WORDS, WORDS, WORDS.
Brightly lit words glowing before her eyes. Molly woke in the bath the next morning with Mrs Quincy’s letter stuck to her cheek, sunlight pulsing through it. She prised it off and noticed a hairy face gazing at her.
“Agh!”
It was Gabriel.
“Stop giving me that You-need-to-sneak-Mrs-Fullsway’s-letter-back-where-you-found-it look,” she said.
But she knew that Gabriel was right. The letter should not be in her possession.
She got ready for school and tucked the missive underneath the appalling first chapter of Petals in the Stream of Love’s Longing. Then she put her library books and notepads in a stripy laundry bag and headed off to return the chapter and the letter to their owner, who could always be counted on to be up early, writing noisily.
But Mrs Fullsway, Molly discovered when she reached her room, was not typing this morning. The chamber was silent. A few gentle raps on the door did not rouse the writer.
“Mrs Fullsway!” Molly stage-whispered. “Mrs Fullsway, I’ve got your chapter!” She paused and set down the laundry bag full of books. “And I need to get my satchel for school…”
Not a peep.
“Mrs Fullsway?”
She knocked again.
Nope.
“Hey, Mrs Fullsway, how about we swap places for the day?” Molly muttered. “You can get savaged by Felicity Quick, and I’ll finish writing about the adventures of swooning Letitia and dashing Glenn.”
She knocked one last time. No response. Mrs Fullsway, Molly reasoned, had clearly been up late last night.
Molly slipped the papers back into the laundry bag – which for today would have to serve as a school bag – and headed downstairs to see if she was still in Mum’s bad books.
“Don’t touch any food!”
It looked like the whole world was in Mum’s bad books this morning.
The big L-shaped kitchen was as messy now as the attic had been last night. The freezers had stopped working, the floor was flooded and the surfaces were covered with thawed foodstuffs. It appeared that the shelves of one of the fridges had collapsed too; the door hung open and the food the fridge had housed was now in bin-bags, mingled with broken glass from the shelves.
“Flipping Nora, what happened here?” Molly asked.
“These stupid ancient contraptions!” Mum spat, gesturing at the freezer and kicking a nearby cupboard with a long lanky leg. The cupboard door fell off and a tin of lentil and bacon soup rolled out. Molly scurried over to help, but Mum held her hands up to ward her off, as though Molly were a spectre floating at her through a wall.
“Just go to school, Molly – get there early for a change,” Mum sighed. “Take some money from the jar for lunch. I’ve got to find something edible to feed all those zombies.”
“Zombies?” said Molly, shocked. “Oh, the guests…” She let out a giggle. Despite herself, Mum smirked. She did a brief but accurate impression of a zombie. Molly remembered that she and Mum used to have lots of fun together. She headed for the door. The money jar was empty but Molly decided not to say anything. “Good luck with the zombies, Mum.”
But already Mum was slipping back into the grey sadness that had overpowered her since Dad had died. They’d made such a great double act, Mum and Dad, and Molly had loved getting caught up in their jokes and made-up songs and mad debates. Without him, Mum seemed lost, adrift. “Enjoy your last day,” she mumbled, scooping salad leaves off the floor. And although Molly knew that Mum meant her last day of school, not her last day full stop, there was something ominous about Mum’s choice of words. Because if the thoroughly nasty Felicity Quick had her way, today could well be Molly’s last day.
Full stop.