By the end of the afternoon, it was clear to Zoe that nothing was going to go like it was supposed to. In the lunch room after morning lessons, Ava had sat down next to Rani without saving room for Zoe. It was the first time in forever that Zoe and Ava weren’t next to each other, but Ava was so caught up in telling Rani all about Crabtree School’s Halloween Carnival that she forgot all about Zoe. Zoe had to sit across from them and it was difficult to hear over the clanging of cutlery and the chitter-chatter of the rest of Crabtree School.

“I would never want to dress up as anything scary like a witch,” Rani was saying to Ava. “This year I am going to be a princess.”

“Zoe was a witch last Halloween,” Lottie told Rani.

“What’s wrong with being a witch?” asked Zoe loudly.

“Nothing,” said Rani. “I just don’t like scary costumes.”

“Me neither,” said Ava.

This was a strange thing for Ava to say because last Halloween, Ava had gone as a spooky fairy, with a powdery white face and black glitter around her eyes. Zoe had thought Ava looked VERY scary, and it hadn’t helped that she’d kept swooping around yelling “Boo” at everyone. It had been a properly scary Halloween costume, if you asked Zoe. She was going to remind Ava of this, but Ava and Rani were already talking about something else. They were looking down at their lunches.

“Did you say that you are a veterinarian?” Zoe shouted across the table at Rani.

Ava and Rani laughed together. “No, a vegetarian!” said Rani. “I don’t eat meat.”

“Oh,” said Zoe, looking at Rani’s jacket potato. The rest of them had cottage pie. “Why not?”

“Because it’s part of my religion,” Rani told her. “Also, I like animals too much to eat them.”

Rani’s religion was called Hinduism. Isabel, Ava and Lottie asked Rani a million questions. Lottie needed a complete list of what Rani didn’t eat. Ham and cheese sandwiches? No. Roast dinners? No, at least not the meat bit. Pepperoni pizza? No, at least not the pepperoni bit. Beans on toast? Yes.

Isabel wanted to know all about Hinduism, and were there any other rules to it, and by the end of lunch Ava had decided that she wasn’t ever eating meat again.

“But we love cheeseburgers,” Zoe reminded her. They always went for cheeseburgers before they went to the cinema with their mums.

“But I love cows too,” Ava had said after thinking it over.

Zoe hadn’t realized that Ava felt so strongly about cows. Best friends were supposed to know everything about each other, weren’t they?

After lunch, Mummies and Babies was ruined all over again. Instead of playing properly, during second break everyone stood round Rani, asking her all about her old school and her old city and her old friends. Zoe couldn’t understand why Lottie and Isabel and, worst of all, Ava wanted to hear about a place that could never be as perfect as Crabtree School for Girls. But try as she might, Zoe couldn’t manage to drag her friends away to play. Even Lady Lovelypaws was glued to Rani’s side.

If you asked Zoe, Rani was turning into a real problem.

That afternoon, they were all sitting in science class, learning about magnets. Magnets are objects that can be attracted to metal objects, and other magnets. Zoe knew all about them because they had loads on the refrigerator door at home.

Miss Moody told the class that magnets had both north and south poles. Two of the same poles would push apart from each other, and a north and a south would pull together. Then Miss Moody demonstrated this fact with two big magnets.

“And so, girls,” Miss Moody concluded, “if I hold the magnets like this, they stick together. So I must have a north pole and a what, girls?”

Lots of hands went up, including Zoe’s. The answer was easy. But Miss Moody did not choose Zoe.

 

“Ava?” said Miss Moody. “North pole or south?”

Even though she wasn’t near the window any more, Ava must have been daydreaming, because she said, “North Pole. Father Christmas lives at the North Pole.”

Everyone laughed, even Ava and Miss Moody. Zoe loved her best friend even more for being so silly; they were so different and yet they stuck together so well. She and Ava were like magnets, Zoe thought to herself, like a north and a south pole. So she was delighted when Miss Moody told them about their science homework for the week.

“Girls,” Miss Moody said. “As you must have guessed, our next science unit is going to be all about magnets. I want you to think of a way to show the class how magnets work, or how we use them every day.”

Then Miss Moody said something that nearly made up for Year Three’s new seating arrangement. “You can work on your own or with a partner on this, girls,” she told her class. “You can choose whomever you want, just make sure you both contribute equally to the idea. We’ll do our presentations on Friday, so you have a few days to work on this.”

Zoe leaned round in her chair and beamed at Ava. She was already planning to ask her mum for a play date with Ava after school so that they could work on the magnet experiment. And she knew Ava was thinking the exact same thing.