The Magpie Effect - The Magpie Chronicles Book 1 (#Wattys2015)

Chapter 21

The thing about close-knit communities was that news travelled fast, especially news that concerned its more 'esteemed' individuals. Atlantic High was comprised of just four hundred students, so when Carmen Vespin didn't turn up to school the next day, almost everybody knew about it by ten o' clock in the morning.

Watching Holly Ryeland and the rest of her camaraderie wander around like sheep without a shepherd made me nervous. Carmen rarely missed school, unless if something was seriously wrong - like being seemingly being pushed into a thrashing river.

This was no coincidence, I thought. I kept looking around for some sign of Mona; I was sure she'd know what had happened to Carmen.

I'll make them pay for this, she'd said. It had only been a couple of days, but we were running out of time. There was only a week and a half left until the Halloween Ball, until Mona and I put our real plan into action. If Mona was going to get some form of miniature redemption before then, then it was highly likely that this was it.

Carmen was paying. The thought made me feel as though there were insects running up and down my body, centipedes coursing up my spine.

*

Carmen wasn't in the next day, either. Something was definitely wrong, and I hadn't seen Mona to ask her about it. Was she purposefully avoiding me, or busy prolonging whatever punishment she'd decided to subject Carmen to?

On Thursday morning, Carmen wasn't on any of the school buses. When I passed Mrs Vanderbilt's office on my way to class, however, what I saw sitting outside made me double-back in bewilderment.

It was Carmen, but sitting next to her was Edith Vespin herself. I had just enough time to notice that Carmen was wearing a tilted beret-style hat that matched the steely grey of the Atlantic uniform, before they both looked over in my direction and I ducked down the corridor.

Odd, I thought. Hats were strictly forbidden in Atlantic High, as were all other forms of accessorising or stamps of individuality. It was the reason that Debbie had spent more time in detention than in the classroom. And why was Edith waiting with Carmen outside the headmistress's office?

Throughout the course of the day, I slowly found out. I didn't share many classes with Carmen, but in those that I did, she sat there with the hat on her head and a look of smug self-assurance on her face. I stared at the teachers, waiting for them to tell her to take it off, but they said nothing.

That was when I realized Edith's involvement in the whole thing, the reason that none of the teachers dared to intervene and assert school policy. They'd been told that Carmen could keep her hat on, for whatever reason. Edith Vespin had Mrs Vanderbilt wrapped around her little finger like a string of limp spaghetti, and that made me nervous.

At lunchtime, I sat with Debbie in the canteen. We were still friends, but the bridge that we'd erected between us was built of flimsy wood and rope. Jet and Wesley were outside on the football field, which suited me just fine. I was trying to spend as little time around him as possible now that I was convinced of his true alignment.

I sat there with my untouched turkey burger, bitterly devising scenes in my head that involved Jet surrounded by a circle of grassy-kneed boys, all of them sniggering as he told them about the big girl he was chatting up. They probably put him up to this in the first place, I thought to myself.

"How come she gets to wear that stupid hat around the school when I'm not even allowed to wear my lip piercing?" Debbie grumbled. It was true; Mr Carmody always threatened to have a metal detector installed into the doorframe of his classroom, like the ones they had in airports.