White Crow by Marcus Sedgwick Page A

subject, and though my hopes were high, the results were low.
    I scorn myself to record it herein, but we learned nothing.
    Not a single thing.
    But, oh!
    The blood! The blood!

Wednesday 11th August
    R ebecca dozes late into the morning, listening to the sound of her father downstairs, making breakfast, the radio on in the background, gently talking to no one.
    She sleeps, dreams of graves, then wakes again.
    Vaguely, she hears the front door closing and assumes it’s her father going out, but a few moments later she hears footsteps on the stairs and for some reason, she’s scared.
    She sits up in bed and is about to get out when her bedroom door opens, and Ferelith walks in.
    ‘Nice room,’ she says, going straight to the window and looking at the sea.
    ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Rebecca asks, sliding out of bed and pulling her dressing gown on. ‘You can’t just walk into my room like that.You can’t just walk into other people’s houses.’
    ‘Like you just walked into my life,’ Ferelith says.
    ‘What? What are you talking about?’ Rebecca says, annoyed at having really walked straight into that one.
    Ferelith shrugs.
    ‘So, then,’ she says, ‘Your forfeit.’
    Rebecca doesn’t want to know.
    ‘That wasn’t funny,’ she says. ‘What you did last night. That wasn’t funny.’
    ‘Oh, come on. It was only a dare.’
    ‘But you set me up.You must have set the whole thing up.’
    Ferelith walks over to Rebecca and puts one hand out to her waist, but Rebecca pulls away.
    ‘Stop it. I’m not happy.You scared the hell out of me.’
    She sits down on the edge of the bed suddenly, and her head sinks into her hands.
    Ferelith kneels by her.
    ‘Hey,’ she says. ‘I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. It was just for fun, you know.’
    She soothes Rebecca, whispering to her, telling her good things, saying what she needs to hear, and Rebecca starts to cry properly now.
    ‘Hey,’ says Ferelith, ‘it wasn’t that bad, was it?’
    Rebecca shakes her head.
    ‘It’s not that. Not really. It’s just . . . Everything. Everything is going wrong. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it all being so hard, you know?’
    Ferelith puts an arm round her. To Rebecca, still warm from her bed, Ferelith feels cold, but it’s comforting nonetheless.
    ‘I know, I do know. But you’ve got me. I won’t let you down.’
    Rebecca lays her head on Ferelith’s shoulder and lets herself be held for a long time.
    ‘Thanks,’ she says, at last. ‘It’s good to have a friend.’
    Ferelith stands up.
    ‘Absolutely,’ she says. ‘And as soon as you’ve done your forfeit, we can be friends again.’
    And with that, she leaves.

Four Sea Interludes - III
    I went up to the Lover’s Seat and sat by myself for a very long time.
    It’s a strange thing, this world of ours, I know that. But I can’t work out if it makes more sense if the strangeness was created by someone (I’m talking about God here, the bad boy upstairs with the beard and the big smock thing) or whether the strangeness is just because the world is a totally random place.
    And yet, the world is not totally random, is it?
    Things are the way they are for a reason.
    The cells of honeycombs are six-sided because a hexagon is the most material-efficient tessellation. That’s just the laws of geometry and so the bees have worked that whole thing out for themselves. Which is amazing in itself, but I think Darwin had a point, you know?
    I watched the waves far out to sea rolling in towards me and I thought about the pull of the moon that makes the waves in the first place, and again I thought, everything is like it is for a reason. Things are the way they are for a reason, and things happen for a reason too.
    It’s cause and effect.
    And I think that’s truest of all with people. I do something to you which makes you feel something, which makes you do something to me, or to someone else, either then, or years later.
    I was thinking about