declares the Chokey a success, and tells me to go to the common room and eat something. After yesterday’s door-slamming incident, she’s clearly afraid of me getting hurt and it being all her fault.

Most of the girls have walked into town to buy their lunch, but a few people are still lounging around the classroom and avoiding the February cold. Lily O’Callaghan is sitting on her own with a book, her long dark-blonde fringe brushing into her eyes. I can see red swollen spots around her temples, acne breakouts where the grease from her hair touches the skin. How often is she washing her hair these days? Lily isn’t dirty, per se; it’s just that she doesn’t really like to live in her body. She doesn’t like to notice it. If she could just be a brain in a jar, reading books and drawing, she’d be much happier.

She looks up and gives me a tight smile, fiddling with her hearing aid as I walk past. I spot a clutch of girls I know and quickly join them, bustling past Lily without a word.

Why do I do this? Why am I so awful to her, when we’ve been through so much together?

I go and sit with the gang. Michelle has a new make-up palette from this American brand endorsed by all the most famous drag queens, apparently, and she’s very excited about it. It’s hard to see why. The colours look exactly like the kind of thing you’d get for twenty quid in Urban Decay, which I make the mistake of saying, and then everyone laughs and Michelle looks annoyed.

“Sorry,” I say, when I see that her ears are red. Michelle is ginger so any tiny changes in her mood are highly detectable. I sit silently for a while and listen to them talk. It gets boring quickly. I start fidgeting, and I shove my hands into the pocket of my school blazer to find the tarot cards sitting there. What? I was sure I had left them in my school bag.

My face must look confused, because the girls stop and look at me.

“What’s up?” Michelle asks. “You look like you’ve just smelled a bad fart.”

“Nothing,” I say, straightening my expression. “Hey, do you want me to read your tarot cards?”

“My what?”

I show her and the rest of the girls crowd around.

“You can’t actually read them, though, can you?” asks Michelle.

“A bit,” I say. “I practised last night.”

Michelle shuffles and draws. The Queen of Rods, the Three of Cups and the Ace of Pentacles.

Just like last night with Dad, everything slots together perfectly. It all seems so simple what these cards are trying to say. I weave the story for Michelle. About how her creative passion for make-up and her love for her friends are the twin forces in her life, and how they are going to be her path to success.

Michelle is clearly impressed. “Wow. Maeve, it was only last night that I made a YouTube channel for my make-up.”

There’s an audible gasp, and I can already tell that the tarot cards are going to be a big deal.

“No!”

“Yes! Look! Let me show you!”

She pulls out her phone and brings up the YouTube app. She’s telling the truth: there, with zero subscribers and a grey circle for a photo, is a YouTube channel called “SweetShellFaces”. Michelle is burning with embarrassment at showing us, but clearly wants to underline the uncanniness of the reading.

“Don’t be embarrassed. The cards think it’s a good idea.”

“Really?”

“Positive. Look at these!” Then I outline how the Queen of Rods is all about female creativity, the Three of Cups about friendship, and the Ace of Pentacles is financial success.

From that moment, lunches are taken over with tarot readings. Everyone seems to think it’s magic, that I’m psychic, but as much as I would like to believe my own hype, I know that’s not the case. It’s just a case of knowing the cards and knowing these girls really well. When the three of swords comes up for Becky Lynch, I know that the pain of the card is referring to her parents’ divorce. When the Death card comes up for Niamh, everyone screams, but I know that the card is pointing to the fact that Niamh recently had to give up her horse because her family moved from the super rural countryside to the middle of the city.

“Gypsy isn’t going to die, is she?” she asks tearfully. The whole room leans in, high on the drama.

“No,” I say, after a breathy pause. I can’t pretend like I’m not high on the drama, too. “It’s just, you need to accept that the Gypsy part of your life is over, so that something new can begin.”

Soon, the whole year knows about my tarot cards. I’m waiting to use the toilet one morning when Fiona Buttersfield walks right up to me and asks for a reading.

“Hey,” she says. “You’re that girl.”

“Fiona,” I reply nervously. I’m a little intimidated by Fiona Buttersfield. We only have one class together, but she’s kind of a celebrity in our year. Fiona is one of those Saturday-stage-school kids who manage to make it not embarrassing. She’s been doing it for so long