‘Happy birthday!’
I opened one eye to see Mum and Tilly bursting into my room. Mum was carrying a parcel and grinning.
‘My birthday was like two weeks ago,’ I said. And a day I’d rather forget. I’d spent it alone. Some eighteenth that had been.
Mum plonked on to my bed. Tilly jumped up to try to join us. ‘We didn’t get to do things properly then, so I want to change that now.’ She put the parcel in front of me. ‘Your present.’
I sat up, pulling the parcel closer and unwrapping it. ‘Mum, you shouldn’t have,’ I said as the wrapping revealed a new laptop. ‘I don’t deserve this.’
‘You need it.’ She picked up a bouncy Tilly and placed her on my bed. Her tail wagging, she ran over to me. I rubbed her head.
I’d done some horrible things because of my powers. I still felt guilty for taking Mrs Brightman’s life. Mum had bought me an expensive birthday present I didn’t deserve.
‘What you crying for?’ Mum asked, passing me a tissue from the box on my bedside table.
I wiped at my eyes with one hand, still fussing Tilly with the other one. ‘After everything I’ve done, people are still being nice to me. I don’t get it. You should all hate me.’
Mum shook her head. ‘You’re my daughter. I could never hate you.’
‘But, I mean…’ I shook my head, my hair falling into my eyes. I really needed to get my bad dye job fixed. Every time I moved, I saw the bad blend of black/grey/ginger hair out of the corner of my eye, and it made me angry at myself. It also reminded me of everything Dominic had done, which then made me feel sick.
‘No buts. It’s time to stop beating yourself up and look ahead instead. Dominic took you and your powers for granted. But now you’re older and wiser.’
I lowered my head. ‘Am I, though? I still don’t know what I’m capable of. If I could hurt someone.’
Mum put her hand on my knee. ‘You wouldn’t do that. That’s not you.’
‘But I did do it. Who’s to say I wouldn’t do it again?’ I sighed. ‘You have hardly any power, but you’re always using it to help people. What good is my power if it just hurts people?’
‘Edie, you used your power to save me. And to stop Dominic. You’ve protected a lot of people from him. How are those bad things?’
I flapped my arms in the air. ‘If I didn’t have these powers Dominic wouldn’t have targeted me in the first place! Or anyone around me!’
Tilly nudged my hand as I lowered it. I wasn’t allowed to wave them in frustration – I had to keep giving her head rubs. At least she knew how to calm me down.
‘You can’t change what you were born with, Edie. You just have to find a way to work with it. If you fight it…Well. You saw what happened to me.’
I nodded. She’d ended up married to Dumb Dan, pretending she couldn’t see ghosts for seven years while she was with him. They’d divorced when he’d found out she could see ghosts. And it hadn’t been a pretty divorce. It had been for the best, but if she’d been upfront with him in the first place, maybe we wouldn’t have had to live with him for so long.
My phone buzzed. I checked it to see a text from Fadil, wishing me a happy birthday. So Mum had got him involved in her plan too, then. She did so much for people and never expected anything in return. She couldn’t even use her powers properly because she was using them to help Fadil adapt to modern life. The only reason he could speak English was because Mum lived close enough that he could borrow her powers, like an ongoing spell.
‘Oh my god.’
‘What?’ said Mum. ‘What’s wrong?’
I put my phone down. ‘It’s not that. Everything’s fine. I have an idea.’
‘What kind of idea?’
‘What if I used my powers to help Fadil?’ I held my hand up to stop Mum from interrupting me. ‘Let me finish. Gran said that if I keep using my powers, it will become addictive, and it could be dangerous. To me and the people around me. But if I’m not as powerful, because Fadil is constantly borrowing my powers, I can do less damage to myself and the people around me. And you have more power to be able to cast spells and stuff.’
Mum pursed her lips. I could tell from the way she was hesitating that she knew I was right. It was the best solution for all of us.
‘We don’t fully understand your powers yet. But I’m willing to consider it as an alternative solution. You should talk to Fadil about it, too, as it directly affects him.’
I leaned over and hugged her. ‘Thanks, Mum.’
Tilly climbed on to Mum’s lap, insistent on joining in with the hug.
Mum massaged her left temple, closing her eyes.
I pulled away. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Mmm,’ Mum half-grumbled. ‘Still can’t shake this bloody headache. It’s probably just because I haven’t been sleeping well. I’ll be fine.’
Something about the way she said it made me feel like there was more to it, but I couldn’t work out what it was. ‘Are you sure?’
Mum closed her eyes for a minute, as if they were sore or the light was too bright. ‘Yeah. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.’
‘You didn’t have to go to all this effort for a day that isn’t even my birthday, you know,’ I told her. ‘Especially if you don’t feel very well.’
‘Oh, we haven’t even started yet.’ She grinned. ‘I think it’s about time we fix that dodgy dye job of yours, don’t you?’
*
I’d never been happier to spend a whole day in a hair salon. It took most of the day to blend in the stripes and patchiness of my bad dye job, but it taught me a lesson: never dye my own hair. Ever again. I’d save it for the professionals or not do it. I wasn’t coordinated or patient enough to get it right. And naturally ginger hair was complicated to deal with.
Mum had done it for me in the past, but seeing how much better it was when done by a professional, I was never going back even if it meant getting it done less often.
The radio chatted away in the background, singing eighties tunes to itself broken up by random discussions and news updates. We weren’t really listening to it – we were too busy talking.
‘Did you hear about that girl they found in the park? It’s so sad,’ said Bianca, my hairdresser.
Mum exchanged a look with me in the mirror, but didn’t say anything. She was sitting in the chair beside me, chomping away on a sandwich. She’d only needed a couple of inches off the bottom, so she’d had her hair cut, then taken Tilly for a walk and returned with some lunch for me. It was the first time I’d ever had to eat my lunch in a hair salon, but it was necessary. I couldn’t keep wearing hats, didn’t want to cut my hair super short to get rid of the dodgy blending, and I didn’t have the skills to fix what I’d done wrong. It was a good job my mum’s hairstylist was a colour specialist.
‘Isn’t she your age?’ Bianca continued, oblivious to the atmosphere she’d created.
‘Yeah,’ I stared into my lap, suddenly finding the synthetic black fabric of the gown I was wearing really fascinating. ‘She was in a bunch of my classes.’
‘Oh wow. I’m so sorry.’
Nothing to apologise for. Not that I said that.
’It’s scary that the police haven’t found who did it yet, don’t you think?’
‘They haven’t confirmed it’s murder yet, either,’ Mum pointed out. While I couldn’t turn my head, in the mirror in front of me I could see her reflection’s pursed lips. She wasn’t comfortable with the topic but didn’t know how to change it. Neither did I.
‘You don’t think it was?’ said Bianca.
‘I don’t think we should jump to conclusions until we know,’ said Mum.
Bianca continued to paint lightener into my hair, dividing it into minuscule sections I didn’t have the patience to do. The way she did it was almost meditative. We sat in silence for a few moments, the only sounds Last Christmas playing on the radio and Mum eating her food.
‘Did you hear the police found another body this morning?’ said Bianca.
‘What?’ Mum and I chorused.
Bianca nodded. ‘I drove past Dob Park on my way into work. They had one of those tents up.’
‘Doesn’t mean they found another body,’ Mum said, her voice rising in panic.
‘I saw it on the internet.’
‘Could’ve been someone just making it up, scaremongering, you know,’ I said. I hoped. The scaremongering thing was part of why I didn’t have a lot to do with the social media side of the internet, especially with all the bullying I’d experienced in the past.
‘The local paper wouldn’t do that, would they?’ asked Bianca.
‘Wouldn’t put it past them,’ Mum mumbled. ‘They need to get clicks and sell papers to make money.’
‘True,’ said Bianca.
Mum and I were shooting her down and being cynical, but it was because we were nervous. If whoever had killed Tessa wasn’t just targeting her, we had much bigger problems to deal with.
‘What if it’s a serial killer?’ said Bianca.
‘Around here?’ I scoffed. ‘Have you been binge watching true crime documentaries?’
Bianca laughed. ‘A couple. But what if it is? Who’s next?’
*
‘Thank you,’ I said to Mum as we walked out of the salon, six hours later. My hair was now a dark, chocolate brown, with matching eyebrows so that I didn’t look really washed out or need to constantly fill them in with pencil or gel.
Mum put her arm around me and kissed the top of my head. ‘There’s just one more thing.’
‘After all that?’
‘You must be hungry, right?’
‘Starving,’ I said.
‘Good.’
We got into the car, then she drove me to one of the fancier restaurants in town. It was hard to park, but we found space on a side street, then walked up the hill to get to it.
Inside, the black walls were offset with white, modern art statues that were missing various limbs or had holes in their stomachs. It was strange and artsy, but I knew the food was good.
Mum gave the server our name, then we were taken to a table where Ben, Fadil, and Maggie were waiting for us.
‘Happy birthday,’ said Maggie, grinning.
My first eighteenth birthday had been pretty crappy, but my second one turned out to be pretty good.